Friday Reads: Here Comes Tomorrow

While I am still slowly making my way through Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, I take breaks to read other books, especially since a single line from Pynchon can send me spinning off into orbit.

This past week, I devoured several others:

• Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

• Made for Love by Alissa Nutting

• Flux by Jinwoo Chong

First, Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow, a writer who both understands technology and thinks hard about what it means for society. I started reading him back when I was still a tech reporter and was always impressed that he actually knew what was going on under the surface of the apps and toys we all used. More than that, he was not just an evangelist, like many of the tech people I knew. He wondered what the tools we used were doing to us. And he hasn’t ever stopped. Red Team Blues isn’t as big or involved as Makers or Walkaway. It’s more like a detective story set in the high echelons and dark corners of Silicon Valley. His protagonist, Martin Hench, is a senior citizen and forensic accountant who tracks down missing money and cracks open financial scams. He lives in a tricked-out RV, a veteran who was around at the dawn of the industry and knows where all the bodies are buried. He’s asked by an old friend to track down a set of authentication tokens that could be used to hack every phone in existence and melt down the entire digital financial industry. The stakes are high, and of course, people start dying.

Martin is a little too old to kick ass, so he has to outwit the goons who come after him. It was an entertaining diversion, watching Martin stay one step ahead of the bad guys, and it was nice to see an old guy as the protagonist instead of a cookie-cutter Chris Hemsworth type. I picture Harrison Ford or Jeff Bridges in the Netflix series. Doctorow’s fiction deserves at least as much attention as his journalism and blog posting. It’s just as filled with ideas, but more fun.

Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is also set in the world of high technology and impossible wealth, but Nutting isn’t particularly worried about how all the toys and gadgets work. She’s written a highly personalized dystopia about Hazel, a woman who marries a tech billionaire who basically controls the world with all his products. Then she tries to flee him, only to discover that he’s put a chip in her head to monitor everything she sees, does, and thinks.

The book was made into an HBO Max series but what drew me to it was this article by Nutting about what she eats. I have fired down some questionable meals and highly processed junk food in my time, but I was honest-to-God impressed by Nutting’s terrifying diet. That, and the opening scene of the novel, where Hazel’s seventy-six year old father buys a sex doll as a companion for his final days, was enough for me to get on board.

It’s both a horror story and a comedy. Maybe it says something about me that I kept laughing at moments that were undeniably awful. But I think it’s more about Nutting’s great skill as an author. She makes these invasions very funny, even as they represent the kind of violation we all take for granted from our phones, Alexas, and smart watches. Hazel wants nothing more than to be left alone, and her husband finds that both incomprehensible and irrelevant.

There’s also a con artist who’s exclusively sexually attracted to dolphins, but I didn’t see him as any kind of larger metaphor for our culture.

After that, I finally got to Jinwoo Chong’s Flux, which is another high-tech dystopian tale. Flux is a mystery wrapped around one man, Brandon/Bo/Blue, three different personas separated by time. As a boy, Bo’s mother dies in a traffic accident. As a young man, Brandon goes to work for a sinister tech company that may be experimenting on him. And as an older man, “Blue” lives in the aftermath of the company’s collapse and the criminal trials that followed.

It’s an astonishingly sure-handed debut. Chong divides the timelines and moves effortlessly back and forth between them, uniting all of the episodes with his love of an obscure ‘80s cop series called Raider. The deadpan narration rolls along effortlessly and then delivers gut-punches of emotion and pain. Brandon, like Hazel, appears dangerously passive, content to allow other people to decide his life for him — until he’s finally motivated to take action and shift the world on its axis.

These books are all technically speculative fiction, since they all revolve around technology and the future. But they all made me think of the future not as something we are headed toward, but as something that is coming down on us. Every day, it gets a little bit closer, like some very dangerous animal stalking its prey.

As always, would love to hear your suggestions and reviews in the comments.