CLOUDTHIEF

A sharp, smart meditation on humanity’s bent toward eco-suicide wrapped inside a clever, propulsive heist novel.

Our narrator is a dispirited climate journalist in Manhattan with an ailing sister and a dwindling bank account. One night, uncomfortably accompanying a con artist friend who’s plundering people’s excess stuff from storage units, he encounters a mysterious woman who’s found a clever way to disappear in the midst of the city. Intrigued, he starts interviewing her, and before long the relationship turns obsessive, romantic. Soon—once it turns out that her “paranoia” is actually, in these times, due diligence—they flee the city and embark on an elaborate and ingenious scheme to steal both nothing and everything. They will penetrate a gigantic exurban data center near Tulsa, Oklahoma, that contains much of what we call the Cloud—a repository of everyone’s terabytes of accumulated dross and data—and steal servers, which they’ll then trawl for secrets. This meticulously plotted, philosophically compelling caper takes up the book’s first two-thirds, and it’s excellent. What comes after, when the intense, volatile, distrustful relationship unravels, is almost equally engrossing. The next section centers on data mining, the rather tricky matter of how to commodify secrets (and according to what theory of value), and eventually on the emerging field of genetic editing. The narrative, told in long retrospect, is part apologia, part techno-jeremiad, part intensely personal epistolary plea, part self-cannibalizing “autophagiography”…and that strategy works well until the final pages, where the direct address gets a little too earnest and explicit.

Genuine intellectual heft and fast-paced, nimbly plotted action can coexist, after all. Top-notch.