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,… (more)
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, 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, and most 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....
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Sat, 24 Apr 2010 04:54:13 +0200
Excellent book. I, like kaolin, am a Triber evidently on a sabotage mission, since I'm a native PST working in EST... It's a cyber novel taken down to the commercial business level, with a lot of humor derived from the oddities of life. How many people actually meet their femme fatale by running her over? It's a good read, and not just a humorous one. The whole episode with the psych ward should make you stop and think about how could you prove you're not crazy....
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:50:35 +0100
Great story; a little too easy in the end, perhaps, but I find myself mentioning it a lot given its relevance to, well, my life as a GMTriber in the US. And other such I meet via Twitter, etc.