Gareth Southwell's 3 favorite reads in 2023

The best sci-fi has a lived-in feel – think of the polluted, grimy futurism of Blade Runner or Alien.

This is something that it has in common with noir fiction. Compare, say, the cyberpunk of  William Gibson with the gritty, hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett – take out the sci-fi elements, and they could be writing about the same world.

In Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway imagines just that. It is a razor-sharp pastiche, combining the best tropes of the gum-shoe genre – the femme fatale, the world-weary PI, corrupt cops, and menacing crime bosses – with an intriguing sci-fi premise: What if someone invented a drug that made youth eternal? What influence and power would such people wield? And what would happen if one of them mysteriously died?

In one sense, there is nothing futuristic about Samantha Schweblin’s book at all. Everything it describes is in fact happening right now.

Cool cyber gadgets are in our bags and our pockets, invading our homes and our workplaces, informing us, entertaining us – and of course, monitoring us. But what it does brilliantly – by turns funny, disturbing, and poignant – is show how this impacts our personal relationships.

Little Eyes presents this digital infiltration in the guise of a little fluffy robot, no more than a camera on wheels, controlled by an anonymous remote user but lacking in two-way communication. And as the many interweaving stories play out across multiple countries and cultures, with people of all ages, backgrounds, and motivations, we see just how vulnerable such technology has made us. 

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and other Silicon Valley billionaires all have in common? Apart from being mega-rich, and at the forefront of the technological innovations that are shaping our lives, they all seem to want to escape.

Zuckerberg envisions a virtual reality metaverse where we can live our lives without ever leaving the house, Musk wants to emigrate to Mars, while other tech bros are investing in apocalypse-proof secret compounds. But why? It’s almost as if they don’t feel too optimistic about the world they’re helping to create. 

And here, as Rushkoff points out, is the irony: to fund these dreams, there must be ever greater and faster economic growth – at whatever the cost to the environment, working conditions, livelihoods, democracy, or our children’s mental health.