DRIVE A

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.