Infinite Detail is a novel of our grim cyberpunk present, of a time that feels distinctly pre-apocalyptic. We live in a world with immense accumulations of wealth and power and information, and yet rather than steer towards a coherent vision of the future, hell, do anything at all, these machines alternately brutalize and seduce us. If you want a vision of the future, it's Kendal Jenner offering a riot cop a Pepsi forever.

One timeline, BEFORE, follows hacktivist Rushdi Manaan. Rushdi is British, the sysadmin of the ferociously anti-surveillance Croft, a hip Bristol neighborhood blockaded with wifi jammers running on a Bluetooth mesh network. Rush is in a long distance relationship with Scott in New York, living in a world ruled by a surveillance capitalism machine he hates.

AFTER is, well, after. Someone broke the internet, killing every connected device. As communication networks failed and supply chains froze, 'local autonomy' has risen up to replace the survivors. It's a grim world, with a dislocated population sheltering under warlords of various ideological stripes. The various people in After are trying to make sense of their lives in Bristol. Mary sees dead people, those chaotic final hours in the Croft. Tyrone keeps her safe, tries to score survive Bristol Jungle tapes of a dead rave culture. Anika is a guerilla fighter, on the run from the military dictatorship that runs the UK and looking for a new weapon in her liberation campaign.

At a kind of page-by-page level, this is a pretty good novel. Great gritty feel. But stepping back, it doesn't have characters so much as points of view on events that the characters have no ability to influence. And this is 2020, alarmism about surveillance capitalism is practically passé. At least Maughan is honest that what comes next will likely be sticks, stones, and a lot of corpses, to paraphrase Albert Einstein on World War 4.