The teleportation accident is an all-too-common trope of science fiction. The moral quandary of teleporters as "suicide boxes" and as potential human duplicators has been grist for many science fiction and speculative fiction writers, from George Langelaan's 1957 short story "The Fly" to China Miéville's 2010 novel Kraken (and yes, a few Star Trek episodes). But that trope has been given a fresh spin by Tal Klein in his debut novel, The Punch Escrow—fresh enough that, even before its release, the book was optioned for a film by Lionsgate.

A compelling, approachable human narrative wrapped around a classic, hard sci-fi nugget, The Punch Escrow dives into deep philosophical territory—the ethical limits of technology and what it means to be human. Cinematically paced yet filled with smart asides, Klein's Punch pulls off the slick trick of giving readers plenty to think about in a suspenseful, entertaining package.

Watch out for those killer nanobots

Set in the year 2147, Punch is the story of Joel Byram, a self-described smart-ass who makes his futuristic currency as a sort of bot-whisperer. Byram works as an artificial intelligence "salter" who helps train AIs to master the art of human interaction through the use of jokes and language puzzles. He's something of an AI interface hacker as a result, and he has the skills required to linguistically trick AIs into elevating his privileges and performing tasks they'd otherwise not.

But the real bread-winner in the Byram household is his wife, Sylvia. She's a workaholic senior research scientist at a company known as IT: International Transport, the company with a lock on the worldwide teleportation market.

Their marriage is on shaky ground. Seeking a reboot, Sylvia and Joel book a second honeymoon in Costa Rica. Joel is about to teleport to meet his wife, waiting for the flash that usually accompanies the trip, when a suicide bomber makes the leap ahead of him and blows up the Costa Rica teleportation point. The explosion interrupts the network and his transport, and, thanks to the safety system used by IT, Joel's left standing confused in Greenwich Village. But the error shows him having transported. Believing him dead, his wife restores Joel from an experimental backup system. Now there are two Joels—and the original loses his digital identity when the second one is rendered from the quantum foam.

This precipitates a corporate crisis for IT, which in the future Randian (Ayn Rand or Rand Paul, your choice) utopia of 2147 is a sovereign power of its own. After a world war of cataclysmic proportions, much of the world has given over control of all the things to the efficiencies of corporations rather than the ickiness of nation-states. Joel's dual existence is evidence of the fundamental lie behind their patented "Punch Escrow," the secret sauce of the safety system built to ensure safe human transport.

Named for the 17th century Irish philosopher and theologian John Punch (the man credited with formulating the classical definition of Occam's Razor), the "escrow" isn't really a technology, per se; to ensure safe delivery of people, the system "prints" copies of them at the destination, then murders the original with nanobots. From there on out, Joel is on the run for his life—or lives, as both of him and his wife are awfully inconvenient to some and a potential prize to others.

Klein applies hard science to his future-world speculation (he consulted Joe Santoro, a medical physicist, among other sources). And he adds footnotes—asides from Joel explaining the science and history of his future world, in his own smart-ass way—to avoid overburdening the core narrative with exposition, in a style that comes off as a snarkier version of the device used by Susanna Clarke in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

For the IT crowd, some of the hidden pleasure of Punch will come from the subtle references to current tech and information-security life. Klein is an infosec industry veteran, and Joel's language is salted with phrases that will be familiar (and contextually amusing) to tech insiders.

Just how much the reader will enjoy Punch will depend largely on how they relate to the narrator. Given that the story is told entirely from Joel's (and his copy's) perspective, there isn't a whole lot of character development beyond the confines of his wisecracking mind. But seeing why the book drew attention from Lionsgate is easy—you can easily imagine a certain type of leading man in the role of Joel, and the pacing, from its in medias res opening to its conclusion (which neatly sets up a sequel), makes Punch easy fodder for a film franchise.

The Punch Escrow releases on July 25.