
Swipe
By Evan Angler
Don’t read this thinking I’m a cheerleader for the optimistic. I love speculating on the demise of civilisation as much as the next gloomy thinker.
Swipe helped me find myself. To be true outwardly to the manner in which I gaze inwardly. Let’s rephrase that: I can be an utterly miserable bastard.
The story of Swipe goes like this: the world is pretty much hammered into a permanent state of submission through pretty gruesome wars, famine, and probably a fresh hatching of infinite locusts.
To add further mirth to our miserable existence on your first day of being a teenager, you get slapped with an indellible Mark.
The state ineloquently prescribes this as a coming of age. A congratulatory gift. But in the bleak light of reality, the Mark is a way of controlling its people.
Logan Langley is our protohero. He’s thoroughly hacked off that his sister went for the Mark five years ago, only to permanently vanish without trace.
It’s entirely understandable, then, that on the eve of his being Marked, he’s a little cynical about the arrangement. To the point where he buggers off to try and find out the truth about the Mark. And so it begins…
Swipe is the much younger brother of 1984. It’s and your author Evan Angler has clearly taken many clues and cues from the dysfunctional future defined by Orwell to bring about this 2012 work of fiction.
Or should it be faction? Because I’m getting the hint that this is Angler’s own prediction for our collective future.
Swipe is the first work by Angler. Many readers hoped that it would be the platform for a range of books for the keen young adult reader and I’m delighted that this wasn’t Evan’s plateau that others hallucinated.
Sequels tracing the confusing times of the Logan dynasty — Sneak, Storm and Spark — show a maturing author grasping a greater understanding of how technology isn’t just accessorising our every move, but actively monitoring it to sinisterly send our bits as bytes to the new global superpowers of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Twitter and Snapchat.
You should start your Angler journey at the very beginning, and traverse its subsequent titles with delight. But I do warn you on two fronts:
- You’ll freak out as his stories bristle at once with the unbelieveable and the entirely empathetic situations in lockstep with one another
- You’ll reach Angler’s latest work before he’s had chance to write the next, and you’ll be gripped in stasis while his pen froths and fizzles with tales of our impending doom.
Swipe is available at Amazon. Which is pretty much the digital embodiment of this utterly rabid future of Angler’s, soon to be ours.

