How would you categorise the books pip adam is writing these days? You might say something like “political experimental science fiction”. You could then throw in a word like “satirical”. It is not just me who is calling these books science fiction, or at least suggesting they are sci-fi adjacent. Her last novel, Audition, has been shortlisted for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction. I think her new one, kluge, lowercased like her name, would be eligible too.
The “experimental” part should be heeded as well. I remember it took about five attempts before I got through the first section of Audition, which is a dialogue between three giants in a spaceship that is being propelled by sound. She does not always make it easy, even if sometimes the satire can make it funny and the politics can make it accessible and contemporary. So it is with kluge, a novel about artificial intelligence.
What subject could be more contemporary, more urgent and more deserving of political satire? Hardly a day goes by without some alarming, potentially civilisation-ending news from the tech sector, much of it propagated by the world’s worst people. They are begging for mockery and take-down.
The new novel opens as a disembodied intelligence is telling its own story from a distant future, by adopting the format of a stand-up comedy special. We never move outside that intelligence or that constrained point of view, even as the narrator is relying on old footage captured by surveillance cameras, laptops and phones to piece together its story of a tech company run by a tech bro known only as HE/HIM. The company has been developing an AI system called Gene. HE/HIM is a familiar tech type: narcissistic, thin-skinned, needy, self-important. He speaks in a language that is both fantastical and heartless. You will probably recognise the sources of some of these opinions and perspectives.
“Somebody says, ‘Are we completely blowing out what the value of a body is, completely? We’ve never seen such a high value on the life of a body.’”
I think I can pick that one. But does this remind you of anyone?
“We buy many things and once they are ours – within months sometimes – we reduce them to rubble. Literally – start-ups, products, rockets, property, the ocean … That is why HE has so many children. HE invests in HIS children growing, maturing, having some children in case HE needs something later – a kidney, some stem cells, an heir, an army. HIS children are part of the diversification of his commodity-investment portfolio.”
Or how about this? It is much lower hanging fruit.
“Everybody’s got = ‘bills they got to pay’. Am I right?”
There are marketing meetings and emails about restructuring proposals. There are text messages and smart watches. The settings are corporate non-places filmed by surveillance cameras. There is also the language of messianic anti-wokeness: “We are last now. We here are pariah, we are passed over, we are cancelled. Models who run herbal-supplement companies that are valued at far less than our company laugh at us but I have seen it and we will be first in this new world order. We are the victims of a morality of the weak, which has evolved in opposition to our strength, power and achievement … Woke is an idol society worships at. We have done nothing to smash this idol.”
This is a book written in a state of anger or maybe dismay. The author herself describes it as a scream in a dark room in response to how the the world felt in 2025 (“Genocide, war, denial of life-saving medical care, the rise of unchecked wealth, soaring unemployment, torture, dangerously unqualified ego-driven men in power everywhere”). But it is funny, too, and original and imaginative. A straightforward rant about the AI ogres would quickly become tiresome. Readers want and deserve a much more creative response.
So we get comedy. Of course the stand-up comedy world has its share of ego-driven men with obnoxious opinions. While the book’s conceit of a stand-up special is a bit clunky and not always sustained, the idea of comedy allows for an unexpected dimension to emerge in the book – and adam has always been good at the unexpected (such as the still stunning ending of The New Animals or the plot twists in Nothing to See). The tech boss’ speech about wokeness escalates until HE reveals that the coded solution to the future can be found in an episode of an old TV sitcom. And while the sitcom is never named by adam, it is clearly Seinfeld and the episode in question is one titled “The Cartoon”.
It came from the ninth, last season of Seinfeld, when the humour had started to turn sour and unfunny. As ever in Seinfeld, there were three narrative strands. In one of them, Elaine fails to see the joke in a New Yorker cartoon, hence the episode title. In another, George dates a woman who looks like Jerry. But it is the third strand that matters most. It is a storyline that has an actress and comedian named Sally Weaver taking revenge on Jerry Seinfeld himself. The original premise of the series was that it was framed by Jerry’s stand-up routine, as though the episode was the everyday life material that would be distilled into his comic observations. They had cut the opening and closing routines by the ninth season, but the idea that a woman could take the stand-up stage and have a hit show with material that mocked Jerry was a subversive overturning of the natural order.
Is this book’s narrator therefore the Sally Weaver to HE/HIM’s Jerry? Possibly. I’m not sure how deep this rabbit hole goes but it must be worth knowing that Sally was played by comedian Kathy Griffin, who got in big trouble in 2017 for a photo in which she appeared to be holding up the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump. And Trump is surely one of the unqualified ego-driven men adam had as a model, not least because of the way HE/HIM whines about being ridiculed by a popular live TV show. Five years later, Griffin got in some other trouble for apparently impersonating Elon Musk on Twitter. And of course Musk is all over kluge.
No one else in New Zealand is writing books like this. It is not just her subject matter that sets adam apart. She has also honed a style that is direct, unsentimental, even defiantly unliterary. Descriptions of action are plodding and repetitive, yet also oddly hypnotic, as the narrator observes the movement of their body in relation to other bodies and the spaces they are in. There are many long passages like this one, outlining where a body is in a hallway:
“By 8am my body is standing again. It tries to open the door to the room scrum is in last night with my hands and arms. It runs at the door with my shoulder without much commitment. The door doesn’t give an inch. My index finger tries the elevator button. The elevator works. My body goes to a coffee shop nearby. Everybody looks at my body and at each other after they look at my body.”
In her author’s note, adam makes it clear there is a political point to this intense focus. The book is the work of a human body. She does not only mean that in a tech world, we should value organic, human fleshiness. She is also talking about the individual human subject. But all that seems obvious and I took something else from it. The out-of-body descriptions throughout kluge read like the perspective of something experiencing a dissociative episode. Equally, the painstaking focus on attempting to interpret facial expressions, body language and social cues reads like a book narrated by someone who is autistic.
Would it surprise you if I said it also reads like a story of hope? Maybe. But adam must have figured out that one of the privileges of fiction is to rewrite the future. At some time between now and the distant present of the narrator, there will be a revolution. It turns out to be surprisingly easy and bloodless. “You look around and realise there are more of your bodies than the bodies who ruin your lives and you revolt.”
As a reading experience, kluge is challenging and even frustrating. But in other ways it is fascinating and singular. One of the traits of adam’s political writing is an instinctive compassion for the underdogs and marginalised, whether they are the underpaid workers of The New Animals (her John Key novel) and Nothing to See, the incarcerated populations of her prison novel Audition and all the labourers who contribute to the knowledge base of the rapacious AI companies described in kluge. Which is most of us.
“Our company steals 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Emails also. When we run out of texts we transcribe audio. When we run out of audio we transcribe video.”
If this is a protest novel, that is one of the ways in which it became personal for adam. As she outlines in her author’s note, the tech companies stole three of her books to train their large language models. I imagine they didn’t ask. Like Sally Weaver, perhaps, she is stealing some of her words back. Could we call this “Bring me the head of Sam Altman”?
kluge by pip adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.
