‘I have made my mark on history in a series of Stefan-shaped holes and lived to write this account. At the same time, this not the account of a reliab
‘I have made my mark on history in a series of Stefan-shaped holes and lived to write this account. At the same time, this not the account of a reliable witness, only the speculations of a man who was not there.'
4.5*s. This book was so rich and luscious that it positively oozed out of the pages. Weird and funny and creative and compelling, I’ve never read anything like it and can only hope that I do again.
Earth is in it’s final years and the remnants of humanity resides in one, final city: Shadrapar. Stefan Advani, Shadrapan resident and Academy scholar, is on his way to the Island, a floating, jungle prison to the east of the city. There, he expects to die. Despite sadistic Marshalls, deranged cell mates, aquatic monsters and tropical disease, Stefan does not die. Instead, he tells us his story: of life on the Island and the friends he makes there; of his time at the Academy and the reason for his conviction; of the underworld; and of the dregs of human civilisation. It is a strangely hopeful tale in a rather hopeless world.
It is ironic that, in a world where animals are considered abhorrent and humans faces extinction, there should be quite so much life.
‘Wherever there was nothing to be seen, there was the suggestion of life: a sound, a movement. The trees thronged with unseen man-eaters.'
Evolution has accelerated and humans are no longer the only intelligent creatures out there, nor are all of those creatures entirely natural. Through Stefan, we commune with web children and macathars, cyborgs and time-travellers, genetic experiments and those who desperately seek to experiment on themselves. And then there’s the venomous snakes, the poisonous spiders, the river beasts and all number of other terrifying creatures to keep you up at night.
Whilst a good portion of the book is spent on the Island and in the surrounding jungle, we also see deserts and ruins, bustling cities and the endless, forgotten warrens of the its underbelly. Each reminded me a little of other of other settings in other books: the jungles, Annihilation; the deserts, Dune; and the underbelly, The Girl and the Stars. However, nothing quite encompasses the whole of Tchaikovsky’s creation and I delighted in each new setting.
Stefan Advani, self-professed coward, is an oddly likeable character. He’s kind and accepting, but not a mark; hopeful, but not delusional; unfazed but not callous. He’s talented enough to be useful without being brilliant, and, more than anything else, he’s damn lucky, dodging death again and again by the skin of his teeth. He seems to attract friends almost in spite of himself and they’re a delightfully weird and wonderful bunch. My favourites had to be Shon and Peter, even if the latter cheated at chess.
Told in a chatty style, Stefan narrates his story to us, helpfully signposting the parts that he knows, with hindsight, are important.
'If Thelwel looked like anything, it was a junior librarian. He will have a particularly important part to play in my story and he had an unusual secret, which I will eventually share with you. But when I first met him, it was only in passing.'
I initially found this uncomfortable, and the narration by David Thorpe equally uncomfortable, but, quite quickly, I grew to rather enjoy and then love it and him. Unlike the usual sci-fi/fantasy (and it does feel like a blend of the two genres), Cage of Souls does not set a challenge to start that the protagonist must then overcome (well I guess it does but that didn’t feel like the primary purpose of the story). Instead, it felt like a biography, if a fantastical and action-packed one.
The reason that I didn’t give the book five stars was the ending. I didn’t like it. I wasn’t interested, I didn’t feel invested, and I didn’t felt it fit with the rest of the story. It wasn’t awful, it just could have been better. Fortunately, because of the pseudo-biographical structure of the book, the ending was relatively unimportant (and short besides), so it didn’t feel like much of a let down.
All in all, I loved Cage of Souls and would recommend it highly to sci-fi/fantasy lovers (and more selectively to those not so enamoured with the genre). I will certainly be reading more Tchaikovsky in the future. ...more
“Making people change because you can’t deal with who they are isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their h
“Making people change because you can’t deal with who they are isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their heads out of their asses. You say ‘cure.’ I hear ‘you’re not human enough.’”
There is something about reading a book about a pandemic in a pandemic that adds an extra layer of excitement and fear to the experience. As I write this, Britain is going into its second lockdown and, worldwide, 48.1 million people have been infected with Coronavirus and 1.23 million people have died from it. That’s a lot of people, but reading Lock In, it makes me grateful that it’s not more, and that so many have recovered from it without effect. Yes, people panicked initially and life has changed now as we try to adapt to a new reality, but it hasn’t changed drastically. Life if Scalzi’s world changed drastically; it had to after 1% of the human populace experienced lock in. Exploring this new world was an AWESOME experience.
Chris Shane contracted Haden’s Syndrome at the age of two and was locked in. He doesn’t remember what its like to move around in a human body; instead, he grew up and experiencing the world through Threeps (nicknamed after C3PO), controlled via a brain-computer interface. He’s filthy rich thanks to a trust fund from his father, currently running for Senate, and world famous after a childhood as poster-boy for Haden’s.
We meet Shane on his first day as a FBI agent. His partner, Agent Leslie Vann, is an integrator - someone who can allow Haden’s into their head to experience corporeal life for a short time. His first case is a murder investigation.
Is it always like this?" Tayla asked. "My job?" "Yes "This is my first week on the job," I said. "So, so far? Yes." "How do you feel about that?" "Like I wish I had decided to be the typical rich kid and been a sponge on my parents," I said. "You don't really mean that," Tayla said. "No," I said. "But at the moment I really want to feel like I did.”
Murder investigations, it becomes clear, are far from straight forward when one party can take over another party’s body, or when some of the parties involved are only represented by a generic robotic body and so are hard to identify and apprehend. As the body count begins to rack up, and things become more nebulous and nefarious, we gain insight it what it really means to be a Haden and just how society has adapted to incorporate them.
Lock In made me question two things. Firstly, what does it mean to be disabled? Are Haden’s disabled? Shane certainly doesn’t identify that way. Instead, he’d probably say he was differently abled and I would 100% agree. He could do almost anything he wanted to do; sure, he wasn’t doing it in a human body, but does that really matter? This brings me to my second area of consideration: what is a human? Are they the mind in the body, or can you separate one from the other? Cassandra Bell, a young Haden activist, argues at one point that Haden’s shouldn’t feel obligated to manifest corporeally at all (ie. they should shun the use of Threeps and Integrators), and that their life online and in the Agora (the Haden virtual world) is equally valid as a human experience. I don’t necessarily agree but I find it fascinating to ponder.
Though at times I have labelled myself as disabled (I have a chronic health condition), and so know, to a degree, the power of the word, I have not experienced it’s crushing weight like some. Part way through the book, I started researching reviews written by those who had (this was one I found) and two things became clear. Firstly, Lock In was unusual in its explicit discussion of disability and should be commended for that. Secondly, Lock In was not without fault in its portrayal of disability - the scene where a threep is damaged and Shane brashly rejects it being a prime example of this, as is the abandonment of those who have lessened mobility but do not have Haden’s. For myself, I felt the book allowed me more of an insight than ever into what disability meant, and what can happen when it becomes impossible for a society to ignore.
One more thing I picked up from reading other’s reviews is the treatment of gender in Lock In. Despite the fact that I listened to Lock In, I had NO idea that there are actually two Lock In audiobooks, one narrated by Wil Wheaton (the one I listened to), and one narrated by Amber Benson. This is because at no point does Scalzi ever conclusively say whether Chris Shane is masculine or feminine. Strange to say it but I actually never noticed this, I just assumed he was male. Maybe because I associate the name Chris with men more than women, maybe because I was hearing Wheaton’s voice not Benson’s. It works because Shane presents in robotic form which does not have any gender identifiers and Chris is always just referred to as Chris or Shane, not he or she.
Personally, and maybe because I’ve been conditioned to this throughout my life, I feel very disorientated when I don’t know what someone looks like. People’s appearances give you so many clues about them as a person that I feel their loss when they aren’t there. Now, this can also create widely incorrect first impressions or lead to stereotyping so there are benefits to going in blind, as it were. Worse for me, would be the lack of facial expressions. So often I misinterpret texts or emails because I can’t see the intention behind the words. I would hate to lose that in every day conversation, either through my own inability to show emotions or through others inability to show me. And as someone’s that’s had Bell’s Palsy and temporarily lost the ability to express emotions on one half of my face, I only feel more strongly about this.
Ok, so that’s a lot on the world building. Needless to say I LOVED IT and know I will be thinking over one implication or another for a long time. Actually, the short prequel, Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome, was included at the end of my Lock In audiobook and I revelled in the additional detail we got there. I’d recommend it highly to those who’ve only read Lock In and enjoyed it as much as me. On to other aspects though.
Scalzi’s writing was as quick and as sharp as ever. He’s a master of dialogue and his stories always go along at a good clip making them hard to put down. The characters were fantastic. Chris is certainly entitled but he’s also confident, intelligent and capable and I felt myself drawn to him. Vann was more acerbic but made for a good partner and an interesting side-kick. Wheaton’s narration was as faultless as ever and I find his dry humour always adds to his performances.
All in all, I LOVED this book and can’t wait to get on to the next, Head On. HIGHLY recommend to sci-fi fans and others less familiar with the genre but interested in clever crimes, the portrayal of disability, or the future of the world post-pandemic (though not necessarily post-Covid)....more
Citizens of Terra. My name is Opt Enatast. I wish to speak with Rose Frankyin.
Another book, another beautiful cover. The apocalypse is over, the d
Citizens of Terra. My name is Opt Enatast. I wish to speak with Rose Frankyin.
Another book, another beautiful cover. The apocalypse is over, the dystopia has begun. A good end to a fantastic series, and the darkest one of the lot.
Vincent, Eva Rose, and Eugene are on Esat Ekt and it's not as weird as I thought it would be - or apparently as weird as they thought it'd be.
– Too mundane for you? – I don't know, I think alien world, I don't think Martha Stewart. – What did you expect? Space combat? We ate and we slept and we washed dishes.
But with the decision as to whether to allow Vincent et al. home in the hands of a committee, it doesn't look like they're going anywhere is a hurry. Committees, it seems, are the same the universe over.
Meanwhile, at home, the world has gone to shit, and somehow it's more frightening knowing it’s the result of human logic rather than alien invasion. Humans are now divided according to their levels of alien DNA, with those with the highest levels shut away in camps/prisons. This time, there really does seem to be no way out, though Rose isn’t giving up.
Like its predecessors, Only Human kept me on my toes, laughing one page and shaking in my boots the next. Major Katherine Lebedev in particular made a fantastic addition to the cast, with her psychotic moods and witty repartee.
What? It’s called what? Oh, you don’t know if you should tell me…It’s really up to you. No, it’s not really up to you, but you know what I mean. It’s not like we’ll torture you on your first day. I’m kidding! GRU humour…I know.
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