Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A razor-sharp and deeply human satire of data-mining, automation, marketing, finance, and universal basic income, Sensation Machines is a virtuoso rendering of a future that's nearly upon us. 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, whose mysterious owner 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.
Adam Wilson inhabits the perspectives of the Wall Street bros, the marketing mad men, the Silicon Valley sociopaths--and uncomfortably humanizes them, while considering the ways everyone is complicit in the consequences of late capitalism. A novel of big ideas and intricate plotting, Sensation Machines is a brilliantly observed human drama.
Synopsis
A razor-sharp darkly funny, and deeply human rendering of a future that's nearly upon us. 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's lost the couple's life savings. And 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.