Zed

Starred review from September 2, 2019
In this tangled, riveting parable of the modern surveillance state, Kavenna leads readers through an eerie near-future England dominated by the Beetle corporation, whose increasingly invasive technology monitors everything: people’s health, transportation, and even the contents of one’s refrigerator. Beetle claims the BeetleInsight AI can predict all potential futures, but its engineers struggle to foresee events in Category Zed, which are influenced by unpredictable human irrationality. The story is told through multiple, interweaving points of view, including those of Beetle’s CEO, a high-ranking Beetle engineer, an anti-terrorism government employee, a grieving newspaper editor, and a mysterious person who lives on the fringe of society with others unwilling to adopt Beetle technology. When George Mann murders his entire family, Beetle sends a droid to apprehend him, but the droid mistakenly kills Lionel Bigman instead, triggering a cascade of BeetleInsight errors. Beetle’s engineers must grapple with the flaws in their technology, while people skeptical of Beetle begin to wonder whether they too are in danger. Kavenna delivers this gripping narrative with wit and dark humor, leaving readers both entertained and a little paranoid. Agent: Jessica Friedman, Wylie Agency.

September 15, 2019
Kavenna returns to the existential debate explored in her last novel (Come to the Edge, 2013, etc.) in order to further probe the question of free will in the age of deep data-mining. In an alarmingly plausible near future, tech giant Beetle has risen to global prominence in the fields of transportation, communication, health, security, media, and everything else. The society it has engineered is safer, more efficient, and totally devoid of surprise until the insidious presence of Zed begins to derange the algorithm. In London, upper level Beetle Douglas Varley is awakened by his digital Very Intelligent Personal Assistant, or "Veep," Scrace Dickens, to the news that something has gone terribly wrong. Without any prior warning from any of Beetle's predicative programs, perfectly ordinary citizen George Mann has returned home from a night of anomalous hard drinking to murder his wife and two sons. In the hours that follow, the supposedly infallible Anti-Terror Droid, or ANT, sent to apprehend Mann makes a miscalculation and executes Lionel Bigman, an innocent bus driver and British Army veteran. A massive damage control effort follows in which the timorous Varley; Beetle's narcissistic, youth-obsessed CEO, Guy Matthias; and the hacker-turned-Beetle IT guru Francesca Amerensekera attempt to tighten the already iron grip Beetle holds over the totally voluntary participants in its benign social revolution (which--as Beetle controls all currency and thus all means of social mobility--is everyone) while scrambling to stem the spreading chaos created by Zed, "the category term for instability." Meanwhile, Eloise Jayne, a hard-nosed investigator for the Beetle backed National Anti-Terrorism and Security Office, and David Strachey, editor-in-chief of the Beetle-owned Times, Daily Star, Sun, and the Daily Record, seek the truth of Zed and its implications for a society used to the placidity of a near-total parent state. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novel's convoluted plot, burgeoning cast of characters, and barbed use of Beetle brand tech-speak would leave the reader hopelessly tangled in the what of the novel before they ever got to the philosophical why. Kavenna, however, is a diligent scholar of her form, melding a massively complex plot à la Thomas Pynchon and the wicked social satire of Evelyn Waugh with a healthy dose of Gogol's absurdist dysphoria thrown in for good measure. Complex, funny, prescient, difficult: Kavenna's novel tackles nothing less than everything as it blurs the lines between real and virtual.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 1, 2019
In the near future, omnipresent British tech corporation Beetle holds sway over most of the world: monitoring citizens through their security devices and social media, and even predicting via "lifechains" a person's lifespan or likelihood of committing a crime. So when unassuming businessman George Mann comes home one night and murders his wife and their two sons in cold blood, Beetle's predictive algorithm is thrown into chaos. Matters are made much worse when an anti-terrorism droid mistakes another man for the killer and shoots him dead in a diner. Beetle CEO Guy Matthias puts forth one of his senior executives, the hapless Douglas Varley, as a scapegoat, while dogged National Security Officer Eloise Jayne tries to untangle the mess to determine who is responsible. Beetle ultimately chalks the mishaps up to "Zed," or human error and unpredictability, which flies in the face of their prized algorithm. Kavenna's (The Birth of Love, 2010) scathing indictment of the dangers of technology gone awry, tech conglomerates left unchecked, and the silencing of the free press is a smart and timely work of cautionary speculative fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2019

In a not-too-distant future, the Beetle Corporation has monopolized the UK's information and communication infrastructure. Networked devices (Beetlebands) and virtual personal assistants (Veeps) lead people through their days. The corporation controls currency (Beetlebits), automated drivers (Viads), and even language (Bespoke). A journalist, desperate to stay on the good side of his publisher (Beetle Corp.), nevertheless follows the trail of Zed, a series of anomalies and unpredicted violent behavior. Zed seems to be behind the fatal overreactions of corporate droids. Veeps are insolent and unhelpful. Cars are refusing to drive. Doors are refusing to open. Will Zed be the savior, or the end of a perfectly ordered system that has run off its rails? VERDICT Kavenna (The Birth of Love), winner of the Orange Award and Granta Best of Young British Novelists, brings wit and moments of levity to this portentously dark look at a society ruled by corporate technology. [See Prepub Alert, 7/15/2019.]--Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2019

Lionel Bigman has been murdered by a robot, and the CEO of Beetle, the corporation that created the automaton gone amok, claims it was human error. But maybe Beetle's predictive algorithms don't work as they should, or maybe they were hacked. Either way, what's the world to do? From a Granta Best of Young British Novelists, also winner of the Orange Award for New Writing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.