Tim Maughan

A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet BEFORE: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City—now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis? AFTER: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. The luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. In the Croft, Mary—who has visions of people presumed dead—is sought out by grieving families seeking connections to lost ones. But does Mary have a gift or is she just hustling to stay alive? Like Grids, who runs the Croft’s black market like personal turf. Or like Tyrone, who hoards music (culled from cassettes, the only medium to survive the crash) and tattered sneakers like treasure. The world of Infinite Detail is a small step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto-unimaginable come true: the End of the Internet, the End of the World as We Know It.

A Novel

Infinite Detail

Andrew Louis

Some interesting extrapolations of the politics of social media, smart cities, surveillance culture, etc; wish it was better as a novel.

Hans Gerwitz

Good story and very solid world building. If you enjoyed _Snow Crash_ but with it was a little darker, you will also enjoy _Infinite Detail_.

The fascination with Bristol drum’n’bass is a bit much at times, left me feeling like there was a deeper metaphor I was missing. Maybe that’s true.

I worry the shallow, blunt critique of surveillance capitalism (everything is about data) will prevent this from becoming a classic, but it’s a very good read today.

Ben Kraal

I read this because people said it was the antidote to Snow Crash and Diamond Age. It's certainly more pessimistic.

Luke Kanies

Very slow to get started, but became much more interesting at the end.

I really enjoyed the book’s exploration of distributed computing and how it essentially competes against the internet as we know it.

I found the book very hard to get into, though. Every time I picked it up I struggled to remember anything that had happened before. 

Once the shape of the story became clear, it became somewhat hard to put down.

The Guardian's Pick for Best Science Fiction Book of the Year! A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet BEFORE: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City—now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis? AFTER: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. The luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. In the Croft, Mary—who has visions of people presumed dead—is sought out by grieving families seeking connections to lost ones. But does Mary have a gift or is she just hustling to stay alive? Like Grids, who runs the Croft’s black market like personal turf. Or like Tyrone, who hoards music (culled from cassettes, the only medium to survive the crash) and tattered sneakers like treasure. The world of Infinite Detail is a small step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto-unimaginable come true: the End of the Internet, the End of the World as We Know It.

Lee Schneider

Infinite Detail
by Tim Maughan
“The internet was meant to be a decentralized ‘network of networks,’ but control over the data centers, domain servers, and other infrastructure that keep it running is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few giant players. In turn, the logistics networks that support our lives depend on the internet.
“What would happen if one day, something took it all down?
“This near-future speculative fiction novel paints a picture of a world beyond the ultimate crash. It’s a gripping read, and a compelling case for supporting the decentralization of internet architecture.”
—Corin Faife, Data Reporter

Bryan Alexander

Infinite Detail is a novel about technological culture and dystopia, but those two topics aren't paired in quite the way readers might expect.

It takes place along two timelines, something very close to our present ("Before") and a time about fifteen years hence ("After"). During the former we follow characters involved in a technological-separatist community carved out of the British city of Bristol; during the latter, we follow people in the same area after an apocalyptic event. The central trauma of the novel is that the internet is suddenly destroyed, plunging civilization into collapse. Infinite Detail tacks back and forth between these two periods, taking us up to the event, then tracing its impact.

Both of these are described in a naturalist style. Most of the British characters are poor or working class, and the life "After" is horrendous. The class divides between Mary, who can see the dead, and her allies, versus some of her clients, are stark and quite British. Race and racism also structure both epochs. 

Maughan eschews lyricism, except when trying to evoke music, which becomes a major aspect of the story, or the novel's framing romance. Humanity has suffered an extraordinary, cataclysmic die off, followed by a fall back to late medieval living standards. Many practical details make this world vivid, like the Croft's hard-won business in growing spices, largely driven by child labor.

Some readers may recognize the life-after-internet dystopia through other stories. Post-EMP fiction has become a subgenre now, with titles like William R. Forstchen's One Second After or the tv series Jericho. S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire posits a sudden fall of technology; I can't remember if we learn the cause. Infinite Detail offers a particular take on this, showing only the destruction of the internet through a kind of cascading, internet-of-things based denial of service attack. This doesn't only take down computer games and cat videos, but guts all of civilization, from self-driving cars to utilities.

Yet I'm not sure where the novel ends up. It's clear from the start that modern technology is problematic for the text, and also that a sudden return to feudalism is even worse. I'm still wondering about where this takes us. To explain, I have to raise spoiler shields. It's not a suspense novel with twists and turns, but still: (view spoiler)[We begin with a strong sense of technological criticism. Rush is our present day guide, a cyberactivist whose arguments are quite convincing in a 2019 where we increasingly dread Google, Facebook, and smartphones. His solution, a grass roots, non-global network sounds intriguing. Then the world collapses, and Rush's plan seems useless until the very end. Most of the book, in fact, digs into the catastrophe. On balance the novel feels like a slam at those who wish to unplug: for being foolish at best, and deadly dangerous at worst.

Other plotlines leave me unsettled. One character returns to Bristol to revisit her role in the collapse, then leaves... to pursue a bloody, desperate civil war in Wales. Is this a tragic or heroic outcome? We don't see enough of that conflict to determine. Mary's visions of the dead are revealed to be technological artifacts. This development does not destroy her, but seems to leave her in a positive state. Is this a progressive parable of mysticism debunked by the products of reason, or a sad tale of folklore quashed by tech? In America a Movement appears, systematically and violently wiping out internet-age data, deeming it oppression and slavery (357). Is this just another working out of the apocalypse, or the sign of a positive polity in that situation?
Rush ends the novel ready to find his lost love, and also to rebuild the Croft's hyperlocal mesh network. This *feels* triumphant, a positive result after so much horror. Perhaps that's where Maughan wants us to end up, using digital technology, but only at the local, grass roots level. 
 I'm not sure. So much of the post-apocalypse is isolated and terribly lonely (one theme: everyone's looking for someone). Is this a call for a Schumacher-like small is beautiful world, or for the hyper-local holons in Daniel Suarez' FreedomTM (2010)? This feels unsettled to me, perhaps because the determination is supposed to be left up to the reader. (hide spoiler)]

Infinite Detail feels like it's in dialogue with Cory Doctorow's Walkaway (2017) (which we read in our book club last year; the author was then a fine guest on the Future Trends Forum). Doctorow also posited a utopian space, based on a radically different take on technology. He also described a social divide between these two worlds, one which became increasingly violent. Maughan offers a different twist, having the mainstream world utterly wrecked, and the utopian world unable to help. Instead, the Croft is a gangster's domain, powered by child labor and kept in check by public hangings. It's based on a different sense of technological activism, giving us an edge case of destruction, rather than Walkaway's positive, constructive hackers.

A few last notes: I'm impressed by the AR/MR "spex" that people use in "Before" (our near future) to access the digital world. One of the most convincing versions of that I've seen.

One passage stood out to me, one I can't shake, and I'm not sure I agree with it:[T]heir community wasn't... obvious... It wasn't the people that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. The hidden spaces, the communal secrecy, the unwatched places. 
 The spaces that belonged to them. (192)

Overall, one of the more interesting and thought-provoking works of modern sf. Recommended.

Infinite Detail A Novel

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