Alex Foster’s sparky debut novel is built around a new technology of travel. Pods launch high into the sky and connect with one of thousands of “circuit vessels”, all orbiting the world from east to west. Travellers then descend in another pod, arriving wherever they choose. Spring-loaded pads store the pod’s kinetic energy when they land, and propel them up again when they launch. It’s so cheap, so rapid and so ubiquitous that everyone uses it. You can work in London, meet a friend for lunch in New York and come back to work that afternoon.
The novel’s narrator, Tanner Kelly, has grown up in rural Alaska, a backwater without a pod station. He is only too glad to escape, getting a glamorous job in London as personal assistant to scientist Victor Bickle, who works for CWC, the company that runs the network. Bickle’s job is selling CWC’s services and whitewashing their effects. As the company’s booming chief of communications, Cromwell Grant, tells Tanner: “every CWC customer demands two things. He demands the products and services we provide. And he demands a clean conscience with which to consume them.”
