Customer Reviews

Till Human Voices Wake Us

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The three threads are all strong enough to stand alone; they don't start to tie together 'til the middle of the book, but the end more than makes up for earlier confusion.

I first saw this book in my local bookstore. As soon as I read the blurb, I picked it up. "T.S. Eliot, transhumanism and mystic neurology?" It was as if someone had written a novel just for me, and I hoped against hope that it would fulfill its promise.

In fact, it did.

Some of my favorite things in the world include the clinical tales of Oliver Sacks, and the interstitial territory where the experience of neurological events blends into the experience of self and mystical reality. Yeah, a mouthful, that. This may not be your sort of book if a few thousand-dollar words throw you off. But if this sort of thing fascinates you too, read ahead. This is the first piece of science fiction I've encountered which has a full handle on these boundaries and realities.

There is a point towards the middle of the book where a present-day character admits to experiencing a sense that his life is being recorded by cameras in his brain, and in the context of the three interlaced plotlines of the book, it is a moment of wonderful and startling ambiguity. Budz leads us to a place where the possibilities are balanced on a perfect edge: that this character is experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations and that his life *is*, in fact, being recorded by cameras in his brain.

It's a wonderful place to be, a place where it's possible for a thought to be insane and also true, where these qualities are not mutually exclusive. This is a theme throughout the narrative: another character experiences a brain tumor and a series of spiritual revelations, and the relationship between these things is not held to invalidate his experiences...

The situations of the characters in the book are often harsh and dark, but approached with empathy: a kind of open-eyed attitude toward all human experience that drew me deeply into the story. I found myself following every word with deep fascination.

The breadcrumb trail may be a little hard to follow at first, and the author assumes a background knowledge of "post-singularity" fiction conventions on the part of the reader, but it's well worth sticking with for the follow-through. "Human Voices" is a high-bandwidth book; as the pieces come together, it blows the mind, literally and figuratively. This one's a keeper.

I read this book to the end and I still have no idea what happened. The story jumps between characters, locations and time periods mercilessly and is very vague about the details of the various far-future settings. Maybe the author was deliberately obsfucating the plot to emulate the style of Gibson. If so maybe he went too far.