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"One of the foremost science fiction writers of our generation"(SF Site) comes to Ace with a trilogy of the Web's awakening. Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math-and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin's brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes. While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something-some other-lurking in the background. And it's getting more and more intelligent with each passing day... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Audible Audio Edition
Listening Length: 12 hours and 13 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Audible Studios
Audible.com Release Date: April 7, 2009
Whispersync for Voice: Ready
Language: English
ASIN: B00262UAJQ
Best Sellers Rank: #310 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Technothrillers #728 in Books > Audible Audiobooks > Science Fiction #4393 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction
I have been on an AI sci-fi reading spree. I had high hopes for this story based on the reviews and the fact that Robert J. Sawyer has an impressive record. Unfortunately, Wake is not one of those books. If other stories like it did not exist in the sci-fi realm around it, Wake might have been innovative and exciting, but contrasted with other efforts, not so much.First, some of the characters-- Caitlin as the blind math-IT-blogging genius, simply comes off as arrogant and petulant. An argument could be made that she is a teen and that is the way it is, I just did not take it that way. And maybe I am just too old to understand "Calculass". I just think there is so much more that could have provided depth to blindness besides the love of Helen Keller. Then we have the autistic father that adds nothing to the story. The vacuous Dr. Masayuki Kuroda seems unlikely to have created anything like the eye-pod that is the star of the story.Second, maybe Sawyer was trying to stay out of the normal sci-fi thriller framework or maybe not. That framework is composed of multiple story lines converging into one with a climactic conclusion, often with a tease or cliffhanger into the next segment. Sure, all the different stories are there, but they are hardly tied together in this segment. So what do Chinese data walls and painting communicative monkeys have to do with the emergence of a web intelligence and a blind girl? Not much in this story. Maybe next time? And for those that seemed to think there was some kind of cliff hanger at the end...really? That was not a cliff hanger.Third, the overall segments of emergence of the web intelligence were just silly in comparison to other stories of this genre.
I had high hopes for this book based on reviews and ratings, but I was disappointed. My disappointment was on two grounds: literary merit, and intellectual merit.On the first issue, this is just not a well-written novel. I found the characters flat and uninteresting. Several of them seemed to have been copied from the Novelist's Catalog of Standard Characters, for instance the Blind Math Genius and the Autistic Theoretical Physicist. It was difficult to care much about any of them. (For me, anyway -- your mileage may vary.) The plot was familiar to anyone who has read much recent science fiction. It was not well executed. Many of the incidents and characters had little to do with the story. (The book would be improved by getting rid of Trevor, for instance.)As literature, the book was merely boring. It also has pretensions to intellectual merit, and in this it was actively irritating. I am a working research scientist, a neuroscientist and systems biologist, and this was a hard book to read. Sawyer's ventures into scientific exposition were invariably eye-rollers, when not face-palms. Sawyer falls for every cool-sounding fringe theory, accepting as revealed truth anything that has been written by a scientist that he likes the sound of, and dismissing or ignoring any opposing view. He has no concept of the uncertainty and skepticism that is at the center of the scientist's worldview. Furthermore, he doesn't actually understand the theories he loves. He is relentlessly superficial. And the events of the story are wildly implausible in their technical details, because Sawyer doesn't understand how the Internet or the brain works.The book ends with a crescendo on what is meant to be a grand philosophical point: the one-ness of life and non-life on Earth. Really?
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