Amazon Basics Book Safe- Key Lock- Black

Product Information

I love science fiction traditions for exploring such themes as science is beginning to make some of their elements a reality. Chris Shane, one of the most prominent Hadens by the virtue of being a child of a celebrity real estate tycoon, is a rookie FBI agent involved in the investigation of these crimes with his partner Leslie Vann - and he has his android hands quite full very quickly: “Today I fought with a ninja threep, saw two women view the last video from a dead relative, had a woman explode twenty feet from me, and watched my dad kill an intruder with a shotgun. She's a strong woman and hard to handle, but Nolan has a second chance now–thanks to a screwup with the divorce–and this time he's not letting her go…. You get all the elements of a police procedural with a rookie trying to prove himself while delving into a brave new world of a new kind of cyber-people.

Yeah, yeah, there's the horrible brain-re-writing virus and the people who weren't hit so hard with it, allowing those people who were locked-in in their bodies to experience remotely through someone else, and then there's also the robot waldos for the rest of the body-locked victims.It’s a huge part of what made this book such a great read, because to be honest, as mystery or suspense novels go, it’s not as mysterious or suspenseful as it could be (after all, it was pretty obvious who the bad guy was, and there’s really no having to guess whatsoever). I appreciated Scalzi’s insight that adults struck down by the disease would appreciate a sense of agency in the world through their threeps while those affected in utero or as infants invest more time living in a virtual world created for Hadens known as “the Agora. Indeed, Lock In is also quite different from all of Scalzi’s previous books – its tone is perhaps more pensive and serious, with a few scientific and technological concepts that are more complex and may be a little more difficult to grasp. Often, when entering a fictional world that is different for our own–be they far in the future, on another world, or in a place ruled by magic–we have to learn the rules, and there’s often at least a little confusion as we try to catch up and figure out what exactly is going on.

Essentially what has happened is a global pandemic, which has killed 400 million and left many millions more “locked in” meaning that they are left in a sleep like condition. Some find it a good approximation of what they remember before they caught Hadens, either for themselves or to remind others that they are still human.

There is a lot of action, and a lot of fictional science to try and grasp but the whole is an intriguing book which I enjoyed very much.

Obviously not enough to seriously harm the entertainment value of the book, but flaws that did diminish the ending a bit. First off Scalzi, in my opinion, does a very good job introducing new technologies into his near future society.

If it wasn't the banter, it was the situation, such as when he has to use a "loaner" robot in another state and its legs don't work. Many people recover completely but some are left in a situation where they are aware but unable to move. A percentage who went on to survive this second stage found themselves “locked in”, trapped in a state of being fully awake and aware, but having no control over their voluntary nervous systems. Using dialogue so heavily detracts from Scalzi's ability to build characters and to show character development.