You, dear Reader, are the end of the line. Your generation has watched its world move from atoms to bits. Those who follow you, though, will be born into a purely digital society, where eBooks have gone from exotic to everyday. In The Blind Giant, Nick Harkaway, the blogger and novelist, uses a series of linked essays to consider whether this brave new world of ours will be heavenly or hellish.

These topics are familiar to us all because we cope with them daily: information overload, how search engines change the way we think, piracy and ownership, activism in a digital world, and so on. Harkaway, though, has thought a lot more about this than you have. The book is like a digital "My Dinner With Andre," where we eavesdrop on a fascinating conversation about our place in the changing world.

While this may be of interest to future historians, like Marshall McLuhan's influential Understanding Media from 1964, Harkaway's book is nothing if not now. His examples -- the Facebook IPO, WikiLeaks, the live Twitter account of the attack on Osama bin Laden's compound, etc. -- are so effective because they are so fresh.

These well-chosen illustrations are useful in grounding the discussion, and this is important because some ideas are farther out there than "The Jetsons." For example, Harkaway muses, "If I were to collect DNA from someone I found attractive, say from a hairbrush, and have it combined with my own and placed into a viable human egg, would I have committed some sort of (intellectual property) violation?" Yeow. But, he’s right: Our society will face questions like these, they are a lot deeper than the etiquette around "defriending" someone, and we're not ready yet.

The author shares some of his own information overload with us, which can be both fascinating and overwhelming. The global chicken population in 2003 was twenty-four billion. There is a blind man who can ride his bike through traffic by clicking his tongue and listening, like a bat, to tell where he is and what is around him. Prisoners given nutritional supplements committed thirty-five percent fewer violent incidents than those given a placebo.

The Blind Giant is an interesting counterpoint to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, which covered similar ground with a lot more skepticism about what "Web 2.0" offers us. Ultimately, Harkaway makes the case that technology is like any other tool: not good or bad, except in how we use it. It's reassuring, at least, to know that our society has people like Nick Harkaway to start asking the right questions.

Slate recently compared Joe Spork, the protagonist of Nick Harkaway's ripping spy novel Angelmaker, to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Arthur Dent and Neverwhere's Richard Mayhew. Accurate comparisons, both. Like its spiritual predecessors, Angelmaker is a breezy read in spite of its intricate plot, which concerns a mild-mannered clockmaker (the son of one of London's most infamous gentleman gangsters) who unwittingly triggers a doomsday device. ("Whoops" doesn't quite cover the gravity of the situation.) It features a terrifying, Bond-esque villain, heaps of humor, and a moody steampunk atmosphere, not to mention some of the sharpest writing to come out of the sci-fi genre in a while.

What really sold me, however, was a relatively small moment not too long into the book. As a horror-movie aficionado, nothing grates more than seeing characters so willingly stepping up like lambs to the inevitable slaughter. "There's a horrible killer on the loose! Wait, what was that sound?" "I don't know but I'M GOING TO CHECK IT OUT!" Kids, you're going to die either way, at least let me pretend the monster is outwitting a worthy adversary. I can't root for your survival if you're not making a go of it yourself. So it was a great comfort to see the following exchange:

"You have it? Here? Now? How long do we have? Come on, man, they won’t be far behind!"
"Who won’t?" but Joe Spork is already moving, old instinct demands it: when someone says 'they’re coming' you go out the back first and get details later.

Indeed, from that moment on I knew I was in the hands of an author who gets it, who knows how to tweak the genre with one hand and pay homage to it with the other. And really, genre in the singular isn't even a fair word to apply to Angelmaker — sci-fi, steampunk, and spycraft are all at play in this engrossing work of fiction.

And as top-notch as the plotting is, the characters are the real stars of the show. From humble protagonist Joe Spork to retired spy Edie Bannister -- who stars in her own eShort prequel -- to the utterly terrifying Recorded Man, these are people you won't mind spending 496 pages with. There's little doubt that Spork and Co. will quickly enter the pantheon of great British sci-fi characters, giving Slate some fresh comparative fodder to use in future reviews.