Finished it. It was a quick read.I thought it was a great concept, great setup for the first half of the first novel, then didn’t really explore the conceit at all. He mostly just used it as a way to rehash a bunch of Star Trek stories, but without Star Trek’s social awareness. (He literally has a vignette where, at a party, all the women are in the kitchen cooking and washing and remarks how nothing has changed in 200 years. Ugh.) There is one major character who is female in the series, and her purpose is to serve as a kind of Beatrice. (Taylor’s hamfistedness here makes me appreciate Lemony Snickett’s slyness all the more.) Bobs are always virtuous and capable and know the right thing to do: a pantheon of geek gods. Aside from the barely-cloaked sexism, he also has a luddite’s understanding of evolution, which veers dangerously close to eugenics. And he doesn’t get relativity, nor does he deal with the paradoxes that would be ever-present with bunch of Bobs communicating instantaneously across light-years while at various relativistic speeds. (Once you have FTL comms, causal chains become unglued.)
This should have been a good series of books. It starts out well. It should have explored the issues of consciousness and identity more in-depth. This is what the conceit is crying out for. Instead it’s just solipsistic to a ridiculous degree. I think the first book is worth reading, but skip the rest.
I’m now about halfway through Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon and, as a palate cleanser it’s great. A quote:
Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar way.
Gnomon is about consciousness and identity and how narratives are constructed. It is, like most of Harkaway’s writing, kind of elliptical, tinged with shades of magical realism. It’s about… hmmm, well at heart about a woman who dies while under interrogation and the subsequent investigation into her death. But this all takes place in a kind of Benthamian high-tech future society where surveillance is both total and mostly welcome. The “interrogation” is literal mind-reading, but who the subject is and how she attempted to defeat the interrogators and how it did or didn’t cause her death are the core of the narrative. It’s a fascinating, multi-layered novel. It evokes David Mitchell and Claire North, but with Harkaway’s gift for prose.