Test Drive

"Patrick McGinty is a hellaciously brilliant writer whose sentences combine to build not a story, but a city." -Sarah Marshall, host of the You're Wrong About podcast

"Test Drive is very strange and very, very good. The prose is airtight, surprising, funny-often revelatory. The conceit is perfect, and perfectly executed. Patrick McGinty is far more than a promising young writer. He's someone whose thoughts and dreams a good many readers will, with any luck, be seeking out for years to come." -Tom Bissell, author of Creative Types: And Other Stories

"Autonomous vehicles should, by all rights, be a rich vein in the science fiction genre, worked thoroughly by generations of authors and now emerging into prominence as we stand at the brink of this technology's vast yet mysterious potential. After all, humans have been dreaming of vehicles that drive themselves since the times of some of our most ancient surviving myths. Yet somehow the stock of speculative fiction exploring autonomous vehicles, particularly how these powerful robots shape and are shaped by human individuals and societies, is surprisingly thin. Luckily the genre has received a vital and urgently-needed resuscitation in the form of Patrick McGinty's Test Drive, a gripping and deeply insightful story that captures some of the most important themes related to autonomous vehicles and their human and environmental context. An intimate struggle for individual survival amid profound collective failure plays out in a lovingly-rendered near-future Pittsburgh, whose occupants are battered by waves of climate crisis and technology-driven social stratification while still coming to grips with the legacies of the past. The autonomous driving technology at the center of McGinty's story works, at least for the most part, but it's the exception. Everything else in this brilliant parable is trapped by the suffocating pressures of habit and history, struggling with varying degrees of effort and success against a surging river of forces that can be neither tolerated nor effectively resisted. The grim, relentless gravity of Test Drive's narrative not only pulls the reader in, it reinforces why stories like this are so desperately necessary: only in the clear reflection of great fiction like this can we catch a glimpse of what awaits us downstream, and find the strength to fight against the current." -Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors