The Warehouse

Rob Hart's novel The Warehouse explores a future world in which a Wal-Mart-Amazon hybrid mega-retailer achieves complete market saturation and dominance in a post-capitalist world.  In short, this means that the warehouses for Cloud stores are live/work facilities that operate like corporate owned cities.  Those who are hired by Cloud live within the complex (their board is pre-deducted from their pay), shop at specially designated promenades in the complex (staffed by other Cloud employees) where they pay with "credits" that are roughly equivalent to US dollars (which have been converted for them by Cloud at no fee), and dine at Cloud-owned restaurants (also staffed by Cloud employees).  Each Cloud employee is issued a helpful smart watch that is a personal ID, method of payment, training guide, locator, etc.  So everything within the complexes are a function of employment and are designed to monitor the individual's movements.  The city-stores replace the city-state of old in this world and there is little reason ever to leave the facilities.  In fact, the few scenes narrated outside of the facility show a world that is run-down and on the brink of collapse.  At several points in the novel, we learn that there are very few other employers in the world.  What this means for the economy of this world is that the company Cloud exists to sell to its own employees.  It is a perfect post-capitalist world in which the corporation creates and serves its own demand, serving its own employees and trading in its own corporate scrip.  While all of this is an obvious allegory for Amazon and the tech-giants' corporate campuses, the story itself holds together pretty well.
The narrative follows two recent hires at Cloud; one, a corporate spy hired by an unknown to gather information on Cloud's employment practices, the other, an inventor/small business owner who was put out of business by Cloud's cutthroat practice of undercutting competition and cannot find work elsewhere.  The latter individual, Paxton, had worked at a prison guard in the past and so is designated to work in Cloud security division.  The corporate spy, Zinnia, ends up using Paxton's connections because she is relegated to working in the warehouse as a picker.
There is a romance subplot between the two and the bulk of the narrative is rather predictable, given the setup.  Zinnia seeks to work around the smart watch system to move around the facility with impunity while Paxton unwittingly gets drawn into his own work.
Working in a warehouse myself, I found the author's descriptions of the stocking and picking practices to be inconsistent with how a facility like this would actually be run.  There is a fundamental problem with the logistics that Hart has developed for the novel that would render the whole operation obsolete and completely unable to fulfill the demand that it must meet.  This is an uninteresting aspect of supply chain management that I may answer questions about in the comments if anyone is interested in knowing more but which does not interest me to write about here.  No one not working in a fulfillment center would ever think twice about these things, so it is moot to the actual reading of the novel.
There are two other points I want to hit regarding this novel.  First, Hart creates a pretty interesting analogy in the book about the source of beef for the famous Cloudburgers available only inside the facilities.  It turns out that in this world beef is an expensive rarity enjoyed by only the very privileged.  However, Cloudburger is well known to be of exceptional quality.  The main characters eat these burgers several times throughout the novel before Zinnia discovers their provenance.  Much like Soylent Green, Snowpiercer, and other sci-fi stories before this, the source of food can be a big question.  The Cloud burgers are not made from former employees, as I suspected, but are made from the protein extracted from the waste that the employees produce.  Yes, Cloudburgers are in fact shitburgers.  I like this disgusting idea because it fulfills the notion that the entire novel presents that Cloud serves its own needs.  Recycling the shit of its employees as food seems to line up pretty well with the system of selling your own products to your own employees with your own currency.  Cloud closes the loop in both cases, which leads anyone to wonder how the system sustains itself with no outside input.  This, then, is the central question that the novel presents and which any post-capitalist, dystopian story worth its salt presents.  How does the system sustain?
The second point is the allusions the novel makes to the Ursula K. LeGuin short story, "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas."  During a trip to the world outside of the Cloud complex, Zinnia runs into a band of scavengers who want to try to break into and disrupt Cloud.  After a struggle and with the bandits retreating, one of them calls Zinnia Omela.  I didn't catch the reference at the time, having not read the story, but Zinnia recalls the story and it makes her rethink her position a bit.
LeGuin describes the city of Omelas where people are happy and carry out their lives at peace but all of the adults know that the price of their peace and contentment is a single child held captive in a cellar beneath the city.  LeGuin doesn't explain why the city works this way but the scapegoat child has reverted to a feral, brutish state and the citizens may not give any comfort.
LeGuin doesn't blame the citizens or moralize beyond mentioning that there are some who leave the city once they have learned of this secret.  So the question remains who might have the moral high-ground here?  Those who walk away simply walk away and choose not to alleviate the child's suffering.  Those who remain take the child's suffering as a reasonable trade for the happiness of a city full of people.
In the context of the novel, this seems to be a question about complicity since all who are inside of the Cloud complex have once been outside of them and know what the conditions are like.  They receive some degree of comfort in their employment and must be content in the knowledge that there are many more suffering on the outside.  The analogy isn't perfect, but it is enough for the novel as it attempts to put the same question to its own readers.

Who Fears Death

*I wrote this post a few months back after reading this novel with my sci-fi book club.  I haven't really read it over since then.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s novel, Who Fears Death, reminds me of a few other books that I have read in my life, and it puts the author in good company.  It reminded me of China Achebe’s matter-of-fact narrative style, particularly in the way that Okorafor describes violence and pain as things that are normal, natural, and to be expected in life.  This treatment actually underscores the impact that violence has on those involved: both on the perpetrator and the victim in different dimensions.  This book also reminds me of Ngugi wa Thi’ongo’s work Wizard of the Crow.  Magic exists in a realistic landscape, but not the magic of wizards and witches.  This is real magic made from human experience and connections to nature.  In this light, it also reminds of of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  But for as much as Okorafor’s novel reminds me of these others, hers is something apart and is uniquely her own.

I read this novel in the context of a science fiction reading group that I host in Cleveland and I think that the context led me to expect a different book. I had been wanting to read this novel for some time, and suggesting it to the group seemed like a good way to make the time for it.  I had been hearing about this novel as a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic novel.  I didn’t find it worked as well with that expectation.  My group tended to agree; they seemed to like it, but not as a sci-fi novel.   There is a sci-fi element, I would add for the sake of full disclosure.  The characters use some futuristic technology that resemble GPS systems and smart phones, but these are outclassed by Onyesonwu’s intuition and magic.  Mostly, the use of technology is glossed over in a society that uses older technology.  There is one passage that sticks out to me and seems to be the main connection to the post-apocalypse:

The Lost Papers go into detail about how the Okeke, during their centuries festering in the darkness, were mad scientists.  The Lost Papers discuss how they invented the old technologies like computers, capture stations, and portables.  They invented ways to duplicate themselves and keep themselves young until they died.  They made food grow on dead land, they cured all diseases.  In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild creativity.

Onyesonwu later thinks of the Okeke as “a sad miserable unthinking lot,” for the embarrassment that they feel about their own past.  This hint of lost technology does fit in with a lot of modern sci-fi that speculates on a world that turns its back on the high technological past in order to regain something human about itself.  But this is also theme that Asimov dealt with, along with many other authors.  

What I like about the novel is that it presents magic as a hard-earned skill.  I tend not to enjoy more traditional fantasy, but I wouldn’t lump this book into that genre, either.  To me, this book picks up on the best traditions it draws from.  The sci-fi/post-apocalyptic tones are there but they are minor.  What they add to the novel is a fresh conflict between modernity and tradition, between the mythic and the realistic.  Characterization is strong and the revenge plot works well to drive the narrative.