In the world of NØT NØW, women are issued a daily word quota.
Exceed it and the hybrid enforcers come.
Not police. Not soldiers. Something in between — part human, part machine, built to monitor, built to comply, and increasingly unsure which one they are.
This is the world Anaïs wakes up into. A world that didn't collapse overnight. A world that was built slowly, carefully, and with the full cooperation of people who told themselves it was for the greater good.
NØT NØW is an adult dystopian sci-fi novel set in a near-future surveillance state where genetic engineering created a servant class that nobody wants to call slaves, where AI manages compliance so quietly that most people stopped noticing, and where one woman's decision to use her words anyway sets something irreversible in motion.
What kind of book is it:
It sits at the intersection of literary dystopian fiction and sci-fi thriller. If you've read Vox by Christina Dalcher, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, or watched Black Mirror with the lights off, you're in the right neighbourhood. But it goes further into the technology — the hybrid robots, the AI infrastructure, the genetic architecture of the world — than most literary dystopian fiction does.
It's not YA. It's not romance. It's not action-first. It's ideas-first with genuine tension and a protagonist who earns everything she gets.
What I'm looking for:
3 to 5 readers who will actually finish it and tell me honestly what worked and what didn't.
I don't need cheerleaders. I need readers who will tell me where they got bored, where they stopped believing the world, and where they couldn't put it down.
Specific feedback I'm most interested in:
- Does the world feel internally consistent
- Does Anaïs earn your investment as a protagonist
- Where did the pacing lose you if it did
- Does the technology feel plausible or does it tip into unbelievable