Silicon Valley in the 2030s is not so different from today, filled with vaguely sexist CEOs, contested inequality politics, and startups that are almost a joke.
After she loses her job when her startup folds and loses her home to California’s annual wildfires, Sara joins the latest thing: an unnamed tech giant’s quasi-utopian community, floating above the drowned land that was once Monterey.
Alone on the inside with a thousand mysteriously chosen strangers, Sara is insulated by an all-powerful corporation from the turmoil of crumbling governments and a changing climate. Everyone around her seems incredibly thankful, rescued from gig work and student loans and bad news, but she can’t find her own gratitude.
As she learns more about her new home, she begins to see the cracks in its perfect facade. She must choose between surveillance and lies from the anonymous algorithms that protect her or face a vulnerable life outside the system to which she has signed away her next five years. Leaving, she learns, may not even be an option.
“A postmodern story reminiscent of works by Kafka or Sartre.”
– J. F. Alexander, author of the theological sci-fi novel I Am Sophia
“Beautifully written and terrifying.”
– Susan Lee, former Silicon Valley journalist and winner of the Writers of the Future and World Fantasy Awards
“A very highly recommended story that will hit close to home for many sci-fi fans in a dystopian production designed to keep readers thinking and involved to the end.”
– D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“Kelsey Josund’s Platformed is a deliciously slow-burn SF character study very much in the vein of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway in all its close-to-home one-wrong-move-from-reality plausibility, its deep dive depiction of a too-familiar-for-comfort hypercapitalist dystopia, and, most critically, the hope it extends toward an alternative.”
– Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Firebreak and Archivist Wasp
Targeted Age Group:: 18+
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
There are many dystopias, and many critiques of the modern world, but I felt that they often weren't close enough together, and I saw the collision of climate change and the trajectory of megacorporations as a compelling way to explore that intersection. I also wanted to center a character like me, someone who sees the flaws in the tech industry from the inside.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
When books include women in tech, the characters often work in marketing or business. These are important roles in the tech industry, but all of my female friends are engineers, just like I am! Platformed's protagonist, Sara, is a software engineer with a background much like my own, and she, like all of the characters in the book, are loosely inspired by real people I know in Silicon Valley. None draw too much from any single real person, but many of their experiences and traits reflect real things and real people.
Book Sample
The blaring of her phone’s emergency alert jolted Sara out of sleep and into confusion. It wasn’t an alarm she’d heard before and it took her an embarrassingly long minute to realize where the noise was coming from. When she did, her stomach sank and her head felt light as she realized with horror that this was it: the moment she’d somehow known was coming but had never acknowledged.
She shook Zach awake—he had somehow slept through the alarm—and he held his own phone above his face, blearily trying to read the tiny words.
“Evacuation notice?”
“It’s the fire,” she breathed. “It’s here?”
For a shocked moment they stared at each other, trying to decide if it was real. Because it couldn’t have reached them, right? Disasters happened to other people.
But then she had the presence of mind to go to the window and look out, peeling back the curtain to the thick air of the late night, the smoke heavier than she’d ever seen it. She lifted the window open to let it in, all its choking glory, and felt the unnatural heat and heard the roar and felt some instinct kick in that overrode the numbing panic.
“We have to go,” she said, voice steady.
Zach was already struggling into jeans. She moved in a daze as the smoke continued filling the room, pulled a hoodie over her head, slipped on her running shoes and wetted down several towels to press over their faces, then pulled her emergency bag out of the closet and looked around the apartment one last time. Would it still be here when they returned?
Would they return?
“Come on,” Zach said, gripping her arm harder than he ever had before and pulling her out of the room.
It happened so fast. It had been happening for decades.
They ran out into the hallway, pounded on their neighbors’ doors and didn’t wait for anyone to answer. Hoping they would get themselves out. Was it too late already?
Her phone was still blaring in her pocket. How to turn the damn thing off?
A neighbor burst into the hall before them, bizarrely wearing pajamas and a winter jacket. “Do you have a car?” he cried, sounding justifiably terrified. “Can you give us a ride?”
Zach nodded wordlessly and Sara beckoned the man to follow, but they did not slow down.
They ran, the two of them and their neighbors, a middle-aged gay couple they’d met only on the day they moved in. They ran and the air grew hotter and harder to breathe and the car seemed impossibly far away.
Sara was struck by the unlikely but horrifying thought that the car had been stolen. What if?
But then it emerged out of the haze in the parking lot, the taillights flashing and the horn honking as Sara repeatedly pressed the unlock button, desperate for the assurance that it was there.
They piled in and Sara threw her bag at Zach, shouting, “Find my glasses!”
He dug madly through the backpack as she started the ignition, blinking furiously against the smoke. She fumbled the glasses onto her face, pressing down on the accelerator, but the car wasn’t picking up speed. The engine whined.
“Parking brake!” one of the neighbors called from the back. Sara cursed, released the brake, and they were off.
Her emergency-kit glasses were from an old prescription and so the world was full of starbursts and smears. She couldn’t be sure that was just the glasses and not the fire racing toward them.
“Are you good to drive?” Zach whispered, or maybe shouted, as she sped away from the complex.
“I have to be!” she replied. Her voice sounded so normal in such an absurd moment. How could her voice sound the same as always?
They careened down the street toward the main thoroughfare, but where were they even going?
Zach studied his phone, looking for indication of where to go, but no one had thought to share such vital information.
“My uncle,” the neighbor said, voice shuddering. “My uncle has a house in San Jose. If it’s…”
She knew what he was saying. If a house deep in the city was at risk from this blaze, they faced problems on a scale they could probably not survive.
She turned right, winding as fast as she dared through the hills with the emergency flashers on, the grass around them blackened where the fire had already passed. Not able to catch her breath, gasping, heart jumping.
Her mind kept flashing to Bea, and she kept pushing it away. Bea lived up the ridge even further. She could not help her, could not waste a moment to even try to contact her. She just had to trust that Bea had gotten herself out.
The opposite ridge flared and caught, horrifically red and glowing, smoldering and inflaming in turns, like an image straight out of hell. She could feel the heat on her face through the windshield, though it was at least a hundred feet away.
A hundred feet was nothing.
They descended toward the lights of a suburban downtown below them, Christmas lights wound around palm trees and neon signs lit up like it was any other day. So close.
Zach’s hands clenched on the dashboard, the neighbors murmured in fearful whispers in the backseat, and Sara tried so hard to remain calm, unhappy and uncomfortable in her role as savior. Her head pounded; what time was it? She always felt awful when she didn’t get enough sleep.
Did she feel nauseated from lack of sleep or the panic or the smoke?
They reached the bottom of the hill and faced a stoplight, an absurdly human barrier between them and safety. The red of the burning hills behind them drowned out the red of the stoplight before them, a cosmic joke. She barely slowed before racing through the intersection against the light.
It was three in the morning, the dashboard told her. There would be no cross traffic.
The air did not clear, but the wind calmed and the temperature fell to something approximating normal and she let out her breath, trying again to calm her racing heart and almost succeeding this time.
“San Jose?” she asked, signaling to get on the freeway.
“I’ll give directions,” the neighbor said, his voice steady now, assured.
How odd it was that he sounded calmer just when she was giving into her fear.
Her arms felt shaky and weak and she could barely keep them on the steering wheel, her head spinning wildly as the adrenaline released her, but she followed his instructions and headed south, fifteen miles away from the conflagration, her mind stuck back where everything she owned was surely being devoured.
The annual California lottery that no one thought they would ever lose.
Tonight they had lost.
Getting off the freeway and turning onto slow neighborhood streets always felt surreal to her, brought her back to her childhood in the backseat while her father drove and she pretended to sleep in the hopes he would carry her into the house. When voices fell silent and lights dimmed and everything slowed down, you could almost believe something magical was happening.
That was especially true this time, as they slowed to a near crawl, creeping along streets made strange by the smoke through a community left whole. Her neighbor tried to guess at the appropriate turns to take. He’d been there many times, he kept saying, but he couldn’t remember the address, and his uncle wasn’t picking up the phone.
Were the phones even working?
She knew emergencies could overwhelm the network. Maybe emergency services had commandeered everything so they could push out alerts, or maybe they were using everyone’s numbers for their own purposes, coordinating a response. That could happen, right? Wasn’t that how things worked?
She realized she had no idea.
It seemed impossible that these people in these big houses would get to go on living as if nothing had happened, as if people just a few towns over hadn’t lost everything that night, and she realized it was no stranger than every other year.
The smoke made each streetlight nearly ineffective. The whole of San Jose seemed to be one great yellow haze, almost poisonous. They swam through it.
And then the lights went out.
It took her a moment to realize what had happened, since the glow had been so sickly and unsettling to begin with; it was almost better this way, the white of her headlights the only light cutting through the smoke.
But the implications of the blackout shook her. Was the utility trying to prevent further burns, or had the fire destroyed transmission lines? The mystery of the night thickened, growing more ominous. Their refuge felt impossibly far away.
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Author Bio:
Kelsey Josund is a software engineer and author of scifi, fantasy and young adult fiction, including a series of forthcoming feminist retellings of classic childhood fairytales. Originally from Seattle, Kelsey loves getting outdoors and living in places that allow her to escape to the mountains on the weekends. She cares deeply about the ecosystems that humans impact and that impact them in return. Her writing explores these themes through the prism of the traditional coming-of-age arcs of science fiction and fantasy. Kelsey is particularly interested in stories and characters that complicate the traditional and familiar, leading her to rediscover old tales from new and unexpected angles. With a passion for storytelling in all its forms, Kelsey approaches writing fiction the same way she approaches writing code: she likes to know where it's going, but wants to figure out the details as she goes. She believes good software is a lot like a good story-full of neat and clever solutions to tricky problems, beautiful at a granular level but also from a distance. Kelsey lives and works in Silicon Valley, California with her partner and their cat. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from Stanford University, and is currently plotting her return to the Pacific Northwest and working on her next novel. For more information, visit www.kelseyjosund.com.
