This awards-nominated novel is pretty good

For the last week I’ve been reading a self-published novel, Drive A, that the author submitted to a contest I’m running. This book is pretty good! I enjoyed reading it, and with this post I’m announcing Merritt Graves’s Drive A as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Award.

This novel takes place in a near-future world where most (80%?) of the people in America are unemployed drones who subsist on a Universal Basic Income from the government and spend their time immersed in games, livestreams, and other virtual entertainments. In this world, if you have a job of any sort, you’re one of the lucky ones.

NPC (or non-player character) was increasingly becoming the term for people who didn’t work, collected basic income from the Fed, and spent most of their time in VR and watching other people’s livefeeds. AI had clear-cut a lot of creative and process-oriented jobs, and was a blackpill rug-pull for those who felt like they’d been built for one thing, spending their entire lives perfecting a craft that now—surprise, poof—wasn’t viable anymore. Most alarming, it wasn’t for any lack of effort to keep them as PCs: there were all kinds of work, volunteering, and re-training programs shuffling around various automation casualties.

But competition is vicious, and you’re always in danger of losing your foothold.

To gain an edge, some people do an initial public offering, selling off shares in themselves—these shares increase in value as their subject gains income and/or clout. This not only generates capital that they can use to invest in their education, it also gives them a set of powerful ‘shareholders’ who have a vested interest in their success.

Cable Rostenfarm IPO’ed at age twelve, used that money to go to a private school, and there developed an alliance with the powerful Chandley family. Now he’s graduated from college and working in his first job, at a human-cap firm—a hedge fund that invests primarily in individual peoples’ stocks.

What’s great about this book is the degree to which it’s fully invested in this premise. The book takes an absolute delight in the details of how people would hold, sell, and short various stocks, and the sorts of complex relationships that would form between people and their shareholders.

For instance, here’s an aside about how this system is used to facilitate the bribery of government officials:

[I had heard] more and more about FDA staffers dropping hints that they wanted a friend or family member to get a certain job or a “charitable foundation” to get a certain size donation (credited back in future speaking fees). Fulfilling these “wishes” then became a way of racking up points for a later on-chain, off-balance-sheet transaction or OCOBST. Which was an alternative to the tried-and-true method of purchasing their extended family’s tokens outright—although that was starting to attract more scrutiny.

The book also loves to describe various trades and hedges and arbitrate opportunities. For instance, here’s one character describing their newest trade: their firm sells an expensive performance-enhancing drug to this company, and then the firm securitizes the resulting productivity gains.

So...someone here had the idea to loan prescriptions to workers in jobs with measurable cognitive performance attributes in exchange for their employers paying out thirty percent of the performance gain. And then to take that, package it up into a CDO with an eight percent coupon, and sell it to investors as a smart contract. We’re calling them cognitive-backed securities or CBS.

The heart of Drive A

But the book really succeeds because of its protagonist, Cable Rostenfarm. This guy is a classic meritocrat. He’s gotten ahead by knowing the rules of this game, and knowing them much better than people who were born to it. But precisely because he has succeeded, he also has a kind of naive goodness. He believes it is possible to use this system to do good things. After all, for him it worked: he did an IPO, raised money, and bettered himself.

And although he’s confronted constantly by evidence that the system doesn’t always work well, he persists in thinking that his work can be good. In his work at the firm, he gets involved in two major trades, and the bulk of the plot concerns his relationship with these two subjects. The first is Traeger Logan, a manosphere streamer who attempts to commit suicide mid-stream. Cable’s company buys up Traeger’s shares (which have depreciated because he’s stopped streaming), and then Cable convinces Traeger to begin streaming again. Cable manages to build some kind of connection with the streamer, telling him that he can use his notoriety to get a message out there, and that the resources of the company can help him sell that message.

This book is about capitalism. It’s about allocating capital to productive purposes. Cable believes that within this system it is possible to invest in good people—folks with a compelling story—and that people can use that investment to become very successful and make everyone a lot of money.

This theme is developed even further in the course of Cable’s second trade, which he originates himself. He realizes that the most compelling and interesting people are probably too emotionally-healthy to want to appear on a livestream. So he goes out and finds an attractive, personable woman, Sierra, who works at a failing wildlife rescue, and he convinces her to go live in order to save her rescue from being taken over by a for-profit business. This leads to a web of intrigue and double-dealing as the other business fights back, and we discover some of their business interests are entangled with those of Cable’s employer.

It’s really Cable’s point of view that sells this book. It felt extremely authentic. It’s not like he’s never heard of the idea before that this system (buying shares in human beings) is bad, or that his society is riddled with corruption. He is familiar with that idea. His society is a fast-forwarded version of our own: most people in it are extremely cynical and disaffected. The question is...what’re you supposed to do about it? Resistance seems impossible. But he also doesn’t want to sell out completely and just go in it for himself. And, to be fair, that’s not what anyone else expects either: he’s not surrounded by cackling villains. Everyone is just doing their job, trying to make money.

It’s the law’s job to try and stop them, if it can, and these people take care to stay within what they think the law allows. But everyone also knows that the law has become increasingly powerless. The people in this story are not haunted by existential angst over what they’re doing. But they are also not necessarily true believers. Nor are they amoral. They control this system, but they also somehow feel like they’re at the system’s mercy. In this, they feel exactly true to life.

Drive A is a deeply-humane book, and no matter how weird the story gets, the people never stop feeling like real human beings. Cable is better than most of his coworkers, but he’s not so much better that he feels like a sheep amongst vipers. What makes the story so compelling is that you can see how true happiness, true friendship, true love, and even true job satisfaction remain tantalizingly possible in the midst of this zany, dystopian world.

The reason I kept reading was that I wanted Cable to succeed. And I wanted him to succeed because I understood that the alternative to success was pretty bleak.

Because unlike his privileged coworkers, Cable has no safety net. His dad is an auto-mechanic who’s about to be put out of work by AI. His sister is a PhD candidate whose future is also probably fairly bleak. He is the last hope of his family. If he can earn some money, then they can all join the elite and have good, comfortable lives--in this world, most peoples’ thoughts are colonized by ads. One of the funniest scenes is when Cable’s conversation with his dad gets interrupted by his dad’s ruminations about various kitchen appliances the dad wants to buy as gifts for Cable’s sister:

“She isn’t exactly hosting dinner parties. Like you just said, she’s studying, going to class.”

“Their student housing has a kitchenette now.”

“Dad, besides, they’re just ads that get triggered when you think about gifts. It’s not really you thinking that.”

“That’s what they say, but I’ve wanted to get her those for a while.”

“’Cause the ads keep targeting them as key thoughts,” I explained.

This was deeply upsetting, but since these discussions only confused Dad—made him feel like he was batshit—it was better to gently steer him away from the idea. Deflect and redirect. Mrs. Chandley had bought me a part-time ad-thought blocker subscription for my fifteenth birthday and hopefully, if things kept cruising at work, I could afford permanent subscriptions for all of us.

Even freedom of thought is a privilege afforded only to the rich.

Structural difficulties

If you pick up this book, I feel compelled to note that the first chapter is not good. This chapter is a description of a bunch of people watching Traeger Logan’s livestream as he tries to commit suicide, and it’s quite confusing, I had a very difficult time making sense of it when I first opened the book. However, I find that first chapters not infrequently feel overstuffed, because authors are trying to hard to hook the reader, so I skipped forward: The second chapter puts us on much firmer footing, giving us a clearer point of view and smaller, more-focused scenes. After this re-introduction, I found the book much easier to follow.

The book has a few other flaws. The pacing is a bit slow. The first half is given over to this Traeger storyline; the second half is devoted to the Sierra storyline. The book consists of many conversations where people discuss the finer points of their trading strategies. There’s a lot of planning and discussion: some of this dialogue could’ve been cut, shortened, or turned into narrative summary.

The story could’ve used a villain, someone to turn up the heat. At this human-cap firm where Cable works, it would’ve been nice if there was a rival, somebody who was trying to catch him out—a person to put a human face on the villainy that’s an obvious outgrowth of this inhumane system. But I can also see how that might’ve been difficult, structurally. The whole world is so strange and complex that it might’ve gotten confusing if there was also somebody in it trying to blow up our hero's plans.

As it is, most of the tension comes from the fact that Cable’s career relies on these huge trades working out, and we know that in real life long-shots tend not to work out. We keep waiting something to go sour, and the expectation was enough to drive my interest.

Honestly, I have read plenty of award-winning science-fiction novels with slower pacing. I read two Charles Stross novels a year ago, Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood (both were nominated for the Hugo) where literally nothing happens. Those books had much, much less plot than this one. They were entirely explication of ideas, with no conflict whatsoever.

This book is a throwback

I had six novels in my pile for this award. Under the terms of the contest, I have sole discretion to name a finalist from my pile. During the second half of the contest, after they’ve picked their own finalists, my fellow judges will read Drive A and decide how it holds up!

One of the knocks against this contest structure (which I borrowed from a similar contest for self-published fantasy novels) is that individual judges have too much discretion, and that the choice of finalist relies solely on the taste of the individual judge.

In this case, that is definitely true! This novel is exactly the type of novel that I most loved when I was in my teens and early-twenties: the New Wave science fiction novel—the slightly-gonzo science-fictional extrapolation of current trends. It gives major Big Jack Barron and Stand On Zanzibar vibes. Another judge, someone less well-disposed to this genre, might have easily been turned off by the novel's aggressive enthusiasm for the details of its science-fictional premise.

This is a kind of novel that’s not necessarily in fashion anymore. Most science fiction novels today are either genre-crossover novels, which pair high-concept premises with lyrical writing, or they’re adventure novels, about larger-than-life heroes fighting against evil forces.

Drive A is so nerdy, so filled with jargon and so concerned with the details of its world, that I am honestly not sure if it would be attractive either to a literary imprint or to a science-fiction imprint. But that’s the beauty of self-publishing: it provides a home for types of novels that are, for whatever reason, out of fashion with the industry.

Reading through the contest entries was a surprisingly emotional experience. These books had great covers, great lay-outs, they’d obviously been written and packaged with tremendous care. After working years on these books, the authors had set them adrift into the world, hoping somebody might notice their goodness. I remember being in the same position myself, just a year ago, preparing my novella for publication—I had no reason to believe anything good might happen, but I knew that I’d gotten ahold of something good, something that deserved to be in the world. With many of these books, I could tell that the authors felt a similar compulsion. And even if I didn’t happen to choose their books as finalists, I was very happy to have an encounter with their work.

Buy Drive A here.

Elsewhere on the internet…

• I have a standing offer that if you blog about a book I’ve mentioned recently, then I’ll link to you. After my big post on Westerns,

  Gonzalo Baeza
  wrote a follow-up where he discusses in great detail the publishing landscape for the Western. I learned a lot! I particularly liked these details about erotic Westerns: sexy stories for hetero boys:

  Often pseudonymously written by the same authors churning out regular Westerns and issued by their same publishers, these raunchier stories catered to an audience of truck drivers, bikers, and presumed non-traditional readers who otherwise, it was assumed, would not buy any books at all. Having talked to a few of the authors behind the monthly installments of adult Western series like Longarm and The Trailsman, they coincide that the books were turning a profit but the publishers decided to gut them because they no longer wished to be associated with such “lowbrow” fare.

• Derrick Jeter
  wrote me to say he’d published a post about one of Larry McMurtry’s inspirations, an early 20th-century literary critic named T.K. Whipple, who called upon American writers who tackle the subject of the West. After Jeter mentioned it to me, I hunted down a copy of Whipple’s essay and found it to be fascinating reading. Jeter describes it here:

  Of writers, Whipple’s criticism is pointed and blunt: “The better American writers are too highbrow. They find Henry James more interesting than Jesse [James]. . . . They have abandoned themselves to trying to be subtle, minute, and accurate. In a word, these . . . young men find the West too strong a meal for their stomachs.” He speculates: that “to write of the commonplace is easier, and that authors have avoided more powerful stuff [peril and excitement, blood and tears] because they had not the power to deal with it.” As a result, “the West was set aside.”

P.S. I am still recovering from my copy-edits, so there’ll only be one post this week. But in the meantime, I did have a short story in The Metropolitan Review last week.

A Precious Natural Resource