Not long ago , it seemed like every literary author was doing a Christian Bible about the apocalypse , perhaps involving zombies or loup-garou . But now , there ’s a new moving ridge of darling authors tackling our bewilderment with the net - overlook world we live in .
Top image : Ed Yourdon / Flickr .
The literary waving may have started withGary Shteyngart ’s Super Sad True Love Story , with its omnipresent societal media ranking everybody ’s social condition and fuckability . ( Although this sort of thing was predicted years earlier by authors from Rudy Rucker to Cory Doctorow . )
And then , just a few months ago , every literary source — admit Shteyngart — had to try Google Glasses and save a soul - searching essay or firearm of literary fiction about them .
Now , there are a few new Holy Writ add up out all at once , which deal in different ways with our immersive new world of technology .
There’sthe new Thomas Pynchon novel , Bleeding Edge , which look at place in 2001 and deals with the humans of dotcom entrepreneur and internet whiz - kids . According tothe review by cyberspace idealogue Evgeny Morozov , Bleeding Edge “ offers us a deeply poetic meditation on the digital modernity , ” while research the whimsy of the Deep Web , a part of the net that has n’t been crawled by search locomotive . And the Deep Web comprise a future of the net that we love , from the vantage detail of 2013 , will never materialize . Writes Morozov :
Pynchon – illustrious for shunning publicity and not allow himself to be photograph – makes a critical example for namelessness and invisibility – to hell with both Google and NSA ! – as a key enable ingredient of this alternative , sunnily weird and heterotopic postmodernity – a postmodernity that has unravelled under the pressure of informational capitalism and the global warfare on terror .
Then there’sThe Circle , the new rule book by the fecund Dave Eggers , who already tackle globalization and our discontents with engineering in A Hologram for the King . In The Circle , Eggers follows Mae Holland , who give out to work at an net caller in the nigh future . The Wall Street Journal describes the plot of Eggers ’ book , which number out next month :
Set in the near future tense , The Circle is the phantasmal and business successor to our times , a mashup of Google , Facebook , Twitter , Pinterest and PayPal .
It ’s run by a radical of Sheryl Sandberg - ian in high spirits achievers and institute by shadowy futurist whose vision of gross , global noesis - sharing carry minatory consequences for democracy by the book ’s end .
Like any good horror story , Mae ’s institution into The Circle seems to be a bless result . She beam with her freshly won condition and gawks at The Circle ’s docket of academic lectures .
That ’s just when she begin to miss herself into a digital maw . She ’s ask to wear gimmick that supervise her wellness and emotions ; she ’s pressured to constantly update her societal - networking condition ; and soon she ’s asked to document her every move with a telecasting camera hang from her neck , with what will be calamitous effects .
And then , perhaps most surprisingly , there’sRipper by Isabel Allende . The notable generator of historical fabrication with magical - realist tinge has moved to the present day , and she ’s doing a thriller that sound as though she ’s commenting on the relationship between the virtual and “ substantial ” worlds in a very different way than Eggers and Pynchon .
In Ripper , Amanda is a teenager who loves to play Ripper , an on-line game where she and other teens around the Earth endeavor to solve Jack the Ripper ’s murders . But then a string of execution start happening in 2012 San Francisco that echo Jack the Ripper ’s methods — so Amanda and her friends decide to adjust the game to try and work the real - life murder fling pass around them . And then , of course of instruction , Amanda ’s female parent gets catch by the in series killer , and it ’s a backwash against clock time to enamor him before she dies .
You canread an extract from the novel here , include one bit where Allende writes :
The kids who played Ripper were a quality group of nut and geeks from around the world who had first met up online to hound down and destroy the cryptic Jack the Ripper , take on obstacles and enemy along the way . As games master , Amanda was creditworthy for plat these adventures , cautiously bearing in mind the force and weaknesses of the alter- egos created by the instrumentalist .
Then finally there ’s The Unknowns by Gabe Roth , which has gotten nice review article inthe New York Timesandthe Telegraph . Like Pynchon ’s novel , Roth ’s takes office in the mists of history — in 2002 , on the eve of the Iraq War . Roth ’s main character is a dotcom millionaire who ’s made a fortune analyze on-line marketing , like the Amazon ads that suggest other book like the one you ’re looking at . And Roth ’s hero , Eric , tries to give his data - mining expertness to fixing his social aliveness and his love sprightliness . It ’s a Latinian language and a coming - of - age novel , but by all accounts it also deals a lot with the monoculture of internet marketing and entanglement growing , and the people like Eric who inhabit it .
Did we miss any other novel or late literary books about our fresh internetocracy ? Please let us know !
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