Asleep At The Wheel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, 2019
The magic trick:
Establishing a technology-heavy setting but then focusing on the human relationships at the core
T.C. Boyle takes on modern technology in this one, which made me nervous for a couple reasons. One, I get bored just thinking about technology criticism these days. The computers are coming for your jobs. The robots are coming to kill you. Alexa is spying you. Yeah, probably. But it’s just so played out, isn’t it?
Two, if we are going to really tap into our modern panic, do we want to rely on someone as old as Mr. Boyle?
Meh. These fears were rendered pointless pretty quickly. It’s a really good story.
The early going establishes the technology angle. This feels like a not-too-distant future, maybe late 2020s? So the reader works on adjusting to this new world during the first few pages.
But, and this is the key, the technology soon becomes part of the background. You familiarize yourself with this reality and move on to the more traditional story ideas: the human desires and relationships.
Even in a tech-driven universe, human emotions win out.
And that’s quite a trick on Boyle’s part.
The selection:
The night grew a shade darker. Then one of the dogs let out a howl from the depths of the building, and here it came, the Knightscope K5+ unit, turning the corner and heading for them on its base of tightly revolving wheels. She’d seen these units before—at the bank, in the lot behind the pizza place, rolling along in formation in last year’s Fourth of July parade—but they’d seemed unremarkable to her, no more threatening or intrusive than any other labor-saving device, except that they were bigger, much bigger. She’d only seen them in daylight, but now it was night, and this one had its lights activated—two eerie blue slits at the top and what would be its midriff, if it had a midriff, in addition to the seven illuminated sensors that were arrayed across its chest, if it had a chest. Its shape was that of a huge hard-boiled egg, which in daylight made it seem ordinary, ridiculous even, but the lights changed all that.
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