Just Finished Reading: The Warehouse by Rob Hart (FP: 2019) [465pp] 

Paxton was, despite everything that had happened to him, one of the lucky ones – and he knew it. With the world falling apart and with unemployment the fast road to starvation and death he had been accepted as a provisional employee at Cloud, not only a major retailer (and SO much else) but THE dominant retailer on the planet. If he worked hard and kept his nose clean he could, at least, have three ‘hots’ and a cot which is more than a lot of people could say right now. Sitting next to him on the bus to his new home at a Cloud City was Zinnia who had also passed the interview. Her aspirations were somewhat different from Paxton’s. Her assignment was to infiltrate Cloud and discover what was REALLY going on behind their walls. Luckily for her Paxton had been given a role in security and, from the way he looked at her, was open to some horizontal social engineering. She’d need his access to get deep enough into Cloud to discover its secrets for whoever her employer was. It wasn’t that different from a hundred other jobs she’d had around the world. This, she thought was going to be a walk in the park compared to some of her jobs – no scars or broken bones this time at least! Or so she thought... 

This was, in many superficial ways, similar to my last read – The Store. A mega-corporation has taken control of the majority of the world’s trade and someone wants to know what their dark secret really is. After that the similarity ends. This is a vastly better written and equally better plotted narrative than ‘The Store’. Both the main protagonists Paxton and Zinnia are more rounded and believable that the cardboard cut-outs in the previous novel. I didn’t like Paxton very much at first but, as the story progressed and he got his mojo back I started to warm to him a bit more. Zinnia, however, was a completely different story – I liked her immediately and this grew as the book progressed. I’d have liked to know more about her backstory and the world she came from but that wasn’t really the focus of the novel. Like ‘The Store’ this was essentially a criticism of the Amazon-style workplace and the process that leads to one corporation completely dominating a sector to the exclusion of all else. But the critique is actually, contra to ‘The Store’, contained within a good story rather than simply hitting you over the head with it. Zinnia’s experiences as a ‘picker’ make the point very well indeed. But... despite there being much to like about this book – and not only standing next to the risible Patterson example reviewed last week – it does have a number of notable weaknesses.  As with the apparently omnipotent ‘Store’, Cloud despite its driven workforce and meticulous attention to every detail is rather grubby around the edges and seemingly falling apart with elements out of order or just shoddily made. There’s mention of an impenetrable ‘firewall’ separating Cloud from outside interference/hacking followed by a simple hacking event. Then, most annoyingly, is an obvious plot device (almost as if the author had painted himself into a corner so had to use ‘magic’ to progress the plot) of a failed security device that IT knew about (!) but didn’t tell anyone for fear of blowback. As soon as I found that out I'd have fired the WHOLE department!! As to the ‘hidden’ secret(s) I thought the first one was better than the end big reveal – even if the first both made me laugh and turn my stomach at the same time. The second secret was honestly LAME. The other thing that both bothered me and made my eyes roll was the introduction of a ‘resistance cell’ that gave the whole idea of resistance a bad name. My god, I could create a better resistance movement than that and I wouldn’t be bitching about the lack of access to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ as part of it. That group was quite honestly pathetic! [Deep breath]. But, despite those criticisms, this was a reasonably good read which could probably be catergorised as light-SF anti-corporate dystopia. Not exactly knocking it out of the park but should give you an entertaining few days and something to think about – especially as you use the McDonalds Drive Through...