Book Review: To Kill a Unicorn, by DC Palter
A Silicon Valley tale of techbros, teleportation, and elephants.
Pandamoon Publishing, 2023, 354 pages
A wild, page-turning ride through the crazy, high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where startup founders aided by venture capitalists and blockchain tycoons are out to make their billions no matter what the cost. A unique novel with scenes in manga where a pair of aging elephants hold the key to stopping the murders.
SüprDüpr is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley until one of the company’s physicists disappears and hacker Ted Hara sets out to find his missing friend.
Led by a glamorous young scientist and funded by billionaire crypto investors, SüprDüpr promises to revolutionize transportation. But as Ted investigates the secretive company, nothing is what it seems.
Are the millions the company is spending building a homeless shelter truly corporate philanthropy? Or is the company a complex real estate scam? As the homeless residents of San Jose begin disappearing, too, it appears something far more sinister is happening downtown. But why was his friend searching for a pair of elephants before he disappeared?
Days away from the technology unveiling that will confer unimaginable riches on the company’s investors, Ted becomes trapped in a web of corruption protecting its founder. While avoiding the police, he has to find out why people are disappearing before it’s too late.
I only picked up this book because I have been reading DC Palter's Japonica publication on Medium. Palter is a venture capitalist who has lived in Japan, speaks Japanese with native fluency, and writes lots of articles about Japanese language and culture. Like most debut novels written by someone with a previous successful career who wanted to scratch his novelist itch, To Kill a Unicorn is readable but rough, with a decent story and some emotional beats but prose that tries too earnestly for "literary" and characters who sometimes resemble a bundle of cliches more than people.
As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley, one of the pleasures of this book was seeing so many familiar places namechecked. Cupertino, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Stevens Creek Boulevard and Half Moon Bay - I have been to all the places the protagonist visits. Like the protagonist, I also miss those long-vanished orchards that once dotted the landscape. To Kill a Unicorn also reminded me of early (late 90s era) Salon articles and short stories, when Silicon Valley was an optimistic glittery place high on its own supply and stonks always went up. In other words, kind of like now.
The inspiration, according to the author, was Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, and Bad Blood, the story of the fraudulent start-up Theranos and its beautiful blonde sociopathic founder, Elizabeth Holmes. To Kill a Unicorn combines a Murukami-like protagonist and a villain who is practically a carbon copy of Elizabeth Holmes.
Tatsu "Teddy" Hara is a Japanese-American computer programmer working for a FAANG company and turning into an alcoholic borderline hikikimori. He's got abandonment issues (his father drank himself to death, his mother was an angry, bitter neurotic who committed suicide) and his best friend Ryu has disappeared. Ryu's sister (who used to be Teddy's girlfriend) shows up asking Teddy to help find him, leading Teddy down a rabbit hole investigating a mysterious startup called SüprDüpr which is going to "revolutionize transportation." The story takes us on a satirical ride through the Bay Area's homeless problem, Silicon Valley's absurd startup culture, elephant preserves, Japantown, and every techbro trope (Bitcoin, blockchain, Soylent, gourmet ramen-topped pizza).
Teddy is a mess, and is an extremely annoying protagonist in the same way that Murakami's protagonists are annoying: he's a passive schmuck who keeps making shocked-Pikachu faces when the police don't immediately go arrest the billionaire when he tells them she's using a teleportation device to murder homeless people, and despite being a dweeby alcoholic loser, his hot lawyer waifu ex is still into him.
To Kill a Unicorn is probably more enjoyable if you are into the culture of Silicon Valley. Much of the story was a bit implausible (besides the central conceit of a working teleportation device) and a lot Nipponophile-geeky, and the Elizabeth Holmes expy villain was more Hollywood than the real Holmes. The "Learn to code" ending had me groaning (especially given the current bloodbath in the tech industry, where SSEs are being laid off by the thousands and no one is hiring homeless HTML coders like it's 1999), but if you are willing to stretch your suspension of disbelief, it's also funny and touching. Especially if you like elephants.
My complete list of book reviews.
Pandamoon Publishing, 2023, 354 pages
A wild, page-turning ride through the crazy, high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where startup founders aided by venture capitalists and blockchain tycoons are out to make their billions no matter what the cost. A unique novel with scenes in manga where a pair of aging elephants hold the key to stopping the murders.
SüprDüpr is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley until one of the company’s physicists disappears and hacker Ted Hara sets out to find his missing friend.
Led by a glamorous young scientist and funded by billionaire crypto investors, SüprDüpr promises to revolutionize transportation. But as Ted investigates the secretive company, nothing is what it seems.
Are the millions the company is spending building a homeless shelter truly corporate philanthropy? Or is the company a complex real estate scam? As the homeless residents of San Jose begin disappearing, too, it appears something far more sinister is happening downtown. But why was his friend searching for a pair of elephants before he disappeared?
Days away from the technology unveiling that will confer unimaginable riches on the company’s investors, Ted becomes trapped in a web of corruption protecting its founder. While avoiding the police, he has to find out why people are disappearing before it’s too late.
I only picked up this book because I have been reading DC Palter's Japonica publication on Medium. Palter is a venture capitalist who has lived in Japan, speaks Japanese with native fluency, and writes lots of articles about Japanese language and culture. Like most debut novels written by someone with a previous successful career who wanted to scratch his novelist itch, To Kill a Unicorn is readable but rough, with a decent story and some emotional beats but prose that tries too earnestly for "literary" and characters who sometimes resemble a bundle of cliches more than people.
As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley, one of the pleasures of this book was seeing so many familiar places namechecked. Cupertino, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Stevens Creek Boulevard and Half Moon Bay - I have been to all the places the protagonist visits. Like the protagonist, I also miss those long-vanished orchards that once dotted the landscape. To Kill a Unicorn also reminded me of early (late 90s era) Salon articles and short stories, when Silicon Valley was an optimistic glittery place high on its own supply and stonks always went up. In other words, kind of like now.
The inspiration, according to the author, was Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, and Bad Blood, the story of the fraudulent start-up Theranos and its beautiful blonde sociopathic founder, Elizabeth Holmes. To Kill a Unicorn combines a Murukami-like protagonist and a villain who is practically a carbon copy of Elizabeth Holmes.
Tatsu "Teddy" Hara is a Japanese-American computer programmer working for a FAANG company and turning into an alcoholic borderline hikikimori. He's got abandonment issues (his father drank himself to death, his mother was an angry, bitter neurotic who committed suicide) and his best friend Ryu has disappeared. Ryu's sister (who used to be Teddy's girlfriend) shows up asking Teddy to help find him, leading Teddy down a rabbit hole investigating a mysterious startup called SüprDüpr which is going to "revolutionize transportation." The story takes us on a satirical ride through the Bay Area's homeless problem, Silicon Valley's absurd startup culture, elephant preserves, Japantown, and every techbro trope (Bitcoin, blockchain, Soylent, gourmet ramen-topped pizza).
Teddy is a mess, and is an extremely annoying protagonist in the same way that Murakami's protagonists are annoying: he's a passive schmuck who keeps making shocked-Pikachu faces when the police don't immediately go arrest the billionaire when he tells them she's using a teleportation device to murder homeless people, and despite being a dweeby alcoholic loser, his hot lawyer waifu ex is still into him.
To Kill a Unicorn is probably more enjoyable if you are into the culture of Silicon Valley. Much of the story was a bit implausible (besides the central conceit of a working teleportation device) and a lot Nipponophile-geeky, and the Elizabeth Holmes expy villain was more Hollywood than the real Holmes. The "Learn to code" ending had me groaning (especially given the current bloodbath in the tech industry, where SSEs are being laid off by the thousands and no one is hiring homeless HTML coders like it's 1999), but if you are willing to stretch your suspension of disbelief, it's also funny and touching. Especially if you like elephants.
My complete list of book reviews.