In The Warehouse (Bantam, £12.99), Rob Hart has written a cautionary tale exploring the effects of runaway capitalism, corporate greed and consumer complacency in a near-future dystopia where governments no longer function and “The Cloud” runs everything. Amazon writ large, The Cloud is the invention of billionaire Gibson Wells, who oversees a city-state environment called MotherCloud, where every aspect of workers’ lives is rigorously monitored and controlled. Mired in this hellhole is Paxton, working as a security guard for the very concern that demolished his own startup company, and Zinnia, an industrial spy who befriends Paxton in a bid to get at vital information. Hart expertly interleaves the story of how The Cloud came into existence with a slow-burning thriller narrative, while hammering home the iniquity of the system and the soul-destroying monotony for those trapped within it. Featuring an explosive twist-in-the-tail climax, this terrifying hybrid of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Zamyatin’s We is a triumph.
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