Thoughts on Infoquake

The only way I can see to get your fiction published these days is to write something that no one else is writing. Sure, there are several players in, say, the "vampire space" on the bookshelf, but they've all been around for a while. Try breaking into that now. Not so much. Even in generally evergreen niches with devoted fans, like military SF, you need something different, like John Scalzi.

David Louis Edelman's Infoquake is just that: something different. It's Big Idea Science Fiction. It's dystopic-flavored. It's got the Competent Man. But the most unique thing about it, and what probably got it published in the first place, is that it's about commerce. That's right, not exploration, not the Singularity, not aliens with lasers. It's about how you make a living in the future, and how you compete for a big pile of money not a big rock in space. It's the science fiction that James Stewart would write. It's not like anything you've ever read before.

There is so much going on here that it's hard to give a summation, but I'll try. Natch runs a bio/logic programming concern, which makes products that people can buy to enhance or alter their bodies or minds through millions of nanobots lurking in their blood and tissues. Natch is ruthless, brilliant and ambitious, engaging in all manner of subterfuge and cunning to put his small company on top of the bio/logic rankings. His notoriety and resourcefulness earn him the attention of the scion of a powerful, revered and very wealthy family (imagine a woman who is Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett), who wants him to help her bring a new product to market, one that can observe, calculate and reproduce the desired cause and effect of any action from any alternate reality.

It's also not like most popular science fiction in that there is almost no violence in it. There's a thing with a bear, and a scene with a couple of dart guns, but that's about it for on-screen physical threats. Which is why it is all that much more amazing that Edelman managed to raise the stakes high enough to rivet me to the page.

I'm going to get the sequel, MultiReal, as soon as I can get myself to a bookstore.

Highly recommended: GOOD ENOUGH TO BUY