Where It All Goes Down
The San Francisco Bay Area, the Not-Too-Distant Future
Tech Utopia
The Circle is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a fictional city called San Vincenzo, which is likely standing in for tech towns around San Francisco and San Jose like Mountain View and Sunnyvale. Although Dave Eggers never utters the words "Silicon Valley" within the novel, it's pretty clear that this is what he has in mind.
Although Mae Holland travels back and forth between San Vincenzo, San Francisco, and Longfield—her rural hometown—most of The Circle is set on the main campus of the Circle itself. Nestled on a bright, gorgeously landscaped swath of land, the campus seems neither part of nor wholly distinct from San Vincenzo itself. It's almost like the campus is a sovereign nation that exists within the borders of the city.
Which isn't far from the truth.
To Mae Holland, the Circle's main campus feels like a utopian haven in the midst of a chaotic and unruly world, and one of her fondest wishes is for the Circle to make the whole world as perfect, orderly, beautiful, and efficient as the company's main campus has managed to be.
The Future Is Now
As with many dystopian narratives, The Circle's setting could easily be called the not-too-distant-future. But exactly how not-too-distant is it?
The truth is that it's hard to tell exactly when The Circle is set, but it would be a safe bet to guess that the novel's events take place before 2020. Here are the facts available to us:
- The Circle was published in 2013, and it definitely isn't set before then.
- The Circle is "less than six years old" by the time Mae Holland lands her job with the company (1.1.4).
- During the "less than six years" of its existence, the Circle has out-competed and "subsumed" rival companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google (1.3.60).
- Mae Holland used Facebook as recently as 2010 (1.16.48).
Add all of this up, and it starts to look as though The Circle could actually be set as early as, oh, 2015 or 2016.
The juggernaut speed of technological development is a major theme in The Circle, so it's no surprise to see that the novel's not-too-distant future may already be receding into our not-so-distant past. One thing's for certain: the Armageddon that Dave Eggers depicts in the novel isn't about to wait around while we catch up.