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A review by rascalking
Nexus by Ramez Naam
5.0
I picked this up after seeing it recommended multiple times in my twitter stream. My twitter stream was not wrong. I had a lot of fun with this one.
Ramez Naam was a programmer in his former life (multiple stints high up the food chain at Microsoft), and it shows. He uses the Ken Thompson compiler backdoor hack as a plot device. And he's got multiple scenes where the main character is developing code that actually rang true. I'm hoping they're not too boring or confusing for non-developers.
The other thing that jumped out was the ambiguity of the different players trying to get Kade and his tech. Each one had a slightly different agenda, and different means to achieve it. None of them were angels, and none were outright evil, either. Even the one character that did come close to being a cardboard cutout was redeemed by a good character scene towards the end.
If you're looking for a good sf thriller, with just a touch of the singularity to it, and some reasonable scientific backing (he gives you a laundry list of recent experiments he extrapolated from in the afterword), I can easily recommend picking this up.
Ramez Naam was a programmer in his former life (multiple stints high up the food chain at Microsoft), and it shows. He uses the Ken Thompson compiler backdoor hack as a plot device. And he's got multiple scenes where the main character is developing code that actually rang true. I'm hoping they're not too boring or confusing for non-developers.
The other thing that jumped out was the ambiguity of the different players trying to get Kade and his tech. Each one had a slightly different agenda, and different means to achieve it. None of them were angels, and none were outright evil, either. Even the one character that did come close to being a cardboard cutout was redeemed by a good character scene towards the end.
If you're looking for a good sf thriller, with just a touch of the singularity to it, and some reasonable scientific backing (he gives you a laundry list of recent experiments he extrapolated from in the afterword), I can easily recommend picking this up.