Review: WWW: Watch

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

After my spectacularly inept review of book one I was hesitant to say much about this one. Here I go anyway, hopefully with some more meaningful commentary. I'm truly invested in the characters now and even though I thought that some plot decisions were questionable I am pleased with the way it has all come together so far.

The writing ebbs and flows for me, sometimes I'm leaning towards 5 stars for ideas and interesting developments, other times I'm drooping down near 3 stars for plain language and awkward scenes. The story has a more energetic plot overall involving covert ops; intelligence agencies around the world have begun to notice the existence of Webmind and it's no challenge to guess how those types of folks will respond. This puts Caitlin and her posse on the defensive and makes for a good tense bit of storytelling, especially the ending which had all the heart racing elements of a good thriller.

Having previously established Webmind's existence, this book explores more about exactly how Webmind came to be and we follow his learning and decision-making processes. Note that I didn't lazily refer to Webmind as a he, the gender is chosen in the story. I think this series would have been written just a few years too early to have noticed that the fact Caitlin chooses Webmind's gender is a little distasteful, but I reiterate with sincerity that I don't think there was any disrespect intended by the author. After all, Webmind got to choose his name and since I am reading in 2022 I fully expected Webmind to get the option of gender also.

One of my favourite parts of the series so far has been the opportunity to think about things from a blind person's perspective. I need more of this type of thing in my life. Anyway, regarding seeing her classmates for the first time, Caitlin's mum says to her: “Did people look like you expected them to?” - and I really like the internal monologue that followed:

"Even after all these years, her mom still didn’t really get it. It wasn’t as though Caitlin had had dim, or blurry, or black-and-white, or simplified mental pictures of people prior to this; she’d had no pictures of them."

I liked book one but this was much better. I don't usually get too frustrated when a series is obviously a series - I mean when the first books leave lots of loose ends which we know will have to be resolved later - it doesn't bother me because I'm usually late to any bandwagon and therefore typically able to read the complete series in succession without having to wait for the next release. But fair warning to those who don't like that, book one has a lot going on that won't begin to flower until book two and then book two leaves you feeling like things have really only just begun to take shape. With that said, my expectations for book three are probably now unreasonably high.

Among other details which I had failed to accurately describe in my review of book one, was that the talking, painting Chimp was actually a Bonobo/Chimpanzee hybrid born out of an accident at a zoo. This became a very fascinating element in the way Sawyer applied it and the way that Webmind himself exploited it.

I don't really do these, but this one deserves a *Trigger Warning*. There is a pretty gross online suicide scene which features some of that shit we've all heard about but would rather pretend doesn't exist, online users egging on the person to "do it already" and "quit pretending" etc... and to me it was kind of more horrific than anything I've ever seen in horror. It's not very long and does add to the story but be prepared for it to be uncomfortable.

Webmind watches that terrible event and tries to ask Caitlin how to understand it, which leads to Caitlin making a pretty dumb decision. You can probably guess it but I don't want to spoil it by specifying it. Something that could lead to the absolutely classic AI conundrum but which doesn't go all the way down that path in this book and I'm hoping that Sawyer manages to keep it from hitting that cliché in the final book.

Well, that's all I have to say about that. Onwards to book three, SCIFI Readers.

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