The Cloud Intern

by David Greenwood

" With his signature precise, erudite sentences, [Greenwood] brings humor and lightness to otherwise bleak portraits of what it means to be a person. He' s a tightrope walker crossing a chasm of loneliness, doing cartwheels." — Kate Reed Petty, BOMB Magazine
While social and environmental woes roil the world below, Chris Curtis, lesser cofounder of tech giant eddy, studies clouds and chats with an emulation of his not really dead father on eddy's luxury blimp. As it approaches a summit of world powers, Chris is forced from the swimming pool into the shoes of his revered, and really dead, cofounder.
At least his new intern appreciates the sunrises, and doesn't seem to be of the entitled intern class, even if her motives aboard appear increasingly alarming. Her name is Zoraida, and her closest friend is an emulation of her former self.
Together, they become embroiled in a mass protest movement, revealing that underneath Zoraida's desire to change the world and Chris's desire to withdraw from it lies the collective loneliness of a society in which the deepest human connection has become a commodity, and deepest human weirdness may be our best hope.

204 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 27, 2025

Reviews

[Matthew]

"In the heartland, despair mounted. The Democrats and Republicans were something out of Romeo and Juliet, actually brawling in box stores. Extreme fringes set neighborhoods on fire just to feel they were getting somewhere. The workweek absorbed Saturday gratis, though I believe unemployment had risen. Blinding tin roofs year by year set up around cities like tree rings. More than two percent of working people, as of Wade’s last topical lecture, lived in these camps. Four years of college all but guaranteed a bonus decade of roommates and instant ramen. The older generations were still all right. The rich were discreet and very rich. Medicine was luxury. You rarely saw a bird that wasn’t a goose or a pigeon."

A page-turning work of near-future speculative fiction that asks a question no less great than did Bartleby the Scrivener and Endgame before it--what do we do with the godawful gift and curse of other people, especially as ravenous capital stalks us at every turn?

We track tech CEO Chris Curtis ("the young, cofounding Chris Curtis, the savior Christ Curtis," as Greenwood memorably captures in a mocking singsong) as his disillusionment with his capitalist project reaches a terminus. He is in a state of decadent bloat and self-loathing, his life "too slight a thing to spend [his] whole life perpetuating."

Our setting is a kind of tax-evading airship called the Yacht which serves as both his company's headquarters and the company town; the novel's confined setting, combined with the characters' laissez-faire, "it'll all work out" attitudes (emblematic of their fat and happy state) lend the book the feeling of a campus novel. There is an easiness, if a contested and temporary easiness.

Of course, there's a reason why the bosses always live in a mansion on the hill; when the employees launch an interior revolt, Curtis is surrounded. Yet he carries a torch for their fiery commitment to their vision, as visionary feeling of any kind has become quite remote to him. And so, Chris Curtis gets more entwined in this protest moment than he ever expected his poverty of vision would allow him.

It's a book worth your time... not least because I narrate the audiobook, now available on Spotify and Audible! Hop to it!