Pentapod reviewed WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
Review of 'WWW: Wake' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is the first in a trilogy, and focuses on a blind teenage girl who's offered the chance to try a technological intervention that might potentially cure her blindness. Basically, she has a "crossed wire" in her visual processing, and the surgery inserts a chip and streams her visual data through a portable device to correct the data errors and feed the corrected data to her brain.
I enjoyed the perspective of the blind protagonist, and I understand Sawyer had a group of blind readers act as early reviewers of the book to give him feedback and corrections to ensure that her perspective is accurate. I also enjoyed the look at multiple aspects science and technology throughout the book. It's well researched and covers a lot of interesting and complex technical topics in an approachable manner.
I DIDN'T like the way a few of the plot threads seemed to just …
This is the first in a trilogy, and focuses on a blind teenage girl who's offered the chance to try a technological intervention that might potentially cure her blindness. Basically, she has a "crossed wire" in her visual processing, and the surgery inserts a chip and streams her visual data through a portable device to correct the data errors and feed the corrected data to her brain.
I enjoyed the perspective of the blind protagonist, and I understand Sawyer had a group of blind readers act as early reviewers of the book to give him feedback and corrections to ensure that her perspective is accurate. I also enjoyed the look at multiple aspects science and technology throughout the book. It's well researched and covers a lot of interesting and complex technical topics in an approachable manner.
I DIDN'T like the way a few of the plot threads seemed to just be dropped, incomplete, without resolution. I suppose since it's a trilogy they may return later, but since the main plot thread ended satisfactorily at the end of the first book, it's irritating that the various side characters were just left hanging.
I was also fairly horrified at the lack of encryption or other security protocols on the visual processing device the heroine is given - it seems horrifically insecure that it's described as automatically connecting to "any available wifi" in order to download. Making everything that I am seeing with my eyes be potentially openly hackable by anyone who can get on the same free wifi network as me sounds like a complete security nightmare. This is probably a technical info sec detail that will not bother most readers, but I couldn't read the various descriptions of the device's data transmissions without feeling slightly appalled.
At the end of the book it seemed as if not a huge amount had happened, it was a fairly gentle, intellectual plot, but nonetheless I found the characters engaging for the most part and didn't feel bored. I may pick up the sequels, although I probably also won't go out of my way; it was enjoyable but not irresistably gripping so it'll have to wait till I get through some other books on my list first.
