On the HahaFiction shelf

Sewer, Gas & Electric

The Public Works Trilogy

by Matt Ruff

Joan Fine's murder investigation leads back toward her billionaire ex-husband Harry Gant, whose latest Manhattan project is a new Tower of Babel. In this imagined 2023, her investigative companion is a computerized Ayn Rand, confined to a hurricane lamp and distinctly unwilling to help.

Science fiction Absurdism Parody Satire

From the publisher’s blurb

“The year is 2023.”

Read the full description at Grove Atlantic

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What makes it funny?

Gant's skyscraper has a souvenir shop that sells bottled air. At the opening party, guests get motion-sickness medicine in their food so they can enjoy the storm outside. The man celebrating his triumph over the skyline is himself afraid of heights.

The comedy at work

Ruff tests grand ideas against embarrassingly practical circumstances. Gant's self-image requires careful public relations, while Rand has to dispense her philosophy from a portable lamp. Ruff also rewrites the capitalist pirate of Atlas Shrugged as a submarine ecoterrorist.

Try this if…

Readers who enjoy elaborate science-fiction conspiracies and arguments with Ayn Rand have plenty to follow here. Publishers Weekly praised the silliness but found the characters and language too thin to sustain the crowded plot.

Good to know

The satire includes a pandemic targeting Black people and robots built around racist caricatures. Its imagined future was written before September 11. Despite the subtitle, this is one standalone novel.

A few distinguishing details

An unwilling computerized Ayn Rand as investigative assistant
A mutant great white shark in the Manhattan sewers

From book groups

Questions readers ask

Is this really a trilogy?: Ruff says the subtitle is unintentionally confusing: he always intended it as a single book, with no sequel.
Was the airplane crash in the opening written after September 11?: No. Ruff says he wrote it long before the attacks, drawing on the 1945 plane crash into the Empire State Building.