New Books In Science Fiction

It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to access this digital wonderland? That’s one of the key questions animating the first two books in Eliot Peper’s action- and idea-packed Analog trilogy. In the first book, Bandwidth, which came out in May, a single company called Commonwealth controls the digital feed for most of the world. To imagine its power, Peper says, picture all of today’s technology and internet giants “times a thousand.” Despite its monopolistic control over the world’s information delivery system, it finds itself vulnerable to a clandestine group of hackers and psychologists, who, over many years, covertly and subtly manipulate the feeds of world leaders to influence their thinking about important policies, such as climate change. “They’re not creating fake news,” Peper says. “They are actually sorting, ordering, and surfacing true facts about the world in a way that shapes s