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
“Bravura…Cory Doctorow writes fast and furiously, the words gushing out of him in a stream of metaphor and imagery that keeps you glued to his futurist tales.”
— Now (Toronto)“Carried along by the rocketing narrative, the reader may not immediately realize this isn’t just a wacky futuristic adventure; it’s a fable with a distinctive moral about choosing physical comfort over spiritual fulfillment and worldly success over true happiness and the frightening consequences that can result.”
— RT Book Reviews (4 stars)“Doctorow lives up to the promise of his first novel…This short novel’s occasionally bitter, sometimes hilarious, and always wackily appealing protagonist consistently skewers those evils of modern culture he holds most pernicious.”
— Publishers Weekly“As in Down and Out, Doctorow shows here that he’s got the modern world, in all its Googled, Friendstered, and PDA-d glory, completely sussed.”
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and author science fiction and nonfiction. His writing has won numerous awards, including three Locus Awards, two John W. Campbell Awards, three Prometheus Awards, two Sunburst Awards, the White Pine Award, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, among others. He has served as Canadian regional director of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is coeditor of the blog Boing Boing, and he was named one of the web’s twenty-five “influencers” by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a contributing author to Wired magazine, and his writing has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, Popular Science, and others.
P. J. Ochlan is an Audie Award–winning, multiple Earphones Award–winning, and Voice Arts Award–nominated narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has also included Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp, critically acclaimed feature films, and television series regular roles.