Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of their daughter’s stillbirth. Michael, a Wall Street trader, has secretly lost the couple’s life savings. Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to reshape America’s social and political landscapes. When Michael’s best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy’s client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple—and the country.

An endlessly twisty novel of big ideas, Sensation Machines is a brilliantly observed human drama that grapples with greed, automation, universal basic income, revolutionary desires, and a broken justice system. Adam Wilson implicates not only the powerbrokers gaming the system and getting rich at the intersection of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, and Capitol Hill, but all of us: each one of us playing our parts, however willingly or unwillingly, in the vast systems that define and control our lives.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Novels, Mystery, Audiobook, Contemporary

384 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2020

About the author

Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, and the collection of short stories What's Important Is Feeling. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, VICE, and The Best American Short Stories, among many other publications. In 2012 he received the Terry Southern Prize, which recognizes "wit, panache, and sprezzatura" in work published by The Paris Review. He teaches creative writing at Columbia and NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Carole]

DNF

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Broder liked her long, elegant nose with its flat bridge and nostril flare.”

I picked the sentence above more or less randomly to give you a flavor of this book’s style. The book is written from multiple points of view but every one of them is the point of view of someone who notices and passes judgment on their surroundings at a meticulously finite level. The style is the story here, for me. I was invited as I read to be the kind of person who notices things like noses.

“Wendy swirls her coffee like it’s wine and watches the models emerge from Makeup with contoured cheekbones and halos of hairspray, musk rising off the men who cross in silent formation like hunky monks or spa-bound angels wearing robes that shine white against tan and brown skin.”

That’s another random sentence from somewhere in the middle. I’m honestly very interested in this style of writing. What is it, Pynchonesque? Whatever it is I enjoyed it, and if this kind of writing appeals to you then you will, as well.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The end my friend and here we are: the fall of Rome, the decline of derivatives, the rise of dildos made from real human skin like Hitler only dreamed.”

“Ricky sucked the string of cocaine-tinted snot back up his sinus canal and wiped his nose.”

A privacy-ending invention will change the world and accelerate the disintegration of the marriage of Wendy and Michael. The author spends a lot more time on Wendy and Michael than he does on the invention. For the invention to succeed, a proposal being considered by Congress must fail. Frankly, after Wendy “threw the crying cat across the loft” I couldn’t have cared less whether flesh eating bacteria ate Wendy’s face, and I wasn’t any fonder of Michael.

I am not sure why I finished this book, because from the beginning I wasn’t really enjoying it. I didn’t care for the writing style, and the author elected to include every social issue of the 21st century in a very heavy-handed way without any cleverness or particular insight. For example: The Economy “These people’s tax dollars had gone toward the previous bailout, and they’d been repaid with foreclosures and overdraft fees. And now their jobs had been replaced by bots or shipped abroad.” and Racist Cops “Quinn reminds himself that he is not a racist. He is doing this for reasons other than racially – motivated umbrage, he tells himself, as he uses his foot to lift the toilet seat and unzips his fly, freeing the long, skinny dick that all three women he’s slept with have noted for its resemblance to Quinn’s own face. He’s doing it for Gunther and Gunther alone. Why? Because a boy needs a dad, and a dad needs a job, and that job needs to pay more than eighty grand a year if that dad wants to keep up with hippie school tuition and alimony payments and still have money left to put food on the table and Wi-Fi through the airwaves, and pay for premium upgrades to Gunther‘s AR helmet, and if they don’t charge someone for the Cortes murder, then Quinn won’t get promoted, and worst case, he’ll be out on his ass.”

This book just wasn’t for me. 2.5 stars I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensation Machines is set in the near future and is a combination of satire, social commentary, and crime story. The story starts from two points of view, Michael and Wendy. Two well off Manhattanites whose marriage is crumbling as a result of a miscarriage and Michael losing their money in some bad investments. Michael is trying to find a way to replenish the money they lost (approximately 3 million) while Wendy is working on a project that can only be called data mining via a special suit the user wears that sends all kinds of data to a company that Wendy is working with who in turn sells it to companies for profit. The suit also influences your purchases using your own voice. Creepy, right?

The second part of the book introduces the murder mystery part when Michael's best friend Ricky is murdered. There are a lot of characters introduced in this part and it is hard to keep track of who is who. There is a bit of social commentary regarding government and police corruption as we see the police investigation of who killed Ricky unfold. The final part is Wendy in the aftermath of the unveiling of the suit and how her life is now.

Overall, this was an enjoyable read, although a bit out of my usual reads. The majority of the characters are well rounded and the plot is drawn out really well. Given the curry state of the US, you can see how easily this hits close to home rather than if it had been published a year or two earlier.

Thank you to Soho Press, author AdamWilson, and NetGalley for gifting me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great book from Adam Wilson. Funny, thoughtful and at times eerily prescient with elements of its dystopian near-future that keep getting checked off the to-do list of the crazy moment we live in.

[Bandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is kind of a difficult book to review. I wanted to gather my thoughts and produce something more coherent that exclamations of its genius and so took my time, but it never quite became crystalized, so I’m just going to ramble, like I tend to anyways. Ok, title first, the title refers to people as bodies, machines that look for comfort and avoid sharp corners of life, however futile their efforts might be. Life as lived viscerally and as such its occasionally a viscerally unpleasant/repulsing read, but very much in a car crash sort of way, where you just can’t look away. The main protagonists are Michael and Wendy Mixner, the well to do Manhattanites in crisis. Their marriage is stumbling after a stillbirth of their daughter, their finances are struggling with Michael recklessly misinvesting something like 3 million dollars, their personal ideologies appear at odds as Wendy takes on a new project for a new evilly charismatic boss. And this is all against the infinitely complicated sociopolitical scene set in the all too near future where society, addled by increased automation, is debating UBI (Universal Basic Income) and its alternatives, the latter of which is Wendy’s boss’s grand idea. There’s more to it than that, sociopolitically, it’s a terrifically complex, strikingly intelligent and soberingly plausible look at a world where justice isn’t just, where equality, equal opportunity and other excellent concepts have never taken off the conceptual stage in any way but rhetoric, it’s a world of manipulation of the lowest denominator where money talks loudest and exigencies of Mammon drive the abandonment of personal integrity. In other words it’s a frighteningly recognizable world, albeit more technologically advanced. And that’s all good and great and right along the lines of my love for dystopias of all kind, but that isn’t all, not even the main thing. Despite the compelling plot and subplots, including murder, the main attraction here is the author’s cleverness. I mean, this is by far the smartest book I’ve read in ages, the way he thinks, the way he turns phrases, his ideas…it’s all so erudite, intelligent, awesome. It’s the way I’d love to sound, the way I probably do to myself on a good day. But the author actually did that for 400 or so pages. Freaking genius, really. What this man has to say about the world, about society, about the future…it’s s just so (not to pun in a book that’s in no small way about all that lucre, but) on the money. There’s a certain droll cynicism to the entire thing, most appropriately so, and it just works so well. Though I don’t think it is a satire as such, it can be read as one, but it’s more profound than that, alarmingly so. An absolutely fascinating read, not an easy one, but excellent, very smart and extremely rewarding. Probably not to everyone’s liking, but it certainly worked for me. I just about loved it. Definitely love the cover, that's an awesome cover. The UBI discussions were just an added bonus, a subject of personal interest. It wasn’t just the economics or politics, not at all, it’s a first class literary drama with excellent character development, plotting, etc. But the economic politics were probably the most striking aspect of this production. Great read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 3 out of 5]

On paper, this novel fills all the check-boxes for near-future dystopian landscapes: droll commentary on society and the characters, a technology breakthrough that dubiously promises to make society more egalitarian, and an imagined fast-forward of Occupy-style economic protests. Given the deep recessionary landscape we will move into post-coronavirus, several scenes may well be close to a 2020s we will see. The book was fast-paced and fun to read, but two major flaws kept me from giving it more than a middling ranking.

First, the novel was populated with anti-heroes exemplified by the NYC power couple Michael and Wendy. Now, one can craft an anti-hero that is an empathetic character. Many from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Yossarian and Tyrone Slothrop, would fit this bill. But beginning in the 1980s, anti-heroes from the brat-pack cloister of writers, characters from writers such as Ellis and Janowitz, represented a new breed of fictional character it was hard to feel much emotion toward, whether anger or empathy. This was echoed in the 21st century in novels like Joshua Cohen's 2015 work, The Book of Numbers. Sure, Cohen gave us an accurate look at high-tech moguls, but it was difficult to care about what happened to his more or less creepy characters. Wilson presents his novel with that same sense of ennui about modern-day winner/losers. Why should we care if hedge-fund managers go bankrupt or marketing experts sell their souls? Michael in particular is a privileged white guy, hung up on writing the definitive analysis of Eminem, who has spent his life since high school in a dissolute haze. Big deal. Thank U, next!

My second gripe is that the technology breakthrough of Project Pinky really isn't that revolutionary, and it is unclear why its introduction should immediately sideline the political struggle to move to a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. Wilson rightly shows how the growing automation of service and working-class functions will lead to UBI demands, and that various political lobbying groups will try to lay claim to the UBI movement. It is also clear that the personal device based on thousands of microsensors will be the ultimate self-invoked privacy destroyer that critics bring up when they talk about "surveillance capitalism." But technology breakthroughs like this are disseminated to the public at large in small increments, and in fits and starts, in the same way that the smartphone slowly replaced the flip-phone. For the last 30 years, a new product press conference from Apple has provided lots of cult worship from Appleheads, but a product introduction has never totally upended society, whether Steve Jobs or Tim Cook was playing the role of cult leader. Why would Lucas and his magical suit be any different, and in particular, why would a marketing campaign ultimately centered on a product have an immediate effect on financial stimulus bills being considered in Congress? In the end, the puzzle pieces just don't add up.

Wilson wants to end the book on a redemptive note, and it's wise he chooses Wendy, as she has slightly more survivalist cred than her husband Michael. Maybe Olivia the baby represents a hope in a dismal future to overcome the tragedy of the stillborn baby Nina. But Far Rockaways as a refuge from the city? Hell, even the upper Hudson or upstate New York would be a problematic closing scene. One thing the Covid-19 crisis and social distancing has taught us is that getting off the grid and moving into prepper mode means getting far away from urban culture. But in the same way that Brad Easton Ellis in the 1980s found it hard to imagine a world outside Manhattan and Brooklyn, Wilson finds it hard to imagine a dystopian world outside East and West Coast urban areas. Ultimately, that makes this novel less believable, and one in which the elements don't quite add up.

[Mob Razor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook. A few humorous moments but story was not interesting. I was in and out a little on the audiobook. So maybe I missed some important stuff but I don’t think so. The current culture stuff was a little too on the nose and not clever in any way.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I leaned in and kissed her. Our accounts were overdrawn, creditors called me by the hour, my job was in limbo, and Wendy knew none of this, but at least we appeared to be bedbug free.” This line from early in the opening pages of Adam Wilson’s SENSATION MACHINES, a novel set in the ever-reliable “near future,” goes some distance to giving us a workable sense both of tone and general parameters. The voice belongs to Michael Mixner, a New York derivatives trader working for (or out of) the fictional bank Clayton & Sons (C&S). Mixner has indeed lost a fortune, descending rapidly thereafter into debt, and he has kept this information from his wife, Wendy Mixner, none-too-convincingly rationalizing to himself that he can make up for his mistakes and get the finances back in the black before having to face the music and make with the requisite mea culpa. Though Michael is a passably affable man of forty or nearly forty, relatively sensitive and seemingly capable of earnest feeling, his primary character demerit may be the somewhat uncritical way he overvalues these flimsily bundled character assets. One imagines that the privileges afforded by fantastic upward class mobility include among them the privilege of never really having had to take anything resembling what we in recovery might call “a searching and fearless moral inventory.” Far from being simply a defect, this may in fact be the trader’s operational precondition. Other people's ruined lives must remain theoretical abstractions. As Michael puts it himself fairly late in the novel: “reality’s a thing we’ve been conditioned to un-see until it’s too late.” Wendy, who works as something akin to a multitasking optics troubleshooter at Communitv.ly, a “Think Tank for Creative Synergy and Digital Solutions,” is a good deal more emotionally sober than her husband, though she is in consequence also a colder sort of a fish…though this will prove itself increasingly to her credit. Wendy does not serially delude herself in the way her husband does. If Michael’s obviously never-realized not-quite-plan to fix everything before spilling the beans sounds more than a little bit like the floundering of a gambling addict (think perhaps of Adam Sandler in last year’s UNCUT GEMS), this is of course more or less exactly what derivatives trading is. The stock market is itself the hook and the lived experience of being hooked. Those who live and die by the market will with regularity experience intense activation of the midbrain, A.K.A. the reptile brain, the primordial legislator of fight or flight. It just so happens that in SENSATION MACHINES, nearly all who live and die by the market, Michael included, are standing at the edge of a precipice. Adam Wilson’s novel is demonstrably a New York tale, and the two events of the recent past that most reverberate through its near future are 9/11 and the 2007/08 crash. The ubiquity of bubbles and their tendency to pop: the increasingly gentrified and increasingly cutthroat playboy's playground of New York speaks to this, as do the illustrative individual personages of Michael Mixner and his fellows, most notably the gay, garrulous, and permanently high Ricky Cortes, the “best friend” whose murder will occur at the beginning of the second of the novel’s four formally diverse sections. In order to establish in a maximally efficient manner the particular species of dark humour at which Adam Wilson so colourfully excels, let us pause to apprise his razor-sharp characterization of Wall Street bros: “finance guys, men whose hands had palmed footballs in high school and in college had been body inspectors: tweaking nipples, forcing pinkies into tiny anal holes. After college they’d tied ties, tapped out lines, and touched money. Now they pecked touchscreens, checking the Dow, sending vaguely reassuring emails to investors.” Wilson has a dark and curdling sense of humour. If this is a quasi-satirical mode which takes no prisoners and would not wish to, it is curiously warm all the same, and it is this combination—the tough love that could not possibly be mistaken for anything other than love—that I believe connects Wilson to other great Jewish American male fiction writers the likes of Stanley Elkin and Saul Bellow. In this respect we might also compare SENSATION MACHINES in style and content to Sam Lipsyte’s LARK and Adam Levin’s BUBBLEGUM, two recent novels by American males who happen to be supernaturally brilliant and hilarious and also Jewish. Two other recent novels come to mind, these written by men I am pretty sure are gentiles: Mark Doten’s TRUMP SKY ALPHA and Stephen Wright’s PROCESSED CHEESE. It may not serve us to exhaustively pursue all the relevant correlations respective of general filiation here, but surely it does bear mentioning that Doten, a very fine writer to be sure, was also Wilson’s editor on SENSATION MACHINES (as made explicit in the Acknowledgements). Last year’s TRUMP SKY ALPHA may venture further into the hallucinatory speculative than does SENSATION MACHINES, but both are novels set in the near future and both as such involve themselves in those kinds of marginal speculative projections the reader could not possibly mistake for anything other than extrapolative commentary on where we find ourselves in the novel’s present (from the standpoint of its composition and pre-publication fine-tuning). While the POTUS named in the title of Doten's novel (and caricature therein) is not named at all in the Wilson, he is addressed tangentially, and I think the implication here would seem to be that a single term was all that was in the offing for the big, brash cream-sickle-hued blimp (speculatively). The near future is in play and the speculative imagination is going to have a certain amount of free-reign. As with the Doten, I sense in the Wilson more than a slight trace of the influence of Philip K. Dick, especially, say, in a comic bit of business involving a “tele-barista” that cannot help but evoke an equivalent in Dick’s UBIK involving a coffee shop’s “ruling monad turret” which asks patrons if they want cream and/or sugar, et cetera. (There is also a lot of this sort of thing in the stories of George Saunders, especially those collected in IN PERSUASION NATION.) The opening pages of SENSATION MACHINES quickly angle to make mention of the ubiquity of delivery drones, which cause pigeons to scatter and which have been re-designed to resemble actual birds (“now it was Hitchcock twenty-four seven”), after earlier versions modeled upon “floating orbs and baby Death Stars” had popularly come to be considered excessively “sinister.” The drones return near novel’s close in an ominous sentence I would imagine all would be hard-pressed to characterize as anything other than outright sinister: “Hundreds of drones converge on Columbus Circle, empty of product, returning to base to meet the clear-skies curfew.” Much techy fantasia is generally afoot throughout SENSATION MACHINES, some of it redolent of Thomas Pychon’s BLEEDING EDGE, a novel into which the events of 9/11 intrude, meaning that it is set around the time Michael and Wendy first meet as college students and commence dating. Wilson’s tightly (though not fussily) plotted novel involves “Augmented Reality helmets” and a VR game which overlaps with the actual urban space (thanks to the helmet). The game is called Shamerican Sykosis and it involves its own (increasingly valuable) cryptocurrency (Sykodollars). All of this will come to play vis-à-vis Wendy, Communitv.ly, and the “enigmatic client” Project Pinky, whose emissary is the secretive and to the manor born Adonis, Lucas Van Lewig, son of Chip Van Lewig (“a Midwestern cosmetics scion with family ties to the Heritage Foundation and John Birch Society, whose lobbying efforts had helped reverse decades of environmental progress”). Lucas Van Lewig and Project Pinky will come to seem like they might be involved in the murder of none-too-reputable best friend Ricky Cortes, a homicide perhaps having something to do with Sykodollars, and the question will for a time appear to suggest itself respective of the depth of Wendy’s culpability as unwitting contracted accessory. As her concupiscent boss Lillian insists of Project Pinky: “Something sketchy is going on and I want us to be part of it.” (The word pinky cannot help but evoke the earlier-quoted passage about trader bros and “tiny anal holes.”) The murder of Ricky will, like all the gizmos and tech (culminating in The Suit™), prove largely to be red herrings serving as so much highly expressive window dressing. The type of speculative extrapolation in which Wilson is most interested has to do with our current socioeconomic reality, characterized as it is by outrageous wealth/structural inequality, societal schism, and the usurpation of the jobs fought over by a desperate labour precariat by increasingly widespread automation (tele-baristas, drones, and suchlike). At the beginning of the novel, a Universal Basic Income bill has passed through Congress and is headed for the Senate. Lucas Van Lewig, a would be Master of the Universe, wants to see the bill fail so that his new initiative can fill the hole it leaves. The Occupy Movement of 2011 has graduated to #Occupy, a populist progressive vanguard that supports the UBI bill and is effectively headed by the not terribly effectual and extremely callow Jay Devor. Wilson enumerates some of the numerous woes of the present moment early on (in the voice of Wendy): “the cataclysms and wreckage of the last administration. Headlines warned of coming hurricanes and tsunamis. Warned of rising sea levels and methane emissions. Chronicled the continuing barrage of Weinstein-esque behavior in politics and entertainment. Addressed the uptick in anti-immigration violence in the wake of mass layoffs at fast food chains in Texas and Arizona, the rightwing backlash against the soda ban in public schools. It all just kept coming. That morning’s front page featured a Florida militia with stockpiled Uzis who wore swastika armbands but touted their support for the Jewish State.” Wilson likewise thoroughly unpacks the pros and cons respective of the implementation of basic income, one of the most telling points on the positive side of the ledger relating to how a financially secure public “might feel less imperative to freely spray bullets in public space.” True to his mordant sensibility, however, Wilson has never met an easy answer that’s failed to excite his skepticism; it is in this sense that the author’s sensibility is probably closer to Wendy’s than it is to Michael's, even if we might be reluctant to attribute to Wendy Mixner anything quite like a sense of humour. As SENSATION MACHINES commences, it's clear Michael and Wendy’s marriage has been in trouble since well before the market tanked and Michael inadvisedly, in his own self-pitying diagnosis, “bet everything on America.” The brief excerpt with which I commenced this consideration makes mention of bedbugs, and indeed Michael and Wendy have recently emerged from delousing “quarantine,” a terminology that will hold a great deal of weight for 2020 readers. There have also been a series of miscarriages culminating in a stillbirth, though the heartsick Michael does not believe the term “stillbirth” a terribly accurate one, since the baby was technically alive when it emerged, the event accompanied by a great deal of frenzied movement. The opening and closing bookend sections of SENSATION MACHINES alternate between first person narration care of Michael and Wendy respectively, introducing a grounding parallax upon which so much of the novel will ultimately rest. Though I have not read Kenneth Fearing’s celebrated hyper-literary “crime novel” / “thriller” THE BIG CLOCK, I have read a good deal about it (in addition to having watched John Farrow’s 1948 film adaptation numerous times), and here we might wish to draw a parallel, as the Fearing likewise alternates between perspectives and because Wall Street in SENSATION MACHINES is every bit “big clock” its evolved self. Adam Wilson’s skill as a craftsman and as a student of life shine most especially in the way he stages his divergence of voice. The stylistic modality is such that Michael and Wendy (both Jewish or mostly Jewish) have fairly similar voices, this serving to highlight all the more the elements of character and sensibility that distinguish them each from the other. While Wilson clearly identifies with both characters, the counterpoint ends up expressing very important distinctions at the level of values. A pertinent case in point relates to the experience of each insofar as pertains to sexual intimacy. It is Wendy who first incorporates the novel’s title when she describes herself as a hyper-stimulated “sensation machine” when engaging in the sex act, such that when an encounter goes bad it can be truly wrenching. Michael, who sees a therapist, confesses to having difficulty being present for sexual intimacy, as though looking down upon himself from a remove. His career in free-fall, Michael daydreams about writing a treatise on his childhood hero, the rapper Eminem, the Michigan demigod. The three principle personae of Eminem represent something akin to an alternative creation myth for Michael and his cohort, or so he believes. The violent misogyny and homophobia are problematics part of a greater tapestry, and though Michael, who would like to believe himself to be a sensitive and thoughtful man, acknowledges these elements as problematic, his inability to pursue them to where they properly lead becomes illustrative precisely of the limits of his capacity to be honest with himself. Though he will occasionally become critical of his own actions in hindsight and will experience the “throb” of “conscience,” he appears ever ready to revert to his self-serving operational baseline (tellingly at a crucial moment in the novel’s final section). Though he is able to be cynical respective of the “white saviour” archetype, his best efforts only find him reduplicating it. “Vanity, it turns out, is that last sturdy pillar of society.” Indeed. The novel ends without giving us the satisfaction of establishing whether Michael has ultimately been able to help the black doorman wrongly charged with Ricky’s murder. Michael certainly fails to help Broder, once Mix Master Mucinex to his WebMD, former roommate and partner in rhyme (also, as it should happen, a heroin addict). Help him? In fact, Michael fails to so much as hear him. In the final section of SENSATION MACHINES, Wendy provides an axiom that is far more livable than ongoing submission to the nebulous throb of conscience: “the knowledge that this freedom is a willful delusion doesn’t make me feel any less free.” This seems like the novelist’s own ultimate declaration. Like Sam Lipsyte in HARK, Adam Wilson is directly advocating for an instrumental irony not to be confused with cynicism.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although flawed, this is a solid drama with lots of ideas and some unexpected turns. This author has written a lot of stories, and his talent and experience are apparent. This one seemed a little uneven and I wasn't always engaged, but for readers seeking a good writing style and well formed characters, plus a good overall plot, this will probably work. 3.5 stars.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!

[Kaitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of a wealthy New York couple in the near future. Wendy works for an advertising firm, and Michael works in finance. Everything is going great (except maybe the most important thing) until their apartment is infested with bedbugs and they lose their savings when their investments tank. Wendy is approached by an unusual new client with political interests, and Michael attends a finance party feeling sorry for himself. From there, the two split paths and life goes haywire.

I liked the gentle sci-fi, all of which was integrated so well and seemed so plausible that those who aren't interested in sci-fi would still enjoy this as a work of literary fiction.

This is written in Michael and Wendy sections at the beginning and end, and in the middle we get a more general overview. The writing is great, but won't be to everyone's tastes. Especially in the Michael sections, the sentences are long and full of modifiers and pop culture references.

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really unique writing

[Brontë Massucco · Rating 4 out of 5]

i need to stop reading books that antagonize my already progressing loss of faith in humanity

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second chance read! I initially put this one down because I'm not a huge fan of an author simply listing real-life commodities-- whether it be grocery store lists, lists of social media platforms, or celebrity name drops. All of which this book definitely has. It strikes me as a way to fill a word count. But I picked this back up and really loved it. I particularly liked the writing. The concept is also interesting and well executed, and I quickly realized that, as basically a commentary piece on capitalism and consumption, these long lists of modern life paraphernalia lends to the overall picture Wilson is looking to paint. One thing I will say is I did not find the dialogue to be very realistic: there was not enough of a distinction between the prose and the dialogue between the characters.

If you like well-written, fast paced modern-day commentary with a hint of sci-fi, this is the read for you.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those books where the author wrote it (it feels to me) to prove how insightful he his about American Society. But he refuses to acknowledge nuance in our society. My biggest grief is that he says at the end that now there’s wifi on the subway, people read less than ever and bookstores are going away. And that’s in contradiction of pretty much every trend in the book world.

It starts out really good - Michael and Wendy and their falling marriage as a backdrop to Ricky’s murder. And then we’re randomly thrown into various side characters chapters and I kept having to go back to remember who anyone was. And it seems like each of these momentum spoiling chapters was just so the author could once again show how WOKE he is.

I usually love near-future dystopia as a genre, and even literary fiction. But this one was super hard to power through. I wish we had just stuck with Wendy and Michael. But instead the reader is forced to slug through almost 400 pages of societal insight that isn’t really insightful (and a lot of Eminem references).

[Kelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

At one point, early on in the book, a character's ideas are described as "pretentious and half-baked." That pretty much sums up this book, which tries way to hard to be a book about the Modern American Experience, but just ends up feeling shallow and weirdly outdated (it reads like it's supposed to be five minutes in the future, but stuff like Tumblr keeps getting referenced like it's still 2013). The characters are all either contemptible or too stupid to live or both. Maybe that was the point, but are we supposed to feel invested in these assholes?

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timing is all when it comes to a publishing date, and this cautionary tale of speculative dystopia would have had a stronger impact had it been published a year earlier, pre-pandemic. However, since there are forces at work in the real world that render the dangers put forth here irrelevant, this can only be read as an entertainment, and it delivers on that very well.

[J.A.]

This is Wilson's best book to date - funny, elegiac, smart - he's wrapped a new (and sad) future inside an engrossing story.

Interview at The Millions:

https://themillions.com/2020/09/too-b...

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Darkly humorous, political, satirical fiction that’s incredibly smart - I just had a hard time getting into it. A lot of the economic stuff went over my head but I loved the writing and characters.

[agata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensation Machines is a novel set in the near future and focused on Wendy and Michael; a married couple living in Brooklyn. On the outside, they may look like a successful duo but we quickly learn that their marriage is irreparably damaged, haunted by the stillbirth of their daughter and the gigantic debt that Michael has accrued. He's been trying to prevent Wendy from finding out about their financial situation, but when the truth finally comes out, it immediately has to take a backseat to even more shocking news - Michael's best friend, Ricky, has been murdered. Now Wendy and Michael have to figure out how to navigate not only their strained marriage, but also the loss of their friend that quickly becomes politicized by strong, opposing forces.

Sensation Machines is part dystopia, part social commentary, part literary fiction. I have to admit that it took me a few chapters to really start enjoying it, but once I got used to the writing style, I couldn't put the book down. I loved how Wilson blends our present with the possible future. Every event and invention in the novel feels like something that could easily happen a few years from now, and the reader doesn't have to suspend their disbelief to feel like they could be a part of the story. The worldbuilding was phenomenal and the commentary on our society, economics, and politics was very thought-provoking and clever. The novel focuses mostly on Wendy and Michael and while I found them both to be quite unlikeable, they were still compelling characters that made me want to keep on reading. There are also other more or less likable characters we meet along the way, but the one I rooted for the most was Donnell, Ricky's doorman. His subplot affected me the most, and I wish we'd gotten more of him.

Overall, Sensation Machines is a complex, dark novel rich with ideas, reflections and predictions for our nearest future.

[Aaron]

A prescient and deeply entertaining novel. Read shortly after its publication in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, the issues of capital and crime at the heart of the book made it a timely read. This is the kind of novel that will be looked back upon as an artifact of this time and will be seen to have articulated something so clearly about the contemporary world despite the fog of the present moment. But it's also funny, well-paced, and moving on the interpersonal level. Give it a read if you like speculative fiction with heart and a good sense of humor.

[Sarah Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just loved Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson. This books marries some of my favourite things- a near future alternate reality that is terrifying yet utterly possible; complex, flawed and completely relatable protagonists; an intense interrogation of capitalism; and a drug fuelled murder mystery. And somehow, though I shouldn’t be surprised, it managed to shock me at every page turn. This will be a very hard book to forget!

[Natalka Burian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a total stunner.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid story with relatable characters in a not-so-distant future. Written with a unique style, I thoroughly enjoyed!

[Ben Brackett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so ambitious I don't know if it would have worked without the writing style that felt like an all out assault starting from page one. The satire set in the not too distance future was actually terrifying in how little it needed to hyperbolize, if at all.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's easier to intellectualize than to face the gutshot of a human vanished."

[Tracy O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Wilson’s voice and comic sensibility seize your attention and don’t let go.

[Sarah Schulman]

Adam is clearly a very good writer. I did not relate so well to the frame, but would look at his future work.

[Emma Clarkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Eminem motif was weird

[MisterHobgoblin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If ever there were a case for three and a half stars, this is it.

Sensation Machines starts out strong and tight. Michael Mixner is a Wall Street trader who has invested badly. He's up to his eyes in debt and his credit has just run out. His lavish lifestyle is in trouble but he doesn't want to break the news to his wife Wendy. Meanwhile, Wendy knows they are in trouble and immerses herself in her work at a publicity agency as a form of escape. This is all set in a near future United States where traditional society and the traditional economy are collapsing; there's a growing political consensus for a Universal Basic Income; and technology is displacing more and more workers.

There's a real human drama unfolding as Michael and Wendy have to discover and explore their new situation; they need to work out how they relate to one another; they need to plan a way forward. Oh, and Michael drops into the narrative that his friend Ricky has been murdered.

Then, about a third of the way through, the camera pans back from Michael and Wendy's alternating narratives. The cast of characters increases exponentially in a bewildering array of far right political commentators, tech entrepreneurs, traders, advertisers, hangers on. These additional characters are not terribly well drawn and it's pretty difficult to keep track of who's who. They are all grotesque, greedy and seem to want to thwart one another for reasons that escaped me. Some of the plot lines descend into farce. It's as though Adam Wilson didn't know whether he was writing a crime novel, a satire or a character driven novel. This section - which is most of the novel - feels slack and choppy.

Finally, as a coda, we return to Michael and Wendy to catch up with them some time after the fateful days of the story. Trouble is, I had really lost interest in their story with some of the mad plotting and scheming in the middle. Did they reconcile? Did they split? Did they end up rich or poor? I know the answers because I read the book, but I'm not sure I really cared by the end.

This is a novel of ideas. Some of them, at least, remind me more than a little of Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers. It deserves credit for that. But I wish some of the narrative drive from the opening third could have carried on through to the end.