The Absolved (a Novel)

It’s 2036. Henri is a wealthy physician, husband, father, and serial philanderer. He is also one of the relatively few people to still have a job. Automation and other technological advances have led to unemployment so severe that many people are no longer expected to work and are now known as “The Absolved.”

Meanwhile, it’s election season, and a candidate from a radical fringe party called the Luddites is calling for an end to the “Divine Rights of Machines.” After Henri is displaced from his job, two Luddite sympathizers—whom Henri has befriended at his local bar—frame him for an anti-technology terrorist act. The prospect of Henri’s salvation comes at the cost of foregoing his guiding principles in life. This new vision for the world, after all, just might prove better than the technological advancements that, paradoxically, have “left humanity out in the cold.”

Some Nice Things People Have Written About The Work:

"With touches of Vonnegut and Huxley, Matthew Binder delivers a darkly funny look at a future we’re most likely stuck with."  - Seth Meyers

“You have to read Marx to be able to deconstruct him, of course, and Binder’s historical sense is thorough and impeccable.” Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times

“In The Absolved, Matthew Binder has delivered us a devastating portrait of where we are imminently headed. Through his narrator Henri's fopperies, ranging from the affair to the revolution, Binder's novel is an ode to the imperfect and hilarious beauty of being human.” -Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora 

“The Absolved feels like a really big ‘F%&# you’ to 2018’s denial of climate change and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence. It has a similar feel to American Psycho’s chilling indictment of the 1980s yuppie’s obsession with wealth, though without the horrific violence.” - Rebecca Bower, Story Addict

“Binder’s work recalls that of Brett Easton Ellis in that he can make an oversexed, overpaid, chauvinist protagonist dynamic and symbolic without bashing readers over the head with metaphor or apologetic subtext.” - Michael McClelland, Spectrum Culture

"The Absolved shines an unapologetic spotlight on the malaise and absurdity of an America whose soul has been sucked out by an over-dependence on artificial intelligence -- a journey that feels as poignant and honest in today's world as it does in Binder's techno-dystopia."- John Cunningham Ph.D., AI professor, Columbia University 

“The book is to be savoured rather than devoured.”- Nigel Robert Wilson, British Fantasy Society

"The Absolved is as hilarious as Vonnegut's Cat’s Cradle, and as terrifying as Lewis's It Can’t Happen Here. Eerie in its insight, lacerating in its wit, merciless in its conclusions, this is a book liable to become an instant classic. Binder points the finger in these pages, and names the names. He is an oracle for our time.” - D. Foy , author of Patricide

“A blistering account of an America with few jobs and no purpose. This is a funny, fast-paced novel with its finger on this country’s dying pulse.”—David Burr Gerrard, author of The Epiphany Machine

“A hilarious, witty read that ponders where automation might actually take us, not just where we want it to go.” - The Library Journal

“For those who can stomach despicable protagonists—think Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky—in a world that’s utterly unappealing, The Absolved is actually a fun and easy read.”- Quartz Magazine