Harry Josephine Giles, ‘Deep Wheel Orcadia’ (2021)

 

A science-fiction novel-in-verse, written in Orcadian—the dialect of the author’s native Orkney—with a translation into English running along the bottom. That's a pretty tasty prospect, I'm sure you'd agree: and in many ways the book passes that taste-test. And actually my opening sentence, there, is wrong in several respects. Giles’s book is a novella not a novel, the idiom of the poem is not a ‘dialect’ but a language (it's an important distinction) and the foot-of-the-page translation is not exactly English. But it is science-fiction: a story about a group of visitors to a deep-space space-station, the titular wheel turning slowly amongst the stars. The business of this place is to harvest a fuel named ‘Light’. Astrid has been in ‘the big city’—a colonised Mars—and is returning to the place she grew up. On the same ship as her are two English speakers (Noor, an archaeologist studying a mysterious alien artefact, and a man on the run called Darling). The station, in other words, is like an island, like Orkney, and the story manages the parallels pretty well. 

Then again, it's not entirely accomplished. The SF elements feel a little derivative, even rote: the time paradoxes entailed by faster-than-light travel, the space-whales, even the 2001-spinning-wheel of the space station itself, all over-familiar and sketched rather than fully developed. Some of the characters aren't very rounded. The ending feels rushed. But there are moments of real descriptive vividness, and it earns its status as a poem: the form feels right, not (as it might be) a gimmick, and the book as a whole is memorable and worthwhile. You should read it.

I went to Aberdeen University as an undergraduate in 1984. Before I went up I had assumed that Scots is a dialect of English. It’s not: Scots is a language in its own right, as I learned in my first-year linguistics lectures. It has many similarities with English (or English has with Scots) because they both descend from a common ancestor. But talk of ‘dialect’ subordinates one to the other, and isn't correct. Then again, canons of orthography and spelling for English were more rigorously determined than for Scots, which was a language for much of its history spoken by a largely illiterate population. That means that to write Scots involves a greater degree of latitude than is the case with English.

I suppose the most famous Scots poet is Burns, but the best Scots poet is Hugh MacDiarmid, the pen name of C M Grieve. MacDiarmid invented a ‘synthetic Scots’, sometimes called Lallans, combining various forms of Scots both vernacular and archaic, forging an idiom in which he could write his verse. Giles is doing something similar in this book, although in a less systematic way.

Another memory of arriving at university in the 1980s is discovering that though a return ferry ticket from Aberdeen to Orkney cost several hundred pounds, a return ferry ticket from Orkney to Aberdeen was only a tenner; a subsidy by the government was in place to encourage people from the islands to come to the mainland to, for instance, go to university. What this meant was that young people on the island would buy a ticket, come to the city, sell the return half at the mainland going-rate and get roaring drunk on the proceeds. Happy times.

Not to get distracted. I mean no disparagement when I suggest Deep Wheel Orcadia is written in Synthetic Scots. On the contrary: MacDiarmid was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. And there is a Synthetic Scots tradition in SF too: actor James Doohan, of Northern Irish stock, born and raised in Canada, affecting his hoots-mon pantomime accent to play ‘Scotty’ Scott, the Scottish engineer of the Starship Enterprise: ‘the ingines cannae tek it, capn!’ and so on. Giles is considerably more sophisticated and expressive than that. This is how the poem starts:

Easy enough to read, even for a non-Scot. Indeed, the language in which the poem is written is less Lallands, and more a (slightly inconsistent) phonetic transcription of spoken Scots, like Irvine Welsh’s Transpotting, or indeed Banks’s Feersum Enjinn. That’s fine, and often works well. I was less enamoured of the ‘English’ translation, which renders often perfectly simple Scots words into Gerard Manley-Hopkins clusters of synonyms, Joyce-like or else just a tangle.

The logic here, I suppose, is that translation from one language to another is never a process of one-to-one mapping. I don’t gainsay that, but actually in this case the two languages (Orkney Scots and English) are pretty proximate in many ways, and the English splurges read as chaff, or a kind of over-compensation: turntwistwhirlspinning againstaboutbefore is a mess, not an expressive rendering of turlan anent. Often the juxtaposition of Scots and Hopkins-English works to suggest that the former is a more concise, to-the-point, punchier language than the sprawling, flailing latter:

Stuart Curran, reviewing the book in The Scotsman, notes:

Although the book contains its own justification – “sheu hears thir vooels roondan, thir consonants clippan / thir wirds switchan” – and often English intrudes when the vocabulary is simply not there – “Ma coseen is wi a college / roon Alpha Centauri, wirkan / wi archives o 21st century / intertextual narrative” – the problematic part is the difference between phonology and orthography. Why do these space-Orcadians say (or write) “arkaeolojist” and “ruinaetion” rather than “archaeologist” or “ruination”, “taks” for “takes” or “injines” for “engines”? I can understand the use of dwam, smirr, watergaw, on-ding, hae for have gie for give, but I’ve never known anyone insist on “crampit, caald offiece” rather than “cramped, cold office”. It may make the lilt of the language more apparent, but it can seem like difference for the sake of difference.

That’s right, I think. More, the peculiar orthography and the need to incorporate technical and other jargon into the story leads, sometimes, to verse of rebarbative ugliness. Here, for instance, two characters discuss the ‘new teknolojy’ of hyperdrive:

“Whit wey deus hid work?” asks Eynar, pooran
a beer “A’m no sure,” says Olaf,
“but yin arkaeologist, ken, ach,
whit’s her name, telt his like this—”

The jumpit yoleman taks twa glesses
an a pock o nuts an steers
this subtle injines trou the warp
o time, noo rings o spirit on

the binkled aluminium bar.
“The drive maks a pock, see,
O hyperspace tae win trou,
Tae exceed relatievistic constraints.”

“Ya, but,” says Eynar, “I thowt his wis
more ontolojiecal restrictions
as teknolojiecal limits. Whit wey
ir thay avoydan catastrophic

temporal paradox, eh?” Olaf
taks a drowt o his ael an says
“Ya weel. Best kens. An best kens
thay maan, fer hid’s bad enough tae loss

the laast bit o the laast bit
o wir shippeen ithoot messan wi fuckan
multiversal anomalies
an aa.”

The lines that work here as poetry, as Wordsworth might have said, are the ones describing simple, everyday sights or actions: rings o spirit on/the binkled aluminium bar; Olaf takking a drowt o his ael. The rest is lumpen, awkward, ungainly. It’s hard to see what ‘Whit wey deus hid work’ has over ‘Whit way does hit work’, or indeed ‘Whit way does hit woruk’ (the ‘English’ translation gives us: ‘whathowwherewhy does it work?’, over-egging the simpler original—where does it work? What kind of question is that? Why does it work? What?). The use of ‘subtle’ breaks the phonetic logic of the whole—or is the idea that Orcadians pronounced that word ‘sub-tlee’?—and ‘I thowt his wis/more ontolojiecal restrictions/as teknolojiecal limits’ is just ugly.

Curran's line, in the Scotsman review I quote above, is that experiments are worth undertaking but that not every experiment works. That Deep Wheel Orcadia doesn't entirely work doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile, or doesn't deserve its place on the Clarke shortlist (I think it does), or that you shouldn't read it. But it is a text of promises more than it delivers. The wheels in deep space go round and round, round and round, round and round.

Mercurio D Rivera, ‘Wergen: The Alien Love War’ (2021)

 

Shortlisted for the 2022 Clarke award, Mercurio D Rivera’s Wergen: The Alien Love War (NewCon 2021) is a fix-up novel: seven previously published short stories, plus five unpublished shorts, laying out the story of humanity's encounter with the alien ‘Wergen’ from roughly AD 2500 to 2600. The wrinkle here is an inversion of the conceit of Tiptree’s ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side’ (1972). In that story (a great story it is too) humans are enthralled by, sexually obsessed with, an alien life form called the Sellice. In Riviera’s fix-up it’s the aliens, the mild-mannered, civilised, technologically-advanced Wergen, who are hopelessly in love with humanity. They can’t help themselves. To them we are wonderful, adorable, no matter how ugly we may be physically or morally, no matter how badly we treat them. Wergen devotion to humanity leads to them sharing their interstellar tech with us, collaborating with us in planetary colonisation and above all serving us, de facto slaves. We abuse and demean them; they love us and serve us.

It's a solid piece of SF, this novel: readable, engaging, thought-provoking. It is, let me assure you, considerably better than its ‘Olsen Twins Meet Eric Cantona’ cover-art, at the head of this post—truly, some of the worst cover-art in the long and glorious history of sciencefictional cover art. The novel behind the cover is a servicable thought-experiment—what if E.T. were helplessly in love with us?—to which it adds the correlative: the ways we would likely act thereafter would not reflect creditably upon us.

Each chapter here functions as a standalone as well as a unit in the larger story, though as with many collections of short stories the units are of varying quality. One problem is that Rivera’s core conceit—a good one—fits a short-story setting, and gets stretched too thinly when extended over 300 pages. In order to keep the story going he has to throw into the mix, first, an anti-love drug for Wergens, to cancel the effects of his premise; then a pro-love drug that mimics Wergenlove among humankind, and finally an anti-anti-love drug to counter the effects of the first drug’s countering. These move the plot along, but at the cost of trivialising love as such, instrumentalising it, and so diminishing the novel. They are, frankly, gimmicks, pushing the characters and populations of the story around like counters on a board.

The ‘anti-love drug’ is breathed-in from a blue inhaler device and gives the individual Wergen, even if only for a few minutes, an unclouded view of unlovely humanity. Under its influence some Wergens begin a terrorist campaign against their human enslavers, and events snowball until humans and the Wergen are at war. The aliens' huge technological advantages ought to make conflict a short-lived affair, but quite a few of them are still besotted with us, so battle is more equal. Besides, an ancient galactic race far advanced even beyond the Wergen, called the Eremites, offers far greater prospects in alliance. Asia and Europe get blasted, but what the hey. Then the Eremites mysteriously withdraw and without their super-duper tech, and unable to maintain the super-tech the Wergen had previously gifted humanity, things look grim for homo sapiens.

The Wergen have three-ply DNA. They mate by linking male-and-female via a cranial umbilicus whereupon the ‘dominant’ party absorbs the other into their body and so generates babies. They lack what a human might recognise as a brain (we’re told ‘Wergen physiology has no analogue to the human brain, all neural activity is centred in a swath of cells that surround their upper and lower jawbones’). Nonetheless they possess, improbably enough, intensely human sensibilities and attitudes. They read like Star Trek aliens: people in prosthetics and fancy dress. The novel does wave its hand a little by way of explaining this—it seems the Wergen modify their physiology to more resemble whichever alien species they encounter—but it still strains credulity. (Matters aren't helped when the book forgets itself, as when it describes the ‘nasal twangs’ of the Wergen speech [13], even though the Wergen lack noses). Then again, perhaps this doesn’t matter. Rivera is writing aliens in order to metaphorize human concerns. That’s fine, SF does that all the time. My problem I think is the narrowness with which the conceit is developed.

It's a premise that would enable a writer to speculate and explore the parameters of love as such—one of the greatest themes in literature, of course But Rivera follows-through on it in rigidly materialist, instrumentalist terms: the Wergen’s ‘love’ for humanity is merely a matter of brain chemistry, easily reversed with drugs. When human scientists develop their artificial love-drug, the ‘neuromone’, which compels humans to love other humans the way Wergen love humans, it's a development with all the shonky contrivence of the ‘love philtre’ device of old romances. Of course, writing in the cynical, bitter 2020s it’s no surprise how Rivera’s spins this in-story development: a worthless elite (the ‘Charismatics’) reserve use of this drug to themselves and enjoy the perks that go along with being adored by the multitudes: a 0.01% governing elite, holders of all the wealth and privilege. The impoverished billions have no choice but to love the Charismatics and so collude in their own oppression. There is satirical potential in this notion, but the novel doesn’t really follow-through on it. 

Much of the problem, I think, is that ‘love’ is this novel is rendered with soap-opera flatness and melodrama: ‘A familiar tenderness flashed across her eyes, but only for a second. “It’s over, Max. It’s been over for a long time now. You just didn’t know it.” … If what she said was true, if what we shared had died a long time ago, why did her words cut so deep?’ Mills: meet Boon.

Actually, that's not fair to Mills & Boon, many of whose books capture something vital and true about the way love works in the world. Love in this novel is entirely stimulus-response, wholly linear and wholly material, and thus completely in thrall to imagined technology, drugs that can either compel you to love somebody, or else can compel you not to love somebody. It's all teenage-crush intensities of joy and grief:

Adrian and I lean over the edge of the rooftop. I move closer to him and he turns to face me ... After so many years of secretly pining for him, I take a deep breath. I can imagine leaning in, kissing him softly on his lips. I'm staring deeply into his blue eyes. [135]

“What’s wrong with you? I’m not some lab specimen! I’m a person!” I’m shouting at the top of my lungs, my fists clenched. “I’m just trying to get through school, to live my life.” I turn and stomp away but then whirl around. “Why are you doing this to me?” [155]

Clunk, goes the prose. Clank, goes the characterisation. This is not a novel that captures the complexities and ironies of love, and for all its sub-Baxterian galactic ranging-around, there's little depth here. Then again, this book has just been shortlisted for the UK’s premier SF award. A surprising inclusion, really.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount 2022)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is old-school Trek, pitched to win-over Trekkers nonplussed by, or actively hostile to, the new-school Trek of Discovery. Disco has plenty of fans of its own, of course. But the latter group is—if I can use the word non-dismissively, and indeed non-ironically—woker than the former, which strikes me as fine, actually. Woke, outside its vapid use as a term of abuse in our ongoing nonsense culture war, speaks to a set of personal, political and aesthetic concerns shared by many, and Disco does a pretty good job, so far as I can judge it, of presenting to those. And there’s room for lots of different iterations of science fiction. Star Trek: SNW makes its pitch to the older-school Liberal fanbase of Star Treks TOS and TNG: viz., happy to make room for some women so long as the handsome white dude with the excellent hair remains in overall control. In favour of an ethnically diverse meritocracy, up to a point, that point being where the ‘ethnics’ constitute one-African-American, one-actual-African, one-Asian, one-Hispanic, one-Alien (who is also the one-Disabled) tokenistically distributed here-and-there among the white majority. No Jews, though, in SNW, which is ... odd, especially considering the show's original casting and prior racial-allegorising trends.

There’s a strong emphasis of the importance of workplace hierarchies and proper functioning of organisations, respecting the chain of command and so on, all the stuff younger wokes (younger, that is, than me) find so irksome. But here we are: it’s a 2022 show with a nicely varied cast, good sets, splendid special effects and some inventive episodic scriptwriting. Plus, let us not forget, Anson Mount’s amazing hair.

This probably comes across as snarkier than I intend. At the time of writing, the first five episodes of the show’s first series ten-ep run have dropped in the UK, and I watched all five in short order, enjoying them. It tickled, evidently, my nostalgia button—a distinct Next Generation vibe to much of it. Episode 1 ‘Strange New Worlds’ sets-up the series and treads water doing so somewhat, but Episode 2 ‘Children of the Comet’ was a very nice little standalone: a comet is headed directly towards an arid world, threatening on impact to wipe out the indigenous population. The obvious thing is for the Enterprise to intervene, diverting the comet’s trajectory, but when they try, that stalwart of Trek scriptwriting, the Vastly More Powerful Spacefaring Species No-one Has Ever Heard Of Before appears, threatening Pike with destruction from their hideously-beweaponed, much bigger starship if he does so. To them, the comet is sacred, a kind of god, and its wishes—even its desire to crash into a populated planet killing itself and everyone—must be respected. How Pike gets out of this, saving his ship, and the world, is neatly spun.

Here's one thing though: the more a franchise propagates itself, the more ornate and intricate its continuity and worldbuilding, the more inconsistency is liable to intrude. Take episode 3, ‘Ghosts of Illyria’, a serviceable romp through a world ravaged by proton storms, or perhaps crouton storms (I wasn’t entirely paying attention) where all the original inhabitants have disappeared. It turns out they’d genetically modified themselves out of materiality altogether and are now humanoid flashes of ball-lightning or something. Anyway, their essence infects the Enterprise crew like a virus, and everyone goes crazy for light (‘Mehr Licht!’ they all cry, like Goethe. Or would do if the scriptwriters had had the courage to boldly Goethe) since their vitamin D levels are so low.

There’s a certain amount of smashing up the ship and of course a last-minute reprieve, but then at the very end there’s a reveal: the virus, or whatever it was, got past the transporter filters because the chief medical officer (Babs Olusanmokun’s Joseph M'Benga) has been keeping his medical transporter free of upgrades and unchecked-over. Why? Because his young daughter has an incurable disease and, rather than watch her waste away and die, he has stored her in the memory buffers of the transporter. But—wait: what? You can do that? But if you can do that then, well, the implications are huge. Why does the sick bay sedate ill patients? Why not just bung them in the transporter buffer? Why travel around the galaxy with a crew of hundreds? why not store hundreds of various folk in the transporter buffer and bring them out as needful? You could fly about in a shuttle and carry an army of thousands in the transporter buffer, conquer the universe.

I mean: really?

Not to get distracted. Episode 4, ‘Memento Mori’, is a hunt-chase spaceship battle where the Enterprise, outgunned by a fleet of Gorn hunter-killer starships, has to hide inside a Brown Dwarf: basically a retread of the final sequence from the peerless Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan, though without the investment that film provides in the characters duking it out. But that's fine, and I like the way no actual Gorns are shown, just their weird-shaped spaceships. Gornless is better. Episode 5, ‘Spock Amok’, is one of those episodic Trek attempts at comedy: Spock and his fiancé T’Pring (full name: ‘T’ Boldly Pring, Were No One Has Pring’d Before’) swap bodies and there’s some awkwardly treading-carefully-to-avoid-crass-gender-stereotyping comedy wrung out of the exchange. Somewhere between Amok: Lame and Amok: Fine. But I shall watch the next five episodes when they finally arrive in the UK.

Still, that plot wrinkle about storing live people in the Transporter buffer indefinitely and without ill effects has put a small hook in my imagination [Ian Burdon on Twitter reminds me that there's a TNG episode based on the same idea]. I know people who write Trek novelisations, and a fine and honourable profession it is; and I know too that there's no way Paramount would ever commission me to write a left-field Trek novel in which Federation ships are small pods containing hugely powerful transporters, attached to gigantic warp engines, and everything and anyone needful is conjured like a rigelian rabbit from a hat as and when needed. Ah well.

David Eggers, ‘The Every’ (2021)

 [This is the first draft of a review I wrote for a magazine last year: I had misremembered my brief, with respect to the wordage, and over-indulged myself. When I submitted it the books editor gently pointed to the more capsule-sized slot I had to fill, and I chopped it down. It is a good discipline, writing effectively in brief, and my initial over-length version was entirely my fault. But blogs are more forgiving of prolixity, so here we go.]

Dave Eggers, The Every (2021)

Review by Adam Roberts

Those for whom Dave Eggers’ name evokes only his celebrated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may be surprised at just how much straight fiction he has written. ‘Those for whom’, here, is code for: me. I confess it, the pros and cons of social transparency being one of the themes of the book under review. Though I know his influential literary magazine McSweeney’s, and have read his book-length nonfiction (his 2009 Hurricaine Katrina book Zeitoun is exceptional), I had not realised Eggers had published so much fiction—thirteen lengthy novels.

Here’s one of them: The Circle (2013), a blockbuster satire on the burgeoning power of internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. We follow idealistic Mae Holland as she is hired by ‘The Circle’ (Eggers’ stand-in organisation for those, I suppose, potentially litigious others) through various in-work adventures, sexual as well as technological. She rises through the corporate ranks by wholeheartedly endorsing the company line, a kind of smiley-face Orwellianism: ‘Secrets are lies’; ‘Sharing is caring’; ‘Privacy is theft’. The Circle’s customers purchase a single online identity through the company, called ‘TruYou’, through which they have access to absolutely everything in the digital universe. This has ended all online fraud, an outcome that strikes me as very unlikely, but there you go.

I summarise this older title at some length because Eggers’ latest novel, The Every, is a direct sequel to it, and hard to follow without some sense of what has gone before—so much so, indeed, that in an act of unusual-for-me reviewerish due diligence I went out and bought a copy of The Circle to bring myself up to speed. Why Eggers considered a sequel needful is something of a puzzle. Conceivably he figured a decade was a long time in internet commerce and tech culture, and he wanted to revisit the ground with more up-to-date sensibilities. But the novel he has written doesn’t tread any new ground. It’s like The Circle, but more so. The Every parses the same mix of admiration for the smiley, shiny spaces of these tech giants and disapprobation at their increasingly totalitarian grip on global culture and society. It even has broadly the same shape as the earlier novel: a young woman, here Delaney Wells, joins the world’s biggest tech company and works her way up.

‘The Circle’ has now merged with ‘the world’s largest e-commerce website’, an entity Eggers coyly identifies only as ‘named after the South American jungle’, surely not enough to get him off the libel hook should Amazon take umbrage. The resulting commercial behemoth is ‘the Every’, whose employers are called ‘Everyones’ and whose sunlit, optimistic, rationalising and secrecy-averse tentacles are in every aspect of human life. The first hundred pages of this novel take us through Delaney’s company orientation, clueing-in the reader to the Every’s corporate culture, wandering its amenities-rich campus, dorm-like housing, gyms and recreation activities. We also catch-us up with several key characters from The Circle, including Mae, who is now one of the organisation’s Head Honchos.

But Delaney has a secret: she’s a double agent, a luddite whose hatred of modernity’s internet supersaturation was acquired in her youth, and cemented when her parents texted her news of her beloved grandmother JuJu’s death with sad-faced emojis. She hopes to bring The Every down from the inside. Will she succeed? It’ll take you nearly six hundred meandering pages to find out!

In essence The Every stages the same moral debate as The Circle: we may agree our increasingly internet saturated world is becoming a real-life Brave New World or Black Mirror nightmare and may even feel moved to free ‘the people’ from this false Zuckerbergtopia—but do the people themselves actually want to be free? Perhaps they’re perfectly happy having their data mined, their actions nudged by clever algorithms and a free lifetime’s supply of ‘You Won’t Believe What These Former Celebrities Look Like Now (Number 4 Will Astonish You!)’ clickbaits to pass the time. A potentially interesting dilemma this, though the novel’s satirical focus flattens it, and it’s a little hard to see that a second hefty novel adds much to the drift of the first.

In essence, The Every’s tyranny is an algorithmocracy. Algorithms govern every aspect of Eggers extrapolated future. Workers are continually monitored (‘all the performance measurements, participation points, smiles, ComAnons, step count, sleep hours, frowns’—ComAnon is a separate app that allows employees to register complaints about co-workers) and the data aggregated by a programme called ‘Everything in Order’, which prompts promotions and sackings, or, as the Every prefers to call it, ‘deëmployment’. The company sells an ‘AuthentiFriend’ app by which you can rank your friendships, disburdening yourself of those pals who don’t score highly enough, and ‘U4U’ a personality test so widely adopted it has superseded psychology (‘Freud’s work has the intellectual heft of a streetside astrology’ says Gabriel Chu, the app’s inventor). There are many more. Here’s one: ‘EveryContent’ aggregates all film and novel storylines by their audience/reader ratings, creating a template to perfect all future books and films: no epistolary novels, no unpleasant characters, no outdated moral positions and so on. ‘No book should be over 500 pages,’ is one EveryContent rule, though with a knowing nod we’re also told: ‘if it is over 500, we found the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577’. The Every is exactly 577 pages long.

If this style of humour is your bag, then there’s stuff in this novel to amuse you, though I found the comedy diffuse and often second hand, and the satire strangely blunt. Having risen through the organisation, Delaney decides to bring it down by putting out apps so absurd that people will revolt against the Every, amongst them ‘Satisfied?’, an app that tells you if you enjoyed the meal you just ate, and ‘Did I?’, which informs the postcoital whether they orgasmed or not, and also rates orgasm intensity via a global database. These releases are all huge hits. No app is too ridiculous for humanity. I was reminded of David Nobbs’ Reginald Perrin who, back in the 70s, set up ‘Grot’ to sell useless rubbish intending it to fail, only for it to become an international success. I’m sure neither Eggers nor his core millennial fanbase have so much as heard of Reggie, though they would have done so if they had downloaded my app ‘NothingNewUnderTheSun’.

The Every grows ever more tyrannical and Maoist (their steering group is even called ‘The Gang of 40’). Having shamed and pressured people out of international travel—to save the environment, you see—they apply sanctions to anyone who commutes anywhere except on foot and by bike, and crash the US market for bananas and pineapples. And so it goes on: ‘millions more became unemployed with every new thing the Every cancelled, but there was always work in the Every warehouses, to work beside robot package-pickers and while monitored by AI and be paid a fair minimum wage.’ ‘This’, Eggers adds, ‘was an orderly system.’ This dystopian whomp-whomp of this increasingly grates. Satire needn’t jettison all nuance, after all.

Not that the ‘ordinary’ people come out of the novel any better: they are all either sheep, pusillanimous conformists, or eager Maoist converts: Eggers tries to strike comic-satirical sparks from various snowflakes and triggerables. Delaney organises a work’s outing, but her coworkers are furious, outraged by the unexceptional play-list she selects for the bus-ride there—hearing an Otis Redding song ‘ruins the day’ (‘woman-hater said [the complaint], supported with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he’d been unkind to an ex-girlfriend he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting’). When the Every bans pets as a kind of slavery (‘Everyones will be given a workweek to remove their animal captives from campus’) nobody complains.

There are some interesting smaller-scale think-pieces herein, but they are embedded in a novel with the texture of suet. Every now and again Eggers throws-in a bomb—an actual bomb—to try and liven the narrative. But the novel remains unenlivened, right though to its twist ending, which many readers will see coming an ergonomic mile off. The Every is one not for everyone.