THE RETURN

In the near future, a young man refuses to accept total immersion in the tech-obsessed culture that society foists upon him.

Aiden Baylor is not your typical California high school senior. His peers are consumed with petty insults and completely enslaved to their high-tech environment—virtual reality games, brain chip implants, text messages sent with the blink of an eye or a tilt of the chin—but Aiden would rather grab his guitar and connect with nature. Other kids in his class do as they’re told and accept the status quo, but Aiden questions everything, especially the bunk passed down to him by his teachers. In one way, though, Aiden is just like everyone else: He has a debilitating crush he’s been nursing since kindergarten, and the girl, Ava Durand, has finally started to notice him. And she, too, may not be satisfied with the tech-obsessed and “ill-informed, confused society” in which she’s mired. It just so happens that Aiden’s uncle, Govind, is one of the most powerful arms of that technocracy—the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. Uncle Govind and Aunt L’Eren are out west ostensibly for L’Eren to give birth around family, but Aiden quickly senses that Govind might be in town for “professional” reasons, and he’s right. Uncle Govind is in California to visit DAPHNE, the all-knowing, state-of-the-art supercomputer in charge of American policies both domestic and foreign. When DAPHNE’s systems go haywire—seemingly resulting from retaliations against the supercomputer’s own attacks on Russian and Chinese systems—the fail-safes of American homeland security are rendered uncontrollable, and the country is poised against arguably the greatest threat of foreign invasion it has ever faced. Though Stevens does sometimes fall a bit too in love with her own imagination—surely we don’t need a description of the provenance and pitfalls of every futuristic device—her worldbuilding is still a delight, and Aiden and Ava provide readers with all the classic fun of an us-against-the-world tale.

A fast-paced ride through a dangerous, plausible world dominated by AI.