A debut novel about a dating app employee who discovers a glitch that transports him to other worlds. A college grad with the six-figure debt to prove it, Ethan Block views San Francisco as the place to be. Yet his job at hot new dating app DateDate is a far cry from what he envisioned. Instead of making the world a better place, he reviews flagged photo queues, overworked and stressed out. But that's about to change.
A glitch in the novel’s tone... never quite resolves itself ... No one seems fazed by the invention of teleportation, never mind that it’s far more Jetsonian than any other of the book’s extrapolations of current technology ... This blasé reaction is made all the more confounding in light of the rest of the novel, which is firmly rooted in the real world ... It’s hard to square this familiarity, bordering on banality, with the technological magical realism.
Not the first – and nowhere near the best – sci-fi thriller to contend with Silicon Valley’s immense power. But it’s a smart and brisk novel that, despite some occasionally leaden prose, speaks the language of a distinct cohort ... Riedel’s prose can be stiff, a weakness that’s occasionally glaring ... But Riedel’s depiction of the book’s technological and financial transgressions... is convincing.
If another close look at a social media startup were all this novel were about, it might not warrant much attention. Thankfully, that's not all Riedel is up to ... The book pushes readers to see the ways both art and technology construct and disrupt reality, forcing an examination of every experience, an insistence that humans are always in the process of discovering what is true. These more abstract and infinitely more interesting questions are the heart of Please Report Your Bug Here.
