Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

When Clay and his pals investigate-there are a lot of heist-movie-type scenes of planning and coding sessions-they track the mystery to a monkish order of geeks who have been working for generations to decrypt the hidden message in these books. Members of the club “arrive with algorithmic regularity,” trading an old book for a new one, and never paying for anything. It is accessible only to a handful of patrons who seem to belong to a strange kind of book club. (Take that, !) Clay calls this section of the store the Waybacklist. Penumbra’s store is in the back, where, on several tall, laddered shelves, there are thousands of books that are completely unique- when Clay cracks them open, they contain long, unintelligible strings of characters, and online title searches yield nothing. Sloan himself-a self-described “ media inventor” who has worked at Twitter, Poynter and Current TV, and also co-hosts an entertaining blog-would fit right into this pack.

His roommate is an effects artist at Industrial Light & Magic his geeky friend from high school made millions in video game software (he’s the “world’s leading expert on boob physics”) and Kat, the nerdy-hot girl he meets by placing a targeted Web search ad, is a data visualization expert at Google. Clay Jannon, our protagonist, is a Web designer who hits hard times when the start-up he works for-a bagel company founded by ex-Googlers who’d created an algorithm that produced a perfectly circular bagel with the ideal ratio of crunchy exterior to soft interior -shuts down because of “the great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century.” Clay’s a sort of Bay Area everyman-tech-savvy, aimless, and possessing of a clutch of brilliant friends with high-powered jobs.

Penumbra’s is a fantasy novel, though the fantasy occurs mainly at the edges most of the story is set in a hyper-realistic version of present-day San Francisco. Digitizing all media-making all art available everywhere, to everyone, in a form that can be endlessly copied and remixed forever-represents such a huge change in society that we’ve only begun to grasp the most immediate, and the most pedestrian, implications of the switch.

Those of us in the tech and media businesses, the engines primarily responsible for our digitized future, rarely consider the out-there ramifications of the work we do.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan