I first started writing this book in 2004. That was three years before the release of the first iPhone, two years before Twitter launched. Social media and surveillance technology wasn’t as pervasive then as I’d described it in this story. At the time, I thought I was being clever by observing trends and exaggerating for satirical purposes how technology might alter our relationships with each other… now, I don’t know what to think. Our present social lives are so hypermediated that the descriptions of “online drama” in the book sometimes feel quaint. It’s hard to remember what day-to-day life was like before the ubiquity of those technologies—and a lot of us were there! It’s not even that long ago! I figured the re-release of this edition, fifteen years after publication, could be like opening a time capsule. But since I’d set the story in “the near-future”, it’s a stranger experience than I thought it would be.

While drafting this book, I was in my mid-twenties and deeply involved in a rapidly changing “street art scene”. Posters and stickers. Graffiti and billboard liberation. No one knew if we should be called artists or vandals; I think a lot of us thought of ourselves as both and neither. Little by little, then seemingly all at once, underground artists started partnering with shoe brands and clothing labels. The aesthetics of street art were suddenly big business, and there was competition to get gallery shows and appeal to art collectors. Very few of these guys (they were predominantly men, yes) ever saw this commodification of their art as “selling out”, that there was anything to be lost from allowing one’s form of self-expression to become a decorative addition to a commercial logo. 

Witnessing the shift, I thought of the people even younger than I was who would be growing up in a world where there wasn’t even a counterculture pushing back against these mainstream ideas of what “success” looks like. Just a pervasive culture grooming kids to be young entrepreneurs who could monetize their personal brand. I thought up Kid as a character who’d most likely fare the absolute worst in this clamoring-for-attention world, and who might also be the best hope to help people hear past the noise.

The book sold in 2008, very quickly and for a lot of money—a “very nice deal” in Publishers Marketplace language, a dizzying amount for a freelance artist from a lower middle class background like me. I did some extensive revisions with the publisher before its official release in late 2010. I found myself in a similar situation to the main character, thrust into a spotlight I’d never sought and didn’t much respect. I remember making the conscious decision to say “yes” to everything suggested to me, just to see what happened. I understood how much control I’d given over by signing the publishing deal. It said it right there in the full-sized print in paragraph 4(a): “The Publisher shall publish each Work in such style and manner as the Publisher deems appropriate.” So I had to make a game of it, and just go along with the meta-ness of it all, where the agent was the cool hunter and the publisher was the brand that “tagged” me.  

I hadn’t read the book since it came out, until just now, as I am preparing its 15-year anniversary re-release. It was a surreal experience, and my determination to keep it as is—like a time capsule—wavered slightly when I realized that scenes I remembered from earlier versions apparently hadn’t made the cut in that wild flurry of revisions before publication.

I’d meant for the emotional core of the story to be about a fraying friendship—kids drifting apart and finding their new crews. A natural part of growing up and figuring out who they want to be in relationship to the world around them, made worse by the artificial interference of hyper-commercial media messaging that preys on adolescent anxieties about not fitting in. That kind of got moved to a subplot as I was encouraged to include some of the tropes in YA literature at the time. A thin love triangle, a high-stakes whodunnit mystery. It bothers me that market concerns on that meta level overshadowed what I’d intended for the story, and those kids. I thought I’d done a better job of keeping their relationships in the center, but I guess I’d lost that game. I made changes in this edition to rebalance the focus, and I’m so happy to be able to present this story to readers as I’d always intended for them to see it.

Since its first publication, readers had contacted me to send links to news stories with the comment “just like The Unidentified!” The Metreon mall in San Francisco, once a flagship for a proposed chain of Sony “urban entertainment centers” and one of the inspirations for The Game setting, had been sold to a mall developer a year after the book came out. All the stores closed down, and on my next visit, I walked the vacated corridors of the ghost mall. Someone sent me a story about a dead shopping mall being converted to a school in, like, 2014—and I just saw an even more recent story (2021) of a high school in Vermont opening inside a former Macy’s department store. Also, Austin Community College in Texas used to be Highland Mall.

I’d read news stories about groups of teens collectively using one social media account log-in to undermine the “for you” algorithm, about the various ways kids were asserting their rights to privacy when parents and social media companies decided they had none. Then, of course, we all witnessed the rise of the influencer and the overinflation of the attention economy… watching the bubble swell, wincing as it grows thin, and always seems about to burst. A young friend who I’ve known since she was born, now 17, gets contacted by musicians and companies to play new tracks or feature specific products to her 13000 TikTok followers. Her most viewed post is a 12-second pan of her bedroom while she and her friends crowd in front of a mirror, getting ready to go out. A song someone paid her 50 bucks to play nearly inaudible in the background. 

Commercial brands exploiting young people’s clout and creativity to sell their products was supposed to be a “what if?” dystopian future. It’s fun to write speculative science fiction, not always as amusing to see your cautionary tales come to pass in real time.

I can’t imagine what it would feel like to encounter this story for the first time right now over fifteen years after its conception. Maybe it sucks? Made irrelevant with time? But I’m happy to be able to bring The Unidentified back, redesigned, and despite all its imperfections, allow readers a brief return to a spaciously claustrophobic artificial environment that promises young people everything they might ever want except for true connection, where every young character in this book finds their own creative ways to revolt against the world adults have trapped them in.

I don’t feel a lot of anxiety about how so much has changed in such a relatively short time. I find it hopeful. If everything can change that quickly, that means our collective efforts can change things again. In any direction. There is nothing inevitable about a dystopian future, nothing enduring about our dystopian present.

-rae