THE VECTORIST

McMillan’s SF novel explores weaponized online communities in a not-so-distant future.

Marek Drovik is a master “vectorist” who orchestrates algorithmic manipulation campaigns from his New York penthouse. In 2043, 94.7% of the world’s population is hyperconnected online and grouped into over four million tribes. A manipulator-for-hire, Marek will shape election outcomes, punish or promote corporations, and otherwise engineer clashes between tribes with clinical precision—for the right price. Zara, his estranged 17-year-old daughter, rejects her father and her upbringing and joins a nihilistic, anticorporate cult called the Glass Frontier. A rival vectorist weaponizes the Glass Frontier in an eco-terror attack that starts to entangle Zara. Marek attempts to use his influence to extract her from it, only for her to disappear into an off-grid site called the Luddite Nation, a refuge from the digital world located in rural Pennsylvania. Marek then accepts a major contract to flip the upcoming presidential election on behalf of his evil oil industry clients. Zara and the Luddites come into possession of a stolen algorithmic lattice that they use to combat the influence of the vectorists and spread the truth about digital fragmentation. As digital connections are cut across the nation, the system Marek and the other vectorists have built goes dark, forcing a reckoning between father and daughter and the worlds they represent. McMillan’s short novel is an efficient piece of speculative fiction, compressing key ideas about social engineering, astroturfing, and human disconnection into a tight plot. The conceit of the vectorists, who influence behavior by coordinating thousands of small nudges, cleverly amplifies today’s realities of algorithmic influencing (“Control was the illusion they all craved”) and sets up a satisfying climax in which the truth becomes its own vector. The prose is sometimes flat, and some secondary characters serve as ideological foils rather than registering as people, but McMillan’s depiction of the Great Log-Off is fresh—this is a techno-thriller that sees hope in deliberate withdrawal rather than better living through technology. A timely, intelligent salvo.

A short, efficient, and scarily plausible vision of online tribalism and its real-world impacts.