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Eminent Domain
In the Socialist Utopia of the People’s Republic of Britain, a routine criminal investigation spirals out of control with world-shattering consequences.
"An enthralling and immersive novel ... Comparable with William Gibson at his most disorienting." — Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again
The Cold War ended thirty years ago, the Communists have won in Europe and the world has settled into two blocks divided by a silicon curtain, The Partition.
The tranquil backwater of the People’s Republic of Britain is due to host an international sporting event, the Games, and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the country becoming a republic. But when the organiser of the Games dies suddenly and his office is broken into, Barrow, the retired security operative enlisted to investigate, is drawn into a conspiracy that has implications not only for him and his team of young and inexperienced assistants, but for their entire way of life.
A kaleidoscopic satire of the present moment, Eminent Domain is both a dark thriller and a formally dazzling reimagining of the political novel in which lives, worlds and even realities collide to devastating effect.
"Gripping, witty and richly detailed... shows us a parallel Britain forged out of political uprisings and economic transformation." — William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry
"What if the future we were promised had really arrived? This pacey, compelling thriller plays out against the complexities, contradictions and conflicts of a world that might have been and points the way to one that might yet arrive." — Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen
"An enthralling and immersive novel ... Comparable with William Gibson at his most disorienting." — Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again
The Cold War ended thirty years ago, the Communists have won in Europe and the world has settled into two blocks divided by a silicon curtain, The Partition.
The tranquil backwater of the People’s Republic of Britain is due to host an international sporting event, the Games, and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the country becoming a republic. But when the organiser of the Games dies suddenly and his office is broken into, Barrow, the retired security operative enlisted to investigate, is drawn into a conspiracy that has implications not only for him and his team of young and inexperienced assistants, but for their entire way of life.
A kaleidoscopic satire of the present moment, Eminent Domain is both a dark thriller and a formally dazzling reimagining of the political novel in which lives, worlds and even realities collide to devastating effect.
"Gripping, witty and richly detailed... shows us a parallel Britain forged out of political uprisings and economic transformation." — William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry
"What if the future we were promised had really arrived? This pacey, compelling thriller plays out against the complexities, contradictions and conflicts of a world that might have been and points the way to one that might yet arrive." — Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen
464 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 9, 2020
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203 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 3, 2026
"Everything for Everyone..." meets "Neuromancer" (with an echo of "SS-GB" perhaps) in a near future scenario where large parts of the world have gone communist. Some of the sub-plots are hard to follow but the world Neville has built is fascinating in many different ways. A long book but I devoured it over the Christmas break.
October 27, 2020
Very cool book, highly original. Modernist science fiction acid communist utopia cold war spy thriller. Be prepared for a challenging read that rewards you with some mind bending SF concepts (imperialist nano-technology, state mandated drug patches) and formal ingenuity. A 'critical utopia' that imagines a much better, but still flawed, society, and plays with the contradictions and challenges it might face.
Never go *Full* acid rave communism...?
Never go *Full* acid rave communism...?
June 19, 2020
I loved Resolution Way, Neville’s last book, and when I heard unexpectedly that he had published another book, a semi-sequel/utopian counterpart, I ordered it immediately. Like its dystopian predecessor, Eminent Domain is a strange but compelling work, though this time around I felt the metafictional elements (calling attention to its relationship to Resolution Way) and its setting more alienating and distracting.
Eminent Domain is utopian alternative history: sometime before WW2, European social democracy and soviet communism, as well as the non-aligned movement, converged to a kind of heavily-automated hyper-democratic communism, now facing off against America and its satellites. People do a small amount of useful work when they want, services are provided for free, there’s no monarchy, police, or landlords, and Britain is majority non-white. At the same time, there’s questions over whether people are engaging with the constant voting required by their democracy, what abuses are permitted by the technology that allows all this to take place, what revolutions make of revolutionaries and how they relate to the generation born into the world they fought for. It’s extremely gratifying and exciting to read, so I can forgive occasionally clunky exposition (a tourist character, useful as an audience surrogate, fades away and the book mostly relies on document inserts from a sort of communist Wikipedia discussing the socialist calculation debate).
Resolution Way was a dystopia that avoided the genre’s occasionally reactionary trappings by presenting the grim future, not as something to make us more grateful for the status quo, but a modest extension of existing affairs. It seems set only just around the corner, and the familiarity breeds contempt. Eminent Domain is set essentially in the present (2018) but has about a hundred years of missed history behind the events of the plot, which means any familiarity I had with the characters was slightly jarring. There’s been a prolonged civil war in living memory, the nation-state is withering away, and nanotechnology, genetic manipulation and medicine have been essentially solved. Some characters are anxious about overcoming their sense of personal property or national identity, and sex and drugs are treated much more liberally, but for a premise that imagines international communism as 70% complete, as well as dramatic advances in technology, I was expecting to be more alienated by the way characters thought, spoke, and acted. I guess I wanted a narrative as bizarre and ambitious as the meta-narrative.
Neville’s writing pays close attention to sensory experience which makes it vivid and absorbing, at times veering off prose and into poetry (with good and bad results). Resolution Way had something similar, and I still sometimes search that book for passages I enjoyed- in vain, since the lack of chapter headings or punctuation makes it much harder to move through the book outside of its order. Eminent Domain is a bit better in this regard, but still disdains things like speech marks, which makes dialogue more confusing than it needs to be, for little reward in my estimation.
It was hard to rate this one. If I have a few complaints, it’s only because the rest of Neville’s work is so rich and enjoyable. I don’t think I could fail to recommend such a bizarre book that I read in such a frenzy, but prepare for a very varied experience.
Eminent Domain is utopian alternative history: sometime before WW2, European social democracy and soviet communism, as well as the non-aligned movement, converged to a kind of heavily-automated hyper-democratic communism, now facing off against America and its satellites. People do a small amount of useful work when they want, services are provided for free, there’s no monarchy, police, or landlords, and Britain is majority non-white. At the same time, there’s questions over whether people are engaging with the constant voting required by their democracy, what abuses are permitted by the technology that allows all this to take place, what revolutions make of revolutionaries and how they relate to the generation born into the world they fought for. It’s extremely gratifying and exciting to read, so I can forgive occasionally clunky exposition (a tourist character, useful as an audience surrogate, fades away and the book mostly relies on document inserts from a sort of communist Wikipedia discussing the socialist calculation debate).
Resolution Way was a dystopia that avoided the genre’s occasionally reactionary trappings by presenting the grim future, not as something to make us more grateful for the status quo, but a modest extension of existing affairs. It seems set only just around the corner, and the familiarity breeds contempt. Eminent Domain is set essentially in the present (2018) but has about a hundred years of missed history behind the events of the plot, which means any familiarity I had with the characters was slightly jarring. There’s been a prolonged civil war in living memory, the nation-state is withering away, and nanotechnology, genetic manipulation and medicine have been essentially solved. Some characters are anxious about overcoming their sense of personal property or national identity, and sex and drugs are treated much more liberally, but for a premise that imagines international communism as 70% complete, as well as dramatic advances in technology, I was expecting to be more alienated by the way characters thought, spoke, and acted. I guess I wanted a narrative as bizarre and ambitious as the meta-narrative.
Neville’s writing pays close attention to sensory experience which makes it vivid and absorbing, at times veering off prose and into poetry (with good and bad results). Resolution Way had something similar, and I still sometimes search that book for passages I enjoyed- in vain, since the lack of chapter headings or punctuation makes it much harder to move through the book outside of its order. Eminent Domain is a bit better in this regard, but still disdains things like speech marks, which makes dialogue more confusing than it needs to be, for little reward in my estimation.
It was hard to rate this one. If I have a few complaints, it’s only because the rest of Neville’s work is so rich and enjoyable. I don’t think I could fail to recommend such a bizarre book that I read in such a frenzy, but prepare for a very varied experience.
October 20, 2023
I don't even know what to make of this one. It gets five stars for ambition alone. This very easily could have been a straightforward narrative: A murder in an alternate Britain where the USSR won the Cold War, a spy/detective is dragged out of retirement to solve it, and in the background, the security state is in the process of withering away, but oh no??? maybe we need it after all??? That in itself would be rad.
But why do that when you could add a boatload of bizarre drugs, cyberpunk mind viruses, alternate universes, neo-Situationists, more drugs, self-referential bits to other novels by the author that I haven't read, and an experimental literary structure that adds to the mindfuckery?
Do I know exactly what went on in this book? Not as such. Was I riveted? Absolutely.
But why do that when you could add a boatload of bizarre drugs, cyberpunk mind viruses, alternate universes, neo-Situationists, more drugs, self-referential bits to other novels by the author that I haven't read, and an experimental literary structure that adds to the mindfuckery?
Do I know exactly what went on in this book? Not as such. Was I riveted? Absolutely.
September 21, 2023
Hard to follow at times, but it think that comes with the territory of reading an acid communism sci-fi detective novel.
April 1, 2021
Remarkable, and very strange. I'll be thinking about this for a long time I think.
A kind-of utopia of fully automated luxury communism - or, yes, acid rave communism - but it's a utopia that the text itself is ambivalent about. The latter part gets quite dark, and ends in a satisfying enough yet open-ended fashion that makes me wonder whether it would help to have read Resolution Way first - I'll be seeking it out in any case.
A kind-of utopia of fully automated luxury communism - or, yes, acid rave communism - but it's a utopia that the text itself is ambivalent about. The latter part gets quite dark, and ends in a satisfying enough yet open-ended fashion that makes me wonder whether it would help to have read Resolution Way first - I'll be seeking it out in any case.
March 4, 2021
Read this alongside Neville's earlier work 'Resolution Way'; the two novels intertwine (I think that's the right word) with each other. Not an easy read and it can be bleak at times, but a great novel of ideas and 'what ifs'.
January 12, 2021
Started off good enough but soon lost itself to drug drivel.
November 16, 2021
Exactly the same what I have learned was different * true colors of life in book.extra, for me.thank you for the wonderful creation; indeed.
May 2, 2022
This wasn't bad, but confusing and difficult to get into.
December 21, 2022
Fragmented narration and a slightly boring murder mystery slowed down me getting through Eminent Domain but the creative backdrop of a socialist Britain worked really well and did keep me intrigued.
May 26, 2024
underrated and thought provoking
October 18, 2023
I found this one hard to get into. Utopian literature is one of my favorite subjects and I appreciated the nuanced and complicating approach the book takes. I will most likely give it another reading. Fwiw, I listened to the audiobook, may work better read.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews