A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping
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 a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world.
Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, 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. 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, and most certainly not love … which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside of Boston.
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“Doctorow’s easy-going storytelling belies the rapid-fire pacing of his
tale of one man caught in a nightmare of time zones and technology.
Combining near-future suspense with magical realism, the author of Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom crafts a surrealistic parable of
progress gone wrong that belongs in most sf collections.”
—
Library Journal