This dark near-future thriller does for Amazon what The Circle (2015) by Dave Eggers did for Google and Facebook, by painting a stark fictional picture of where unrestrained monopoly online retail capitalism could soon lead us.
A failed small businessman who is also a former prison guard, and a beautiful female industrial spy, get jobs with "Cloud", a new mega-corporation and tech giant, in one of the company's ubiquitous live-in warehouse communities.
As they're selected and trained for their dead-end jobs, meet each other and begin an affair, and as the spy plots to crack the all-seeing security of the company's network on behalf of an unknown client, we see a horrifying vision of all the ways our own familiar compromises with convenience in purchasing and product delivery, low costs based on cheap labor, and unlimited business access to our personal data could lead to a powerless and empty existence for all but a small ruling corporate elite.
An excellent contemporary cautionary tale, strongly reminiscent of 1984 and Brave New World, but updated to address some of the unique challenges to freedom emerging in our own times and society. Recommended.
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