This book was not what I expected it to be and because of this I did not finish it. This was probably a little to sci-fi for my liking I think.

This book was overall enjoyable but it did seem to lull in areas. It took me a while to connect with the characters so I would have liked a bit more action to keep it flowing while I got to know them.

Thank you Netgalley for sending me this arc. I requested this book based on the description and the stunning cover. Sadly, it wasn’t to my taste. This was nt the book for me, but your mileage may vary.

I found the concept of this book to be interesting and initially felt that I would enjoy reading it a lot. The world building is also done very nicely. But that's about all I can see for this book as the story just bounces from one person to another. Conversations and the technical jargon that they use is confusing and I had to force myself to complete. Overall, this turned to be a very convoluted read.

Kavenna is an established writer, but she is new to me. I saw the description and—okay, yes, the cover—and I knew I had to read this book. Thanks go to Doubleday and Net Galley for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

At the outset this story is electrifying. It’s set in future Earth in what was once London. Beetle is an all-powerful company that governs both business and government; it resembles Future Amazon more than a little. Its employees have Real Life selves, and they have virtual selves that make it possible for them to attend meetings without physically being there. They have BeetleBands that measure their respiration, pulse, perspiration and other physical functions, and those bands are supposed to stay on:

“The Custodians Program tracked people from the moment they woke (having registered the quality of their sleep, the duration), through their breakfast (registering what they ate, the quality of their food), through the moment they dressed, and if they showered and cleaned their teeth properly, if they took their DNA toothbrush test, what time they left the house, whether they were cordial to their door, whether they told it to fucking open up and stop talking to them, whether they arrived at work on time, how many cups of coffee they drank during the course of an average day, how many times they became agitated, how many times they did their breathing relaxation exercises, if they went to the pub after work and what they hell they did if they didn’t go to the pub, how late they went home, if they became agitated, angry, ill, drunk, idle at any point during any day, ever.”

Of course, it is possible to avoid the entire Beetle system, but there’s almost nothing that someone that is off the grid can do for a living; these people scuttle about in abandoned buildings, living miserably impoverished, private lives.

Those in high positions of responsibility have Veeps, which are virtual assistants that run on artificial intelligence. There are few human cops out there because those jobs are done by ANTS—Anti-Terrorism Droids—and these in turn follow the protocol, which says they should shoot at their own discretion. And all of these things lead up to the murder of Lionel Bigman, who bears an unfortunate resemblance in both body and name to George Mann, who has just cut the throats of everyone in his family. The ANTS find Bigman and kill him.

The aftermath features the sort of government whitewash and cover-up that every reader must recognize. The error was caused, say the higher-ups, by two factors: one was Mary Bigman, wife of Lionel, the uncooperative widow of Lionel who demands answers and is therefore conveniently scapegoated; and Zed, the term for chaos and error within the system. And Zed, unfortunately, is growing and creating more errors which must also be swept under the virtual carpet.

Those dealing with this situation are Guy Matthias, the big boss at Beetle; Eloise Jayne, the security chief who’s being investigated for saving the life of a future criminal that the ANTS had been preparing to shoot; Douglas Varley, a Beetle board member; and David Strachey, a journalist torn between his paramount duty to inform the public, and his self-interest that suggests he shouldn’t rock the boat.

Once the parameters of this book are defined, I am excited. The book could be the bastard antecedent of some combination of Huxley, Rand, Vonnegut and Orwell. The possibilities! But alas, though the premise is outstanding, the execution is lacking. I have gone over it multiple times trying to figure out what went wrong and what could fix it, and I am baffled. All I can say is that by the thirty percent mark, though a major character is running for her very life, the inner monologue drones until I am ready to hurl myself into the path of the ANTS just to end it. All of the fun stuff has been offered up already, leaving us to slog our way out of it. How could a story so darkly hilarious and so well-conceived turn so abstruse and deadly dull?

Nevertheless, I would read Kavenna again in a heartbeat. Someone this smart will surely write more books that work better than this one. But as for you, read this one free or cheap if you read it at all.

Thank you Netgalley for sending me this arc. I will be reviewing this book in the near future with an honest rating and review.

Speculative fiction is at its best when it has something to say. From the very beginning, sci-fi has used its trappings to examine and explore the (sometimes harsh) realities of the real world. It reflects and refracts, commenting on where we are and where we might be going.

We live in a world where technology is ubiquitous and a handful of people sit in control of the vast majority of the resources behind that technology. Those people, perhaps more than any elected official, are the ones who hold our societal destiny in their hands. But as we grow ever more reliant on the various forms of tech to live our daily lives, as it infiltrates every aspect of our everyday existence, we must ask ourselves – what happens if those people lose control? What happens if this omnipresent technology stops working the way it is supposed to?

That’s where Joanna Kavenna’s “Zed” takes us. This darkly comic dystopian novel imagines a world not too different from our own, a near-future in which a single company has risen to the top of the food chain and extended its influence into every aspect of society. This company provides the technology on which seemingly the entire world runs. And something’s wrong…

With a biting wit and a discomfiting plausibility, “Zed” offers up a portrait of what might happen if everything – and I do mean EVERYTHING – was dictated by algorithmic whims … and what happens if those algorithms should start to crumble, leaving those at the top to make panicked choices aimed more at protecting themselves than the world around them.

The tech company Beetle has become ubiquitous, an omnipresence in the lives of almost everyone in the Western world. They provide the wrist-worn BeetleBands that monitor the health and well-being of the wearer 24/7. They developed the Veeps (Very Intelligent Personal Assistants), AIs that have become indispensably intertwined with the world. Their cryptocurrency – BeetleBits – have become the de facto currency. And their predictive algorithms are purported to be so powerful and precise that they have developed what they call “lifechains,” a method of predicting future behavior so accurate that they have become vital and unassailable parts of the justice system.

Now, you don’t HAVE to work for Beetle or engage with Beetle’s products or deal in BeetleBits. Beetle and its founder Guy Matthias are strong believers in free will; you’re perfectly free to be jobless and homeless and penniless. You have that choice.

Douglas Varley is one of the senior members of the Beetle team, in charge of the predictive algorithms that generate the lifechains. His gentle and constant adjustment keeps them chugging along, churning out accurate predictions about the paths taken by literally every person in the system. The algorithms are perfect, flawless.

And then a man named George Mann, without any indication from his lifechain, walks out of work, throws his BeetleBand into the sea and goes home to murder his family.

This event – absent from any realm of probability produced by the algorithm – is an anomaly. And there’s no room for anomalies; the unwavering accuracy of the lifechain is the foundation for everything that Beetle does. If that proves capable of producing inaccuracy, it all comes tumbling down.

Mann’s crime is classified as the fault of human error – how could it be anything else? The algorithm is perfect, after all. But when an autonomous robot sent to take him into custody winds up killing an unrelated person named Lester Bigman for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time while superficially resembling George Mann, things begin to spiral out of control.

As things spiral, the notion of “Zed” events – unpredictable variables introduced by the presence of human beings in the system – is hatched. Matthias demands that Beetle find ways to rein in these Zed events, but it isn’t long before Zed is everywhere.

And there are those who find ways to exist outside the seemingly-closed system, who live their lives apart largely apart from Beetle’s ubiquity … and they have agendas of their own.

There’s a dark absurdity at the heart of “Zed” that is reminiscent of Kafka or Pynchon, a sense of being trapped within an unfeeling system that is itself trapped by its own crumbling omnipresence. It’s a world in which the trust people place in the powers that be is rewarded with a complete disregard for their well-being on the part of those powers. It is a bleak portrait painted here. And a hilarious one. Call it a black comedy of errors, a techno-farce in which mounting misfires on the part of the centralized technology are met with little more than cosmetic changes and brandspeak. It’s a comic look at faith in the establishment gone wrong.

Kavenna’s wit is almost as omnipresent as Beetle in this book; every page offers a wry observation or dark joke that sticks in the mind’s eye. Her prose is smart and propulsive, giving her storytelling a sense of urgency even as the techno-bureaucracy spins its wheels in mud of its own making. It’s a rendition of end-game capitalism that feels unsettlingly prescient even as it makes you laugh.

“Zed” is an exceptional book, a novel of ideas that embraces the thoughts that it provokes while also delivering legitimate laughs. It’s funny and frightening, an unrelenting and sly satiric look at a world that feels like somewhere we could legitimately find ourselves sooner than we think.

I received an ARC of this book but purchased the audiobook from Libro.fm. When I first read the description of ZED, I was excited by the premise. One of my favorite books I read last year was After On by Rob Reid, and this book looked extremely promising. I ended up picking up the audiobook from Libro.Fm and started it on the day of publication. The narrator is great. He was the reason I stuck with this book for so long, but unfortunately, not even a great narrator could salvage this book. I felt incredibly bored the entire time. Nothing about the book kept my attention. The writing became repetitive, and the plot was completely jumbled. It almost felt like the author took all the great parts of After On & other dystopians, put them in a blender, and then tried to claim it was a masterpiece. I'm honestly agitated that I paid money for this. Save your money and skip this one.

I received a Advance Reader Copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. All opinions my own.

I really really wanted to like this book. I tried really hard to like this book. I attempted to get through it so many times. The concept is one that grabbed me. The world building was great.
It was too jumbled. Conversations between characters were too repetitive and circular. I appreciate what the author was going for but it didn't work for me. Unlike yhencharacters in the book, I can opt out. And I did.

I received a copy of this from Netgalley and the Publisher in exchange for my open and honest review.

Joanna Kavenna’s highly unusual and unpredictable novel, Zed is not what you expect. Going into the story, and looking at the gorgeous cover, you would think that what you are in for is a deep science fiction story. While reading it, your perception of the story changes to confusion. Then you realize what this is, is a stylistic darkly humorous techno-thriller that is more about how digitally enthralled we are with technology and human nature, then the ins and outs of the technology itself.

The story starts with Douglas Varley, a technologist for a large company called Beetle. Beetle reminds me of what Amazon could be in 10 years and no laws. Beetle has integrated itself into every facet of human life. From the regulation of physiological things, “You might need to do some deep breathing Eloise. Your pulse is elevated, and something is burning.” To society, people are paid in beetle credits. Predictive algorithms predict crimes before they happen, programs speak for you, and humanity is quantified down to data points and numbers. Other characters, company owner Guy Matthias, and police officer Eloise Jayne also have interesting parts that balance out the weird dynamics of such a dizzying computer-driven world. All of these data points and prediction, belie the one unquantifiable behavior humans have, choice. The choice humans have to behave unpredictably.

This story is written in almost a frenetic style. It bounces from one character to the next, then through technical jargon and back again. It is spastic and, at times, challenging to follow. Stylistically, the idea behind the novel is excellent. Technology has infused our existence. We talk to our phones more than we talk to people. We talk about idealistic human behavior but often lack context. We live in soundbites in this digital world. But because of the frenzied pace of the story and dialog, I had a difficult time making connections with the story. Instead of caring about any of the characters, It all blended in a freewheeling cacophony of digital noise. In hindsight, this may have been the point all along from author Joanna Kavenna. But for me, as a reader, it felt very flat.

If you would like to read more of my reviews or various other bookish things please come by my blog
at https://beforewegoblog.com/

I 100% requested Zed from NetGalley based on the cover and I’m not going to lie it was a big mistake. It was a struggle for me to finish this.

There's a lot going on in this book with multiple characters to keep track of which resulted in an absolutely confusing mess. With the exception of Guy Matthias, the CEO of Beetle and one of the most vile characters, I felt indifferent to them all. I needed to have a character to side with or cheer on, but the lack of this was disappointing. Maybe I'm missing something, but I would suggest passing on this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it is still sitting with me weeks later. I work in the world of social media and technology, so this really sang to my ongoing worries about the privacy we are giving up in sacrifice for convenience. It's a fresh take on the dystopia that was first imagined in Brave New World and 1984 but with the much more real possibilities that companies such as Google and Facebook bring to the table today, stripping us of privacy, bombarding us with propaganda, all with the promise of making our lives better. There were some bumps in the road that a little more time on the editing table might have smoothed out, but overall I thought it was a fantastic story, one that definitely captured (uneasily so) my imagination.

This is a DNF at 20% for me. I got it, but it was too repetitious for me. I knew the message, so it didn't keep my interest, which is kind of a shame because the dark humor was good. It was the writing style and pacing that lost me.

As a result, I had a hard time getting into the book. Very Orwellian mixed with a little bit of Woody Allen's "Sleeper," which again isn't a bad thing.

I read this thinking it was YA, but it really isn't. Cursing tirades and odd pacing make this an awkward recommendation to teens.

Zed is a dark comedy dystopia where only a few learn lessons, and even those that do learn can do nothing about it. Beetle is a large conglomerate that controls/knows everything about us. (Think Google or Amazon on steroids) One day a horrible, anomalous event happens and daily life is thrown into chaos. Court cases, rude AI, collapsing relationships, and death follow. Presentation is everything here. The ridiculous "innovations" to improve life and the continual technobabble and double speak make this a title you can't put down - out of a desire to see how much can go wrong. The answer? A lot.

“To err is human. Human error is perfectly normal, and, of course, human. All systems that deploy humans—prone as they are to error—must incorporate and compensate for this tendency of humans to make errors.”
-Joanna Kavenna

With many science fiction novels illustrating the path that society is surely heading towards, and with many of the predicted futures coming into fruition, there has been a strong abundance of such media, located across most of the artistic mediums. The new science-fiction novel Zed from Joanna Kavenna describes the many negative aspects of our current society and expands in satirical directions with its own possible predictions of what may occur in our future. Told through the conflicts surrounding a large company, Beetle, Zed explores the aspects of our growing advancements in technology and how much overall growth as a society has become something beyond our control, melding ambitious concepts that fit better within thick theory textbooks than a science-fiction novel. Indeed, Zed often collapses under its own pretentious weight, giving in to what is one of the most outlandishly melodramatic books to be written in recent memory. Still, Kavenna’s book surely impresses and even wows at its best moments, but these moments simply come too far in between hundreds of pages of what is a sluggish, dull mess.

Zed begins with the description of Beetle, a company not unlike the ones we have in our own society, but something bigger like a combination of our current largest companies such as Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Guy Matthias, creator and founder of Beetle is viewed as the man who created a perfect utopia, managed almost solely by Beetle. Matthias developed revolutionary technology that has revolutionized the landscape for crime investigation and prevention. Beetle has created the technology to predict what will happen in an individual’s future even going as far to arrest someone before they can commit a crime. This technology, titled “lifechains,” has undoubtedly improved the quality of life in this dystopian society, buttering day-to-day activities with comfort and content.

However, when a man kills his wife and two children, throwing off the balance and order of Beetle, ripples are sent within Beetle in addition to Matthias’s personal marital issues. The crime, not predicted or foreseen by lifechains, is depicted as being Zed, “the category term for instability, for elements that disrupt the lifechain.” Following this, the death of another man, Lionel Bigman, is also classified as being a Zed event which is the first in a chain reaction of various deaths, all of which are suicides. The growing number of Zed events triggers the slow acknowledgement of the reality of what happens when someone tries to create a perfect utopia due to the unpredictable nature of humans.

Personally, the overall narrative of Zed was simply far too choppy to be easily digestible by the average reader. Lacking both the intrinsic intrigue and curiosity that has ushered the genre in through so many decades, Kavenna fails to engross the reader in what is on paper a genuinely compelling plot though not too original. For a piece that is clearly intentioned to poking fun at the potential lifestyles and extravagances of tomorrow, Zed is awkwardly shy, holding its best ideas an inch away from its chest as if it needs to hide these moments. There’s an underlying potential here, but it is smothered by wordy prose and weak development all around. And yet, I still found myself propelled through Zed’s meaty length in just a matter of hours. Despite its gaps in storytelling, there was something enticing about Kavenna’s magnificent conception of the consequences that our technological innovation may arise. The novel does a decent job at describing and exploring themes that should be recognized and understood by the people of this generation as with such development worldwide, this could be our future. Though I didn’t quite fully grasp the key points that Kavenna wanted to convey, her overall message and purpose, to describe the nature of humans and the advancements in technology, were more than effective, even offering a fresh perspective for myself on how time is changing our daily livelihood for the better or worse.

Our dependency on technology and how much it has become integrated in our daily lives is and should be frightening. The largest corporations of today are those that provide technologies and services that ensure a continuous sense of comfort and security, and Zed makes do work in instilling that fact in every single one of its readers. Serving as a symbolic warning for the theorists and philosophers that will surely intake the book with the greatest enthusiasm, author Joanna Kavenna dives into themes and topics that the rest of the genre has barely scratched the surface of; I just wish it had fully embraced its identity as just that.

Zed explores a society where a huge tech corporation, such as Google/Apple/Amazon, has quietly taken over, socially, politically, economically, and ingrained itself into every aspect of existence. What happens when this company loses control over the technology it created to run the world? The Beetle CEO and his much maligned employees scramble to prove that they are still in control, all while a group of people opposed to Beetle, attempt to bring it down and others find themselves caught in the middle, do they do nothing and let Beetle control their lives, or do they move against Beetle at the risk of their livelihoods and possibly their lives.

If this sounds exciting, it is. It is also humorous, thoughtful, and sometimes very confusing. It is extremely well-written and very fun, in a wordy way, to read. I really enjoyed it, but I also feel that it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. I also really enjoy Kafka and feel like what I read was akin to that, with more humor and a little less existential crisis, though that's definitely in there too.

Zed is a dystopian fiction novel that combines the worst elements of our society. Not only does technology and the technologists control our world, recommend how we live our lives and attempt to dictate every part of our daily activities, but it also predicts what we will do through the use of 'life-chain' predictors. The problem is Zed - errors in the algorithms that mean the code just doesn't work. Of course, the technologists won't give up that easily! This is a satirical look at what our world could become, from the dumbing down of our abilities to the control we give technology and the companies that own it. Unfortunately, the unlikability of most of the characters makes it hard to care about what happens to them. The pace of the story is quite slow and as a result, the reading of the novel can take some time, without much drive to find out what happens next. While the ideas behind the novel are fascinating, the plot could use much streamlining and more compelling characters. Nevertheless, it is an interesting read, considering the direction our world is currently taking.

Thank you Netgalley for sending me this arc. I will be reviewing this book in the near future with an honest rating and review.

This was a really frustrating book for me to read. I think the theme and issues are important, but there were several aspects of both the style and the plot that made it fall flat.

In terms of the style, this was a bad mix of scifi and literary fiction. I love both genres, so I was really excited for this and it didn't meet my expectations. It was bad scifi (way too many info dumps that led to an excess of telling an not showing) and I found the style and characters abysmal. At points it seemed allegorical and dreamy, but she clearly wanted us to care about the characters. And although she clearly wanted us to care about the characters, they were all incredibly shallowly drawn and oddly prone to fall in love with the central trickster figure.

In terms of the plot, I think the author was going for a modern 1984, where instead of Orwell's political techno-fascistic dystopia, she presented a softer, corporate dystopia, where people are nudged and influenced and governments are captured and tech manipulated to promote corporate goals. Fair enough - that's happening right now, and she did a great job of showing what a horror that society/our society is (although the comparison to China were a little too "hit the reader over the head").

But the details were maddening.

She made good points about nudges and libertarian paternalism (who gets to decide which way to nudge people?) but nudges don't nearly have the effect that she portrays them to have, and that reduces the power of her clarion call.

Second, I can't for the life of me understand why a tech company would want to take over police and justice functions from a government. Why would Google/Facebook want to be responsible for the liability of autonomous robots with guns and police power? What's in it for them to take over criminal justice and put at risk their core businesses?

Finally, and most annoying, the central conceit of the book was that "Zed" puts a spanner in the works of "Beetle's" lifechain predictive models that are supposed to perfectly predict the future behaviors of all citizens. And the techno gurus and data scientists are all astounded that their models have predictive error - that people sometimes suddenly do random things. Which is preposterous. Measuring and understanding predictive error is core to building a model! I can understand government and non-data corporate officials not understand how models fail, but portraying statisticians and data scientists as flummoxed by a model's error is just silly.

It's entirely possible I've missed something major with her style, but on the whole, I wanted better.

Unfortunately, this is a DNF for me right now. Just not in the headspace for it but will try to come back to it before January 2020