In Montreal, in 2032, intern in a cybersecurity firm, Adel Salem, born 22 years earlier in a Kurdish refugee camp in Syria, belongs to a group of extremist activists who fight against the privatization of drinking water and the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods. In this perhaps not-so-distant future where “surveillance capitalism” and artificial intelligence applied to the justice system absolutely dominate, in the heart of an “atrociously peaceful” Quebec, the protagonist of Dissident will have a burst of revolt commensurate with his romantic disappointments and his servitude (“I have been a sheep all my life.”) by targeting a developer of software systems for lethal autonomous weapons. If certain propositions of this exercise of anticipation hit the mark, with this third novel, Jean-Pierre Gorkynian (Sniper2020) offers us a thriller without much narrative tension, inflated with the spirit of the times and accompanied by a rather thin reflection on terrorism.
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