By John Scalzi© 8/26/2014, Tor Books
337 pages
ASIN: B00IHCBE1C
My last Scalzi read, Starter Villain, was light, snarky, and filled with feel-good stuff, even though it had some dark overtones. This one, Lock In, was the opposite. Based in a world where a new, highly contagious virus has affected millions of people worldwide with “lock in”—a condition called “Haden’s Syndrome” in the story, where victims are fully awake and aware but unable to move or speak or respond to outside stimuli—the story drops rookie FBI agent Chris Shane into a roiling situation where a new law will end government protections for Haden patients. Protests, violence against Hadens (who interact with the world through “threeps” or “integrators”), and the threat of riots is rampant, making Chris’s first week on the job a bit more exciting than he’d expected—especially since Chris is, himself, a Haden’s victim, and lives his life through a high-end threep. (Think android who is driven by the main character’s own brain through wireless computer connections.) Not a light read at all, but absolutely gripping.
At its most basic, Lock In is a mystery, a riveting, fast-paced thriller about complex political, corporate, and societal conflicts. But at the same time, it is so much more than that. It’s a story of classism, bigotry, and the social unrest that greed-fed fear can raise. I could totally imagine this same kind of situation arising in the real world, given this set of circumstances.
There is so much detail, so many layers to this story’s complexity that it’s hard to summarize. An opening “preface,” presented as a scholarly summary of Haden’s Syndrome, explains the disease, how it affected the populace, how integrators and lock-ins came about, and other data points necessary to the reader before diving into this complicated drama. This is a very good addition to the book, because without this information, it would be difficult to get past the first few chapters; the story’s intricacies would quickly drown the reader.
The overall concept is enormous. Imagine significant numbers of people who require an entirely different type of existence: robotic or other-human interfaces in order to do anything outside their bodies; people who also rely on a virtual world in which they can freely move, think, interact with other Hadens, and simply relax; patients whose physical bodies require constant monitoring, feeding, cleaning; special “cradles” to safely hold their physical forms, and so many other needs not shared by the general populace. And in the story, Haden’s Syndrome isn’t eradicated. It continues to infect a small number of people every year. Not all of them end up locked in, but every single one is affected, their brain altered by the disease.
Now imagine that all government funding to support these absolute needs is going to vanish overnight. Yeah. This book is all about that crisis.
Lock In is not an easy read, not just because of the subject matter—no, if you love a good thriller, you’ll love this book—but because there are so many names and details and layers to track. A couple of times, I had to page back to remember who was doing what, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book. And even though it was hard to relate to the quality of Chris’s locked-in state, it was easy to connect with his personality, his ethics, and his actions. Same with Vann, who is an integrator. Can’t really relate to having a neural net in my brain, but I could empathize with her woundedness, and completely understand the reasons for it. She struck me as courageous and admirable due to the hard work she’d done to get where she was.
I could say so much more, but I don’t want to give any spoilers. Suffice it to say that this twisty, captivating story kept me reading past my bedtime. An absolutely fabulous thriller you won’t want to miss.