From the Bookshelf: Lock In
Oct. 14th, 2016 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLooking through the bookstore, I was passing by the remaindered shelves when one particular title broke through the unfortunate sense of disconnection I just might all but wallow in when it comes to science fiction these days. I couldn't quite remember where the impression I'd heard of John Scalzi's Lock In before to have it catch my attention had come from, but in picking up a copy and reading the blurb inside the cover I thought I could take a chance on it, remembering I had liked his book Redshirts; it was cheap enough anyway.
There's a brief summary at the beginning of the book setting out the ground rules of its "near future" society, in which a new disease has left millions of people "locked in," conscious but with no control over their bodies whatsoever. Scalzi goes for a "can-do" solution and in the book, the United States threw money at the problem so that brain-scanning technology lets those afflicted remote-control robot bodies or "integrate" with specially equipped people. After that summary, the fine details of what it's like to actually live in that world fill in a bit at a time the way science fiction prides itself on being able to do. However, it wasn't long until I had an explanation of why the slang term for the robot bodies is "threeps"; at that moment my instant reaction wasn't amusement but rather "oh great, how long until this Star Wars reference gets followed up with gratuitous new-movie condemnation?" It did bring to mind one of the first things that had made me pull back from following the discussion of written science fiction and started disconnecting me from the literature itself, even if that was a bit mixed up with the uneasy awareness it had been much more possible to detach altogether from that form of science fiction than from the more "popular" stuff.
However, despite the ambiguous detail of the slang being described as coming from "one" movie (which is at least better than some of the alternatives), nasty follow-ups didn't materialize. I suppose I did, though, pick up on how there's a secondary character called "Lucas Hubbard," and then remembered that the bill to remove government subsidies for those affected by the disease is called "Abrams-Kettering"; even the fact of the disease being called "Haden's syndrome" had me thinking that was almost another resemblance. I also did happen to think that before he got (further) burnished by having been "there in the good old days," there'd been a fair bit of contempt towards C-3P0 in the Star Wars fandom... With all of that more or less accepted in my mind, anyway, I could concentrate again on how the story was a murder mystery involving someone who could "Integrate" with "Hadens." There were a lot of pieces to keep track of and at times the feeling they were close to getting away from me, but in the end everything seemed to come together well enough; as I often find when I do more or less force myself to start reading prose fiction these days, I find myself getting through it pretty quickly. To some extent, my imagination did get to wondering just what more could be done with the idea (whether the "general" idea or the world itself developed in the novel, which does keep concentrating on the United States), but I kept reminding myself of a conviction I have that you shouldn't let "possibilities" overshadow what a work of fiction actually contains. For all I know, Scalzi has his own follow-ups in mind.
There's a brief summary at the beginning of the book setting out the ground rules of its "near future" society, in which a new disease has left millions of people "locked in," conscious but with no control over their bodies whatsoever. Scalzi goes for a "can-do" solution and in the book, the United States threw money at the problem so that brain-scanning technology lets those afflicted remote-control robot bodies or "integrate" with specially equipped people. After that summary, the fine details of what it's like to actually live in that world fill in a bit at a time the way science fiction prides itself on being able to do. However, it wasn't long until I had an explanation of why the slang term for the robot bodies is "threeps"; at that moment my instant reaction wasn't amusement but rather "oh great, how long until this Star Wars reference gets followed up with gratuitous new-movie condemnation?" It did bring to mind one of the first things that had made me pull back from following the discussion of written science fiction and started disconnecting me from the literature itself, even if that was a bit mixed up with the uneasy awareness it had been much more possible to detach altogether from that form of science fiction than from the more "popular" stuff.
However, despite the ambiguous detail of the slang being described as coming from "one" movie (which is at least better than some of the alternatives), nasty follow-ups didn't materialize. I suppose I did, though, pick up on how there's a secondary character called "Lucas Hubbard," and then remembered that the bill to remove government subsidies for those affected by the disease is called "Abrams-Kettering"; even the fact of the disease being called "Haden's syndrome" had me thinking that was almost another resemblance. I also did happen to think that before he got (further) burnished by having been "there in the good old days," there'd been a fair bit of contempt towards C-3P0 in the Star Wars fandom... With all of that more or less accepted in my mind, anyway, I could concentrate again on how the story was a murder mystery involving someone who could "Integrate" with "Hadens." There were a lot of pieces to keep track of and at times the feeling they were close to getting away from me, but in the end everything seemed to come together well enough; as I often find when I do more or less force myself to start reading prose fiction these days, I find myself getting through it pretty quickly. To some extent, my imagination did get to wondering just what more could be done with the idea (whether the "general" idea or the world itself developed in the novel, which does keep concentrating on the United States), but I kept reminding myself of a conviction I have that you shouldn't let "possibilities" overshadow what a work of fiction actually contains. For all I know, Scalzi has his own follow-ups in mind.