Technopathy

by Chantal Boudreau

Bertie likes to live a natural life and he doesn't trust technology, especially the latest craze: a device that essentially gives its users technological telepathy. What will he do when technopathy goes wrong, and the nanobots that are supposed to fix any malfunctions seem to be malfunctioning themselves? How will he survive when the latest craze turns its users into techno-zombie crazies?

Nook

First published September 18, 2011

About the author

Chantal Boudreau is an accountant by day and an author/illustrator during evenings and weekends, who lives by the ocean in beautiful Nova Scotia, Canada with her husband and two children. In addition to being a CMA-MBA, she has a BA with a major in English from Dalhousie University. A member of the Horror Writers Association, she writes and illustrates predominantly horror, dark fantasy and fantasy and has had several of her short stories published in anthologies. Fervor, her debut novel, a dystopian science fantasy tale, was released in March of 2011, followed by its sequels, Elevation, Transcendence and Providence Other books published include her Masters & Renegades fantasy series (Magic University, Casualties of War,Prisoners of Fate)and The Snowy Barrens Trilogy, her YA tribal dark fantasy trilogy.

Reviews

[Werner]

Ever since the advent of the Internet, pundits have been speculating about the possibility of installing high-tech implants directly into the human brain, to "augment" and "enhance" us by wiring us for direct feeds of outside influences into our minds. At present, such technology doesn't exist; but it's far from impossible, and the mindless attitude that anything that can be done must be done virtually guarantees that some researchers somewhere will soon develop it. And it's entirely predictable that Big Government and Big Business will embrace such technology with joy for its mind-controlling potential, and that many humans will willingly subject themselves to it if it's presented as cool and trendy. SF writers such as David St. John in Sisters of Glass have already sounded a warning about the possible abuses of such a development.

Now, another cautionary tale about this particular Pandora's box comes from the pen of Chantal Boudreau, in the form of a quick-moving short story that plunges us into a very dystopian future, as the implants in her fictional world start to turn their users into kill-crazy maniacs targeting the non-implanted "naturals" for their homicidal frenzy. It's a gritty tale with some violent (at times a bit graphic) action, marked by a distinct sympathy for high-tech society's despised underdogs. (Her characters include a trio of homeless street kids who talk the way their real-life counterparts usually do --which is to say, with some bad language, including a couple of f-words.) The author's social vision is pretty similar to mine, and she held my interest from the outset with this yarn. True, I have a couple of minor quibbles; one sentence is incoherent, probably because of some words accidentally being omitted and not caught in the proofreading. And while knowing the geographic setting of a story isn't always necessary, here I think it would help --especially if, as I hope, this becomes a story series; it has series potential written all over it! But those quibbles don't count for much here; this is a great read of its type. Boudreau is definitely a rising speculative fiction star to watch!