What would you do if you had twenty-four waking hours per day? As tempting as that prospect sounds, journalist Jamie Vega learns that these extra hours aren’t necessarily all they’re cracked up to be in Victor Manibo’s debut, The Sleepless, a sci-fi thriller which came out last year.
In a near-future world where a strange pandemic has left nearly a quarter of the population with a condition called hyperinsomnia, Jamie Vega is one of the Sleepless. His body no longer seems to need—and, in fact, is not even capable of—sleep. When he’s not picking up and perfecting a stream of new hobbies or attempting to find rest through various meditation techniques, Jamie funnels most of his extra hours into his work as a journalist for C&P, chasing groundbreaking stories about corrupt politicians and the insidious networks of both pro-Sleepless and anti-Sleepless extremist groups. He’s on the brink of exposing a particularly big scandal when he arrives at the office to find his boss, Simon, dead at his desk. Simon’s death at first appears to be a suicide, but when the pieces don’t quite fit together and an impending corporate takeover opens up an endless swirl of motives, the police launch a closer investigation. Jamie, it turns out, was not only the first person to find Simon’s body, but also the last person to see him alive the previous night. Even more troubling, Jamie has no memory of those key hours and that last encounter with Simon. With no good answers to give when the police come knocking, Jamie realizes he’ll have to find out who the real murderer is if he’s to have any hope of clearing his name. But as more gaps open up in his memory, Jamie begins to doubt whether he can even trust himself.
The novel does an intriguing job of presenting Sleeplessness as a complex social issue. On the one hand, those with hyperinsomnia are marginalized and discriminated against. There is often a stigma associated with the condition, and as an invisible, non-inherited difference that affects one’s lifestyle, Manibo draws parallels between Sleeplessness and the real-life experiences of the LGBTQ community: characters have to “come out” as Sleepless to their friends and families; they face slurs and harassment and are targeted by religious hate groups; and they can face social isolation, which they remedy by finding community with other Sleepless folks at designated bars and neighborhoods. On the flip side, hyperinsomniacs have an advantage in a capitalist society. Despite the stigma, employers often prefer workers who can devote extra hours to the job. Meanwhile, many of the Sleepless are able to double their income by working multiple full-time jobs and save on rent by living in smaller apartments without a bed or separate bedroom. This economic incentive drives the demand for artificially induced hyperinsominia through an illegal process called biohacking. And as the Sleepless population grows, their excessive consumption of resources and contribution to increased corporate expectations in turn feeds back into the social stigma against them, creating a feedback loop that threatens to spiral out of control.
Lastly, I always have to mention one of my favorite tropes: the unreliable narrator. Astute readers will realize much quicker than Jamie that his memory issues are much more serious than normal forgetfulness. Jamie can’t quite be trusted as a narrator of his own experience when he can’t even remember everything that he does and often doesn’t even notice until long after the fact that he is missing several hours. Not only can the reader not quite trust Jamie, but Jamie can’t even trust himself, wondering at times if he really could be guilty of the murder. The anxiety of not being able to trust your own thoughts and memories is one of the most frightening elements of the book, perhaps even more so than a pandemic that eludes science, an unknown killer, and corrupt corporations.
If you like thoughtful, near-future science fiction, anticapitalist critique, and a good murder mystery, definitely check out The Sleepless. You can find it on shelves now at your favorite retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!