Several People Are Typing (by Calvin Kasulke)

And the longlist is out early! It's the most wonderful time of the year.  

In previous years I tried to guess what was most likely to make the shortlist and inevitably failed. My new strategy is just go through and see what books I find interesting, and read those first.  So I tried all my libraries (I have cards for five different libraries) and ended up checking out 10 books and putting 7 more on hold. One, Matrix by Lauren Groff, I already had checked out. 

More than likely I won't be able to get through all of these (one library only does two-week checkouts, for example) especially since I was already in the middle of a 750-page nonfiction book, but I'm excited to have all these options. 

Several People Are Typing was one I already had on hold at my main library, but ended up finding available at another library when I went through them all in the ToB deep dive. A satire where a tech worker gets his consciousness uploaded to Slack sounded right up my alley and I read it in one sitting because it's all told through Slack messages.  Overall cute, funny, clever. My biggest qualm was the non-consensual sex, treated as kind of amusing and no big deal? Clearly the author was not framing it that way at all but yeah what happens is rape. And that's not... amusing?

My prediction is that it's too lightweight to make the shortlist, but I have been wrong before.