Sensation Machines
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
A razor-sharp, darkly funny, and deeply human rendering of a Post-Trump America in economic free fall
Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is meanwhile keeping a secret: he lost the couple’s life savings when a tanking economy caused a major market crash. And Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to solve a national crisis of mass unemployment and 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.
Set in an economic dystopia that’s just around the corner, Sensation Machines is both an endlessly twisty novel of big ideas, and a brilliantly observed human drama that grapples with greed, automation, universal basic income, wearable tech, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson's scathing, engrossing latest (after Flatscreen), a satire of digital and consumer culture in a near-future New York, centers on Michael and Wendy, a 40-something married couple who become divided over a government-created Universal Basic Income program. Wendy works in marketing and is tasked with creating an anti-UBI ad campaign in order to promote a secretive data-mining product. Michael, a dividend trader obsessed with the artistry of Eminem (Michael called himself MC WebMD in college), loses his savings via bad investments and reels from the murder of his friend, the flamboyant and wealthy Ricky. Michael's suspicions range from Wendy's employers to members of the city's #Occupy movement being responsible for the murder, and while spiraling into a depressive breakdown, he launches a quest for justice. Meanwhile, Wendy takes to her new client, Lucas, masterminding a ludicrous anti-UBI campaign aimed to promote the tagline #WorkWillSetYouFree. Filled with characters bred in an environment "that values entertainment over accuracy," Wilson's observations are often sharp-witted, extracting humor from sources like video game addiction, cryptocurrency, and herd mentality. Wilson undercooks some of his attempts at crafting futuristic products (swag for immersive videogame Shamerica), yet as Michael and Wendy's marriage fractures, the author carefully braids their individual narratives to a satisfying, if inevitable, crescendo. This feels all too real.
