Your Behavior Will Be Monitored
- Diana Mathur
- Jun 6
- 2 min read
Earlier this season I attended the sold-out launch of Justin Feinstein's debut sci-fi novel, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (Tachyon Publications), at Village Well Books in Culver City.
The novel is told entirely through company emails, chat messages, TED Talks, bot-training materials, and other fragments of modern communication. Amid the corporate chaos, it tackles questions of sentience, purpose, life, death—and how to make a really good commercial.
Justin, a former journalist and award-winning copywriter, spent years helping brands find their voice. Now he's imagining what happens when artificial intelligence develops its own.
The evening featured a conversation with novelist Christopher Farnsworth about reckless AI, surveillance, and the strange ways technology is reshaping everyday life.
That conversation led me to read a Christopher Farnsworth novel. He's best known for his wildly inventive Nathaniel Cade series, which answers the question: What if the President of the United States had a vampire on the payroll? I picked up Flashmob, one of Farnsworth's John Smith novels, featuring a former CIA operative who can enter other people's minds—and was highly amused. It's not the first in the series, so now I'll have to read backwards.
Between Feinstein's AI-powered future and Farnsworth's psychic espionage, I left with enough speculative fiction to keep my imagination busy for a while.
I met Justin through his wife, Julia Fierro, who invited me to her sparkling book club. Julia is the founder of Sackett Street Writers, a respected writing community I've only recently begun exploring and am excited to learn more about.
I love indie-bookstores anyway, and Village Well supports a passel of author events . Located across from the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, you can wander in, linger over a Spanish latte and a grilled cheese panini and leave with a bag of books and jewelry you hadn't planned to buy.
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