Book Review: Zed

By Ryland Johnson

Science fictions job has always been to reflect on the present by imagining the future. In the old days, the sci-fi future seemed further away. We imagined flying cars and dome cities on distant planets. Joanna Kavennas new novel, Zed, is more apropos of contemporary sci-fi, which is to say that the future has already somewhat arrived. We dont need to trek deep into the future to imagine how its all going to go wrong. This is the science fiction of five minutes from now, the sci-fi of the very probable disaster, derived less from speculation than from the ordinary strangeness of realizing that the apocalypse has already happened.

Kavennas tale imagines the coming global techno-corporatocracy, where Beetle, the mega-conglomerate apex-predator tech behemoth, rules the Western world through its fancy products, which provide total surveillance of personal information, ensuring the complete predictability of human activity. Your Beetle-band smartwatch, which knows everything about you, encourages you (or coerces you) to live a life of optimal efficiency and profitability. Everything is totally, unfailingly predictable, of course, until it isnt.

A man commits a heinous crime, a robot cop murders an innocent, and everything begins to slide sideways. What follows is partly a futuristic detective story and partly an Orwellian morality tale that examines the techno-horror of the digital surveillance state, our terrible obsession with consumption, youth, and beauty, and the complete narcissism and unforgivable depravity of the rich.

Zed is a serious book that manages to entertain throughout because Kavenna knows how to turn a clever phrase but also knows how to give absurdity its proper, poignant depth. There are a million ways that we interact with the digital reality, but its rare that we slow down enough to understand the implications of it all. As a result, todays fiction often engages with the anxiety-inducing aspects of our technological culture. The depth to which Kavenna explores these issues is noteworthy, and her insights are both cutting and profound.