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Eliot Peper

Cumulus Paperback – April 26, 2016

by Eliot Peper (Author)

4.1 818 ratings

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"Cumulus is your new favorite surveillance-fueled dystopian novel. It's a future we can all recognize--and one that we should all be genuinely afraid of." -Ars Technica

In the not-so-distant future, economic inequality and persistent surveillance push Oakland to the brink of civil war.

Lilly Miyamoto is a passionate analog photographer striving to pursue an ever more distant dream. Huian Li is preeminent among the Silicon Valley elite as the founder and CEO of the pervasive tech giant Cumulus. Graham Chandler is a frustrated intelligence agent forging a new path through the halls of techno-utopian royalty. But when Huian rescues Lilly from a run-in with private security forces, it sets off a chain of events that will change their lives and the world.

The adventure accelerates into a mad dash of political intrigue, relentless ambition, and questionable salvation. Will they survive to find themselves and mend a broken system?

Print length

214 pages
Language

English
Publication date

April 26, 2016
Dimensions

5.98 x 0.49 x 9.02 inches
ISBN-10

1532707193
ISBN-13

978-1532707193
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Cumulus is your new favorite surveillance-fueled dystopian novel. It's a future we can all recognize--and one that we should all be genuinely afraid of."-Ars Technica
"A gritty view of the future of economic inequality and surveillance. In a city divided between the haves and have-nots, anonymity is virtually impossible... except for a few insiders who have the power to subvert the system for their own purposes."-David Brin, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell award-winning author
"A world in which surveillance is constant and inescapable - the energy of Peper's writing and the strength of his characters are palpable."-TechCrunch
"An intriguing, fast-paced thriller that looks closely at the most pressing issues facing the nation: a growing wealth gap, corrupt governments and an ever-increasing surveillance apparatus that threatens the country's very character. Cumulus holds up a mirror to ourselves, and shows just how scary the world could be right around the corner." -Gizmodo/io9
"Cumulus is a prophetic Bay Area thriller, a Jason-Bourne-meets-Silicon-Valley story of escalating technology, inequality and a crumbling state. When a former CIA-operative-turned-hired-gun joins forces with tech giant Cumulus, cracks in the digital facade emerge, laid bare by a powerful and simple analog alternative. In today's world where intimate personal details are just another row in someone's 'big data,' Cumulus is a stark reminder that data are power--and absolute data corrupt absolutely."-Andrew Chamberlain, Ph.D., Chief Economist, Glassdoor
"Cumulus takes off like a Falcon 9 rocket, immediately propelling the reader into a world of sinister intrigue and deceit. You should read it right now, before it happens for real. Highly recommended."-Popular Science
"A fun read full of provocative ideas. Cumulus is a near-future technothriller focused on issues of income inequality and corporate power."-Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media
"A picture of Big Tech run amok."-Bloomberg Businessweek
"All too real. A thriller of the very near future, at the intersection of surveillance and inequality. Read it now, before it happens!"-Ramez Naam, award-winning author of Nexus
"Cumulus grapples with technology oligarchs, their influence over politics, and the outcomes for everyone else."-Endless Magazine
"Exhilarating and provocative, Cumulus is a richly imagined narrative set in a future threatening to become the present. Peper riffs memorably on our current zeitgeist and wrestles with the social implications of technology with a spellbinding adventure that moves at breakneck speed. The digital era begets the analog revolution. Be afraid, be very afraid. Read it now."-Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not The Answer

From the Author

I moved back to Oakland in 2013. It was the city of my birth and where I grew up. Seeing how Oakland has evolved since the '80s is at once inspiring and harrowing. Cumulus is a kind of twisted love letter to my favorite city in the Bay Area.
Over the course of the past few years, we've bonded with many of our incredible neighbors, sated our appetites at countless ethnic food joints, had a triple homicide on our block, installed a free little library for our community, hiked in beautiful Redwood Park, and watched a protest with thousands of people and hundreds trailing police vehicles terminate at the end of our street. We love the birdsong but hate the gunshots. Oakland feels like a special point of confluence for so many critical social issues: the implications of the growing wealth gap in American society, the extraordinary promise of new technologies and diverse worldviews, our failure to solve persistent social problems like poverty, racism, and homelessness, and the power of fierce, pragmatic optimism.
Writing Cumulus allowed me to explore my enthusiasm for my hometown and my fascination with how new tools like the internet are reshaping our lives in so many ways, big and small. Through years of working with startups and venture capital investors, I've had the privilege of seeing how some new technologies come to be and getting to know a few of the people who build and popularize them. I've never been more excited about the promise of human ingenuity and there's no other time in history when I'd rather live. That said, these new developments are changing our social fabric, the texture of our personal lives, and even our geopolitics. Such change is always painful. Times like these require open-mindedness, compassion, critical thinking, resourcefulness, and creativity. I don't have the answers but I hope that this story might contribute a few questions.
I will be donating the first 6 months of proceeds from Cumulus to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Chapter 510. EFF fights tirelessly for a free and open internet, championing user rights in the face of entrenched special interests. Chapter 510 is a local literacy non-profit serving underprivileged youth in Oakland. These organizations are the real heroes. Day in and day out, they roll up their sleeves and work to avert the darkest aspects of the future that Cumulus portrays.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (April 26, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 214 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1532707193
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1532707193
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.98 x 0.49 x 9.02 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,702,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,095 in Technothrillers (Books)
- #5,933 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 818 ratings

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Eliot Peper

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Eliot Peper writes speculative thrillers that explore the intersection of technology and culture. He is the author of Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, and the Uncommon Series and his books have been praised by the New York Times Book Review, Popular Science, San Francisco Magazine, Businessweek, io9, Boing Boing, and Ars Technica. He has advised technology companies as an independent consultant, designed games, survived dengue fever, pioneered new media formats, translated Virgil's Aeneid from the original Latin, worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture capital firm, and explored the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, VICE, Tor.com, the Verge, and the Los Angeles Review of Books and he has been a speaker at places like Google, Comic Con, Future in Review, SXSW, and the Conference on World Affairs.

Learn more at www.eliotpeper.com

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4.1 out of 5

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Leonard Lin

More plausible than most

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2016

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I often get pretty annoyed by day-after-next thrillers. They often are annoyingly unrealistic, or involve people acting in stupid ways to move the plot forward. Luckily l, this most doesn't do that, and when it does, is mostly forgivable.

Summary: definitely worth a read w/ some thoughtful points and likable characters in a squint a bit and it's pretty plausible setting.

Some thoughts (Spoilers ensue):
* one of the characters is a walking black swan who happens to tie everything together. I guess it works, but two coincidences seems a bit much
* would you give a single ex-CIA operative carte blanche log less root access to Uber-Google? Seems like a pretty bad idea
* Any employee doing any sort of fixer role would still have oversight and a super iron clad employment contract (liability, acceptable conduct policy) or would have actual deniability (subcontracted, not even officially affiliated in any way)
* the spy schemes were just harebrained - as a known employee, why/how could you even imagine you could blackmail someone behind the ceo's back for an m&a w/o it getting back to people? That's just crazy because it assumes people would never bring it up once they came on board? Executing a well connected muckraking lawyer seems like just the least effective way to make something go away (if he was doing it to gain trust and engineered the lawsuit anyway why not just make the evidence go away?)
* if you're building a public service panopticon, probably best not to create backdoors that allows a rogue employee to ruin the organization - not saying it's unrealistic, just a thing to keep in mind - it seems impossible to create the ghost program on that scale w/o it being known and either objected to our being nbd (you could imagine the system being built for national security reasons and being exploited)
* IMO like most tech thrillers, grossly underestimates highest level opsec/security expertise/protocol design resources available at elite tech levels (laughable security design in Ex Machina being something that sticks out)

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Solipsist

Sings the soft parts way too loud

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2016

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Is it more unfortunate to read a well-crafted novel with no actual substance, or a book with an interesting premise but poor presentation?
Neither is particularly satisfying, but if you are frustrated by shortcomings that diligent editing and thoughtful rewrites could repair then perhaps this is not the book for you.
I picked this title up on the recommendation that it was a spy thriller with an intriguingly dystopian twist, which sounded great. In reality there is very little thriller, little espionage (outside of awkwardly blunt blackmail schemes and blandly vague power struggles), and only sketches of a techie-zeitgeist-dystopia in Oakland to serve as backdrop.
I really wanted to like the book, but the author does not have any trust for the reader. The plot is spelled out in a poorly paced series of expositions : for example, after a character spends half a page carefully dressing down and culturing his appearance in a very obvious way the author then spends over a page describing what the character was intending to do, i.e., dress down in an attempt to blend in with a different socio-economic area. Come on! If a reader somehow didn’t pick up on what the character was trying to accomplish it would have been clear in the very next scene, instead an attentive reader is treated to the same basic information in three different ways. It is not thrilling to read the same thing over and over.
The writing overall lacks depth and nuance, the characters all talk the same way, think in the same ways/terms, and share the same two-dimensionality. The indie-photographer sounds like the CEO who sounds like her employees who sound like the street enforcers for the local cartel leader/Robin Hood who sounds just like the journalist who sounds just like the indie-photographer. The dialogue is very stilted, as are the internal thoughts of the characters (which are never subtle or complicated despite numerous opportunities for interesting areas of development within the plot). Despite being a major character the CEO thinks in limp aphorisms that wouldn’t be out of place on a satirical calendar of “CEO Daily Motivators!”
Also a problem for me is the use of details that don’t matter or don’t add up. The author decides it is relevant to say that the photographer spent a week converting a bathroom to a dark room, and then explains all the work that went into the conversion: covering the window, taping towels around the door frame, changing a lightbulb, and stringing up lines by putting nails into the wall and tying string to them. This took a week? This is unfortunately just my least favorite example of many salted throughout each chapter.
This review is perhaps a bit harsh, I didn’t hate the book, it just felt like someone rushed through an interesting idea; like someone took an elevator pitch from a young Neal Stephenson (that comparison is unfortunately apt, there is even a character supposedly fixated on breakfast cereal (as in the Cryptonomicon) but again, without development, nuance, or much of anything beyond an irrelevant piece of trivia for the reader about that character). I know that there are a lot of people who really don’t care about how the story is presented, they just want their good guys to be good (in the end) and their bad guys to be bad (and properly punished in the end) and everyone to look cool. This book delivers that much.
The less said about the climactic scene the better, though. It was foreshadowed heavily, utterly obvious, spelled out excruciatingly, and unsatisfying. The denouement was the strongest writing of the book, but was still littered with constant exposition. Instead of walking with the reader through an interesting story the author stands and points at each step of the way and says “there, step there and see this and know this and know that it is because of this. Now there, step there and see this and…”
If you liked this book but thought it could be better I agree with you and encourage you to check out the similarly themed early works of Neal Stephenson, the excellent work of Paolo Bacigaulpi and probably also Little Brother, etc. by Cory Doctorow.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Excellent!

Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2016

Verified Purchase

I found this to be a delightfully well written book that envisions how cultural trends of today might play out in the future. On the one hand is the relentless acquisition of personal data by an ever-expanding population of digital devices, sensors, cameras and services, and on the other is the equally relentless push to use this data to manipulate us economically and politically. The author's characters are unusual and intriguing, as is the notion of what an evil-doer could accomplish if given unfettered access to a Google-like tech giant's treasure trove of data and algorithms. Examined as well is the power that would accrue to one becoming digitally invisible in a world in which privacy has been erased. The central setting of the tale is the city of Oakland, California, an unusual choice for a tale of runaway technology, but very effective. I found the conclusion of the book to be a little disappointing in that it seemed a bit hurried and not developed as well as the rest of the book. That said, the rest of the book was so well done, I give it 5 stars.

4 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

MR MARK NEEDHAM

Read it in one day!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 12, 2020

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I think I heard about the book via the Reason Roundtable podcast and I read the whole book in one day - I couldn't put it down!

The story is very fast paced and although the surveillance of characters is a bit spooky, it doesn't seem that far fetched.

A really fun read, highly recommended!

Daniel Wolstenholme

A bleak but excellent look into the future!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 5, 2016

Verified Purchase

Having purchased this based on passing a thread on a message board with William Gibson giving it the thumbs up, I am hugely glad that I did so.

Just shy of 200 pages long the book runs at a brisk pace and whilst it may lack some character development it exceeds at painting a picture of a possible future whereby technology peers into every nook and cranny of our lives and is a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.

Really enjoyed and will recommend to others and look forward to seeing what Eliot comes up with next!

andrew hryniewicz

Another fascinating, furious and thought-provoking ride

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2020

Verified Purchase

Once again Elliott pepper waves together technology, politics, philosophy and a page turning story to explore the challenges, opportunities and tensions at play In America (and by extension the world). I want to thank Seth Godin for turning me on to all of these books. Enjoy!

Simon Dell

A Cautionary Tale For The Near-Future

Reviewed in Australia on September 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

Make no mistake, a fun, fast-paced thriller set in the near future. Only let-down is the villain of the piece who offers so much in terms of back-story and build-up and then fails to deliver. But still a great book and very easy to read.

Amazon Customer

Good read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

The book has very interesting take on a future Oakland and the potential for all pervasive technology companies to influence every aspect if life.
Good read.

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