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This month's top sci-fi reminds us to beware technocrats bearing gifts

In her latest sci-fi column, Helen Marshall finds simmering revolution against the tech moguls in two new novels, The Warehouse and The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

By Helen Marshall

28 August 2019

US town — Life in a one-horse town teaches you there is no such thing as a free lunch
David Alan Harvey/Magnum

Dave Hutchinson

REBCA

Rob Hart

Bantam Press

THE pulp novels of the 1950s are best remembered for their sense of wonder. This is exactly the feeling that billionaire tech funder Stanislaw Clayton tries to create in The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man, the latest novel by Dave Hutchinson, author of the deservedly praised Fractured Europe series.

The 1950s were also a golden age for social satire: for Pohl and Kornbluth’s The…

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