The events of MindsEye left Nick Hall with brain implants that allow him to access the Internet from anywhere, and also with a little unintentional side effect of being able to read minds. Both abilities make him a prize to any number of organizations – the US government being just the most obvious – so he’s doing his best to stay under the radar now that most of the world believes he’s dead. A terrorist attack on the Academy Awards ceremony forces Nick into the open; now there are powerful figures hunting him down, and they’re willing to target those closest to him to get what they want.
Author Douglas E. Richards uses his experience as a biotech executive and his research on thought-controlled Web surfing to weave existing and theoretical technology together into a combination sci-fi action novel/military thriller. The story doesn’t quite work for me, but the concepts he uses are fascinating and thought-provoking.
The story leads off with the terrorist attack on the Academy Awards, and it’s by far the strongest segment of the book. It’s a horrifying scenario, not just from the violence (which it has quite a lot of) but by how close it feels to something that could actually happen. The existence of an undetectable explosive material doesn’t seem that far off in the future, and neither is a terrorist group this organized and dedicated to causing as much pain to the West as possible. Having them infiltrate a civilian ceremony, lock themselves and thousands of people inside, and then televise everything? It’s extremely believable. Richards even includes real celebrities in the carnage to make it feel that much worse. (Scarlett Johansson doesn’t have anything to be embarrassed about with her portrayal here; her character handles herself like a trooper. Hugh Jackman however didn’t even have a chance to be brave. Tough luck dude, such a shame…)
The attack means Nick Hall has to come out of hiding, so the rest of the book focuses on the world’s reaction to this new technology and at least two different groups trying to get control of it. Nick has a few allies: a surprising likable tech-company CEO/genius and his scientist girlfriend, the army general who helped him hide in the first place, and of course Nick’s obligatory love interest, Megan, who also happens to be the only person in the world who’s mind Nick can’t read. And since this is a techno thriller with a heavy dose of government conspiracies, it’s hinted that at least one of these people will betray Nick at some point.
(There are also a few comic-book references that made me happy. The author is either a Marvel fan, or he knows what his readership likes.)
If I had any quibble about the writing it’s that Richards uses an awful lot of “tell”, and not quite enough “show”. The terrorist attack in the beginning worked because everyone was under a deadline (one hour until the shooting starts), so it was crucial that Nick and the rest of his team utilize every second in order to slip past the terrorists and stop the massacre. In a situation like that you have to show everything as it’s happening. The rest of the book, not so much.
This is the second book in a series so some exposition is unavoidable. But then much of the rest of the story is something that’s being told after the fact or just briefly summarized. If the characters need to prep for an undercover mission, the book takes one paragraph to say that so-and-so is an expert in disguise, so he applies tattoos and hair dye. That’s it. A meeting of high-ranking military personnel reviewing a very big secret that’s been kept from the President is discussed over drinks on a yacht, same with the development of a world-changing technology and the covert security needed to protect the planet’s one and only mind-reader. The amount of action in the story gets overshadowed by talk-talk-talk. You’d think that Nick’s experiences of being forced to secretly mind-read politicians in order to gather blackmail material would be something the readers would like to see as it’s happening, but no, we just see a summary of the findings later.
Some of these summarizing passages are done to move the plot along a little faster, but there’s no reason to turn a large portion of the book into a series of very dry journal entries. If you can take the time to mention that the characters are sitting down for a dinner of homemade chicken-and-cheese quesadillas, then you come up with a better scene for a long awaited reunion than to just say “and then they made love, and compared notes on their captivity.”
To quote the great English philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead: “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”
The technology of Nick’s Web-surfing implants is the real draw for this book, with all the ways it can be used and all the ways it might possibly be misused. Think about how hard it is to convince people to put down their phones and actually pay attention to anything. Now imagine if the Internet, all of it, was accessible 100% of the time. Think about how it would affect the ability to focus or remember if your brain had access to round-the-clock distractions and a way to save every tidbit of information you ever encountered, forever. The BBC TV series “Black Mirror” has already done an episode about a technology that records everything you see, making it impossible to ever let anything go while at the same time letting you ignore the present by reliving your favorite moments of the past; add internet porn and CandyCrush and you could turn the entire human race into zombies.
Beyond the distraction element, students might use it to cheat on tests, so you’d have to put internet dampeners on schools. Of course you’d also have to have dampeners in any building with confidential information, and in cars to keep people from checking their e-mails while driving, and you’d need programs installed to keep people from downloading someone’s personal information, and new legal codes written to penalize privacy violations and keep governments from spying on people’s brains…the list goes on and on. It shows how truly dangerous a technology is if so much of your focus has to be on how to keep people from using it.
In a way it’s similar to how the author effectively uses Nick’s mind-reading abilities in the story. If you have a character with a god-like ability to see into people’s heads, then you need to do what Richards does here: create situations where either the power doesn’t work, or can’t help.