Zed : a novel
(Book)

"Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Faber & Faber Ltd., London, in 2019, and subsequently published in hardcover by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2020."--Title page verso.

One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm... now what to do with all these messy people? Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient 'lifechain' don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it. Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment -- the ugliness and the beauty -- perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present -- and thrown back her head and laughed.