The Unswitchable
In a world where the Switch-Bracelet lets people instantly jump into any body, Dan Arbel is cursed with something unthinkable: he’s stuck being himself. While others hire stand-ins to do their workouts, commute in borrowed bodies, or vacation through the eyes of professional tourists, Dan remains trapped in his own skin—the only person on Earth who can’t switch.
Working as a black-market courier in a society where identity is fluid, Dan thought his condition was just a lonely burden. Then a dying stranger in a borrowed body whispers impossible words—tying Dan to a secret buried deep in his past. Before he can process the revelation, assassins with ever-changing faces descend, hunting for something he carries without knowing.
In a world where anyone can be anyone, how do you know who to trust?
Dan’s unchanging identity, once his greatest curse, becomes the one constant in a deadly maze of deception. To survive, he must rely on the only thing no one else can claim anymore: his own irreplaceable self.
A heart-stopping blend of cyberpunk thriller and philosophical mystery that will leave you questioning the nature of identity itself.
- First published
- 2016
Reviews
The Unswitchable tackles the question of the relationship between body and soul through a suspenseful, fast-moving plot. To enjoy every layer of the book, it is worth making time for a second reading—as with all of Yoav Blum's books.
Yoav Blum represents a generation writing a different kind of science fiction. […] There is something almost impressive about the book's nonchalant attitude toward itself, and its fleeting touch on the fundamental questions it raises: the philosophical relationship between body and soul; the image of personal identity being erased in a biometric world; and the desperate longing for a stable fact to cling to—in an age of fake news and empire presidents who emerged from television reality shows.
Yoav Blum does not simply toss an idea into the air and leave it there. He does not tell readers, ‘Imagine a world in which people can exchange bodies with one another’; he investigates the idea deeply and tries to understand what this new world would look like—one that is ostensibly identical to ours except for that small change. The more you read, the more you understand how one technological development can affect the world in every possible way. The book could easily have fallen into the genre's obvious traps, but again and again, just when the reader thinks they know where the plot is headed, they realize they will not be getting off this roller coaster anytime soon—or guessing when the next loop will come. It has been a long time since I found myself saying ‘wow’ out loud while reading a book. It happened at least three times while reading The Unswitchable.
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