Lock In

John Scalzi

Reading the description of this novel I immediately thought of Blindness by Jose Saramago. That was an OK novel (fascinating in many ways, but overall flat). As such, I was not jumping to get into this. However, I must say it was brilliant. Set in a future where a new disease has caused some people to become "locked in", where they have zero physical ability, but their minds are vibrant. The result is a massive worldwide effort to develop neural interfaces with those brains so that the victims of this disease can interact with a world through a remotely operated physical transport (i.e. robot). With this setting, Scalzi gives us a straight up detective thriller. Think mashup of Counting Heads, I-Robot, and Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch. I can definitely see this becoming a serial. What is particularly fun is the ability of the locked in to rent physical transports (thereby traveling across country almost instantly) or borrow (local police departments have loaners for out of town detectives), and all the difficulties that entail. I also liked the way Scalzi would introduce new characters without explicitly stating whether they were a locked in or not. As a reader, you couldn't make assumptions about the person and were forced to read other characters reactions and interactions carefully. Very fun, very clever.
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