Review: WWW: Wake

WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very good blend of hard and soft scifi, or at least a lovely imaginative fantasy rooted in a bunch of scientific knowns. I suppose that latter is what you all mean when you say "speculative fiction" *shrugs* I don't know. I read another reviewer calling it cyberpunk and I went "oh, yeah, I suppose a bit o' that too," ... as you can see, I really don't know what I'm talking about so you should probably read someone else's review.

The main theme is a cyberpunk/biopunk mashup but the actual plot is much more of a human story. Sawyer imagines various examples of interactions that require a paradigm shift for any sort of useful interpretation to occur. This is largely based on what we know to expect and then Sawyer runs with it a bit which is how good scifi happens. Some of the examples have a sense of "uplift" about them, but of course, this is considered an "uplift" from the fundamentally narrow perspective of the "uplifter" and the book does a pretty neat job of capturing this flaw at all levels.

A Chimp at a zoo communicates using sign language via webcam with an Orang at some other zoo and begins to paint abstractions thereafter which has the researchers scrambling for answers.

A teenager, blind since birth due to essentially a communication error ocurring in the signals between her eyes and brain, gets an implant which corrects the problem and we follow her experience of interpreting the newly available information.

A developing internet consciousness, (or Webmind), experiences discomfort when China's internet is disconnected from the rest of the global network, which I initially found hard to buy, but then I considered that the usual fluctuations of sites and servers coming and going could perhaps be like shedding skin cells (hardly noticeable) and that this loss of such a large amount of connections all at once may be more akin to losing an entire organ or a limb. (There I go with an anthropocentric examination of the ideas presented, oh the irony, and yet, how else to best try to understand?)

All of this contributing to the Webmind eventually making contact with our newly visual young protagonist. In which we see aspects of the interaction from both points of view and again fascinatingly, both are trying to interpret the other based on the best information that they have available to them, their own experience.

So there's clearly plenty of scifi intrigue. There's a heap of threads to keep track of, thankfully by the end of book one some of those have merged. There are still a few unresolved elements that make it clear the story is part of a larger series. I thought the characters were all quite good, especially the young lady who gets the implant (Caitlin), her parents, and the doctor who created the implant.

I love a protagonist with an inclination for mathematics and I enjoyed the quirky mathematical tidbits which popped up (not nearly enough) in this story. (Easy stuff, nothing challenging, eg. 07:49 is the last time that the actual time is a number followed by its square each day).

"How seeing more could make people see less was beyond her." - I thought this observation made by Caitlin was a modestly profound insight.

Another thing I love about my book characters is when they share a perspective with me that I've not much personal experience with and I enjoyed being occasionally surprised at some of Caitlin's observations which I would otherwise have taken completely for granted.

Caitlin may also be on the spectrum for autism, although I don't think that's conclusive in this story. Perhaps in the next. However her father is described as having Asperger's syndrome and the story tried to include a little on what that life is like. I think it had some success, I think it was never intentionally disrespectful too, but I think it did slip at times. For example, while making an interesting point about the possibility that blindness might suppress the presentation of autistic characteristics, Dr. Kurosa tells Caitlin that he thinks she may have "dodged a bullet" by being born blind. This is an awkward phrase that I would wager many autistic people wouldn't like, because of the implication that they are undesirable. Not to mention that I would find it weird if somebody told me that I was lucky to be blind. Anyway, the point was actually very interesting, and I don't believe Sawyer would have intended offense.

Some other more minor quibbles that I had...

One was that words were coming naturally to the Webmind for ages and then suddenly we see it inventing the word "data" which was just unnecessary and inane to me. It reminded me of Douglas Adams' spontaneously generated whale who spends its entire minute-long existence inventing words. At least the whale was intended to be funny.

Another was just me wondering why Hobo was being threatened with getting sterilised when he was living in a controlled environment and unable to mate without researcher facilitation anyway?? Just didn't make sense other than to create some sense of urgency among those researchers.

Here's an irrelevant anecdote for ya. This book wouldn't have been on my immediate radar, but I picked it up because I had been invited to attend a digital discussion with the author, hosted by an American library's scifi book club. I'm in Australia and the meeting was at 3am on a Wednesday morning for me, and I did try to attend, but I fell asleep at about 2.40am and believe it or not, awoke at 4am, exactly when the meeting ended. Bummer. But at least it got me to make a start on this series which, (based on topic alone), might not have come up for a few years on my scifi quest.

To end on a slightly more positive but also completely irrelevant point. Having noticed, in other places, that the author is also a bit of a star trek fan, I wondered if the character "Bashira" was named for Dr. Julian Bashir of DS9, but I think it's fair to say that I look too hard sometimes.

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