G.F. Smith

What if your smartphone directly interfaced with your brain?

In many ways, this was an interesting thought-experiment into that potential. While the theory is arguably plausible, the version in the novel was very ambitious, and the tech behind it was mostly hand-waving. -Which is OK, but when much of the text is talking about the details of this tech, the hand-waving aspects got annoying.

It was mostly a very talky novel, where people talked a lot about what things mean, etc.

However, there was a section that was action-adventure, with pure space opera tropes. That part was very exciting and page-turning.

In short- I think it had promise as a critique of smart-phone, social-media conventions... but such were nonetheless described as a 100% plus, and the secrecy about the mechanisms made me very dubious.

Also- it is long. It's a large book, with a reasonable but small type, and just under 500 pages. I mention this because large books can sometimes be hard to read for me, physically.

I do not think that it would be that easy to integrate smartphone tech with brainwaves, especially as miraculously as was described here. And, if that happened, I do not think a utopia is necessarily the inevitable result; I think it would be likely to be misused.

The book resolved the current plot arc, but had another one that was very much not resolved- the Big Bad remained amorphous.

I received this book in exchange for writing an objective review.… (más)