Gabrielle Korn

It’s 2050 and the world is falling apart. In order to save what humanity they can, the world government devises the Inside Project - a couple dozen billionaire-funded sealed compounds across the globe that will safely house a few million survivors while the world burns. The residents are randomly selected for every Inside except one - the Sheryl Sandberg-esque girlboss author-and-CEO Jacqueline Millender secretly micromanages her Inside to be a perfect utopia. Everyone is young, thin, upper middle-class, female or non-binary, unattached to men, and equal. Everything about their lives is perfect, right down to the perfect amount of drugs pumped through their vents. The only requirement is that they work, with the cushiest job of all being that of mother. But how are the residents going to do as pawns in Jacqueline’s experiments?

Shelby, a trans woman and Jacqueline’s personal assistant, was not picked for Inside but gets to accompany Jacqueline on the billionaires’ space ship with all the other assistants. Olympia, a non-binary doctor, successfully convinces Jacqueline to include people of all races in Inside, and so thinks that she can manage Jacqueline's other quirky requests from the inside (so to speak). And Ava, an insecure lesbian, gets injured Inside and cannot work, so there's only one option left.

I really enjoyed all of the things this book made me think about. It's about the systemic failures of non-intersectional rich white feminism. It’s about how any kind of equality is impossible while any one person or group has more power. You can control for gender and race and age and temperament and culture and personal property, but as long as billionaires still exist a utopia will never. They can’t save us from a world of climate change and social injustice because they cause it. There are some parts of Inside that don’t make sense (Why can’t people change jobs? What is the enforcement of rules? Why is everything so boring?) but the flaws are part of the world. The project wasn’t well thought out! Unlike some similar stories about attempts at utopia, the plot here is not a puzzle to be solved. The reader knows what is happening the whole time, but there is enjoyment in seeing the characters figure it out and decide what to do.… (more)