Best Science Fiction - Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Publisher - Hodder Studio

Published - Out Now

Price - £12.99 hardback £2.99 Kindle eBook

Is it still WFH when you're now just binary code?

Whilst working on a spreadsheet for a New York-based PR firm, Gerald has his consciousness uploaded into his company's Slack channel. He posts for help, but his colleagues assume it's an elaborate joke to exploit the new working-from-home policy, and now that Gerald's productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from . . . wherever he says he is.

Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists co-worker Pradeep to care for his body and Slackbot, the service's AI assistant, to help him navigate his new digital reality. But when Slackbot discovers a world (and an empty body) outside the app, will it hijack a ride into the 'real' world?
Meanwhile, Gerald's co-workers are scrambling to stem a company PR catastrophe like no other, their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture, and if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can't everyone?

Humour is subjective and so always difficult to review. So to start giving you my thoughts let’s say Several People Are Typing is like a cross between Welcome to Nightvale and The Office but leans more to me towards The Office. I find The Office to be a deeply unfunny shallow piece of work and that’s where my conclusion went with this book too.

The inventive idea here is this is a book comprising slack messages (an online chat message tool beloved of many companies) so we get the characters trading sentences as set of online conversations. That’s a really interesting approach it’s just not used very well.

For me starting off from the block there are really no interesting characters in the story. No time to build them up before we get the central character of Gerald saying he is now trapped in the slack channel. Indeed Gerald is more puzzled than sacred at this change in circumstances and I think in an attempt to show people can be driven by work he actually boosts productivity this felt a massively unlikely reaction as does the fact none of his team try a phone call, face to face meeting or even a video call to check on him until late in the novel. The book only works if you accept this PR team is completely stupid (like The Office).

There is a hardly understood plot of a demonic spreadsheet and a SlackBot who takes over Gerald’s body - which leads to a questionable scene where a Co-worker aware that Gerald’s body has been taken over by someone involuntarily still found it acceptable to have sex with Gerald’s body (quickly airbrushed by the revelation that Gerald would have agreed if he’d been there but that’s really ignoring the consent issue).

So for me this novel resembles most office humour ie deeply unfunny and reminds you that you’d rather not be in a toxic workplace. The funniest thing I found reading this was how it will soon be outdated as a work tool. Others may find this humour works for them. Safe to say not in my voting mind for this award.