S.N.U.F.F. by Victor Pelevin

In this farcical utopia, esoteric Russian writer Victor Pelevin fast-forwards our current culture – where the lines between fact and fiction are increasingly blurred – to create a world where the population have simply stopped needing to suspend disbelief: most people just believe everything as equally true. The central narrator, Damilola Karpov, is a 'discourse monger' working for Big Byz, a media conglomerate that manufactures war for entertainment purposes. He lives in Byzantion, an oligarchic city which floats above Urkaina, where the masses live and which functions as a sort of testing ground for newsworthy events.

When he is not trying to finely tune his bionic sex partner, Damilola uses a sort of advanced drone to incite and record combat in Urkaina. When Damilola is instructed to help two 'Urks' (or 'Orks'), Grim and Chloe, their fate becomes bound up in his own. As is often the case with sci-fi, S.N.U.F.F. is more of a thought experiment than a novel. Long unwieldy conversations are used to explain what Pelevin’s invented etymologies mean, or what sort of skewed mysticism a character is in thrall to, and some of the farcical elements seem designed to show how all moral sanctioning is irrational, not just some. Nevertheless, some of the more absurdist passages are disturbingly prescient.