Award-winning author Susan Daitch's new novel, The Adjudicator, is a visionary cyberpunk mystery that explores the boundaries of consciousness and individual autonomy within an authoritarian state that controls the genetics of its citizens.
In a near future where the surveillance state legislates the genetic code of its citizens, babies are created in a laboratory according to a template set by parents and the corporation. It is a utopian world of perfect control, where disease has been eliminated and the human genome has reached apotheosis. Mistakes, though unlikely, still occur, and it is adjudicator Zedi Loew's job to fix them. One day, a cold case file based on an absurd premise crosses her desk: that gene-coding can go beyond structuring the body, it can alter consciousness. Fearing exposure, Zedi's boss makes the case top priority, and she has only a few days to solve it. The case will prove to be an entry into a dangerous labyrinth, and Zedi follows a taut thread of information, one which, she will learn, connects to the corporation's hidden mechanism of power as well as her own origin story.
About the Author :
Susan Daitch graduated from Barnard College and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is the author of six novels and a collection of short stories. Her short fiction and essays have appeared inGuernica,Tablet,Tin House,McSweeney's, Bomb, Conjunctions, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, and elsewhere. Susan's work was the subject of aReview of Contemporary FictionHer first novel,L.C., was a recipient of an NEA heritage award and a Lannan Foundation grant.Fall OutHer novel,Siege of Comedianswas listed as one of the best books of 2021 inThe Wall Street Journal. One of her essays was listed as a Notable in the Best American Essays 2022. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.
Review :
"An engrossing story that grapples with dystopian possibilities lying at the intersection of ethics and technology. In a not-too-distant future where the state regulates its citizens’ genetics, a closeted empath gets called upon to investigate a death that challenges the infallibility of a totalitarian system. Blending SF with suspense and interweaving science with speculation, Daitch’s novel offers readers a glimpse into a future that is as alien as it is disturbingly familiar."
—Kirkus
“In The Adjudicator, Susan Daitch delivers an intricately layered dystopia that reveals the havoc wreaked by genetic engineering and the pervasive reach of corporate power. With razor-edged prose, fierce intelligence, and humor she crafts a noir-infused tale of desperation and control, pushing the boundaries of the novel’s form through multimedia elements to create an experience as thought-provoking as it is gripping.”
—Ross Benjamin, translator of The Diaries of Franz Kafka
"How can something so smart, so ethically engaging, so subversive and sane, also be fun? Susan Daitch has made it happen, with wit and verve and empathy. Empathy is, at least partly, what The Adjudicator is about. Its narrator, sharing the DNA of a film noir gumshoe, searches for clues in a futuristic dystopia, a place where morality is up for grabs, where perfect control is a hair’s breadth from chaos, a world both imaginary, and eerily reminiscent of our own." —John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet
"A bad trip journey through the tangled knot history of technology, art, and capitalism through the form of a sci-fi mystery page turner. Daitch’s kaleidoscopic range is only bested by her stunning accomplishment—it burns in a million ways."
—Sammy Harkham, author of Everything Together
"Who are we when we become made-to-order? And do they take returns? Profound questions of self and consciousness are sewn into a propulsive spycraft plot set within a Byzantine surveillance state populated by designer babies. Susan Daitch expertly superimposes biotech, grim office politics, and literalized empathy to construct her Pynchonesque scenes. A mirror-dream to get lost in."
—Eugene Lim, author of Search History
"If the sentences comprising the text of this wonderful illustrated novel were to be disentangled, like a strand of DNA, they would stretch from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Brighton Beach.”
—Ben Katchor, author of The Dairy Restaurant
FOREWORD REVIEWS (MARCH / APRIL 2025)
A woman hiding personal neurological secrets probes the limits of genetic control in The Adjudicator, Susan Daitch’s tense dystopian novel.
Zedi, an adjudicator for Pangenica, a major corporation where babies’ genes are coded to delete “extreme cases of physical or mental aberration” and fulfill parents’ predetermined specifications, scrutinizes customer complaints. Zedi is tasked with an old case claiming a genetic switch between the consciousnesses of two children. As Zedi investigates this explosive possibility of genetically altering consciousness, she masks her mirror-touch synesthesia (experiencing others’ observed feelings and sensations as her own) in a world wherein neurodivergence is erased.
Zedi’s investigative commentary is deadpan, injecting dry, almost glib, levity into the text: The impossibility of forthright inquiries, she quips, is “like D-Day is approaching, you’re an Allied soldier, and you walk into the German headquarters in Normandy and say, ‘Could you show me your plans, if you don’t mind, old boy?’” Still, her attempted inscrutability is grueling; she absorbs even the “near-death reactions” of a boy whose neck is stuck between subway doors. These infectious details of Zedi’s elevated stakes, magnified by references to people “disappeared” in totalitarian fashion, create an oppressive malaise of claustrophobic entrapment spiked with panic-inducing, inescapable suspense.
Acting as a gritty, hard-boiled detective, Zedi follows dangerous, semilegitimate leads; circumventing bureaucracy, she borrows a fake identity to collect DNA from a rehabilitation facility and accepts clandestine collaborations with shifty men. Through included multimedia clippings of photographs, documents, and scannable barcodes linked to animations and videos, this sleuthing is made interactive. Meanwhile, the book’s pressing philosophizing about individuality amid widespread eugenics is consequential: Zedi struggles to formulate a stable, baseline definition of consciousness in the first place.
Suppressing her own brain’s proclivities, a woman unravels the enigma of manipulating consciousness in the futuristic noir novel The Adjudicator.
—Isabella Zhou, Foreword Reviews
PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS OF SUSAN DAITCH
“…like Roberto Bolaño’s gothic “2666.” Yet for all its latent darkness, Siege of Comedians is inquisitive … exhibiting a boundless curiosity in its characters’ unusual professions, a delight in the uncanny ways that history connects and repeats itself and a quixotic sense of hope that whatever has been lost to time might, one day, be found and restored.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Best Books of 2021, Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"With shades of Umberto Eco and Paul Auster, this brilliant, addictive adventure novel is about the search for a mythical lost city located somewhere in modern-day Iran. As a succession of explorers and shady characters dig deeper into the landscape, the ancient secret of Suolucidir is gradually revealed. This is brainy, escapist fiction at its best."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"The author's prose is rich with winking allusions and sendups of modern tomb-raiding tropes, down to an explorer with 'a long stiff braid down her back.'"
—The New Yorker
“Daitch’s ebullient latest (after The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir) uses genre conventions as a jumping-off point for offbeat explorations in three interlocking novellas. Throughout, Daitch finds stimulating connections and writes with sharp irony and joy. This offers delights on every page.”
—Publishers Weekly
" . . . cerebral, satirical, and entertaining archaeological thriller . . . this richly crafted and handsomely written novel rewards rereading."
—David Cooper, New York Journal of Books
"In The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir, history is revealed as ghost and prankster, archaeological remnant, information feed. This search for a vanished city takes in rare book rooms and obituaries, travel records, borders drawn and redrawn by war, boxes of records from a sanatorium where Kafka stayed, a statuette of Disney's Aladdin, and quotes from Ignatz Mouse and Samuel Johnson. Where is the city? Where are we? We are lost, and will one day be someone else's Suolucidir, at best. In the meantime, Daitch's latest is a beguiling and virtuoso companion to our inevitable end: a novel that wrenches, sentence by fine sentence, some order from the chaos, while never shortchanging the chaos itself."
—Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
"Susan Daitch has written a literary barnburner of epic proportions. The question buried at the core of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir is one of empirical—or is the imperial?—knowledge itself. Her labyrinthine tale of archeological derring-do calls to mind both 1984 and 2666, and does so by looking backward in time as well as forward. It is also utterly original, the work of a visionary writer with an artistic sensibility all her own."
—Andrew Ervin, author of Burning Down George Orwell's House
"Susan Daitch's The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir is a daring undertaking, the creation of an ancient land of fantastic proportions, its borders touching other countries we think we know while still remaining elusive and mysterious. This is a novel of archeology and history, of mythology and empire, powered by an undeniable call to adventure and a deep yearning for understanding, written by a novelist who manages to surprise on nearly every page."
—Matt Bell, author of Scrapper
