When she's brought in for an interrogation and dies in official custody, a state investigator named Mielikki Neith, “an enthusiastic proponent of both the System and the Witness,” is assigned to investigate the extensive memory recordings taken of Diana Hunter – in which she immediately notices hints and dissonances that trigger her detective's instincts. Most people are completely content to live their lives cupped in the hands of this elaborate set-up, but there are dissenters: one of them, an iconoclastic willful Luddite named Diana Hunter, has tried to disconnect herself from the omnipresent umbilicals of the System – which in itself draws the attention of the authorities. The novel is set in a relatively near future in which society has transformed into a totalitarian surveillance state called the System – a state overseen by an all-knowing AI called the Witness. Now, years later, Harkaway's new novel Gnomon has both its feet planted firmly in the fantastic – this is a big, bristlingly detailed science fiction fantasia whose plots thread and fold back upon themselves and communicate with each other like computer algorithms, if algorithms intended to mystify and captivate instead of misunderstand and hamper. There were flickers and flashes of the fantastic winking all through Nick Harkaway's 2014 novel Tigerman, odd moments when the peripheries of the book's main plot veered well away from the fields we know and then veered promptly back.
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