Yes/Maybe/Never: A Novel

A brilliant, AI-skeptical, dystopian debut novel by the award-winning playwright Jon Robin Baitz.

In the near future, America has not so much collapsed as frayed. Cities empty out by degrees. Systems falter, and people learn to live with what they once would have found intolerable.

At the center of Yes/Maybe/Never is Timmy, a gifted, unstable young man living alone in a cabin near the Canadian border, surrounded by antique toy robots, homemade devices, and the relics of a vanishing world. Convinced that the great crisis of the age is the human willingness to surrender judgment, memory, desire, and free will to a powerful new technological regime known as Animas, Timmy is determined to resist—even if his acts of resistance are as strange, theatrical, and dangerous as he is.

Around Timmy moves a small, wounded family: Simon, his uncle, a poet altered in ways he can barely name after an experimental neurological procedure; Barrie, Timmy’s mother, a former State Department official turned dangerous pragmatist, unblinking in her realpolitik view of the world, burnt out by years of crisis management and bitter about what diplomacy has become; and Ganju, a civil servant charged with finding Timmy before the young man’s gestures of protest harden into something more serious, though he is no longer entirely sure what, exactly, he serves.

Funny, melancholy, and sharply observant, Jon Robin Baitz’s Yes/Maybe/Never imagines a world of ecological strangeness, political exhaustion, technological seduction, and private ferocity. When the future arrives, he asks, what will be left of us? Amid the wreckage of damaged souls and cherished objects, there is something that may still be worth defending—if we can only remember how.