The Resisters

 Gish Jen

The Circle meets The Brothers K. Set in the near future where civilization is run by artificial intelligences (referred to as Aunt Nettie in Autoamerica) and the major geopolitical tension is between Autoamerica and Chinrussia. In this world, there are basically two social classes, the Netted and the Surplus. Since Aunt Nettie has so vastly improved the efficiency of production, most workers are no longer necessary. But to do their part, the Surplus have consumption goals to help utilize all the production that the Netted produce. Into this setting, our protagonist is Gwen, a Surplus girl who finds that she has a gift for pitching. The story follows her development as a pitcher, getting called up to the Netted leagues and with scholarship to NetU, and the manipulative ways that Aunt Nettie arranges to coerce her along the way. So while Aunt Nettie is terrifying (in that Jen describes the technology so that we can see that it is much nearer-term than we like to admit), the baseball storyline throughout is brilliant. A couple of really enjoyable pieces to look forward to include (since I listened to this on audio, read by William DeMeritt) is his voicing of the "house", and Jen's "name branding" of tasks. Can't recommend this enough.

4 stars (out of 4)