Head On
By John Scalzi
Head On is a sequel to John Scalzi’s Lock In, with FBI agents Chris Shane and Leslie Vann returning to investigate another high profile murder case.
The premise behind the Lock In universe is that there is a disease that shuts the body down but leaves the mind fully functioning. People in this locked-in state, Chris Shane being one, are able to get around and interact by using mechanical avatars known as “threeps.”
Head On begins with a game of hilketa, a new, ultra-violent team sport played by threeps whose corporate backers are trying to break into the professional big leagues. When one of the hilketa players is killed in action Shane and Vann are drawn into a complex web of intrigue that spans the globe, and some prime real estate in virtual reality as well. You’ll have to pay attention in order to follow all the different threads, but Scalzi is in good form again here with his usual rich blend of smart, rapid-fire dialogue and well-paced bursts of hard-hitting action.
It’s often said, correctly, that SF doesn’t predict the future so much as it reflects current anxieties about where we may be heading. If so, there seems to be near universal concern over growing social and economic inequality. In recent SF books and movies one of the most common elements is a vision of the world divided into rigid castes of haves and have nots.
The premise for this novella has it that in order to become a British citizen, immigrants have to pass a psychological assessment that takes the form of an advanced virtual-reality scenario. The reader immediately thinks of one of the more sinister experiments devised by Stanley Milgram, and while that isn’t far off the mark what’s telling here is what the technology (an advanced mix of software and drugs) is really doing. The point isn’t to control Idir (the applicant) but to reveal him to the observers. And, as things develop, the story turns out to be just as much about them as it does Idir. The observer effect is amplified by the human factor, changing lives as well as the results of the test. This is the real threat here, more than the political misuse of the assessment being made, and the resonance is all the greater in the age of Big Data because we are, voluntarily or unconsciously, taking these tests every day.
The end game of capitalism is looking grim in this dystopic novel by Claire North.
Half Way Home is a 2010 book by Hugh Howey that was, for some reason, re-released in 2019. I don’t think it holds up that well against his more recent work but it does give some early indication of where he was going.
As an author and activist Cory Doctorow’s fiction often takes up the same political subject matter as his advocacy and opinion pieces. In recent years the two have been drawing ever closer together, to the point where the four novellas in his latest collection, Radicalized, might almost be thought of as dramatic essays.
Time travel is a venerable science fiction trope, so much so that various sub-genres of time travel story can be identified. Permafrost may remind us of of 12 Monkeys in its basic premise, which has it that in the year 2080 the world as we know it has gone to hell, the result of a total environmental collapse known as the Scouring. A group of scientists in Russia, however, have come up with a way to inject the consciousness of selected “pilots” into the minds of people living fifty years earlier by way of MRI machines. In this way they hope to avert catastrophe.