Dave Eggers' publicity team claims that he is letting his new novel speak for itself; to that end, the first thing we've read about the forthcoming "The Circle" is a brief Q&A on the literary site he founded, McSweeney's. There are only three questions asked of Eggers about his book, which paints a picture of a world in which one Internet company has "subsumed all the tech companies we know of now, linking users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency."
Eggers seems, generally, removed from the subject about which he writes other than on an imaginative level; he did not tour any tech-company campuses, he said, so as to avoid letting too much of any one company's culture into the book. But his imagination was surprisingly accurate: Asked about keeping up with the development of contemporary technology in writing the book, Eggers said:
A lot of times I’d think of something that a company like the Circle might dream up, something a little creepy, and then I’d read about the exact invention, or even something more extreme, the next day. It happened with the names of some of the software and system features, too. I had to change a few names when I realized they already existed.
"The Circle" is to be released on Oct. 8.
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