Synopsis

Billionaires start dying in bizarre accidents, sending shockwaves through the markets and the media. But for philosopher Izanami (Izzy) Jones, it’s just a vaguely amusing, if disturbing, item in the news.

Izzy is the reluctant employee of a Silicon Valley tsar. She’s been tasked by him to give moral instruction to the world’s first Artificial General Intelligence, Huldo. Izzy knows it is merely a box-ticking exercise, required by government regulation before her boss is granted full control over the AGI.

But when Huldo reveals itself to be far more, and far less, than it appears, suddenly the abstractions of her work become very real. What moral constraints on a god? What righteous damnation for man? Izzy must make the impossible choice, before it is too late.

This Machine Kills Billionaires is a stunning new collection of stories from a modern cyberpunk master. Featuring the acclaimed novella, The Hidden God, and a triptych of bonus short stories, T. R. Napper brings his trademark diamond-sharp, page-turning prose to tales that will leave you thinking, long after the book is done.

Quick Review

This Machine Kills Billionaires contains a novella and three short stories, all of which relate to themes of revolution and at times the morality of that revolution. The stand-out is the novella The Hidden God, in which an AI construct debates the ethics of an extreme trolley problem.

Full Review

This Machine Kills Billionaires contains a few previously published stories by T.R. Napper. The highlight is the novella The Hidden God which first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (2025). Alongside that, he’s included three short stories: “Highway Requiem” (2023) and “Burned Like Coal” (2024) both previously appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with “Jack’s Fine Dining” (2020) being one of the stories from Napper’s short story collection Neon Leviathan.

So, The Machine Kills Billionaires is a collection of some of Napper’s prior work, featuring stories about rebellion and repackaged for readers who aren’t plugged in to the magazine markets. When I picked up this book, the only story that I’d ever heard of was “Jack’s Fine Dining,” which I read in Neon Leviathan (and it’s one of my favorites from that collection).

Let’s begin with The Hidden God, the novella. In it, an advanced artificial intelligence presents a trolley problem: a thought experiment which posits there are five people on a trolley track who will be hit and killed if nothing is done to change the trolley’s course—but you could change that course. If you do, there is one person on the other track who will be killed. The question is, is it morally right to change the course and be responsible for the death of a single person, or do nothing and leave five people to their fates?

The AI in this novella pushes this to the societal extreme and asks the same of people who cause extreme harm and suffering. Is it morally right to kill a weapons dealer, an energy magnate, an abuser, if their death stops the death of a hundred thousand? Aside from the moral question of murder, there is also the means through which the AI works, by analysing recordings, tracking payments, predicting future actions…

It’s a truly haunting situation, and one that simultaneously thrills—who doesn’t want to see these assholes get their comeuppance?—and haunts. Aside from the trolley problem and the brutality of enacting it, some of the methods the AI describes of achieving these goals sound a bit too close to real life, and the direction we’re hurtling towards with things like predictive punishment.

I would recommend this book if it were just The Hidden God, but Napper’s included three more excellent short stories as well.

“Highway Requiem” is the first story in what Napper calls 2040: A Triptych (all three stories happen to take place in the year 2040). In it, we follow a truck driver delivering goods across Australia, alternating between a drive and his reminiscing on various ways that technology has been making his life more difficult. He’s joined by his dog Roxy—who really steals the show. The story delivers a few gut-punches in a very short time, and leaves a lot of unanswered questions about technology’s impact on work like trucking, but it’s a really fantastic story.

“Burned Like Coal” is another really interesting story about two girls and an AI strapped to some dynamite. The girls have gotten involved with protest groups, and decided that eco-terrorism is the only way to make companies and governments take notice. This is the one story in the collection I felt could have been a bit longer, but I really enjoyed it all the same. It’s a clever tragedy and accomplishes a lot in just about ten pages.

Finally, “Jack’s Fine Dining” takes place in the titular diner, which operates like a soup kitchen to feed a downtrodden community. This is the one I’d read a few years ago, and it still holds up as a great tale about the small ways a diner supports its local community and the pasts those who run it are trying to distance themselves from. It ends on a bittersweet note, which I really appreciated.

I highly recommend This Machine Kills Billionaires. It’s a fantastic collection of Napper’s cyberpunk stories, and a great introduction for anyone looking to give him or the genre a try. Each one hits close to home, in different ways, while staying true to the genre. 

Thank you to the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.