Utopia or dystopia?

Book critics are divided over the quality of Eggerss highly anticipated novel The Circle,which has gone on sale. But in Silicon Valley and beyond,the books theme promises to spark an even bigger debate over the 21st-century hyper-connected world that Eggers describes.

Set in an undefined future time,Eggerss novel tells the story of Mae Holland,a young idealist who comes to work at The Circle,an immensely powerful technology company that has conquered all its competitors by creating a single login for people to search,shop and socialise.

Initial orders lifted the book to No. 21 spot on Amazon,no small achievement for literary fiction. In the tech world,some readers have bristled at the reflection of their world. It makes me feel defensive,because it hits home, said Esther Dyson,an investor in tech start-ups.

I dont think this book is really going to make people stop using social media,and I dont think thats at all Daves intent, said Jennifer Jackson,Eggerss editor at Knopf.

Eggers,who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,declined to be interviewed. He is not doing anything to publicise the book.

The Circle most closely resembles Google,with its Google Glass-like retinal computers,initiatives to map far-flung parts of the world,a triumvirate running the company,anti-trust investigations and a secret lab for future projects.

The Circles founders have mantras that paint a troubling,dystopian picture,like sharing is caring and secrets are lies.

Those refrains are similar in tone to remarks made by executives like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric E Schmidt of Google,who once said,If you have something that you dont want anyone to know,maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place.

Eggers portrays Silicon Valley as a place with ostentatious goals and an idealistic belief that its technology will change the world for the better,no matter the potential consequences. Benedict Evans,a tech and media analyst at Enders Analysis,a London research firm,said that Eggerss descriptions captured two qualities typical of tech companies: unbridled optimism and the failure to understand real-world consequences of new technologies.

But,he added,The flipside is there is a sort of utopian and a Panglossian approach that comes from never having seen failure and never having to deal with people who arent in Silicon Valley.

Yet part of the reason The Circle can seem unnerving is that it stops short of far-fetched science fiction. Many of the inventions are just one small step further than tech companies have already gone.

Circle employees and lawmakers go transparent,meaning that they wear cameras that broadcast everything they see much like Google Glass can do. In other cases,Eggerss dystopian imaginings seem to have come true in the time since he wrote the novel.

Eggers is using fiction to ask questions that writers like Rebecca Solnit,Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov have raised in non-fiction. The novel continues the debate,and asks whether the semi-imaginary world of The Circle is inevitable.

JULIE BOSMAN amp; CLAIRE CAIN MILLER