In Our Mad and Furious City
Losing Earth
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Infinite Detail

9780374718602 fc
Paperback, MCD × FSGO, 2019
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A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL!
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.

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An excerpt from Infinite Detail

1. After


The pathetic tinkle of the shop’s bell announces their first visitor, the first believer of the day. The first of the regulars, the tired-looking mothers and lost children, the ones that come in just to catch a quick word with Mary, to thank her, to nervously leave offerings on her desk, to smile their awkward, uncomfortable smiles. The ones that just pop in to stare at the sad, pale, distant, generic dead faces.

“All right, Janet,” Tyrone says.

“Hello, Tyrone.” Janet flashes him a nervous smile from beneath her cowl of lank, greasy hair, her face gaunt pencil marks on torn gray paper, almost merging into the crowds that watch them from the walls. It’s enough of a smile that he knows she’s genuinely pleased to see him, like his unprompted words to her are some minor but important victory, one of the few tiny sparks of life that separate her from Mary’s drawings.

“Is she busy?” Janet’s eyes twitch anxiously around the room, her grip tightening on the oversized blue IKEA cube bag that bulges with unknown junk.

Tyrone glances over at Mary. She’s sitting there as always, at the back of the shop, teenage eyes peering at him over the kaleidoscopic mass of debris that litters her desk— cans full of pens, crayons, paintbrushes, and sticks of chalk, broken toys. Worthless trinkets and colorful fragments of junked history that threaten to dwarf her barely teenage frame. Gifts from believers. She smiles back at him over it all, through those heavily paint-splattered glasses of hers, lowers her eyes back down to her desk. He can’t see what she’s working on from here, the paper protected from view by castle walls of priceless detritus, and in all truth he doesn’t care. He knows exactly what it is, the same thing she always draws.

He knows it’s the face of another dead person.

Most likely, he thinks, it’s the face of another dead white person. They always seem to be white people. Dead white people. He’s seen so many of them now that he struggles to tell them apart. College likes to joke that it’s because all white people look the same, but Tyrone knows that’s not true. It’s something else, perhaps how Mary always draws them—sad, pale, distant, generic. Or maybe that’s just how dead people all look.

“Nah, she’s just drawing. Go say hello, innit.”

Mary squeezes ghosts from sticks of chalk, traces lines of memory in pastel.

“Hello, Mary.”

Mary looks up, over the brim of her glasses, and her heart sinks slightly from awkward discomfort as she sees Janet’s nervous face looking back at her; feels her disturbed, overfocused eyes drilling into her skull. It’s not that she dislikes her, it’s not that she dislikes any of the believers—Tyrone and Grids’s word, not hers—it’s just their unfailing intensity that puts her on edge. She doesn’t blame them; when she can see past the thousand-yard stares and the sense of odd displacement she can see the hurt, the pain, the struggle to cope with the shock. Plus it’s her fault they’re here, that they come to see her. They come because of what she does, what she is.

Grids tells her she’s a celebrity. He says people need celebrities, especially now. He says there used to be too many of them, but then they were all washed away with everything else. Mary’s not too sure about this, not sure she wants it, but she remembers his words at those times when she wants to avoid the people like Janet, to avoid the devotional gazes and awkward exchanges, to run from the responsibility.

“Morning, Janet, how you doing?”

“I’m o-kay.” There’s a high-low timbre to that last word, a noncommittal tone shift fishing for concern. Mary ignores it, not wanting to get sucked in. She always tells Tyrone she likes his music, his ancient tapes, and it ain’t a lie, but the real reason she lets him play it in the shop all day is because it sucks the silence out of the room, fills the awkward vacuums, lets the pauses slip by more easily.

Janet ain’t stopping, though. “What are you drawing? Another one?”

Mary looks down at the pale paper, the reverse of a twofoot-wide segment torn from the back of a Land Army recruitment poster, and for the first time this morning she feels like she really sees it. Formless pencil marks. Thick, dappled, inconsistent lines in chalk dust. Powdered history deposited on the texture of cracks from her unwashed hands. She looks, but remembers none of it, as though she had no part in its creation.

“Yeah. Another one.”

“Oh, I brought you something!” Janet rummages in the pockets of her torn, stained, but still defiantly pink anorak, and then in the pockets of her baby-blue jogging bottoms, the faded trousers so short that the gray elasticated trim grips her ankles, exposing two-inch bands of pale skin marbled with blue veins as they fail to reach the rainwater-grayed, blood-flecked bandages that she wears because the ships carrying socks from China and India stopped coming.

Eventually she gives up and turns to the inevitable, muttering to herself as she opens wide the long-broken zip mouth of the IKEA bag, the blue plastic cube straining along its frayed seams, where it looks in places like single white fibers are the only things maintaining its hull integrity. Mary fears it might explode, either from pressure buildup or Janet’s fevered rummaging, and fill the shop with even more historical residue, the same sedimentary layer of scraps she’s been trying to dig her way out of all her life.

“Here! Found them!” exclaims Janet, just a little too loud, a little too excited. She thrusts forward a fist of brightly colored tubes, of various widths and lengths, her face full of glee and accomplishment. Mary takes them, smiles with forced appreciation, and thanks her as she cradles the gift in her open hands. Broken crayons; empty plastic pen shells; leadless, splintered pencils. Useless, all of it. But Mary feels some warmth from the gesture, sincerely, understands what these discarded odds and ends represent to some, the value they have in their irreproducibility, their nostalgia, their power as memory triggers. She understands these things way too well, and as she stares at her open palms the vibrant chalk dust that patterns them turns black and impossible to remove, as memories of scrabbling in the dirt, digging with broken fingernails in the shit, flood her senses.

She wants to throw them back in Janet’s stupid fucking face.

She doesn’t, she just smiles, thanks her again, gently lays them down on the desk. Memories fade, but the private stench, known just to her, still lingers.

Janet, about to speak, looks pleased enough, though, happy her gift has been welcomed, and Mary remembers Grids’s words. Give them what they want.

“I was just wondering, if maybe—” The same question, every day. Mary knew it was coming.

“I was just wondering, if maybe, if you were out today, and you saw our Mark—”

“Janet—”

“You know, maybe you’ll see him out in the street, y’know.” Janet points toward the front of the shop, the light filtering in through the half-boarded-up windows. “Maybe if you see him out there you could tell him something for me?”

“Janet . . . we’ve been through this before. You know I can’t say whether I’ll see him. I can’t always choose who I see.”

“I know, my love, but you might—”

“I . . . I might, yeah, but it’s not very likely. And even if I did, I can’t talk to him.”

“But you could just tell him—”

“Janet. I can’t talk to Mark. He can’t hear me, Janet.” Mary swallows hard. “I can’t . . . he’s dead, Janet.”

“Yeah, but—” Janet is unflustered, not even decelerated, by this statement of unquestionable fact.

Mary decides to let her finish. The path of least resistance.

“Yeah, but if you do see him, yeah? If you do, can you tell him just one thing? From me?”

“What’s that?” Mary asks. Polite, redundant. She knows the answer.

“Just tell him his dad is sorry. Please?”


Gulls main2

Pirate Radio Returns

Playlist by Tim Maughan

Illustration by Jasjyot Singh Hans

  • "Infinite Detail is the new required reading for the future's next fifteen minutes. A sobering, often frightening look at the implications of the networked world. Riveting, sinister and deeply human."

    Warren Ellis, author of Normal
  • “Deft and jolting as an EMP, Infinite Detail is a worryingly credible ghost story about our electronic lives.”

    Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
  • “A singular speculative debut, Infinite Detail asks crucial questions about the nature of our relationship to technology. A lively and provocative novel particularly equipped for the challenges of our moment.”

    Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and the Southern Reach trilogy
  • "Looping and layered, disruptive and deeply linked—Tim Maughan’s unsparing tale of the internet's end is a paper internet unto itself. The native 21st-century novel is coming into view; it looks like Infinite Detail."

    Robin Sloan, author of Sourdough
  • "Tim Maughan brings a deep knowledge of why the contemporary world works as it does, along with an informed awareness of how subcultures operate, to Infinite Detail—a powerful narrative featuring characters hardened but never crushed, told in crystal-sharp writing that leaves you wanting more."

    Jack Womack, author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence
  • "Tim Maughan’s fiction is whip-smart, funny as hell, and full of hard truths most people would rather ignore. And despite its riveting dystopian scenario and biting critiques of life in late capitalism, Infinite Detail has so much deeply felt grace, heart, and hope."

    Ingrid Burrington, artist, journalist, and author of Networks of New York
  • "Tim Maughan gets it. This civilization is over and everyone knows it. Infinite Detail gets on with the job of figuring out what to do next. His inspiring characters show us how to live and love in these ruins."

    McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, and Telesthesia
  • Infinite Detail is an immaculately patterned debut novel, its author as in control of its design as the metafiction specialist Christopher Priest. Maughan's feel for and knowledge of the technological straightjacket of contemporary culture is the equal of William Gibson. I have not often felt optimistic after reading a dystopian sci-fi novel, but Maughan's debut leaves you with a Vonnegut-like sense of abiding humanity. Infinite Detail offers a sorely-needed perspective on the transience of the internet age. Fierce and compassionate, its vision of a post-apocalyptic afterlife is a blessing.”

    Dan O'Hara, editor of Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard
  • "Says something important and thought provoking about such hot-topic issues as privacy, the interconnectedness of the world’s population, and class structure; but, thanks to Maughan's rigorously developed characters and his ability to tell a compelling story, the book is never preachy. A seriously good page-turner with plenty of meat on its bones."

    David Pitt, Booklist
  • “Maughan’s dynamic, sprawling, post-postmodern cyberpunk debut . . . is an energetic novel about civilization as it races toward the ultimate overload.”

    Publishers Weekly
  • “Maughan conducts a masterclass in the thrill and contradictions of counterculture, the uses and abuses of networks, the ways that capitalism can bend and flex to adapt, until, suddenly, it breaks. This is a stunning debut.”

    Cory Doctorow
  • "The characters are compelling, and it’s worth reaching the end just to find out how Maughan wraps up this Byzantine puzzle box. An original and engaging work of kitchen-sink dystopia."

    Kirkus Reviews
  • “Maughan conducts a masterclass in the thrill and contradictions of counterculture, the uses and abuses of networks, the ways that capitalism can bend and flex to adapt, until, suddenly, it breaks. This is a stunning debut.”

    Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
  • “On its face, the internet kill switch is such an on-the-nose science fiction premise that it’s a wonder Maughan is the first author to get it to market. Luckily, in his hands, the broad-stroke concept trickles down into weird and unexpected crevices: sage futurism, political treatise, and mournful meditation on the violence of technological dependency.”

    Elvia Wilk, Bookforum
  • "A politically astute, fascinating, and depressing glimpse of a near future brought to its knees by the abrupt death of the internet."

    Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
  • "I still think about Infinite Detail . . . It's one of those rare novels that, if you enjoyed it the first time, you'll want to re-read it."

    Valentina Palladino, Ars Technica
  • “Maughan’s book, as precise and evocative as its title demands, is ultimately clear-eyed in its evaluation of what would be lost, and what gained, if our connections were swept away.”

    Sumit Paul-Choudhury, BBC Culture
  • “Much-anticipated . . . It’s a book that only Maughan could write . . . Maughan chose the harder task and pulled off a marvel. It makes for an uncomfortable read but a necessary one.”

    Skiffy and Fanty
  • “A tapestry of near-term prognostication that stuns you with its contextual implications while its streetwise prose gets to work on picking your emotional pockets . . . a searing debut novel from a writer who couldn’t be more relevant to these troubled and troubling times.”

    British Science Fiction Association
  • “On its face, the internet kill switch is such an on-the-nose science fiction premise that it’s a wonder Maughan is the first author to get it to market. Luckily, in his hands, the broad-stroke concept trickles down into weird and unexpected crevices: sage futurism, political treatise, and mournful meditation on the violence of technological dependency.”

    Elvia Wilk, Bookforum"A politically astute, fascinating, and depressing glimpse of a near future brought to its knees by the abrupt death of the internet."
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Tim Maughan