Only when he’s insinuated himself into the heights of you society months later does he realize that he managed to abduct Jin Daiyu, only daughter of the company’s president. The book opens in one of Taipei’s many night markets, where Jason kidnaps a you girl in order to extort her rich parents for the funds to bankroll the plot. Their hope is that making this fact public will allow the Taiwanese legislature to pass stiffer air pollution controls, a remarkably pragmatic goal, though the plan evolves into one in which they decide to blow up the Jin servers that maintain the suits (no cloud backups here), forcing their you (have) owners to unseal their helmets at last. Jason and his friends-hacker Lingyi, cat burglar Iris, smooth grifter Victor and budding crackerjack biophysicist Arun-have hatched a plan to prove that the powerful Jin Corporation, which makes the environment suits that prolong the lives of those who can afford them, is also responsible for the pollution that makes the suits necessary in the first place.
Set in Taiwan, Want follows Jason Zhou, a mei (have-not) petty criminal with his sights set on loftier goals than mere larceny.
Something similar has happened in Cindy Pon’s Want, a “near-future” YA science fiction novel where the dystopia is all too believable because it’s already lurking just around the corner. As someone who grew up reading science fiction, it was a weird and vertiginous moment when the future caught up with William Gibson’s novels and he started writing about our present moment.
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