A satire of a surreal technocratic future by the national-bestselling author of Lovecraft “Dizzyingly readable” (Thomas Pynchon). High above Manhattan, android and human steelworkers are constructing a new Tower of Babel for billionaire Harry Gant, as a monument to humanity’s power to dream. In the festering sewers below, a darker game is a Wall Street takeover artist has been murdered, and Gant’s crusading ex-wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out why, in this wild romp by the acclaimed author of Fool on the Hill and Lovecraft Country . The year is 2023, and Ayn Rand has been resurrected and bottled in a hurricane lamp to serve as Joan’s assistant; an eco-terrorist named Philo Dufrense travels in a pink-and-green submarine designed by Howard Hughes; a Volkswagen Beetle is possessed by the spirit of Abbie Hoffman; Meisterbrau, a mutant great white shark, is running loose in the sewers beneath Times Square; and a one-armed 181-year-old Civil War veteran joins Joan and Ayn in their quest for the truth. All of them, and many more besides, are about to be caught up in a vast conspiracy involving Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, and a mob of homicidal robots . . . “[An] SF roller-coaster satirizing the horrors of our nascent technocracy . . . Told with breezy good humor, this exuberantly silly tale will find an audience among admirers of the day-glo surrealism of Steve Erickson and the tangled conspiracy theories of David Foster Wallace.” — Publishers Weekly “A turbocharged neo-Dickensian hot rod [with] plenty of intellectual horsepower.” —Neal Stephenson