Lock In by John Scalzi

Lock In is a science fiction novel set in a near-future. Cars drive themselves, but other than that, the world is very similar to our own. One key difference: after a devastating side effect of a global flu pandemic, a significant number of people suffer from lock in syndrome. They are unable to control any aspect of their bodies, but their minds are fully functioning. So a huge programme of funding has created three solutions to give them fuller lives:

1. They can link up remotely with a robot avatar, which interacts with the world on their behalf. The robot feeds them sensory input, and they control it, to a point where their experience of the world is similar to that of a human - except they have the internet more or less built-in, so they can access information internally, make voice calls to others without making a sound, and control how much pain they actually want to feel if the robot gets damaged. These avatars are called Threeps (after C-3PO), or, derogatory, clanks.
2. A tiny number of people had a different side effect from the flu: their minds have become open to let others in. So the locked-in can, if they have the cash, download their own minds into a real human body, and experience the world through a human avatar. However, the owner of the body is never entirely gone, and can take control back, and this is much more expensive than using a threep.
3. There is a virtual reality just for Locked In people, called The Agora, where they can meet, interact, and have their own personal space.

Our hero, Chris Shane, is one of those locked-in people. (They're called Hadens in the book, as their condition is called Haden Syndrome, after the US president whose wife got the condition while he was in office). We start the story on his first day working for the FBI, joining another agent to form a team of two focused on Haden-related cases. It's also a day of a Haden strike, as the government is changing the subsidies and funding for Haden sufferers (threeps are, after all, not cheap).

Of course, his (or her?) very first case is a murder. (While reading, I was sure that Chris is a guy. I'd swear that it was explicit at some point. Except, a review by Pat Rothfuss suggests the audio book exists in two version, one with a female narrator, one with a male one. This makes me wonder whether our narrator's sex might have been left more ambivalent than I thought... after all, "Chris" could be short for Christine.)

The world is introduced in a clear, concise infodump, right at the start. Basically, before the story starts, we get a school text book revision notes of the history of Haden's Syndrome, and within two pages or so, we know pretty much all the background that's needed. The rest is revealed casually and deftly, but easily accessible. It's not the sort of scifi novel that throws you in at the deep and and enjoys your disorientation.

The story is, of course, a whodunnit. Along the way, we learn more about the world, more about the different perspectives (of Hadens about others, and of others about Hadens). Characters occasionally discuss politics and change and what should or should not be done for Hadens. Should there be work to 'cure' the condition, or should all efforts be about enabling people who have it to function without physically altering them? It's a debate that reflects one about deaf culture (should there be more work aimed at enabling deaf people to hear, or more recognition of sign language, lip reading and deaf culture as just one different culture living in a multicultural society, with efforts to enable deaf people to live independently and successfully among us, but no efforts to make them hear the rest of us?). 

Lock In is a novel with simple, straightforward prose, clear dialogue, people discussing things - it is not a book that dazzles you with style, but it is a book that draws you in with ideas. One very obvious thing is that it doesn't present the locked in characters as victims. They may have some vulnerabilities, and they may have been badly afflicted when the condition first arose, but by the time of the story, they have successfully become fully functioning citizens.

Our hero is rich, his threeps are ultra-modern models, and he isn't shy to download himself at a moment's notice into a borrowed threep in a different part of the country, or use his internal gadgets to record video and audio and 3D scans. He is living in his parents' mansion, but looking to move his threep into a flat share with other threeps. Some Hadens might have to survive with unreliable threeps, parked in depressing wardrobe-like boxes to recharge, but that's a rich/poor divide, not an inherent victimhood. And just as the Hadens aren't victims, but highly capable individuals who can be very empowered by technology, they are also mixed people. Our hero is smart, brave and good, of course, but we also encounter firebrand campaigners, selfish egomaniacs, and at the very heart of the murder case, a cold-blooded murderer. Hadens, in short, are people. Good people, bad people, rich people, poor people. Some aspects of their lives are quite different from the rest of us, but in a way those are mere logistical matters. (Perhaps that is all 'culture' boils down to: the logistics of interaction - the rest is just humanity).

I enjoyed reading Lock In. It's thoughtful, engaging, and entertaining. Some things are never really expanded upon to the extent I had expected (I had expected more things about / in the Agora), and there are never really enough suspects in the story (it's not like those TV crime shows, where every character would have a motive), but it's a thoughtful book packing complex ideas into an entertaining whodunnit (without telling us what to think).

Rating: 4/5

The Hive Construct by Alexander Maskill

New Cairo is an underground city inside a giant crater, surrounded, like a crown, by waytowers / elevator exits & structural supports for the roof hanging over the city. The roof of the city is covered in solar panels; an artificial sun lights the inside. Inside the city, many people are effectively cyborgs, augmented with artificial limbs and organs. Unrest is stirring: an affliction has been shutting down the augmentations, leaving people disabled, and even dead. A curfew has been put in place. People from the areas where the infection is common are not allowed to leave the city, supposedly to keep the outside world safe. But it does not seem like a coincidence that those are also the poorer areas of the city - augmentations being pivotal to hard physical labour and industrial work. The rich, meanwhile, are not so restricted.

Then, a hooded stranger walks up to the waytower, seeking to return secretly into the city...

The Hive Construct won the 2013 Terry Pratchett Prize (for first novels). Despite the patron of this prize, this is not a comedy novel (nor a prize for humorous works). It's a thriller set in a future of CCTV-ridden, highly networked cities, full of bio-augmentations and contact lenses that work much like Google Glasses. In terms of technology, there is nothing in the book that seems inconceivable - and nothing you haven't encountered before in other science fiction. But the story isn't really interested in technology: it's interested in the politics and mechanisms of resistance and uprising.

The main characters are a computer hacker with a past, a city councillor who is part of a dynasty of super-wealthy businessmen politicians, and a mother who just lost her husband (a revolutionary) and who wishes to escape the city with her children. They all have different problems at the start: one wants to find and solve the virus problem, the second has been kidnapped, and the third finds herself drawn into directing operations due to her experience of running police ops from her computer, while waiting for a people smuggling opportunity to arise.

The Hive Construct has several admirable qualities: it never gets boring, it builds up some degree of credibility in its characters and their actions, and everyone has their own problems to deal with. No one is a square-jawed selfless hero, and no one is an evil villain.

Set against that is a series of flaws. While the setting may be called New Cairo, it does not feel authentically Egyptian. Where Ian MacDonald creates immersive futures set in emerging nations, this novel just picks up a few vaguely Egyptian-sounding character names, but could otherwise be just as easily set in America or Britain. And while the characters seem more or less believable (if not particularly Egyptian), the story still treats the wider population - crowds especially - as a malleable mass, easily manipulated, directed, a liquid flow, rather than anything feeling realistically like people. This gives the book a strangely detached feel, especially in the later chapters. These come across like a strategy game or a Roland Emmerich movie: lots of action, but not much punch.

In the end, it's a novel experimenting around with politics. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, the London Riots, and every other recent instance of unrest and the wider problem of economic disparity, it's really a novel wondering about the rich and the poor, about politicians and corporations, about ends justifying means and how the means might affect the ends. It's a thought experiment, dressed as a scifi thriller. It's not stupid, but, like other novels which toy around with such themes, it feels a bit too calculated, a bit too concerned with its points to really connect. It's like reading China Mieville's more political novels (e.g. Iron Council), but without the linguistic distractions.

As thrillers go, it's not bad, and on a par with Michael Crighton's work. I had hoped for something a bit more ambitious, though.

Rating: 3.5/5

Dark Digital Sky by Carac Allison

Dark Digital Sky is a novel about a Private Investigator, initially hired to find a Hollywood powerbroker's progeny - three men who grew from his donor sperm.

While his investigation swings into gear, America finds itself subjected to a series of crimes - heists and theatrics seemingly motivated by some kind of political agenda - and our detective tracks not just his own case, but keeps aware of the news.

There are many things to like about this novel, but also some which are a bit frustrating. Let's start with the frustrations: the plot takes quite a while before there's real tension. For a good third of the novel, our PI basically stalks and manipulates three men and people connected to them, without anything other than an easy paycheck driving his ambitions. The plot does pick up, and eventually there are stakes - higher and higher stakes - but at the start, things aren't as mysterious and intriguing as you'd expect from a thriller.

With regards to our detective's work, there is a split between the technical and the human stuff: he's utterly convincing when using technology, hacks, botnets, and other digital methods to track down, investigate, spy upon, disrupt or manipulate. But when it comes to the human interactions, the story seems to be outside its comfort zone. Our hero's method is basically: find source. Ask source questions. Get all the answers. It's true that his angle of attack varies - slightly - between the people he approaches, but every single one of them ultimately answers all his questions with all the information in a single interview. A reader willing to suspend their disbelief would argue that this is the reason why our detective is so successful, why he can afford a Porsche and being quite particular about his methods and very direct when interacting with his clients. Personally, I wasn't convinced - our hero is way too blunt with almost every character, and I simply did not believe that no one disengages from his confrontational approach, when flustered. If someone met me under false pretences and revealed their lie, I'd walk away. None of the characters in this novel do. It felt too much as if each human character was treated as an information repository, which, queried by our detective, spills out all its data, exactly as laptops and hard drives spill their secrets once cracked.

The writing is to the point. Our hero is somewhat cynical, like a detective should be. He does have a tendency to opine about things that one does not expect a detective to be waxing lyrical about: he wears a different black rock band t-shirt each day and briefly describes each motif at the start of each day. He has read hundreds of books and watched many movies, and every evening he winds down simultaneously watching films, re-reading novels and keeping track of the news, in a multi-screen set up that could be straight from Back To The Future 2. Oh, and our hero is bipolar, with a keen interest in his medication (and a habit of describing it, and his brain, with the sort of attitude that wouldn't be out of place in a car enthusiast, fine tuning the engine of his most precious, if somewhat temperamental, classic sports car).

Having a bipolar detective as hero is not something I've encountered before. I guess after OCD detective Monk, in-care detective Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a schizophrenic detective in Perception, a deaf detective in F.B.Eye, a paraplegic detective in The Bone Collector, and many, many arrogant geniuses with flaws where social niceties would be (cough, Sherlock, House, Lie To Me, cough), there isn't going to be any disability, physical or otherwise, that isn't going to have a detective series dedicated to it. That said, the manic episode is the most interesting and well-crafted part of the novel: it allows the detective to remain convincing while making decisions that would be out of character for a super-competent hero, so his condition certainly earns its narrative keep and does not feel like a gimmick.

The novel moves quite quickly, and while it takes its time to build up tension, it never gets boring. It's entertaining and smooth to read, comparable to thrillers by Michael Crighton, Jeffrey Deaver, Robert Galbraith and especially Michael Marshall (with a sub plot that slightly echoes the Straw Men mythos being built up by Marshall). It's a satisfying popcorn read, technologically convincing, and very smart when it comes to the baddies' attacks & the wider repercussions of those deeds. It's not as satisfying when it comes to character interactions, and every now and again the plot construction feels a bit forced, but to be fair, neither Dan Brown nor Michael Crighton worry too much about these things.

It's got a good pace and an interesting hero - it's certainly a promising start to a series. For comparison, I'm more likely to continue reading this series than I am to continue reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files after trying the first two.

Rating: 3.5/5