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From the brilliant mind of New York Times bestselling author David Yoon comes a lightning-fast and scorchingly observant thriller about how we can save ourselves from the very real perils of a virtual world.
Max, a data whiz at the social media company Wren, has gotten a firsthand glimpse of the dark side of big tech. When he questions what his company does with the data they collect, he's fired...then black-balled across Silicon Valley.
With time on his hands and revenge on his mind, Max and his longtime friend (and secretly the love of his life) Akiko, decide to get even by rebooting the internet. After all, in order to fix things, sometimes you have to break them. But when Max and Akiko join forces with a reclusive tech baron, they learn that breaking things can have unintended--and catastrophic--consequences.
"Digitally agile readers will recognize plenty of the ills of our time, and some will empathize with the counterintuitive way our heroes interpret the modern adage 'Move fast and break things.' A fast-paced, contemporary take on The Monkey Wrench Gang, blowing up digital infrastructure instead of dams." - Kirkus Reviews
"[A] clever if uneven near-future thriller...The novel is at its best when satirizing the high-tech business world and internet culture, but loses steam when it shifts into high-octane thriller mode. And the insights into the Faustian bargain between social media users and data harvesters aren't particularly surprising. Still, fans of dystopian fiction will want to check this one out." - Publishers Weekly
"With Version Zero David Yoon holds up a mirror to our ways of life, our hardships and vulnerabilities. As he lures us into the story of a smart, naive young man's desire to make the world a better place, the mirror turns black. This propulsive, visceral, tech-rich tale is both all head and all heart, which is to say, it's all David Yoon." - Caroline Kepnes, author of You
"Version Zero is fast and fun, but more importantly, it's an incisive, thoughtful takedown of Big Tech, our own social media consumption, and ultimately, may just serve as a call to arms." - Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse
"Imagine a world in which the entire Internet is controlled by a handful of shady CEOs. Oh. Right. Well, imagine someone doing something about it. Imagine a high-speed, edge of your seat adventure with stakes higher than you can measure. Imagine it told in David Yoon's unique and singularly engaging prose. That's Version Zero, an addictive, brain-hacking exploration of the tech-run world we live in, and a rollercoaster so fast it will blow your hair off." - Sylvain Neuvel, author of Sleeping Giants
This information about Version Zero was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © David Zaugh
David Yoon grew up in Orange County, California, and now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Nicola Yoon, and their daughter. He drew the illustrations for Nicola's #1 New York Times bestseller Everything, Everything. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Frankly in Love, which was a William C. Morris Award finalist and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature Honor book.
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