The Pashtun Boy's Paradise
Ash flees a war-torn homeland toward a promised utopia — only to find that paradise has a very high price.
About this book
One man's quest for a promised land. A world that has already replaced him. A sharp-edged near-future odyssey — survival thriller and social satire in one.
Ashwand Tanai is a dead man. Fleeing a warlord in the ruins of Afghanistan, his only hope is the Embo — a lethal high-tech wasteland of autonomous darters and spider-tanks built to keep the poor out of the world's last paradise. Against all odds, he survives, and reaches the “Comm”: a sparkling European utopia of National Dividends, driverless cars and total automation. But in this paradise, being human is a side-gig.
Cast as a celebrity refugee — the “Pashtun Boy”, a rare real human in a world bored by computer-generated spectacle — Ashwand is thrust into the bizarre politics of a future House of Lords, where democracy is a lottery and citizens serve as proxies for an AI. From neon-lit London to the gated arcologies of a new America, he navigates hackers, deep-fake scandals and global conspiracies.
In a world where machines do everything better, what is the value of a single human life? With the help of a legendary ghost-in-the-machine hacker, Ashwand must outwit a system that treats people as surplus to requirements — and discovers that the “First World” is just a different kind of cage.
Hunt at his most prophetic: a propulsive, funny and uncomfortable piece of near-future SF about social-credit utopias and the worth of a single human life when the machines do everything better.
- you like Black Mirror and the social edge of The Expanse;
- you enjoy speculative fiction in the lineage of Orwell and Neal Stephenson;
- you want a survival thriller with real satirical teeth.