Customer Reviews

WWW: Wake (WWW Trilogy)

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Robert J. Sawyer's "www.Wake" opens up a few cans of worms and leaves us with a cliffhanger at the end so we can all speculate on what happens next. Without giving too much away, a brilliant but blind teenage girl is enlisted by a Japanese scientist for experimental eye surgery and when it is all done, a lot of interesting things occur. Meanwhile on the other side of the country there is a gorilla painting pictures of its caretaker and in China there is a suspicous avian flu outbreak that results in the Chinese government covering up some drastic action it took to deal with it. I expect Book Two will deal with these secondary issues in a bit more detail and find a way to link them to the main story.

Sawyer's writing style is approachable even for those who are not big Sci-Fi readers. Certainly the science is there (and accurate) but his books tend to deal more with the culture of the day and the way the characters respond to that while the science flutters by in the background. This was an enjoyable start, a fairly quick read, and I am looking forward to the next one.

Wake is thought provoking,a good read and an introduction to modern thought on human perception / pattern recognition. The side-play concerning the heroine and her father is not well done and raises more questions (such as why did her mother marry this bozo?)--however the concept of growing up with contrasting affecting by ones parents is a valid one.

The plot is pure science fiction and points to a plausible future maybe 30 years from now. The reader should pause now and again to think abut the issues Sawyer brings up on modern thought / science.

Wake held my interest to the end and is a kind of "feel-good" book. I can recommend it with out reservation

WWW: Wake has all the hallmarks of a great Sawyer novel: intriguing premise, educational bits of knowledge spread throughout, making you feel like you are reading a great Chricton novel or a very engaging textbook, loads of Canadian trivia, and, most importantly, three-dimensional characters that live in the mind's eye and are people you care about.

Unlike most of his novels, where the main character is a middle-aged male Canadian intellectual with some sort of marital conflict, the star here is a 15-year old American math whiz who just happens to be blind and female. Another favorite Saywer novel, Factoring Humanity, also featured a female lead and the same sense of wonder and emotional depth is present here as well. Only one minor character comes off as a bit cliche during a conflict with Caitlin. I'll let you guess which one that is.

There are at least three plotlines that intersect here and, while this initial volume is fairly benign, with one big exception, there are hints at some sinister goings-on for parts two and three.

I never read his dinosaur trilogy, but this is at least as good as his Neanderthal triology, even though it has more of a leisurely pace, and there is not as much world-building going on. I am looking forward to the next volume. I just hope the story doesn't come true by then!

WAKE is clearly identified in the beginning of the volume (in the list of "Books by Robert J, Sawyer") as the first in the WWW trilogy, with WATCH coming in 2010 and WONDER in 2011. It is good for a reader to know this going in. Although there are multiple plot lines in Wake, it is not a complicated novel. Several plots are resolved and some surely will see resolution later.

Interestingly no date is mentioned in the book. I'm guessing the story takes place right about now (2009) or in 2010 or 2011.

As it is the start of the "WWW" trilogy, is knowledge of the World Wide Web a prerequisite? I would say yes absolutely. Given who the average Sci Fi book reader is this should not be a problem.

There is diversity in the characters, that is, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and in terms of health and intelligence. This makes for some humorous moments. On the other hand - financially - this is a middle class world, one where money matters affect how characters act.

That there is no direct or graphic violence is perhaps a Canadian aspect of the book. The stresses that keep the reader engaged are psychological and physiological. There are specific Canadian details sprinkled throughout. These enhance the story and ensure that author Sawyer dutifully promotes his homeland.

WAKE is a fun and thoughtful book. It is expertly paced. It superbly draws on a historical parallel between its main characters and the lives of Helen Keller and her teacher Ann Sullivan.

Sawyer has things to tell you, and nothing will stop him. Characters know things they don't need to know:

"Sho was aware that there had been a much earlier version by Simon and Garfunkel,but she only knew their names because of the chimp at Yerkes known as Simian Garfinkle."

Or sometimes they know things that they don't know:

"'Le'azazel!' exclaimed Anna; it sounded like a curse word to Caitlin."

And then suddenly a teenager in a high-school mathematics curriculum becomes a working expert on information theory and cellular automata.

When Sawyer can't plausibly have his teenaged protagonist discover all of computational linguistics, he hands off the exposition to a handful of interchangeable scientists. But there isn't a grain of characterization that doesn't feel obligatory; we feel the author straining to get back to the good stuff: summarizing papers and putting them between quotation marks.

The book isn't self-contained. Things happen, but no conclusions are reached. The Internet becomes self-aware, an ape paints a picture, a blind teenager's sight is restored. This might set us up for hijinks in the coming books, but it's not a satisfying read. We aren't even left with any urgent sense of events in motion; the book just ends.

The writing is engaging, once you stop trying to figure out why the narrators of the individual chapters all sound the same, and once you realize that it's okay to skim the chapters in which the Internet ponderously considers its own condition. But really, why waste your time?

Sawyer's lackluster writing suits this tediously unimaginative trilogy very well. The numbingly shallow characters feel as though they were ordered out of a catalog along with the painfully predictable plot, and the only wonder is that both take three entire volumes to crawl a snail's eternal inch to their inevitable, uninspired conclusion.

While the particularly bad realization of teenagers is likely to inspire well deserve contempt in young readers and a dangerous coma in older ones, none of the characters possess sufficient substance to either please or offend. The dialog is painfully stilted and tolerating the labored yet facile plot requires not so much the suspension of disbelief as the erasure of consciousness. And the length "in case you missed the last volume" repetitions render even the merely mediocre actively painful.

I'd have rated it "hated" except that hatred would require taking it seriously.

If you're looking for a mind-bending conception of artificial intelligence, try Ian McDonald's arresting and deranging "River of Gods."

Wake (part 1 of a trilogy, something that accounts for parallel stories left abandoned in the middle of the novel, but nevertheless no less irritating for this) has a few serious flaws that a modern SF reader should be aware of before purchasing it, Hugo finalist or not.

Wake's major sin is that it is way too unsophisticated and way too relying on one of science fiction's cheapest tricks, the "Technological Breakthrough Ex Machina".

Is your planet threatened by aliens and in dire need of FTL? Voilà! In 6 months, a genious kid/or scientist, more often than not born in the same city the author lives and works, comes up with FTL. Are you a Kardashev 1 society desperately needing to harness your star? Done, in 50 pages. Do you need a miraculous implant to restore your sight and (at the same time!) produce sentient AI? Enter combo Japanese scientist/blind girl.

Apart from the convenient science, the main character is not explored enough (something that would have been forgiven, were the book full of ground-breaking ideas), the cold war tone of voice in the China chapters makes the whole story feel dated (I mean, how many times have we read about Soviets covering up crimes?) and the AI awakening chapters, written from a 1st person POV are very hard to go through, like reading 1000 captchas in a row.

On the other hand, the book reads fast and has small chapters.

2 stars.

16-year old former Texan, Caitlin Decter, is living with her family in Toronto and attending local high school. Nothing spectacular except for the fact that Caitlin has been blind since birth. She communicates through an online program she calls Jaws that is an auditory program allowing her to hear everything that is on her screen.

Caitlin and her family fly to Japan to meet with Dr. Kuroda who has come up with an experimental surgery that could give Caitlin sight. Her new electronic eyes would be downloaded with data thereby allowing her to see as well as link to the World Wide Web. This "Websight" initially has some glitches - all Caitlin sees are images that she interprets as actually being the workings of the Web. Eventually, she does gain full sight and is overwhelmed at the world that has revealed itself to her. Underneath all this, however, is a computer entity that has been "awakened" through Caitlin's new vision and she is slowly becoming one with this entity (that she later names Webmind). This novel will give you more detail into the WWW then anything you have probably imagined (or even wanted to know).

Thus begins the first book in a new trilogy by the great Sci-Fi/Fantasy writer, Robert J. Sawyer. However, I found this to be the least drawn out of any of his previous novels. The premise is good, but the characters (with the exception of Caitlin) are not terribly likable. Additionally, there are a few random plot-lines that are introduced and either dropped totally or forgotten about, I imagine, until they get reintroduced in future novels. Most specifically, a plot-line involving an intelligent chimp named Hobo who can use sign language (an obvious homage to Crichton's "Congo") has only the thinnest tie to Caitlin's story and was quite distracting from the main plot.

Like all "first" novels in a trilogy or series, much time is given to establishing characters and motives and laying the groundwork for the far more interesting suceeding novels. I trust that Sawyer has this in mind and that the rest of this series delivers much more than this often dull story.

Wake is the story of a blind girl and her interactions with her family and the internet, but not in a cliched way. It does not get maudlin and Robert Sawyer keeps the story fast paced. Sawyer takes science fact and and stretches it into science fiction; he also uses a lot of pop culture references. These combine to make the stories that take place on Earth very believable, scarily so. His pop culture references made me feel more connected to the story and its characters. If the entire trilogy is as good as book one, then this series will be as good as his previous trilogy Hominids.

bravo ... this is the first of a trilogy,

and I can't wait to read the next two