This awards-nominated novel is pretty good

For the last week I’ve been reading a self-published novel, Drive A, that the author submitted to a contest I’m running. This book is pretty good! I enjoyed reading it, and with this post I’m announcing Merritt Graves’s Drive A as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Award.

This novel takes place in a near-future world where most (80%?) of the people in America are unemployed drones who subsist on a Universal Basic Income from the government and spend their time immersed in games, livestreams, and other virtual entertainments. In this world, if you have a job of any sort, you’re one of the lucky ones.

NPC (or non-player character) was increasingly becoming the term for people who didn’t work, collected basic income from the Fed, and spent most of their time in VR and watching other people’s livefeeds. AI had clear-cut a lot of creative and process-oriented jobs, and was a blackpill rug-pull for those who felt like they’d been built for one thing, spending their entire lives perfecting a craft that now—surprise, poof—wasn’t viable anymore. Most alarming, it wasn’t for any lack of effort to keep them as PCs: there were all kinds of work, volunteering, and re-training programs shuffling around various automation casualties.

But competition is vicious, and you’re always in danger of losing your foothold.

To gain an edge, some people do an initial public offering, selling off shares in themselves—these shares increase in value as their subject gains income and/or clout. This not only generates capital that they can use to invest in their education, it also gives them a set of powerful ‘shareholders’ who have a vested interest in their success.

Cable Rostenfarm IPO’ed at age twelve, used that money to go to a private school, and there developed an alliance with the powerful Chandley family. Now he’s graduated from college and working in his first job, at a human-cap firm—a hedge fund that invests primarily in individual peoples’ stocks.

What’s great about this book is the degree to which it’s fully invested in this premise. The book takes an absolute delight in the details of how people would hold, sell, and short various stocks, and the sorts of complex relationships that would form between people and their shareholders.

For instance, here’s an aside about how this system is used to facilitate the bribery of government officials:

[I had heard] more and more

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