Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan - 4 stars (Subdue)

[Joy D]

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan - 4* - My Review

“People don’t realize how reliant we are on the Internet now. If it disappeared tomorrow, there’d be chaos. It’s not just that you wouldn’t be able to Facebook your mates or read the news. Everything is connected to it now. The markets would stop trading, the economy would collapse. There’d probably be no electricity. No food in the shops. Vital equipment in hospitals would stop working. It’s not just your phone or your specs. Cars, buses, trains, everything would grind to a halt. It’d feel like the end of the world.”

Speculative fiction about a world connected via an immense network, not terribly different from our current Internet, except it allows even more interconnectivity among diverse systems as electrical power, the entire supply chain, global trade, financial markets, smart cities, and pretty much everything in civilization. In the near future, one region, Stokes Croft in Bristol, England, (The Croft) has separated itself by setting up its own mini-society, reminiscent of the counter-culture communes of the 1960s with an emphasis on artistic expression, freedoms, and unconventional thinking (except much more high-tech). This is the world of Before, as in before an act of cyber terrorism brought down the Internet. There is also the dystopian world of After, which takes place ten years after the crash. All the technology no longer works, nothing is interconnected anymore, and people have had to adapt. Many of the responses are violent, including criminal gangs and militaristic enclaves.

The storyline alternates between Before and After. In the Before chapters, communication is primarily achieved through a device called “Spex,” similar to eyeglasses, that serves the same purposes as current cellphones, with significantly greater capabilities. The After segments include flashbacks to convey events that transpired in the immediate aftermath of the crash.

One of the primary characters is Mary, a teen who lives in The Croft. In the After scenario, she experiences visions of what happened at the time of the crash, and people come from far away to ask her for information about their loved ones. Mary occasionally can “see” what happened to them. It is part of the mysticism of The Croft, but the basis for it is explained and is a significant part of the appeal of the book (so I won’t spoil it). There are a handful of other complex and intriguing characters, including a small group of friends and a leader of the resistance.

The author is making points about big data, surveillance, capitalism, and algorithms. The Croft takes a decentralized approach, which stores data locally and keeps it within the community rather than sharing it with the corporations that are using the data to control consumer behavior. One of the main ideas of the book is that after the crash, something needs to arise to replace it, and (hopefully) improve upon it. Will the replacement be better or more of the same? I enjoy speculative fiction in general, and this scenario seems pretty easy to envision. It is disturbing but provides much food for thought.