Or, "Copy and paste: The novel".
This is the tale of a man's quest for immortality, ala Dollhouse. Arthur Vogel is feeling his age, being 127, and everything he has done to keep his body working is slowly falling apart. About half of him is artificial, and he needs to get certain bits of him bio-printed every morning in order to use them. He's also one of the richest people in the world, and feels money should be able to buy him a little longer. How best to achieve this?
The solution comes in the form of Gene, a man built from the ground up to be the peak of human fitness, and a newborn blank slate physically in his twenties. Arthur has himself preserved digitally, and then downloaded into Gene's head via the implant (effectively smartphone) that everyone has wired into their brain.
Unfortunately, Gene, while intended to be a clean body and brain for Arthur to inhabit, happens to have developed a consciousness in the mean time, and so begins a fight over their body. Arthur is the stronger personality, but Gene has a secret weapon. Booze. While drunk, he's more or less entirely in control, which leads to him spending most of the book drunk. This doesn't really help his dialogue.
The book starts with a lovely little bit of world-building, imagining a world in which the Facebooks and Microsofts have taken over and controlled everything. And there's an interesting little sidestep into the concept of people losing the power of original thought, as a constant connection to the internet in their heads is eroding their independence. Bit like Twitter is, now. Unfortunately, the book rather loses its way once Arthur is actually in Gene's head.
Four plot lines leap into action all at once, and none of them get the time they need. There is the romance between Gene and Liv (effectively his emotion teacher), the mental fight over Gene's body, an unexpected society living in the woods (and a grand takeover plan that comes out of nowhere) and the slow failure of Arthur's incompetent empire. There's also occasional AI dropping in to screw things up.
Nothing seems to be connected to anything else, and nobody has anything like a justification for their actions. They all behave horribly stereotypically, or just like idiots (and not in a suitably supported manner). I think the book has an interesting point to make, but is poor at making it. The decision to have the main character remain drunk for most of the book means that he takes on a pathetic passivity, such that even though we're meant to root for him against the evil Arthur, we don't really want to.
The book also suffers somewhat from clumsy phrasing. I'm guilty myself of the odd run-on sentence, but this has such tortuous clauses that I'd get bored halfway through a paragraph and have to start again. There's also not the most consistent approach to the "Newspeak" that is often used in these commercial futures.
Not recommended.
Tagged: Book Science fiction Post-humans Novel Print