Scan barcode
A review by trike
Nexus by Ramez Naam
2.0
This one is okay, rounded up to 2 stars. It's your basic cyberpunk thriller going over well-trod ground. The action sequences are nice, but the writing shifts from the staccato thriller writing to clunky comic book exposition where characters talk AT each other rather than TO each other.
I suppose if someone wasn't familiar with the history of cyberpunk, this might seem fresh and interesting, and Naam's real-life job as a technologist at Microsoft gives him some tech cred in this sphere, but there's a lot of been-there done-that to the idea.
The basic idea is that the drug Nexus is comprised of nanotech you swallow which connects your brain to the minds of other people running the tech. Nexus allows people to communicate with a version of telepathy and telempathy (feeling what others feel), share memories and control devices mentally.
It had promise early on, but once rhe story gets going the OS never crashes, which seems to be the most fantastical aspect of the story. I've never had a computer that DIDN'T crash. The iPad I'm typing this on crashes every so often, particularly Safari when I'm asking it to play a video or something in a second browser tab. I can only imagine that the Nexus OS would crash under high stress moments like the ones we see in the more intense action scenes.
I also didn't buy that it worked the same way on everyone. We don't even see colors or hear sounds the same way from one person to the next, and video games or movies which are fine for one person can cause everything from headaches to seizures in someone else, so I can't imagine how any sort of tech like Nexus would work so well across so many different people. I would think that the notion of mind-to-mind sharing would be inconsistent at best simply because the way we experience the world can be so very different from person to person.
That would be fodder for an interesting angle to examine: the attempt to connect people via shared experiences would necessarily exclude those who weren't able, for one reason or another, to fully utilize the Nexus tech. Naam's doesn't really take a look at this idea. It's mostly just talk about how people would use it mostly for good rather than evil, despite the fact our introduction to the main character has him uncontrollably performing a sex act that would be considered assault (at the least, rape at the most) if he had been able to get his pants off. Playing it for laughs didn't humanize him so much as utterly undercut the notion that people would use it for good. Go look at the comments section of any given YouTube video and imagine those people inside your head.
The single best version of this type of tech is the short story "Dogfight" by William Gibson and Michael Swanwick, which was published back in 1985 and can be found in [b:Burning Chrome|22323|Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0)|William Gibson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1349075772s/22323.jpg|2457086]. (You can find the text online. Trigger warning for rape.) But it shows how unintended consequences can arise from technology, and it lands a helluva powerful blow in just a few pages.
Google has run into this time and again, even endangering people's lives, and that's just by relatively innocuous things like sharing contact lists via Gmail. I'd think something like this would be even more dangerous because of those unintended and unforeseen consequences.
I don't think I'll be reading the sequels.
I suppose if someone wasn't familiar with the history of cyberpunk, this might seem fresh and interesting, and Naam's real-life job as a technologist at Microsoft gives him some tech cred in this sphere, but there's a lot of been-there done-that to the idea.
The basic idea is that the drug Nexus is comprised of nanotech you swallow which connects your brain to the minds of other people running the tech. Nexus allows people to communicate with a version of telepathy and telempathy (feeling what others feel), share memories and control devices mentally.
It had promise early on, but once rhe story gets going the OS never crashes, which seems to be the most fantastical aspect of the story. I've never had a computer that DIDN'T crash. The iPad I'm typing this on crashes every so often, particularly Safari when I'm asking it to play a video or something in a second browser tab. I can only imagine that the Nexus OS would crash under high stress moments like the ones we see in the more intense action scenes.
I also didn't buy that it worked the same way on everyone. We don't even see colors or hear sounds the same way from one person to the next, and video games or movies which are fine for one person can cause everything from headaches to seizures in someone else, so I can't imagine how any sort of tech like Nexus would work so well across so many different people. I would think that the notion of mind-to-mind sharing would be inconsistent at best simply because the way we experience the world can be so very different from person to person.
That would be fodder for an interesting angle to examine: the attempt to connect people via shared experiences would necessarily exclude those who weren't able, for one reason or another, to fully utilize the Nexus tech. Naam's doesn't really take a look at this idea. It's mostly just talk about how people would use it mostly for good rather than evil, despite the fact our introduction to the main character has him uncontrollably performing a sex act that would be considered assault (at the least, rape at the most) if he had been able to get his pants off. Playing it for laughs didn't humanize him so much as utterly undercut the notion that people would use it for good. Go look at the comments section of any given YouTube video and imagine those people inside your head.
The single best version of this type of tech is the short story "Dogfight" by William Gibson and Michael Swanwick, which was published back in 1985 and can be found in [b:Burning Chrome|22323|Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0)|William Gibson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1349075772s/22323.jpg|2457086]. (You can find the text online. Trigger warning for rape.) But it shows how unintended consequences can arise from technology, and it lands a helluva powerful blow in just a few pages.
Google has run into this time and again, even endangering people's lives, and that's just by relatively innocuous things like sharing contact lists via Gmail. I'd think something like this would be even more dangerous because of those unintended and unforeseen consequences.
I don't think I'll be reading the sequels.