The Great Geek Manual

Book:WWW: Wake
ISBN-13: 978-0441016792

Author: Robert J. Sawyer
Publisher: Ace Hardcover
Series: The WWW Trilogy (Book 1)
Genre: Cyberpunk / Science Fiction
Release: April 7, 2009
Length: 368 pages (Hardcover)

Verdict

While many sites categorize Wake as “cyberpunk,” lumping this book in with revered giants of geeks culture like Neuromancer and Snow Crash is analogous to shelving Lemony Snicket with James Patterson under the heading mystery.

Wake has succeeded in creating a thought-provoking book. It’s chocked full of scientific ideas and concepts that will leave readers running to Wikipedia for more information. Plus, it features a well-written, honest-to-god female protagonist that neither entangles herself in romance nor needs rescuing. (A rare find in today’s science fiction isle.) Unfortunately, Wake was clearly written for a middle school audience, somewhere between the ages of eleven and fourteen. It lacks the both the action sequences and hard, gritty worldview that characterizes most cyberpunk in favor of a passive story with the narrative tone of a school primer.

As such, most readers college-aged or older are going to want to take a pass on this book. However, it is almost certain to join the ranks of such books as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother in defining the literary tastes of the next generation of geeks just emerging.

Synopsis

Official: Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math—and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin’s brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes. While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something—some other—lurking in the background. And it’s getting more and more intelligent with each passing day…

Review

In Wake, Robert Sawyer poses the intriguing question, “What if the internet was a living consciousness?” He then proceeds to answer his question with the assistance a metaphoric scenario in which a feisty young internet-savvy teenager named Caitlin is offered the opportunity to see for the first time through the use of an implant. Throughout the entire book, Sawyer keeps the pages turning by presenting readers with an amazing range of scientific fact and theory that boggle the mind and set the imagination to churning. In less than four hundred pages, Wake tackles the issues of autism, blindness, censorship, emergence, and sentience, just to name a few. Impressively, he concludes, not with the expect cliche of the internet moving to conquer humanity, but with his characters at peace, with a better understanding of themselves.

That ending says volumes about the author. By choosing to tell an essentially peaceful story, driven by scientific discovery both on the part of the reader and characters, Sawyer is taking up the best traditions of Isaac Asimov, whose stories rarely involved the sword-and-sorcery-style action sequences of contemporary science fiction. That in itself is exciting.

For decades stories were told like this. Only, they involved space travel, which has long since lost its excitement for modern readers. With this novel, however, Sawyer turns inward to the newest frontier to capture the imagination: cyberspace.

Caitlain is a polymath (look it up) with a fascination for Hellen Keller. After an experimental operation to restore her sight seems to fail, she develops that ability to “see” the internet as a vast network of lines and colors. Slowly, she realizes that, through her ability to see with the use of a computer, she is witnesses the emergence of a proto-intelligence from the internet. Determined not to allow the new entity to be harnessed for commercial purposes, she takes it upon herself to play the part of Annie Sullivan.

This book is perfect for young math geeks and girls who would like to finally see realistic representation of the gender in a story of her own.

Similar Books

• Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
• Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Further Information

Book-club discussion guides for Sawyer novels
Robert J. Sawyer’s website