Infinite Detail

Infinite Detail #1

by Tim Maughan

Before: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the constant surveillance, big data, and corporate hegemony that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City―now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis?

After: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. Luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. The community of the Croft still exists, but it is now more black market and urban farm than creative commune. Everyone has a hustle now, and everyone has a sense of loss. But are they just struggling to stay alive—or are they building something new?

The world of Infinite Detail is a step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto unimaginable come true: the end of the Internet, the end of the world as we know it.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Cyberpunk, Novels, Speculative Fiction, Post Apocalyptic

372 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2019

About the author

Tim Maughan is an author and journalist using both fiction and non-fiction to explore issues around cities, class, culture, technology, and the future. His work regularly appears on the BBC, New Scientist, and Vice/Motherboard. His debut novel INFINITE DETAIL will be published by FSG in 2019. He also collaborates with artists and filmmakers, and has had work shown at the V&A, Columbia School of Architecture, the Vienna Biennale, and on Channel 4. He currently lives in Canada.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of book we might pick up again in ten years' time only to be devastated by how many of Maughan's predictions of techno-terrorism have come true: Intertwining two alternating timelines - before and after a total internet shutdown that has plunged the world into chaos -, this author thinks through how our growing dependency on network technology and digitalization gives rise to new forms of power battles and warfare. The story centers on "the Croft", a counterculture enclave in Bristol that activists have managed to cut off from big data surveillance by the government and corporations. Enduring pressure from the outside and radicalizing from the inside, the Croft is struggling to find a masterplan for its future - until a group of radical hackers shuts down the internet and global production, supply chains, communication, energy, travel, and security systems collapse. Now the oppressive structures of global surveillance are dead - what now?

Maughan orchestrates a whole cast of edgy characters that roam his dystopian world and slowly unfolds what actually happened the day the internet died. They believe in the archaic power of music, they can re-play the past and navigate the online world with their spex (which are like an advanced version of google glasses) - at least as long as they have network connection - and they realize what's the crux of every revolution: You need a plan regarding what you will do once you won. And is it really a victory if people starve and die?

It's hard to describe the text's style, which is of course a plus because it means it's unusual: I wouldn't say it's steampunk (as some reviewers claim), because the Victorian aspect is utterly missing; rather, Maughan shows a heightened version of now, determined by information overload, advertisements and global consumer culture. Privacy is almost abolished and instead, everything is openly dsiplayed in infinite detail.

This book is a very smart thought experiment that negotiates current tendencies and highlights how global surveillance can become dangerous for everybody, including those gathering the information. I hope some literary judges will be bold enough to include this edgy book in their prize lists, because this is a discussion to be had.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow ... One of the best SF books I've read this year, torn screaming and bleeding from the zeitgeist. A post-apocalyptic yarn about #TheEndofCivilisation when the Internet goes tits-up that refuses to pander to any genre expectations. Brutal, bleak, angry, savage, violent, a bit in your face with its fierce polemic. But urgent and so, so now. And it has a tragic (gay) love story as well, goddammit. Tim Maughan proves why SF is the only genre to parse the muddied waters of our insane world as it teeters on the brink of technological transcendence versus annihilation. A must-read for any halfway serious SF fan.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine there was no internet.

What would happen if we were cut off from our updates, our likes, our calorie tracking apps? How would we cope when our online calendars disappeared, when our entire history of communications with friends and family turned to electronic mist, deleted in an instant along with our email accounts?

Now, the crotchety old-timers among us will no doubt harrumph and orate at length about how such a disconnect could help us reconnect with what's important - the family time, face-to-face catch-ups and drinking-from-the-hose of their idyllic pasts - but what they may not have considered is that the internet these days is a whole lot more than likes and twitter pile-ons.

It runs everything. Logistics, transport, communications, power networks, weapon systems. It tracks everything. It connects everything. In a sense, it is everything.

In Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, the internet switch has been flicked to off. This is an SF novel situated in two time periods: a post internet world, set ten years after the modems fall silent, and the buildup to the great computer crash a decade earlier.

Global transport and logistics have completely fallen apart. Communications systems have near universally died. The global financial system has ceased to exist. Ships stop sailing, ports stop loading, bills stop getting paid.

Social order has broken down, and been brutally reestablished by a hodge-podge of government militias and local gang lords.

The people of the UK have long run out of the consumer goods they were used to, making things like plastic pens and Nike shoes commodities of rare value. Even socks are in short supply, with rag-wrapped feet becoming common since the floodgates of Chinese manufacturing crashed shut.

In this fascinating milieu we follow numerous characters in and around The Croft, a suburb of Bristol that once rebelled against the ubiquitous surveillance and networking of everything that was occurring in cities around the globe.

Rushdi Mannan, software engineer, founding Croft member and anarchist tech pioneer on numerous government watchlists, is visiting his boyfriend in New York when the first signs of the coming digital plague begin to show themselves. In a New York City where everything you do is tracked, filmed, RFID’d and gamified into apps on your smartglasses, drones begin to fall from the sky, something killing every digital component inside them stone dead.

A decade later, in the now un-networked world, Rushdi is struggling to get back to New York, to find the boyfriend that society’s collapse has separated him from.

Meanwhile Anika, an old friend of Rushdi’s, and an early mover and shaker in the Croft community, is heading back to Bristol from the countryside, where government militias are forcibly conscripting people to toil on the land and keep the cities fed. Anika is a wanted rebel, a merciless slayer of government militiamen seeking an edge in her quixotic guerrilla war.

When she returns to The Croft Anika encounters Mary - a girl who can somehow relive the deaths of those who died in the end-of-internet riots, and Tyrone, a young man who dreams of creating new music that reflects the world around him.

Each of them has a role to play in helping heal the broken world they live in.

It’s all very well done, and quite convincing. Maughan really made me look closely at my reliance on the internet.

I order my clothes from online retailers. I pay my bills online. Book tickets. Manage my finances with a bank that has no physical branches. Hell, right now I’m writing this for a website, for a community of readers linked across the world by the internet that exists only due to modern networking tech.

One serious virus, a shutdown of even a few days to a week, and mine and millions of other lives would be thrown into chaos. It’s almost enough to turn you into a crazy prepper, hoarding tinned food and guns while muttering about the coming digital apocalypse.

Infinite Detail is an engaging, pacey novel full of interesting characters that had me planning my Armageddon strategy with my friends weeks after I finished it. It’s well worth your time.

Four blinking modem lights out of five.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those novels that delve deep into the lives of a richly imagined near-future that takes us on a trip to a dystopia that explores:

THE END OF THE INTERNET.

Honestly, I'm reminded quite a bit of William Gibson's style. It's a slow and careful build-up of situations and world-building that gives us a no man's land of internet outcasts, people who don't want to be spied on or tabulated for all kinds of data mining, the path that micro-society takes after ten years, and the world of a post-internet breakdown after that.

We get all the arguments and commentaries on our current lifestyles. We get the arguments for and against the business side, the surveillance state, and the desire to finally be free of it all. We spend more time with the last group and sympathize with them.

But honestly? This is a pretty pure dystopia that focuses the light not on single issues but spreading it all about among the deeply-drawn characters.

I can't express how much I was impressed by the quality of the details. Indeed, the title says it all.

However... I did not precisely fall in love with the basic story. It was okay, but the commentary was its master, spreading itself throughout all the cracks in the novel. That's not a bad thing. It's an impressive thing. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I feel I should have.

And really... despite our utter reliance on the internet today, would we really go that bonkers without it?

[Philipp · Rating 4 out of 5]

SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.

Every decade's science-fiction is taking common themes and anxieties of its decade, and transfers them slightly into the future. 60s SF had a nuclear war, 70s SF had ecological collapse, 80s SF had mega conglomerates ruling the planet, 90s SF had... I'm not sure?, but Infinite Detail clearly is about the anxieties Facebook, Google and the ubiquitous Internet have caused, the loss of privacy, more importantly, the loss of private space.

There are two intertwined stories featuring mostly the same characters - one is Before, set in the close future, where glasses-like devices called Spex have taken over as smart phone replacements. Facebook, Google, etc. are all still there, and have only become more powerful. Cars are all self-driving, and people are even more constantly hooked into the network:

We’re not imagining things. And nobody planned this, no cabal of evil old white men in a smoky room. Nobody is in control, and believing that someone might be is where we all start to fail. This is just the political reality, it is just what happened. It’s what we all let happen. It’s the endgame of capitalism.

The story in the Before follows a few Internet and privacy activists (think EFF) in the UK and the US and describes their alternative zone in Bristol, where they jam the worldwide net and have their own local version, an area where artists flourish and an alternative lifestyle is possible (by the way, similar zones were erected during the Arab Spring - the governments shut down the internet to stop people organising, so local digital networks were built).

The story in the Before slowly progresses towards a quasi-apocalypse, the great breakdown of the Internet due to some kind of virus (Maughan never uses the word 'virus' because it would be ridiculous, but most people would understand that?). The breakdown causes a kind of apocalypse, a collapse of all supply chains, of all communications, of all transport, there's chaos, warlords rise up, the remains of the UK army start to enslave people to farm food, and so on.

The second part of the story, the After, is set some time after this collapse, but featuring mostly the same characters who are trying to figure out what actually happened, and trying to bring order back into the chaos, to organise. The main character is hugely into UK drum'n'bass, tries to find samples, tries to generate something new but doesn't have the technical means to do so - while other early activists are trying to hide from the army, and trying to find their friends.

It feels like the book is heavily influenced by Mark Fischer. A lot of the characters' discussions on capitalism and the system they fight feels like it comes from Fischer's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. The After part feels like Fischer's hauntology come to life, British jungle music as a nostalgia for a future that never happened, which perfectly describes the nostalgia the characters in the After have (as described in Fischer's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures). Since there's a lot about electronic music here, allusions to Hakim Bey's TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone are not missing, either. I would love to know what Fischer thinks of Maughan's book, but he's dead, how dare he

If there's one thing to criticize, then this: there are so many ideas and concepts here that the story itself seems to suffer, a lot of the book is 'exploring the world', not 'growing the characters'. Rush is the only one who seems to develop, and that's only because the other characters learn 'the truth' about the time of his disappearance as the story progresses, not because the character itself develops. Like Stanislaw Lem, Maughan seems to be more interested in the societal repercussions of his scenarios than repercussions on a personal, psychological level?

Anyway, this is where cyberpunk and SF will develop into - from anxiety about the loss of physical self-determination (think biomods in 80s cyberpunk) to anxiety about the loss of psychological self-determination (think fake news).

P.S.: After Helen DeWitt's Some Trick: Thirteen Stories contained the first-ever R code I found in a book, Infinite Detail contained the first-ever pastebin I found in a book

P.P.S.: As part of my career I've had interactions with rich people who work in fields I personally loathe, and this book echoes my feelings perfectly - this quote comes from a chance encounter between one of the privacy activists and some kind of stock broker:

Brad seems nice enough—weirdly naïve, even—but Rush can’t shake the realization that he represents everything he hates. All the greed and the ignorance, all the willingness to hand over control to the machines, to take away any sense of human self-determination and to put it in the arms of the network. And all just to keep a few people rich, to squander technology’s potential for real change in order to make a quick, lazy buck.

All good art comes from anger?

Edit 1: Something I realised only later -one of the main points in Fisher's Capitalist Realism is how alternatives to capitalism have become unimaginable. In the 70s, people fought against capitalism and for communism - then communism collapsed and now there's no real alternative. This is picked up in Infinite Detail in a short discussion - the activists brought the system down, but then they didn't know what to put into its place, and everything floundered.

Edit 2: As part of the promo for this book, Maughan put together a playlist of the 'soundtrack' of this book - lots of electronic music, lots of UK rave, very much 90s jungle, you can listen to it here.

[Wendy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came in the mail today and I read the whole thing this afternoon, in about 3 hours, stopping only to make lunch. Suffice to say I found it riveting.

This is a clever work of dystopian near-future sci-fi, imagining a world where the Internet is even more ubiquitous, and even more commodified, than it is now. Or at least, that's how it is in the "before" scenes of the book, set in 2021; the "after" scenes depict an Internet-free wasteland, where global capitalism has ground to a halt because the technology that keeps goods circulating around the world - produced in factories, ferried over the ocean by container ships, and finally distributed at retail outlets - has collapsed.

It's not a pretty picture, to say the least. The people who were responsible for the global Internet shutdown are never introduced as characters; we can only surmise their motives through other characters' interpretations and through the manifesto they posted, revealed to the reader in epistolary form. A charitable interpretation would be that they were trying to make things right again. Trying to help society break free of its gilded chains. Trying to help people take off their Internet-connected AR spectacles in order to see the dystopia that society had already become.

The politics of the book aren't exactly subtle, but neither are they Manichaean. The pre-collapse world wasn't perfect, especially for those on the margins - like Frank, a Brooklyn resident whose only source of income comes from recycling cans he's scavenged, at least until a software update meant to eliminate cash renders his skills worthless. But things still sort of worked, and if the benefits of technological advance were not shared equally, at least technological advance was still happening.

The point of the collapse is to go back to the beginning, before the Internet turned out to be the accelerant that would allow capitalism to spread faster than anyone could stop it. More than a reboot - a factory reset. Back to square one, at least when it comes to technology.

It's unclear whether the architects of the collapse predicted what would happen, or if they would have changed their minds had they known just how much violence and waste would result. After all, resetting the Internet isn't the same as resetting the socioeconomic system that directed its use. The post-collapse world is characterised by material scarcity, where the remaining have no choice but to desperately salvage what they can from the wreckage. Without the invisible backdrop of global trade, most of the advancements that modern society depends on have gone out the window: trees are cut down as firewood; children are forced to do manual labour; medicine is basically nonexistent. All this is underpinned by the menacing control of the state, mediated through the guns and uniforms of the newly expanded military.

The genius of Infinite Detail lies in its ambivalence: as much as it criticises the shortcomings of the system as it is now, it also recognises that there is no clean break from it. We can't simply press a button to undo the bad and bring forth the good all at once. Destruction is, at best, a small part of any emancipatory vision: those who destroy must also have a plan for what comes after. As one of the characters says near the end of the book:

[...] Don't be scared of power. That's the other way we fucked up before, we were always scared of power, of taking the lead. We just thought everything would sort itself out somehow. It won't. It's not enough to just take power away from those in charge. If we don't use it ourselves, they just take it back.

Overall: a gripping read involving cool technology (mesh networks!!), a thoughtful political critique, and a plausible plot. Would recommend to anyone who's a fan of near-future sci-fi authors like Cory Doctorow or Neal Stephenson.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a near future triller/post-apoc SF novel, which theGuardian chose as the best SF novel of 2019.

The story is split in two parallel plotlines, titled Before and After, with the latter taking about 3/4th of the book.

Before is about our increased reliance on internet, including the Internet of things (your smart fridge ordering groceries) and the corresponding increase in surveillance, both by government and private companies. This part is well-written for the author is a journalist who follows the tech developments. It has nice pieces e.g. about losers of increased reliability on smart cities: a minor character is a canner in NY, i.e. he collects used cans and bottles for recycling. When a smart credit system is introduced that gives credit for recycling only to the buyer of a can, he is out of job (despite there are still cans to utilize). But even more important the system follows you, the buyer, knowing where and when you got thirsty and where and when you drop your trash. While the book is great in giving the reader an idea about how her/his privacy is violated constantly right now, it was said quite a few times in non-fic. Unlike Little Brother he doesn’t suggests ways to evade surveillance.

After is a decade after the internet is down (why and how is uncovered about the middle of the novel). The life is harsh, for our utilities, our phones, a sizable fraction of what we buy has internet as its essential part. The global trade is down and stuff like Nike shoes becomes nigh impossible get. The post-apoc future is quite ‘usual’ survival of the fittest with marginal groups with guns bossing everyone around. Also there is an important aspect the sub-cultures of electronic music and graffiti – I hate the former (I prefer ‘love’ – from jazz to rockabilly) and see the latter more often then not as a form of vandalism and not an artistic expression (yes, there is a good stuff like Banksy, but for each there are hundred of gang names and the like).

Overall, the novel was good in delivering the message that you’re unprotected from big business using your data as their wish, but it is not now enough for me to justify high ratings.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Infinite Detail depicts life before and after the 'end of the internet', a mass failure of networks and systems which has created a sort of post-capitalist society. It's set mainly in Bristol, particularly the People's Republic of Stokes Croft – which really exists, though in the book it's developed from an activist enclave into a self-sufficient community with its own private network. Unusually for science fiction, the book is kind of plotless, with a sprawling cast that includes the architect of the Stokes Croft project, a fugitive activist returning to Bristol after years of absence, and a teen girl who seems to have the ability to step into the past, to name a few. With so many threads to follow, I didn't manage to get emotionally invested in most of the characters' stories – while some of those I liked disappeared without a trace (I was waiting the whole rest of the book to find out what became of Frank!).

The story is chaotic but fun, full of ideas, thought-provoking and impassioned. It is clearly a love letter to the subcultures of Bristol, and is one of those books that gives you a very vivid picture of its setting (as, for example, Joel Lane's work does with Birmingham). The style can be a challenge: I often lost track of what was happening and/or couldn't find a focus in a passage or chapter; the writing is always spinning off in myriad directions and doesn't always leave the reader with something to latch on to. Yet it's BECAUSE of this that I liked it. This type of writing is exhilarating in its freedom, and even when it doesn't hit the mark, it's enjoyable. Infinite Detail is a different kind of sci-fi novel, one I think would work well for those who don't usually enjoy sci-fi.

TinyLetter | Linktree

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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.

[Adrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

When's the last time you read dystopian sci-fi by a guy who loves drum & bass?

[August Bourré · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally posted here: http://www.vestige.org/2019/03/07/inf...

It’s rare for me to be as excited about a new release as I am about Tim Maughan’s excellent debut novel, Infinite Detail. I don’t recall exactly who put me on to Maughan’s work—someone on Twitter, surely, as that’s where I’ve gotten most of my book news and recommendations for close to a decade now—but I read Paintwork in 2016 and felt like I’d finally found the kind of science fiction I’d been looking for, and which the genre seemed determined not to give me.

For those who haven’t encountered Maughan’s fiction before I’d probably say that it combines William Gibson’s remarkable ability to see right to the heart of now with the politics and analysis of someone like Adam Greenfield and the weird narrative prototyping of design fiction, although that doesn’t seem quite right. Jay Owens might call it kitchen sink dystopia, which applies to much of his short fiction, but Infinite Detail doesn’t really fit there. We could try some comp titles. I could tell you that I recommend Infinite Detail if you liked Warren Ellis’ Normal, Madeline Ashby’s Company Town, or Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, although none of those quite hit the mark either. Infinite Detail isn’t trapped by genre the way Ashby’s book is, forced to change the stakes and throw away hard-won character development in the face of convention. Maughan also has more than just a surface-level understanding of how class actually functions, the lack of which cripples Doctorow’s writing; you’ll be getting the real thing from Maughan, a world where the “lower” classes aren’t just start-up brogrammers who can’t find work. Warren Ellis’ Normal might be the comparison that works best, though while the two writers are about on par with their prose chops, Maughan seems to care less about the clockwork machinery of his stories and more about the people. Or maybe it’s closer to a stripped-down version of what Nick Harkaway was doing in Gnomon? That comparison has problems, too. Tim might yell at me if I bring up Charlie Brooker. There honestly aren’t all that many touchstones. This a good thing.

Infinite Detail is about network effects, about tracing the impacts that enormous systems—systems that are human made but beyond the scale of any individual human’s understanding or control—have on individuals and communities. And it’s about what happens when somebody says “enough” and burns those systems down. The novel is split into chapters that jump back and forth between “Before” and “After,” referring to the event that brought down the Internet and dropped the entire world into the kind of proper dystopia that many in the global south already live in.

Initially I found myself more interested in the “Before” chapters, with their insightful, if occasionally blunt, dissection of the tradeoffs we make when we ask for convenience from the network and the unintended consequences of those tradeoffs that we are usually willfully oblivious to. It was a bit of a thrill to follow Rush through those early chapters as he tried to make a modern life for himself but still resist surveillance capitalism using tools and skills that have limited value—or at least limited immediate value—outside that context. One of my favourite bits from these chapters is actually available to read online.

As the novel progressed I found myself more and more drawn to the “After” chapters, however, and not just because it became increasingly obvious what the “event” was that the “Before” chapters were leading up to. It’s been clear for some time now that capitalism isn’t sustainable and that something needs to change. What isn’t clear—what can’t be clear—is what’s going to happen next, and how we’re going to get there. I have books on the subject, some I’ve read and some still in the stack, and I have friends who are even writing books about alternate structures that might offer a hopeful transition. Mostly I’m skeptical: there are reasons power and privilege aren’t surrendered without a fight, and the various flavours of anarchism and libertarianism I’ve seen offered up as de-centralized, non-state alternatives strike me as just different mutations of the same species of magical thinking. There are mysteries in the “After” chapters: who is Anika? What’s up with Mary’s “ghosts”? What happened to Rush? But it’s ultimately Maughan’s anticipation of my kind of skepticism that drives that part of Infinite Detail, and his answer is real and raw—Grids’ speech about self-determination later in the book should be required reading for anyone who thinks or writes about these issues. People are going to die. There will be power vacuums and violence, famine and disease. People will be crippled by memory and by the loss of memory after decades of externalizing it. But there will also be music, and art, and hope, people taking responsibility and charting new paths.

It’s fascinating to me that one of the most hopeful moments in the entire novel, which occurs near the end of the extended epilogue, has its origins in an act of love, but that it, too, is compromised. I won’t get into too much detail—surely discussing events in the epilogue counts as “spoiling”—but I will say that the hope created by that act of love winds up not only enabling violence, but what is created also seems to require violence to keep it from falling apart or being overwhelmed. In Walkaway, Doctorow suggests there might be room for a bloodless revolution; Maughan knows that isn’t possible. It’s oddly satisfying, in a way, that it’s so goddamn messy and compromised.

That being said, don’t come to Infinite Detail expecting a thrill ride full of gunfights or hacker battles or whatever else. It’s not that. It’s a slow burn, and the plot doesn’t hinge upon or resolve via violence. Maughan’s writing doesn’t need those things to be interesting, and I’d honestly have been disappointed if that was the kind of novel he’d produced. The strength of his work has always been in his ability to weld the science fictional to the everyday, and through that process reveal what is both exhilarating and terrifying about now and about us. Infinite Detail has that in spades and fully lives up to both my expectations and the positive press it’s been receiving. Maughan has written a bold and unsettling first novel that is nothing short of magnificent. I only just finished my first read through this morning, and this post has only scratched the surface of what’s interesting about this book. I expect I’ll be thinking about and returning to Infinite Detail for quite some time.

[Javier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Las ideas centrales del libro son la creciente dependencia tecnológica, la pérdida de libertad que conlleva dejarlo todo en manos del algoritmo y cómo podría afectar a esta sociedad hipertecnificada el colapso del sistema. No podría ser más actual, hay un interesante discurso detrás y es un tema que me apasiona y sobre el que me gusta leer, sobre todo en forma de ensayo y en la prensa especializada. El problema es que, como novela, Tim Maughan no sabe hacerlo funcionar. Literariamente es un cascarro, argumentalmente un tostón lento que no anima a pasar la página. Y es que lo del colapso del sistema no se sostiene. Entiendo el morbillo apocalíptico pero se me hace inverosímil que la sociedad fracase porque las máquinas se vengan abajo. En lo estético da el pego, es atractivo; más allá no tiene pies ni cabeza que las ciudades ardan y se instaure la República de Mad Max. La conmoción sería global pero el ser humano se reharía: no todo son megalópolis llenas de consumistas y hipsters. Las tecnologías pre-internet podrían seguir funcionando, rearmarse... además es todo tan asquerosamente anglosajón, como si no existiera otra cosa que Inglaterra y Estados Unidos. Me gustan la reflexión de fondo, la llamada a la acción, a replantearse cosas. No me gustan los personajes infumables, las largas y torpes descripciones que nada aportan, la prospectiva facilona de la utopía fallida. En resumen, como representación del momento actual está genial pero nada que no se saque mirando las noticias: la armadura de ficción se cae a pedazos. Podría ponerle dos estrellas, borracho incluso tres, pero le pongo una. Porque me ha cabreado en algún momento, sí, pero sobre todo como advertencia a mí mismo por si alguna vez se me ocurre volver a acercarme al autor con demasiado entusiasmo.

Añadido a posteriori:

La traducción no ayuda nada. Más o menos durante medio libro se esfuerza en mantener un español neutro y luego es como si se olvidara del tema, siendo argentino a más no poder. Se hace muy raro y pesado aguantar las distintas voces. Además es demasiado, demasiado literal. Como resultado, lo que podría ser un parche al soporífero estilo del autor lo empeora aún más.

[James Hanlon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting premise but a weak book. The story basically goes nowhere. The entirety of the book is just world building and exposition. Ok, we get it, the internet abruptly went dark and bad stuff happened... now what? Also, how do people think the little girl, Mary, is some kind of soothsayer when she's wearing freaking Google glasses with blinking LEDs on the frames? The collapse in the book happened within their lifetimes, did they just suddenly forget everyone used to walk around 24/7 wearing "spex"?

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Infinite Detail is a novel about technological culture and dystopia, but those two topics aren't paired in quite the way readers might expect.

It takes place along two timelines, something very close to our present ("Before") and a time about fifteen years hence ("After"). During the former we follow characters involved in a technological-separatist community carved out of the British city of Bristol; during the latter, we follow people in the same area after an apocalyptic event. The central trauma of the novel is that the internet is suddenly destroyed, plunging civilization into collapse. Infinite Detail tacks back and forth between these two periods, taking us up to the event, then tracing its impact.

Both of these are described in a naturalist style. Most of the British characters are poor or working class, and the life "After" is horrendous. The class divides between Mary, who can see the dead, and her allies, versus some of her clients, are stark and quite British. Race and racism also structure both epochs.

Maughan eschews lyricism, except when trying to evoke music, which becomes a major aspect of the story, or the novel's framing romance. Humanity has suffered an extraordinary, cataclysmic die off, followed by a fall back to late medieval living standards. Many practical details make this world vivid, like the Croft's hard-won business in growing spices, largely driven by child labor.

Some readers may recognize the life-after-internet dystopia through other stories. Post-EMP fiction has become a subgenre now, with titles like William R. Forstchen's One Second After or the tv series Jericho. S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire posits a sudden fall of technology; I can't remember if we learn the cause. Infinite Detail offers a particular take on this, showing only the destruction of the internet through a kind of cascading, internet-of-things based denial of service attack. This doesn't only take down computer games and cat videos, but guts all of civilization, from self-driving cars to utilities.

Yet I'm not sure where the novel ends up. It's clear from the start that modern technology is problematic for the text, and also that a sudden return to feudalism is even worse. I'm still wondering about where this takes us. To explain, I have to raise spoiler shields. It's not a suspense novel with twists and turns, but still: We begin with a strong sense of technological criticism. Rush is our present day guide, a cyberactivist whose arguments are quite convincing in a 2019 where we increasingly dread Google, Facebook, and smartphones. His solution, a grass roots, non-global network sounds intriguing. Then the world collapses, and Rush's plan seems useless until the very end. Most of the book, in fact, digs into the catastrophe. On balance the novel feels like a slam at those who wish to unplug: for being foolish at best, and deadly dangerous at worst.

Other plotlines leave me unsettled. One character returns to Bristol to revisit her role in the collapse, then leaves... to pursue a bloody, desperate civil war in Wales. Is this a tragic or heroic outcome? We don't see enough of that conflict to determine. Mary's visions of the dead are revealed to be technological artifacts. This development does not destroy her, but seems to leave her in a positive state. Is this a progressive parable of mysticism debunked by the products of reason, or a sad tale of folklore quashed by tech? In America a Movement appears, systematically and violently wiping out internet-age data, deeming it oppression and slavery (357). Is this just another working out of the apocalypse, or the sign of a positive polity in that situation?
Rush ends the novel ready to find his lost love, and also to rebuild the Croft's hyperlocal mesh network. This *feels* triumphant, a positive result after so much horror. Perhaps that's where Maughan wants us to end up, using digital technology, but only at the local, grass roots level.
I'm not sure. So much of the post-apocalypse is isolated and terribly lonely (one theme: everyone's looking for someone). Is this a call for a Schumacher-like small is beautiful world, or for the hyper-local holons in Daniel Suarez' FreedomTM (2010)? This feels unsettled to me, perhaps because the determination is supposed to be left up to the reader.

Infinite Detail feels like it's in dialogue with Cory Doctorow's Walkaway (2017) (which we read in our book club last year; the author was then a fine guest on the Future Trends Forum). Doctorow also posited a utopian space, based on a radically different take on technology. He also described a social divide between these two worlds, one which became increasingly violent. Maughan offers a different twist, having the mainstream world utterly wrecked, and the utopian world unable to help. Instead, the Croft is a gangster's domain, powered by child labor and kept in check by public hangings. It's based on a different sense of technological activism, giving us an edge case of destruction, rather than Walkaway's positive, constructive hackers.

A few last notes: I'm impressed by the AR/MR "spex" that people use in "Before" (our near future) to access the digital world. One of the most convincing versions of that I've seen.

One passage stood out to me, one I can't shake, and I'm not sure I agree with it:

[T]heir community wasn't... obvious... It wasn't the people that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. The hidden spaces, the communal secrecy, the unwatched places.
The spaces that belonged to them. (192)

Overall, one of the more interesting and thought-provoking works of modern sf. Recommended.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Infinite Detail is a novel of our grim cyberpunk present, of a time that feels distinctly pre-apocalyptic. We live in a world with immense accumulations of wealth and power and information, and yet rather than steer towards a coherent vision of the future, hell, do anything at all, these machines alternately brutalize and seduce us. If you want a vision of the future, it's Kendal Jenner offering a riot cop a Pepsi forever.

One timeline, BEFORE, follows hacktivist Rushdi Manaan. Rushdi is British, the sysadmin of the ferociously anti-surveillance Croft, a hip Bristol neighborhood blockaded with wifi jammers running on a Bluetooth mesh network. Rush is in a long distance relationship with Scott in New York, living in a world ruled by a surveillance capitalism machine he hates.

AFTER is, well, after. Someone broke the internet, killing every connected device. As communication networks failed and supply chains froze, 'local autonomy' has risen up to replace the survivors. It's a grim world, with a dislocated population sheltering under warlords of various ideological stripes. The various people in After are trying to make sense of their lives in Bristol. Mary sees dead people, those chaotic final hours in the Croft. Tyrone keeps her safe, tries to score survive Bristol Jungle tapes of a dead rave culture. Anika is a guerilla fighter, on the run from the military dictatorship that runs the UK and looking for a new weapon in her liberation campaign.

At a kind of page-by-page level, this is a pretty good novel. Great gritty feel. But stepping back, it doesn't have characters so much as points of view on events that the characters have no ability to influence. And this is 2020, alarmism about surveillance capitalism is practically passé. At least Maughan is honest that what comes next will likely be sticks, stones, and a lot of corpses, to paraphrase Albert Einstein on World War 4.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a doozy of a book to read on what turned out to be the longest blackout in recent past. Although to be precise this novel isn’t apocalypse by blackout so much as it is apocalypse by disconnect. Yes, the power goes out, but the main paralyzing factor is that a population so cripplingly attached to its gadgets and instant and constant connectivity suddenly finds that dependency taken…nay, ripped away suddenly, brutally and irreversibly. So in a way it’s very much an apocalypse now, a very timely dystopian read for the current generation. The story is told through multiple perspectives and timelines of before and after and as such execution at times got somewhat busy and confusing…or maybe disjointed is a more apt description. But it did work, was considerably compelling and read surprisingly quickly for such a hefty volume. I found it especially clever the way the author utilized the themes of constant barter of convenience for privacy that seems so prevalent in the modern world. Technology descriptions and world building were quite interesting too. And it was seriously eerie to read a book on a day without power, knowing there was no way to look any information up, post a review or even a recharge the kindle the book was on. One of those infinite details we tend to take for granted on daily basis until it suddenly isn’t there. This novel has a lot of clever things to say about the world as we know it, shaped by internet and the world that might follow, without it. Bleak, heavy, alarmingly realistic end of the world. Recommended for discerning dystopian genre fans. Thanks Netgalley.

[haleykeg · Rating 2 out of 5]

there was nothing really bad about this book but there also wasn't anything really good about it? sorry hannah if I had read this in high school it probably would have blown my mind so my fault for waiting so long. basically just repetitive

[Tele_well · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re into soundsystems, Bristol, shipping-containers, post-abundance, surveillance capitalism, and how it all will look like after the crash of Internet... go read.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the weighty novels I've been reading recently, It was really nice to spend an evening racing through something light and easy for a change. I do not mean to depreciate 'Infinite Detail's quality by this; most things seem light after Gravity's Rainbow. The subject matter isn't particularly cheerful, yet there is something bitterly amusing about reading very-near-future depictions of societal breakdown while in lockdown. This one was published in 2019 and feels suitably cutting edge, except it predicts that the economy will collapse for technological rather than plague reasons. The large scale Black Lives Matter protests are spot on, though. The narrative is split between flashbacks to the time this collapse took place and post-apocalyptic Bristol a decade later. I really enjoyed the fact that the plot is more exploratory than thriller-ish. It keeps the reader's interest with clever world-building, thoughtful commentary, and intriguing characters, rather than perpetual action. There are a few action scenes, however these are spaced out and the implications of violence are not ignored.

Given the focus upon personal technology, big data, and smart cities, 'Infinite Detail' reads like a combination of Perfidious Albion (an excellent novel about social media, smart cities, and Brexit) and the oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. However it is more hopeful than the former and much more subtle than the latter. Although it sometimes seems to be dominated by technological minutiae, 'Infinite Detail' has some nuanced political themes. The descriptions of music are vivid and joyful and I loved the twist regarding Mary's ostensible special power. In fact, the little details are well deployed to build a distinctive future, especially in the pre-collapse sections set in 2026. Perhaps the most memorable and moving moments follow a man who collects cans to redeem at a recycling centre for money. As New York implements a smart recycling incentive scheme that tracks exactly who buys every can, his livelihood suddenly and bewilderingly vanishes. I am implacably suspicious of the smart city concept, which seems to be ubiquitous privatised surveillance sold to us as convenience, so would be interested to know what people unfamiliar with or positive towards it think of Maughan's depiction. Although the book reminded me of too many other things I've read to seem especially revolutionary, 'Infinite Detail' is astute, appealing, and very readable. I also like the cover design.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant contemporary novel that imagines our current globalized, networked, surveilled world taken just slightly further than it already is — and then suddenly brought to a crashing halt. Informed by research into the material reality of how capitalist global supply chains actually operate, how much these supply chains today depend on the Internet, and how much these networks enslave us in a process of self-actualization via self-commodification. In short, Infinite Detail is a deeply anti-capitalist novel, but one that also doesn't shy away from what the dire consequences of the left-accelerationist fantasy of burning it all down would actually look like in practice — namely, vast human distruction and a profound sense of loss — while also insisting (if only sotto voce) that maybe this is the only real choice we have if we are to save our human selves, and reinvent the internet as a tool of community building rather than of consumption and control. Set a bit in New York City but mainly in the provincial British town of Bristol, Infinite Detail attends closely to questions of how sociabilities emerge from specifics of architecture and spatiality, and more broadly of how, in the wake of globalization and the Internet's collapse, localism will reassert itself through morphing subcultures.

I have two critiques of the novel. The is first that it goes on and on about music, and specifically, the music scene of Bristol as it was some twenty years ago (one suspects that this is because this is when the author was obsessed with music, living for it), specifically imagining that the "Jungle sound" associated with the early-to-mid-90s Bristol scene was somehow a force for liberation. While I did appreciate the joke that a key character's name is "Melody" (since melodiousness is precisely what the Bristol sound eschewed) as a middle aged man, I found the idea that music will both help us realize ourselves and potentially save us collectively comes across as a literally childish fantasy. The second critique is that while Infinite Detail does an admirable job of trying to imagine a real world after "the end to capitalism" (which as Fred Jameson famously observed, is "harder to imagine than the end of the world") it insists on imagining this end coming about through a sudden, singular technological shock. This is the easy way out: it's part of the West's longstanding eschatological imagination to imagine that the fallenness of our world will end in a dramatic, instantaneous rupture, rather than through a gradual albeit punctuated process of decline and conversion (which is the way most civilizations actually end).

With that said, Infinite Detail is ultimately a very good political novel because it inverts a whole series of tropes about what is utopia and dystopia, above all by unflinchingly accepting that the only escape from our increasingly oppressive globally-integrated techno-economic system is one that will involve vast pain and loss.

Good quotes:
On New York: "It baffles him, what brings these people to live in New York - a city filled with every culture, with every nation, a massive machine built from people and architecture, that gives birth to new cultures, new conflicts on every street corner, a city that every day fights with the future." (46) "The whole island rolled out in front of him in finite detail: automated traffic and subway trains snaking across to Brooklyn through the exposed dinosaur rib cages of the bridges crossing the water to the east; to the west New Jersey's shoreline fading into the sunset burned red." (123)

Of the dystopian technological near-present: "The whole smart-city idea is so top-down, it's nothing more than a suite of products sold to cities by large companies. It's a one-size-fits-all model - it works on the idea that all cities are the same, that they have the same problems and situations." (81)

Of our many private fantasies about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world: "She's strangely embarrassed that part of her had imagined walking out into some huge abandoned space: a bourgeois science-fictional fantasy of a long-los civilization where she's the special one, the only survivor that could see past the crass commercialism of the masses and got out in time, the intrepid, educated explorer unearthing this forgotten, archaic relic of barbaric capitalism, an empty cave filled with unfamiliar, alien branding." (95)

A nice idea of how silly some of our current architectural conceits may look a few decades from now: "a century-old futurist's dream from a time when subterranean public plazas on the wrong side of town were a utopian planning solution rather than a crime scene waiting to happen." (101)

On the dubious social basis for a lot of leftist fantasies: "It's always how it goes down: Always some white, educated people with some idea of revolution, always some brown, poor kids taking the risks and the beatings." (199) "This is not a conspiracy theory. We're not imaging things. And nobody planned this, no cabal of evil old white men in a smoky room. Nobody is in control, and believing that someone might be is where we all start to fail." (204)

On the absurdity of the current system: "The pinnacle of human effort has been to create a largely hidden, superefficient, globe-spanning infrastructure of vast ships and city-sized container ports — and all to do nothing more than keep feeding capitalism's hunger for the disposable. To move plastic trash made by the global poor into the hands of hapless, clueless consumers. A seemingly unstoppable beast built from parasitic tentacles, clenching the planet in an iron grip." (304)

On what tearing everything down in the name of enabling self-determination would actually mean: "'Self-determination? You're looking at it!' He thumps his chest with his fist again. "I'm self-determination. The Land's Army is self-determination. The city council is self-determination. That skinhead militia down in Knowle that's lynching Muslims? That's self-determination. That's what it looks like. Lots of gangsters and warlords and fucking terrified people trying to look after themselves, trying to protect their own, and fuck everybody else. Me and all the other chancers and yardies that have carved this city up between us, trying to look after their own little bit of turf and their own people." (320-321)

And finally Maugham's hope for the alternative, truly decentralized Internet that might arise phoenix-like from the ashes of the ruined world: "New York City, mapped out in infinite detail: a new map, not dictated by some distant conglomerate or orbiting, all-seeing satellite, but built from the ground up by people that actually live there." (368)

[Kelsey Atherton · Rating 5 out of 5]

My library only had the audiobook, which was a blessing in disguise. This is a good book in any capacity, but especially as background noise during the mundane chores of life at home while we all endure a global cataclysm. The audiobook is well-read, character coming through and sections that feel like they rely on print matting tricks conveyed as appropriate and jarring as possible.

I picked the book up because my small slice of the global cataclysm is a return to freelancing while on furlough, and I pitched a story about science fiction and collapse. Infinite Detail isn't cyberpunk, though if it were transported to 1990 I don't know if you could convince anyone of that. (Maughan is explicit that it's not cyberpunk, so I'll defer to the author on this one).

But it helped anyway to return to this over the week as I revisited drafts of a story about cyberpunk as a genre, because it is a story incredibly *informed* by cyberpunk. What Maughan does is show the power of the internet in ordering lives by stripping it away, by collapsing the whole of human awareness to a neighborhood, maybe a little more.

Where cyberpunk often posits the super-connected corporate world as built up after some great social shift, Maughan shows that universe as the present, and gives us a cataclysm that strips the existing ordering of the universe away.

Max the Canner, an early "Before" section character, has a plight no less real or bleak than that of the characters that exist on the other side of the cataclysm. The chapter alone should be required reading for an urban planner trying to implement Smart City programs.

The story opens as a post-apocalyptic horror story. Then, it is a exquisitely modern slice-of-life. Finally, it is a reconstruction, an examination of what from the ruins is worth restoring. At every point, I found something powerful and upsetting and intriguing, puzzle pieces revealing interconnectedness.

Maughan's time as a supply chain journalist roughly mirrors my time as a defense technology journalist, and there is a moment in an early chapter that felt painfully real. Hacker activist Rush, enduring small talk at a high society party, tells a weary day trader about a protest of a security company for its role in algorithmic police violence. A couple days later, after the euphoria of protest, the trader exhuberantly thanks Rush in public for the hot tip on the stock to buy, having turned the detail about the protest into a hot investment opportunity. I felt gutted, one of the deeper fears of my entire beat made manifest at once.

There is much more to get into, so many little paths to explore and expand and reconstruct. It is a rich world, uncomfortably plausible in every detail.

What does collapse look like? It answers with a range of possibilities, all readily assembled and viable in a way the depair and bleakness of, say, post-nuclear stories never are.

The epilogues, especially, feel relevant, orienting a story that felt often microcosmic on broader possibilities. The audiobook also featured a nice interview with Maughan and Brian Merchant, a welcome cooldown from the text.

Highly recommended.

[Tomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spekulatiivinen romaani internetin ja kansainvälisten tuotantoverkostojen yhdistämästä maailmasta - ja siitä mitä tapahtuu, kun nämä yhteydet katkaistaan. Maughan näkee tarkasti sen mitä nämä kansainväliset verkostot meille tässä hetkessä tarkoittavat - niin hyvässä kuin pahassakin - ja minkälaisia uhkia/mahdollisuuksia se meille avaisi, jos niitä ei olisikaan. Minkälainen olisi tietoliikenneverkko, joka ei ole jättiyritysten hallitsema ja omistama, vaan ihmisistä itsestään lähtöisin? Miltä elämä näyttäisi ilman globaalia logistiikkaa?

Niin kuin scifi aina, kertoo enemmän tästä hetkestä kuin tulevaisuudesta. Tekee mieli laittaa tietokone kiinni, irrottautua verkosta ja palata fyysiseen maailmaan

[Brayden Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is somewhere between 3.5 and 4. I flopped around a bit at times thinking 2.5-3 but it wraps up in a satisfying way to at least mark it as 4 even if I'm unsure.

I think what holds it back is for much of the novel the characters aren't that gripping, but as it progresses and the reader learns more that does effectively change. the characters however, are just the vehicle for the themes at play.

The themes at play and the tone of the novel is where it shines. it's critique on capitalism, the internet as well as terrorism are obvious but well defined. the Gritty reality of the "After" sections of the novel leave the reader wondering is it worth it, but the tail end and the epilogue answer that it might just be.

[Scribe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished this a few weeks back but wanted to digest it before posting a review.

Tim Maughan is one of those people who exists on the edge of the technological present, playing back your own hopes and fears to you. I read his Paintwork many years ago, and am pleased Infinite Detail carries on with his much-needed approach of poking the possibly-immediate future and seeing how many wasps come out.

Infinite Detail runs a fine line between a hate story of technology and electronics, and a love story for Bristol and the resourcefulness of humans. It never quite comes down on either side, preferring to merely project the decisions we're making now, and document the results.

Perhaps it's more realistic than optimistic or pessimistic. And it's kind of all the scarier and brilliant for it.

[Rupa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tim Maughan is a master of making the invisible visible. In Infinite Detail, he forces us to consider the inner workings of systems so ubiquitous that we can barely remember what it was like before we had them, let alone project what a future might be like without them. The premise of the novel is the near-instant dystopia created when all of the internet suddenly stops working. This scenario immediately brings into sharp focus one of the deep ironies about technologies of any kind – the higher the percentage of people who use said technology, the lower the percentage of people who have any idea of how that technology actually works. When home computers first became available, the early adopters were ones who didn’t even need an operating system to get things done on their machines, while today interfaces have been honed to such a degree that children can navigate them before they even learn to read. Given our current levels of utter dependence on decentralized internet-based systems coupled with widespread ignorance of how they work, it is frighteningly easy to imagine how quickly things would devolve in their unplanned absence.

As with all the best dystopian fiction, or any fiction for that matter, there are no easy answers for who is to blame for the book’s state of affairs, what the correct solution is, or whether it’s even worth trying to rebuild the systems that were destroyed. Maughan manages to weave in ideas about surveillance, global capitalism, supply chains, food scarcity, electronic music, the nature of creativity, memory, and kinda-sorta-time-travel so deftly and seamlessly that it is difficult to imagine a nascent version of the novel in which any of those elements were absent. The excellent interview with Maughan included at the end of the audiobook reveals the ways that the author’s journalism, and travels in pursuit of the same, informed the writing of the novel and vice versa, and his deep understanding of the many varied themes is apparent.

And oh, the audiobook! Any audiobook that elicits a, well, audible reaction from me is golden as far as I’m concerned. There was a monologue in this book about the inverse relationship between limits and good art that so perfectly articulated my own sentiments on the matter that I pumped my fist in my car and shouted “fuck yes!” at no one in particular. The magnificent actor Joe Sims (of Broadchurch) voices both male and female characters from Ireland, Bristol, other parts of the UK, and America so distinctly, skillfully, and enthusiastically that the book is an absolute joy to listen to despite the bleak subject matter. (The one slipup I noticed was when an American character angrily shouts something about PRIV-uh-see rather than PRY-vuh-see, but even that was a treat.) It is testament to how much I loved this book that I ultimately bought it in every available medium – audiobook because audiobooks rule, ebook because there were so many passages I wanted to look up and go back to, and of course print, because who knows when I might wake up to find myself in a world where it’s the only medium available.

[Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book by several reviews that recommended it as a portrait of the potential dangers of internet powered smart cities. Maybe 5% of the book actually explores that topic in any depth, and these parts, such as the story of a New York can collector who loses his livelihood to a smart recycling scheme, are by far the most effective. I also liked the aspects grounded in Bristol's counterculture scene although the extensive diversions into the production of jungle music dragged.

Most of the novel, however, is taken up with a turgid and wildly implausible imagining of a post-internet world cobbled together from 80s nuclear apocalypse stories (the TV drama Threads often came to mind), with occasional reflections on the feelings of guilt and responsibility felt by the activists who may have played a role in the internet's demise. There is probably an interesting story to tell here but none of the characters are developed enough to be anything more than ciphers for the author's lefty counterculture philosophising. Unfortunately, for me at least, this was not insightful. I was reminded of a recent article I read in the New York Times that argued that the whole concept of social collapse is "a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness," and that "the appeal of collapse’s sudden, violent drama" is a particular male fantasy which elides the actual diversity of human experience in any given society. Losing the internet would radically alter our world but this book has little to offer beyond stale Cold War clichés to imagine it.

[deena · Rating 2 out of 5]

rebel anarchists overthrow big tech with a virus and ruins everyone's life in the process.

[Julien L · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the mark of a good dystopian novel is both in its ability to project itself onto the future, and to hit on the realities of our current climate. Dystopian novels should make us think about the future, our current reality, the politics and culture of it all, and what changes we need to make in ourselves. Dystopias let us genuinely analyze how shit things are now.

That being said, Infinite Detail would make for a good replacement for 1984 in the classroom.

Maughan's novel approaches contemporary issues from both current and futuristic perspectives: the encroaching, all-consuming nature of capitalism and its evils, the mental escape and degradation of the mind that social media provides, the gentrification of cities based on some idealistic dream that simultaneously drives out the communities who'd been living there for a while, and more. He fits all of this into a dystopian framework that is addressed from multiple perspectives, looking at questions like "who exactly would benefit if the internet were to collapse?" and "how would dystopias transform things like art and culture?" and the answers he provides are kind of surprising.

The book strikes me as a future classic of science fiction literature, if only because it's so driven by its characters and their relationships with each other and the world around them. The plot is kind of lacking, which is probably the one weakness of this book, if only because it spends so much time richly developing its characters and its world.

[Valentina Palladino · Rating 4 out of 5]

What would you do if the Internet disappeared? I don’t mean your home Wi-Fi shuts down for a few hours - I mean the Internet as we know it today crashes and burns. Maughan explores this idea in Infinite Detail by giving his take on life before and after a cyberterrorist attack effectively cancels the Internet.
⁣
I grow fonder and fonder of ID the more it infiltrated my thoughts in the time after I finished it. The first half of the novel keeps you guessing, almost to the point of frustration. But once the mysteries surrounding the terrorist attack were revealed, I literally sat in my bed, stared up at the ceiling, and said “Oh… my… god… THATMAKESSOMUCHSENSE.”⁣
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Aside from a couple clever reveals, Maughan’s ideas about technology in the near future kept me glued to this book. Most people wear “spex” in this futuristic world, or smart glasses that hold all of your information (literally everything) and can tell you almost as much about anyone that you look at who also wear spex. Tech lovers will want to check out this smart, dark, challenging novel.

Check out my in-depth review at Ars Technica.

[Violeta Gómez · Rating 5 out of 5]

En tiempos inciertos, pensar en el fin del mundo (léase capitalismo) y lo que viene después es muy esperanzador cuando se tiene una hoja de ruta posible, y con esta ficción detallada y realista de un post apocalipsis tecnológico, Tim Maughan nos muestra las maneras en las que el rizoma humano se puede reconfigurar después del quiebre.

Hermosos personajes, narración sencilla, conceptos maravillosos de la cúspide tecnológica en la que nos encontramos y que aceleracionistamente nos va a llevar al límite de nuestra supervivencia.