Lincoln Michel
Lincoln Michel’s debut novel, The Body Scout (Orbit), was named one of the ten best SFF books of 2021 by the New York Times and one of the fifty best science fiction of all time by Esquire. He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and his fiction can be found in The Paris Review, Granta, Lightspeed, NOON, One Story, and elsewhere.
Notifications
By Lincoln MichelIn “Notifications,” Lincoln Michel looks closely at how a person's day can be awkwardly reconfigured by an algorithm. Michel's stories frequently adjust the knobs of the present and settle in the uncanny valley, like Saunders's, or amplify a feeling that something is fundamentally off with our timeline. Here, Michel explores the emotional implications of technology, a sort of hard sci-fi realism that drops the reader into a plausible hologram of workplace interaction. The always overthought, dreamlike logic is not dissimilar to the way a Kafka story, like “The Judgment,” operates. Kafkaesque indecision, but now with cell phones!
