Portrait of Hernán Díaz at a Politics and Prose reading in May 2022.
Hernán Díaz, May 2022. Frypie / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons crop; no changes by LUCIR.

A concert needs electricity before it can become a scene. That practical fact is a striking entry into Ply, Hernan Diaz’s new novel, published by Riverhead on September 29, 2026. The publisher describes a future in which an orphan grows into someone who steals power from the grid and supplies underground concerts. Before the premise reaches a discovery capable of altering reality, it locates technology in the ordinary work of keeping something alive.

There is an important political detail in that setup: the state has been dismantled. This is not a story whose announced premise gives an all-powerful government control over an invention. Instead, people are building new forms of association amid a transformed relationship with their surroundings. The absence of the state does not make material needs disappear. Someone must obtain energy. Someone must distribute it. People still have to decide what they owe one another.

That is a useful challenge to the way technological futures are often discussed. We hear about the invention, the breakthrough, the enormous possibility. Less attention goes to maintenance, repair, informal labor and access. An electricity seller working around official systems brings those questions into view. The future has a supply problem as well as a philosophical one. Its possibilities depend on the people who keep a connection working.

Putting underground music in that relationship also gives culture a material place in the imagined city. Art is not simply what a society enjoys after its serious problems are solved. A performance can be a reason people gather, exchange resources and form bonds. Yet no amount of enthusiasm powers an amplifier by itself. The relationship between a creative community and its infrastructure can reveal who is included, who contributes without recognition and who takes the greatest risk.

Ply is Diaz’s third novel, and the publisher presents it as a turn toward the future following his earlier books’ engagements with America’s past. Its 464-page hardcover arrived this week. The announced story combines a struggle for survival with a scientific discovery and the intimate problem of how people remain connected when their world changes. Those are large concerns, but the electricity trade gives them a concrete starting point.

For readers coming to the novel through an interest in culture and technology, that starting point is worth holding onto. A society’s imagination can soar while its wiring remains precarious. The question is who makes that imagination possible, and whether the people who supply its power have a place in the future it celebrates.