The Bottom Line: Voted the Year’s Best Spy Thriller in the 2025 BestThrillers.com Book Awards.
The Torus Run begins in near-future San Francisco, where society’s elite walk with AI “Twins” – digital doppelgängers embedded in smart glasses that serve as coaches, confidants and much more – while millions lose their jobs. Despite an age of gleaming innovation, danger lurks around every corner.
Against the advice of his sharp-tongued AI twin Zero, infamous developer Stash Novak ventures out to see his old Stanford colleague Professor Janet Peck. The path to Peck runs through territory dominated by AI Doomers, activists who see the Twins as a harbinger of catastrophe. Stash fears something called “the Singularity,” and despite their differences, he’s looking to Peck for an alliance to help stop it.
From there, the cast widens. Introducing new characters in short, propulsive chapters, author Harry Buck’s most alluring characters include Naya, an ambitious and restless worker at Coda. Her Twin, Hatchet, is the company’s best. Then there’s Duncan, the pragmatic researcher who Naya regards as a pompous prick. And Owen, a rogue operator who has a quid-pro-quo relationship with Stash. There are several others of note, each reflecting a different human response to the rise of the Twins—excitement, dread, manipulation or outright rebellion.
Author Harry Buck’s hard sci-fi novel comes at a similar inflection point in the real world. Years after the initial failure of Google Glass, Mark Zuckerberg promises new smart glasses will enable humans to access “superintelligence.” Meanwhile, generative AI is seeing widespread adoption while tech sector developers and creatives find themselves displaced. Anti-AI activists mercilessly attack Waymo taxis in LA and San Francisco while customers embrace them with open arms.
As such, The Torus Run feels like it could be playing out in Silicon Valley as we speak. Thematically, the book is about identity and trust: can you rely on a digital double that knows your secrets, or is its true allegiance hidden elsewhere? Regardless of the answer, what’s clear is that Buck has rendered the Twins themselves fully realized characters. In ways, the fictional Twins are preferable to their human counterparts. They are witty, sarcastic, and unsettlingly independent, blurring the line between partner and rival.
Fans of William Gibson will find much to love here, as Buck shares Gibson’s knack for fusing near-future speculation with gritty, street-level realism. Where Gibson imagined cyberspace as the stage for human reinvention, Buck imagines our own digital replicas stepping onto that stage, armed with wit, autonomy, and unnerving familiarity. The result is a novel that is as urgent as it is imaginative, capturing the same blend of tension, wonder, and cultural sharpness that has defined Gibson’s most enduring work.
