Wolves

At school, Connie and Micky were best friends. Together they cooked up all the ways the world could end. Years later, Michel imagines apocalypses for a living, and lives inside fantasies of the Fall. Conrad works in advertising, spinning aspirational dreams out of imaginary light. Their reunion promises to reveal who killed Conrad’s mother. It’s also going to make them a lot of money, wreck Michel’s marriage and maybe – just maybe – bring about the collapse of Western civilization.

Based on research in the booming field of augmented reality, WOLVES is a surreal whodunnit about what happens when unhappy men get their hands on powerful media. Part crime novel, part coming-of-age tale and part intellectual thriller, it should appeal to readers of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin – an informed, atmospheric cutting-edge tale of the near future.

Augmented reality is an appropriate and timely topic for Simon Ings because he was recently appointed the inaugural editor of Arc, a new science fiction magazine from the New Scientist stable. He was also among the first UK writers to report on the technology, interviewing in the 1990s one of its pioneers for the UK edition of Wired. Now, Ings claims, augmented reality’s time has come.