Sign-In
Cart
Things That Can't Be Owned: What Survives Optimization
Paperback
Series: Things That Matter, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 1 2026
Pages: 328
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.73 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
800 years apart. Two different worlds. One universal trap.
Things That Can't Be Owned, the second novel in The Things That Matter Series, is a near-future speculative novel about creativity, power, and what happens when human potential becomes something institutions can measure, predict, and optimize.
In Songdo, South Korea, Rohan is advising a technology company studying the conditions under which creativity emerges. At first, the work seems cautious and scientific: observe, measure, understand. But prediction soon becomes selection. Selection becomes advantage. And when cognitive enhancement enters the picture, Rohan begins to see a system taking shape in which people are not forced to change, but may have little choice if they want to keep up.
Eight centuries earlier, on the Mongolian steppe, Saran spares a captive because of the skills he possesses. One practical decision becomes a method. The method becomes a system. And gradually, usefulness begins to determine who is valued, who belongs, and who survives.
Moving between two worlds separated by centuries, Things That Can't Be Owned explores how systems built for efficiency can slowly reshape the people inside them. Thoughtful, unsettling, and laced with dry humour, it asks a deceptively simple question:
What happens when the things that make us human become valuable enough for someone else to control?
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback