Agents Of The Internet Apocalypse: A Novel
The Internet Apocalypse Trilogy
Hardcover | Kindle
Written by Wayne Gladstone
Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press
Release Date: July 21st, 2015
Cover Price: $24.99

This book has the most unique premise of any book I have ever read. And I read a lot. It is about the apocalypse. It is about a dystopian world.

I know, I know. That’s not unique! There’s a million dystopian apocalypse books! There’s zombies, “Captain Tripps,” aliens, nuclear catastrophes, government conspiracies, weather anomalies, sorcery, robot takeovers, and space disasters. What makes this book so unique?

Just read the title. It’s about the INTERNET Apocalypse! It’s the Agents Of The Internet Apocalypse by Wayne Gladstone.

That’s it. The internet went down. And it was apocalyptic. And truthfully, this book is part of a trilogy, so technically the trilogy has the most unique premise. I devoured the first one, Notes Of The Internet Apocalypse, so I could review this one.

Just think about it. What if the internet went down and didn’t come back. After several hours of rebooting your modem, calling help desks (wait – do you own a land line?), and frantically trying to get news, any news – on when it would be back up, what would happen? What would you do?

First… I would immediately lose touch with about 90% of my acquaintences, open a land line account with Ma Bell, and be thankful that although I have thousands of books in my Kindle cloud, I still have hundreds of books on my shelves.

Wayne Gladstone is a reluctant “Internet Messiah” who lost his mind and ended up institutionalized, convinced he hallucinated a bunch of people and memories. Once he gets sprung, he immediately takes off for LA to win his ex-wife back. Finding his kind, but fucked up, and very real friend Tobey, he gets swept up in a cause he no longer really cares about. Or so he keeps insisting. Tobey makes copies of his journal which goes “paper viral” and the government is super interested in him and his ever growing group of followers.

Gladstone (the character) gets quite philosophical. Maybe that’s what will happen to us all if the internet left, forcing us to ponder instead of regurgitate viral social media opinions disguised as facts.

“Things come in bunches after a long nothing because life needs life to happen.

The quest is to get the NET back up for real and to figure out who the culprit is. Is it the government? Or worse? And really… should the internet come back? It was/is an addiction that everyone (except some really old people) had/has.

Agents Of The Internet Apocalypse is 250 pages of interesting. I can’t wait for the third one.

Press release:

Gladstone, the so-called “Internet Messiah,” has not only failed to bring back the Web, but his search has landed him in a New York City psychiatric ward. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well either, filled with disconnected Internet users still jonesing for a fix, and an increasingly draconian Government, interrogating and detaining anyone deemed a “person of interest” under the NET Recovery Act.
For Gladstone, however, finding the Net is less important than heading to Los Angeles to win back his ex-wife. He takes up residence on the couch of his old friend, gossip-blogger Tobey, while trying to rebuild his lost romance. But when Gladstone’s old journal account of the Internet Apocalypse goes “paper viral,” his newfound celebrity puts him at the forefront of the Internet Reclamation Movement. Soon he is a target for shadowy government agents, and a reluctant collaborator with Anonymous who provides a clue that promises to explain the Internet’s disappearance.
Full of funny yet cutting social commentary, Agents of the Internet Apocalypse continues the trilogy that imagines a dystopian world without the Web.

Agents Of The Internet Apocalypse