Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story

'''Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel.''' New York: Random House, 2010. Available as an Audiobook, which may be a more decorous medium than print, or ironic or (highly, obscenely) inappropriate. (This citation is based on the audiobook.)

In addition to telling a slightly sad fictional love story, the novel presents a near-future SF dystopia of interest for the "human/machine interface" for showing the mediation of human relations in the future culture through "apparati" (cf. apparat, apparatchik) — smart-phones extrapolated to the absurd — and other electronics. Note a hypercapitalism like that of F. Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, but with more cybernetic devices, e.g., poles that announce one's credit rating as one passes. The book is in diary/epistolary style, electronically mediated; Erlich would classify it as art-SF similar to recent works by William Gibson.

3. FICTION, RDE, 05/IV/12