“Do you ever wonder,” she said, “if the system is actually broken. Or if it’s working exactly as designed.”
Ad/PR/Patrocinado. Book review of A Shallow Heart by James Badman, releasing today, Oct 2, 2026. Many thanks to the author for this ARC.
Set in a possibly not so distant future, A Shallow Heart is a dystopian sci-fi drama about control and grief. Taking place in an unnamed city divided into districts, the top percentage of the population live in comfort, turning a blind eye to the suffering of those in the lower districts, encouraged by an algorithm that keeps the truth hidden, offering pretty slogans and mind-numbing entertainment to keep the population compliant.
On the surface this is a quite gentle, quite mundane story of people just doing their jobs and going about their day, working, raising children and going to school. But at a closer look, this is a terrifying tale of a society built on deceit and suffering, maintained not by evil people spreading pain and suffering with malicious intent, but by normal people who see the world as numbers and statistics and therefore chose a system with some degree of stability over complete chaos, regardless of the human sacrifices entailed in an AI-controlled system that chooses who is worthy of welfare and who isn’t.
It is a story of what happens when efficiency and data take precedence over empathy and kindness, when human lives are reduced to numbers in a report, and when the happiness of a select elite is prioritised over the greater good for all of mankind. And it is a story of a family functioning on routine and habit until one day when their carefully curated existence is changed forever.
Thought-provoking, unsettling and raising far more questions than it answers, A Shallow Heart examines the frictions and contradictions between freedom and control, stability and chaos, systems and individuality.
Dystopian – Science fiction – Drama – Thriller
Leave a comment