Analogue nostalgia permeates Robin Sloan’s novel. The hero is a whizz kid of the digital age. Down on his luck, he finds himself working in a quaint San Fran bookshop. The strange reading habits of its cultish clientele lead him to computer-model the shelves and stumble on a cult. There ensues an adventure in detection and code-breaking, facilitated by a talented, laptop-wielding team of west-coast mates. Google Books gets explicit mention, and an ancient tome is scanned as people in the web giant’s upper echelons assist in a new-age Bletchley Park search for meaning. The quest revolves around a secret society, a vital narrative and a missing set of movable type. An untaxing read, this well-intentioned if far-fetched yarn binds the tweed world of disappearing books with the internet-pulsed, trite realms of techno-hipsters to suggest symbiosis. But the cliched characters and light prose are sitcom deep. The technologically enabled world the story inhabits reduces human complexity to little more than pixels and avatars. A book by a book fan whose message is: books are great.
