I might be alive in this not so distant future. The environment the author creates feels like a conceivable mixture of the familiar and the bizarre; it stimulated me to imagine myself living in this world.
Although Lock In fits neatly into a science or speculative fiction pigeonhole, it is also a respectable thriller with smart, plausible dialogue. The most severely affected survivors of a new virus are fully awake and aware, but their bodies are immobile and unresponsive. Their bodies live in cradles, overseen by caretakers, while their minds lodge in Personal Transports, manufactured substitute forms impervious to some kinds of traditional assaults but susceptible to mechanical malfunctions.
The protagonist, fledgling FBI agent Chris Shane, is one of these survivors. In his first week on the job, Shane pursues survivor malefactors against a background of social protest inspired by recent legislation that defunds part of the extensive network of programs that the US government has created to ensure that survivors are integrated into society.
Shane and his partner, a less severely affected survivor herself, have lots of fun new detective toys and technology with which to probe a series of murders, suicides and murder-suicides. But they must still use deductive reasoning and ingenuity to assemble the motives and actors into an explanation of the fast-moving crime wave that spreads out around them.
If I have any quarrel with the book it is that the characters, apart from the narrator, are one-dimensional. Shane attends a dinner where four of his fellow guests are the CEO and general counsel of an investment firm, and the CEO of a pharma firm and his husband. Their characters were sketched so minimally that I had trouble distinguishing between the two pairs during the remainder of the novel in which they all figured.
The disability politics were the most engaging part of the novel for me. They illuminated 2015 era scarce resource battles most astutely.
Although Lock In fits neatly into a science or speculative fiction pigeonhole, it is also a respectable thriller with smart, plausible dialogue. The most severely affected survivors of a new virus are fully awake and aware, but their bodies are immobile and unresponsive. Their bodies live in cradles, overseen by caretakers, while their minds lodge in Personal Transports, manufactured substitute forms impervious to some kinds of traditional assaults but susceptible to mechanical malfunctions.
The protagonist, fledgling FBI agent Chris Shane, is one of these survivors. In his first week on the job, Shane pursues survivor malefactors against a background of social protest inspired by recent legislation that defunds part of the extensive network of programs that the US government has created to ensure that survivors are integrated into society.
Shane and his partner, a less severely affected survivor herself, have lots of fun new detective toys and technology with which to probe a series of murders, suicides and murder-suicides. But they must still use deductive reasoning and ingenuity to assemble the motives and actors into an explanation of the fast-moving crime wave that spreads out around them.
If I have any quarrel with the book it is that the characters, apart from the narrator, are one-dimensional. Shane attends a dinner where four of his fellow guests are the CEO and general counsel of an investment firm, and the CEO of a pharma firm and his husband. Their characters were sketched so minimally that I had trouble distinguishing between the two pairs during the remainder of the novel in which they all figured.
The disability politics were the most engaging part of the novel for me. They illuminated 2015 era scarce resource battles most astutely.
18 of 50 / 52.