Five thrillers featuring technofascism

Ani Katz is a writer, photographer, and teacher. She was born and raised on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, and lives in Brooklyn.

Her new novel is Haven, which she calls "a meditation on techno-dystopia masquerading as a locked room mystery."

At CrimeReads Katz tagged five "genre-bending thrillers that employ elements of sci-fi, noir, and horror to explore what happens when the imaginations of the powerful serve the most venal and repressive of goals." One title on the list:

Gliff by Ali Smith

A harrowing and heartbreaking novel, Gliff, like all great thrillers, demands to be read in a few breathless gulps. Siblings Bri and Rose were raised by their mother to reject new technologies and the grasping tentacles of the algorithm in an attempt to hold on to their freedom and humanity, a choice which renders them “unverifiable” and uniquely vulnerable. When their mother is called away, Bri and Rose find themselves running from an authority that is both inexorable and faceless, a threat made visible by the seemingly inescapable painting of red lines around the dwellings of undesirables—a detail both banal and chilling. Gliff explores the terrifying consequences of surveillance and intolerance in a grim, technocratic and totalitarian society that is perilously close in character to the present, and finds possibilities for resistance and resilience in language, art, and connection.

Read about the other titles on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue