An expansive, disquieting SF tale about the monetization of people.
In Graves’ SF novel, a junior finance worker is caught up in the dystopian game of buying shares of living people.
In the San Francisco of 2029, life has become unaffordable to all but the super-wealthy, and social ranking determines what sectors of the city people are even allowed to enter. In this new economy, any have-nots in need of cash have the option of “going public”: that is, selling shares of themselves to investors. That’s what Cable Rostenfarm did when he was 12 to escape a bad home life and pay for the kind of education necessary to get a halfway decent job. That job, ironically, is the position of junior analyst at Navarium, a hedge fund that trades shares of people just like Cable. His current project is Traeger Logan, a live-streaming star tempted by the possibility of steady cash. Traeger’s schtick is making dangerous suicide attempts that attract rubberneckers and trolls who just want to see whether or not he’ll survive—not an especially promising talent. “This was every bit as cynical as you’d expect, but why bother with the suicide guy in the first place when there was a universe of folks to invest in?” wonders Cable. “[w]hy go there if you didn’t need to? Why get a bunch of toxic-smelling sludge on your shoes?” Navarium does go there, however, so now Cable must help grow Traeger’s audience, thereby making his shares more valuable. When Traeger’s mental health deteriorates to the point that he no longer looks like a sound investment, Cable gets a window into the even darker side of the business: shorting people’s shares. Navarium can turn a profit off of a real death, so long as they aren’t left holding any shares when the person flatlines. Cable must decide how much he owes the company to perform his job for maximum profit, and how much he owes people like Traeger—people like him. Either way, he may discover that Traeger isn’t the only one with the potential to get shorted.
Readers may have trouble penetrating the novel’s dense jargon—it’s typical SF future slang plus Wall Street investment-speak—but once dialed in, they will find the revealed world to be rich and immersive. Graves crafts a future that is simultaneously wondrous and revolting, as when Cable describes his office overlooking “the huge expanse of San Francisco Bay beyond—looking like glass—deep blue from a pigment that the city council insisted be in all augmented reality displays geolocated in a five-mile radius. And, because our window panes had the highest version of BetaBloc embedded, there were no ads for miles.” The author impresses with his gift for invention and his eye for identifying how our own world already operates. The most dystopian aspects of the book are, brilliantly, things we already live with: segregated cities, online mobs, lonely people desperate for affirmation or community, and avaricious capitalists willing to destroy anything for the sake of a return on investment. It’s Philip K. Dick for the TikTok generation—timely and terrifying.
An expansive, disquieting SF tale about the monetization of people.Pub Date: May 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781949272055
Page Count: 582
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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