Fran: S is (Also) for Scalzi

It shouldn't be much of a surprise that Ed and I overlap in our taste for sci-fi, and that we both share a fondness for space opera and action-heavy works.  So I read John Scalzi's Lock In as well.

I liked the adaptation of current technological realities to future ideas.  The ideas of how neural networks function, how sharing occurs between two brains, how prosthetic robot bodies (threeps) work are all anchored in enough current science as to create a believable future world.

Scalzi's characters are...fine.  I read his stories for their plot.  He often gives them back stories which come out in expository lumps when another character needs the information to explain a way the person is behaving.  They don't really remain private or separate and the characters don't really grow and change.  And that's fine, as long as that's what you expect.  The characters are reasonably interesting, and they certainly move the plot along. 

One thing does bother me about the novel set up.  This isn't a spoiler, per se, as it is in the first pages of the novel, is part of the backstory to the world itself, and is described on all the review blurbs of what the novel's about.  But if you care, you might want to stop here.

This is from Scalzi's short piece, Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome, which appears in a VERY changed form as the preface to the novel.

Twenty-five years ago, doctors and hospitals were receiving their first cases of the disease that was initially misdiagnosed as a variant of the Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, and then briefly known as “The Super Bowl Flu,” and “The Great Flu,” and then finally, after the full extent of the damage it could cause was known, named “Haden’s syndrome.” The disease would claim millions of lives and sentence millions more to “Lock In,” a paralysis of the body that leaves the mind fully functional.

Later, he will put the numbers at 400 million dead in the world, 4 million in the US alone.  Yet a mere 25 years later we have a fully functioning society with the locked-in able to use threep technology to move and function, and "integrators" able to host the brains of the locked-in for a human experience. 

What annoys me is the difficulties of the timeline.  Scalzi wants characters who remember what it was like not to be locked in--to be fully functioning humans, as well as characters who have seldom/never known anything else.  But the devastation to society of that many lives lost is glossed over in the novel.  Few people talk about loved ones who died in the waves of disease.  The oral history does some to replace the idea of social disruption that would have occurred with that many people sick/dying but the novel does nothing.  Businesses and politics happen as usual.  The idea of a "moon shot" emphasis on building a subsidiary medical and technical industry is less plausible to me in the wake of the staggering death numbers.  But maybe that's because I find fascinating what happened to the world after the 1340s Black Death and the 1917-18 Spanish Influenza; I wanted something more in my backstory than what Scalzi wanted.  Different priorities, I think.

Once I moved past the 25 years frame, I accepted the idea that a virus swept through and that we have a technological industry that addresses the physical needs of the locked-in; it just became a longer period of time for me between the onset of the disease and the medical industry of the present world.  In no way does this ruin the book for me.  It was an interesting mystery/procedural set in a futuristic world, with an awful lot of action.