JUST CITY

In Tymofiyeva’s debut SF novel set in Silicon Valley, a would-be entrepreneur gets more than he bargained for while beta-testing a new video game.

In three months, 21-year-old college student Nathanand his best friend Jack will be pitching ideas to San Francisco’s most prestigious tech incubator. Nathan is confident in the strength of their idea—a tracking system to prevent people from stealing shopping carts—but there’s still the matter of the pre-seed funding they need just to compete for the incubator’s support. Luckily, his grandmother has just come to him with an opportunity: She and her university colleagues have designed an online multiplayer virtual reality game “rooted in political philosophy.” If Nathan serves as one of the beta testers for Just City, he could win up to $10,000, depending on his score. Each player designs a society according to their own specifications and then must complete tasks within it. Nathan recruits some friends, then quickly sets up what he thinks will be a meritocratic utopia—and soon, he finds that the game is a lot harder than he thought it would be. Can Nathan adjust his political philosophy enough to take home the prize money? And how will he feel when he gets back out into the real world? Tymofiyeva’s prose is simple but sharply effective. Here, for example, she describes one of Nathan’s incarnations: an unhoused man, suffering from clinical depression, who isn’t good at racking up points: “My character has encounters with the police, gets sick because of malnutrition, takes drugs, and gets beaten up by some punks. There is no help in sight.” The overall tone can be moralizing at times, but thankfully, it effectively pushes past the incidents of the game to address their ramifications for Nathan in the real world. The author’s characters feel somewhat underdeveloped, but readers will likely respond to the book’s consideration of ethics against a background of commerce and technology.

A brief but high-minded speculative tale set in Silicon Valley.