If Dickens did digital dystopia

A thriller about what happens when the tech firms take over might be the cleverest book of 2019, says Sophie Ratcliffe

IZED by Joanna Kavenna 400pp, Faber, £16.99, ebook £6.99

f Joanna Kavenna’s debut novel, A Field Guide to Reality, took us down a dreamy, Carrollian rabbit hole, then Zed, her latest, is more post-Orwellian nightmare. Set in the very-near future, the United Kingdom is now “the most advanced benign regulatory environment in the world”. Almost all human activity is logged and mapped by a “global media conglomerate”. Beetle (think Facebook plus Google, on steroids) controls “90 per cent of the Western Web”, has a monopoly on the cryptocurrency, and happens to own “every security contract for the Government”.

The system works just fine for those at the top. Guy Matthias, Beetle’s CEO, relishes Beetle’s “world of Real Virtuality” (RV), and spends his spare time thinking about hair-weaves, sex and the emergent technology (aka “shellshedding research”) that will transfer his consciousness into a younger, more athletic body.

Things become complicated for those further down the food chain. Most people “freely” wear their BeetleBands, “life-enhancing” aids that monitor everything from a user’s pulse rate to their mood (and feed it straight back to Beetle). Walls have ears, and household appliances have agendas. Veeps, (Very Intelligent Personal Assistants), talking fridges, and DNA-testing toothbrushes are linked to Beetle’s “Custodians Program”. Those prone to latenight munchies soon find that their “lifechain predictions” are logged as unstable. Crime is rare, and individuals are pre-emptively convicted – under a form of justice

This made the meeting resemble a surrealists’ pageant, or a

People prone to latenight munchies are logged by their talking fridges as unstable