Booklife Review

This brisk satiric vision from playwright/comedian/inventor Abrams imagines a post-scarcity future of corporate control, drone deliveries, robot workers, ever-widening income inequality, rampant ignorance, and a proudly idle “sophisticated class” of Job-Hobbyists whose most alarmed members, between their few hours of work each week, are prone to making declarations like “We shoulda fought harder when the schools pulled the John Steinbeck books.” Immortality Bytes blends trend-extrapolating SF forecasting with a gift for gags, some principled outrage, and a playful narrative. Protagonist Stu is an accomplished AI programmer, though he puts more energy into “projecting luxury to raise one’s status” on social media. When ex-college fling Roxy tells him of a new project that will preserve a person’s mind after death, and a narcissistic sociopath CEO facing a criminal trial bribes him to steal the technology, Stu comes to realize he’s not the only player in this game of theory and practice.

With multiple points of view and energetic attention to this future’s most dehumanizing particulars and how the Stus of the world navigate them, Abrams weaves a web of corporate and technological intrigue as Stu faces constant reminders of the far-reaching effects of one of humanity’s defining traits: greed. Dark humor and crisp dialogue drive the twisty storytelling, but for all the clever jokes about, say, one coffee shop/dispensary entrepreneur’s “capitalist exploitation of anti-capitalism,” Abrams’s tale is also pained, outraged, and in the end bittersweet, building to a gutpunch.

In 20NF, the novel’s present, everything has a cost, including happiness—Stu literally muses, while making unnecessary purchases that drones will chuck down a chute into his apartment, “There. I feel better. We will be happier with those things.” The accomplished worldbuilding, tech prognostication, and spirit of ethical inquiry continue after the narrative in a host of hyperlinked bonus material (characters’ backstories; histories of this future and its tech; a pointed consideration of Ayn Rand; a sex scene) that take full, clever advantage of e-book formats.

Takeaway: Striking satire of tech, work, class in the American near-future.

Comparable Titles: J.R.H. Lawless’s The General Buzz series, Pedro Domingos’s 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A