THE INTELLIVERSE

In Roman’s cautionary SF novel set in a climate-blighted mid-21st century, a giant tech company offers deliverance from famine by putting volunteers into suspended animation.

In 2062, there’s horrible weather, inflation, global food shortages, and mass extinctions due to climate change. The company QuantumX has responded with miraculous innovations, such as a clean reactor that can produce limitless energy. However, their technology came too late to halt the catastrophic problems, so now QuantumX has an alternative to strict rationing to stave off starvation. As programmed by cutting-edge quantum computers, the Intelliverse is a simulated, software-based environment into which one’s consciousness can be uploaded safely and indefinitely; in it, people live out virtual lives while their bodies sleep in artificial hibernation. QuantumX and its chief research scientist, Crystal Yang, have found about half a billion people willing to enter the Intelliverse. But conspiracy theorists, including religious conservatives, oppose the Intelliverse and call its stewards “soul suckers.” When terrorists attack a QuantumX banquet, suspicion falls on followers of influential Christian businessman Christopher Kelly (who, some readers may appreciate, is not portrayed as a fire-and-brimstone caricature). However, inside QuantumX, some of its own experts have noted peculiarities in the brain functions of current Intelliverse users, which indicate that their creation might not be the paradise that Crystal and others had promised it would be. Roman writes in beach-read-smooth prose, never going too heavily into the science; in the process, though, the author sacrifices a good deal of the texture and nuance one might expect in a society teetering on the edge of disaster. As such, the novel works more like a restrained police procedural than a deep-dive into cyberpunk or “cli-fi” dystopian fiction. The story also offers a subplot about a teenage couple threatened with separation by the Intelliverse, and this thread mainly pays off in the subtle twist ending, which is worth a reread. Readers of the popular In Death SF thrillers by J.D. Robb may be particularly intrigued.

A breezy, soft-SF tale of corporate shenanigans and terrorist-busting.