A review by bookwyrmknits
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

fast-paced

3.5

This book is weird. There's no way around that. Enjoyable, but weird. I enjoy epistolary novels, so I was super curious about this one (told all via Slack messages) and I definitely enjoyed the ride. I had been expecting more of a SF-angle, though, given  the main character "uploaded his consciousness to Slack" thing. However, that was never really explained, so it was more of a SF gimmick instead of a SF angle.

I'm not usually a fan of workplace drama. This workplace, though... man. They have their share of drama and I couldn't look away. This was a very fast read (partly due to so much white space on the page) and even though there are no physical descriptions of any of the characters, I did feel like I got a good sense for what these characters were like. You can learn a lot about someone from their social media presence, even without any pictures.

(Side note with a minor spoiler:
Near the end, one character has sex with Slackbot possessing another character's body. Slackbot wanted sex, but the owner of the body wasn't consulted.
It didn't impact my enjoyment of the book at all—everything is so weird by this point in the story that I didn't notice the potential implications at the time. However, that is a questionable consent issue, in a very weird way.)
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