Cloudthinker

By Andrew McGlinchey

Deal Ends: 2025-08-30

WINNER: First Place 2023 Writer's Digest E-Book Awards for for Science Fiction. Numbers don't lie. But people do. ✭✭✭✭✭ "If ChatGPT had a villain origin story, this would be it" Boogie Wu was supposed to be a genius success story: child math prodigy, Stanford PhD, rising star at Magenta Labs. Then she burned out, flamed out, and disappeared. Now, years later, the trillion-dollar company that cast her aside has launched a startlingly skillful AI. It drives. It cooks. It thinks. It takes more and more jobs from humans. And Boogie’s long-lost proof—the one she cracked in a sensory deprivation tank in rural Japan—might be the code running underneath it all. As old friends resurface, whistleblowers go silent, and protest turns violent, Boogie is pulled back into a web of ambition, regret, and dangerous invention. She thought solving the math was the hard part. But when your mind is the blueprint for a machine that could reshape the world, Boogie must decide: expose the truth and risk everything, or fight a machine intelligence that knows her better than she knows herself. Set in a future so near you can touch it, Cloudthinker is a profound and propulsive new thriller that confronts big tech, memory and consciousness, and what it means to be human. Selected Reader Reviews: ✭✭✭✭✭ "Crackling near-term, hard-SF dawn-of-AGI novel. More ideas per page than any book I've read in ages... Rather than worrying about whether AI understands in a way that would satisfy a philosopher, he asks whether they feel in a way that would terrify an ethicist." - Harry B. ✭✭✭✭✭ "WOW. I always hope but never expect a book to be this good! How much did I ENJOY it?... and on a scale of 1-10 this was 17-19 or something!" - Randy F. ✭✭✭✭✭ "This book will take you down the winding trail of "what ifs" that are fast becoming a reality for all of us. Thrilling and thought provoking. I forgot this was a work of fiction several times." - Joe S. ✭✭✭✭✭ "In many ways, Cloudthinker feels like a movie waiting for a screenplay." - Jules K ✭✭✭✭✭ "The timeliness of the AI progression nailed it, I think - everything from Wuhan to the current state of language models felt like the changes were worryingly plausible" - Sean R. ✭✭✭✭✭ "You can read it as a philosophical and ethical journey into some of the most interesting topics emerging in today's society." - JT. ✭✭✭✭✭ "I picked it up and read it in a single sitting. And then went back and read it again a few days later. A gripping and engaging story both times!" - Jordan D-M. ✭✭✭✭✭ "This distinctly creative, imaginative, and profound debut novel will delight fans of sci-fi, thrillers/suspense stories, technothrillers, and cyberpunk". - Terri Stepek for Reader Views ✭✭✭✭✭ "Hits the zeitgeist in a big way." - Jennifer Hill for Reedsy Discovery Read more