fiction

Much of Hydra’s interface would have looked familiar to anyone who’s used the dark web marketplace Silk Road or its myriad knock-off clones: you can glance through the forums and customer reviews to check which pills and powders will rock your socks off and which will leave you feeling worse than Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction.”

A slim science fiction novel that looks at our “precious and precarious” world through the eyes of six astronauts on the International Space Station has won the 2024 Booker Prize.

“All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”

“I realized I’m part of someone else’s fiction.”

But meta layers of surrealism are on brand for Aitken, who said he’s “really interested in that idea of, like, where the line between fiction and nonfiction gets blurred.”