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Now published for the first time in the UK, the second visionary novel from the acclaimed author of LITTLE BROTHER.Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He’s doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth into the world.Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications mega-corp, but Art’s real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn’t changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted – not happiness, not money, certainly not love.Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain...
Art, an industrial saboteur, finds his loyalties and sanity tested when his efforts to undermine a rival time-zone tribe spiral into a personal crisis. As an interface designer for a telecommunications mega-corp, Art navigates a world where global connectivity has fractured humanity into tribes defined by time zones rather than geography. He operates within a high-stakes environment of constant digital surveillance and corporate warfare, where his objective is to sabotage the Greenwich Mean Tribe. The narrative, delivered through a cynical and sharp first-person perspective, tracks his descent from a confident operative to a man stranded on the edge of ruin, forced to confront the fragility of his own social and emotional reality.
This work is often characterized as a prescient exploration of the social consequences of constant digital connectivity. The narrative style is noted for its rapid pacing and biting wit, which effectively mirrors the frantic nature of the world it describes. Readers frequently highlight the author's ability to blend speculative technology with recognizable human anxieties about belonging and status. The book is regarded as a significant entry in the author's bibliography, offering a cynical yet insightful look at how technology reshapes human social structures.
Page Count:
256
Publication Date:
2013-01-31
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN-10:
0007506023
ISBN-13:
9780007506026
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