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Crux: Nexus Arc Book 2 Paperback – August 27, 2013
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Six months have passed since the release of Nexus 5. The world is a different, more dangerous place.
In the United States, the terrorists – or freedom fighters – of the Post-Human Liberation Front use Nexus to turn men and women into human time bombs aimed at the President and his allies. In Washington DC, a government scientist, secretly addicted to Nexus, uncovers more than he wants to know about the forces behind the assassinations, and finds himself in a maze with no way out.
In Thailand, Samantha Cataranes has found peace and contentment with a group of children born with Nexus in their brains. But when forces threaten to tear her new family apart, Sam will stop at absolutely nothing to protect the ones she holds dear.
In Vietnam, Kade and Feng are on the run from bounty hunters seeking the price on Kade’s head, from the CIA, and from forces that want to use the back door Kade has built into Nexus 5. Kade knows he must stop the terrorists misusing Nexus before they ignite a global war between human and posthuman. But to do so, he’ll need to stay alive and ahead of his pursuers.
And in Shanghai, a posthuman child named Ling Shu will go to dangerous and explosive lengths to free her uploaded mother from the grip of Chinese authorities.
The first blows in the war between human and posthuman have been struck. The world will never be the same.
File Under: Science Fiction [ Stage 2 | Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? | Mind Games | Upgrading… ]
From Booklist
Review
“A blisteringly paced technothriller that dives deeper and even better into the chunky questions raised by Nexus. This is a fabulous book, and it ends in a way that promises at least one more. Count me in.”
- Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and Pirate Cinema
“Smart, thoughtful, and hard to drop, this richly nuanced sequel outshines its predecessor with a wide cast of characters and some complicated, uneasy questions about power, responsibility, and the future of humanity.”
- Publishers Weekly
“Crux does what sci-fi is supposed to do: Leave you staring into a future you never thought of. Make you wonder where you would fit. And challenge previous sci-fi scenarios.”
– Tom Shippey, The Wall Street Journal
“Potent like Naam’s vividly imagined nano-drug Nexus, Crux is a heady cocktail of ideas and page-turning prose. It left my brain buzzing for days afterwards.”
– Hannu Rajaniemi, author of The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince
“Nexus and Crux are a devastating probe into the political consequences of transhumanism; a sharp, chilling look at our likely future.”
– Charles Stross, author of the Halting State and Laundry Files series
“Highly recommended for preparation of the future revolution.”
– Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America
“A brilliant book, full of mind-blowing tech drawn in highly believable fashion. Naam’s action sequences carry a brutal intensity, and every time you think he’ll finally let you breathe the stakes rise even higher.”
– Jason M. Hough, New York Times best-selling author of The Darwin Elevator
“Crux is an outstanding speculative fiction adventure … in the same league as Michael Crichton and Daniel Suarez. Put it at the top of your summer reading list!”
– Scientific American
“Sublime. This book is speculative fiction at its finest. Mr Naam masterfully mobilizes the zeitgeist of contemporary political and tech culture … Tempts readers with equal parts dread and optimism. This is not a book to be missed.”
– Page of Reviews
“Readers of Ramez Naam’s techno-thriller Nexus will not want to miss the awesome sequel, Crux.”
– Kurzweil AI
“Crux does the work of great science fiction. It makes the reader look closely and critically at what kind of world we’re building here and now.”
– Kent Peterson
“Naam’s writing is always strong, fluid and sure. With gripping, heart-pounding action scenes and muscle-binding tension normally reserved for horror stories, Crux is a book you don’t want to miss.”
– Allways Unmended
“A worthy sequel that reads like a mash-up of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, Naam’s cyberpunk thriller is even better than the original.”
– SF Signal
“I found myself tearing through the pages as chapters flew by from different characters’ perspectives until the final pieces fall into place. If you enjoyed Nexus you will absolutely love Crux.”
– My Bookish Ways
“Crux would probably work fantastically as a movie and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a whole franchise spawning from Naam’s creations. […] Until then we should enjoy the thought provoking, but ultimately fun, workings of Nexus 5.”
– upcoming4.me
“I have not seen an ending this well-executed since Steven Erikson. The staccato POV. That slow realization, where you “get it” just a few seconds before the characters do. The warring emotions. The dramatic irony. This is an author who is going straight to the top of my favourite new writers list”.
– Ristea’s Reads
“Crux is a model sequel, a novel that builds off of the success of the original rather than trying to imitate it. Naam is writing one of the most exciting thrillers I have ever encountered – crafting a near future that holds as much promise as it does menace. This could usher in a new wave of cyberpunk, a socially relevant shot to the frontal lobe. I hope the overlords of Angry Robot Books are smart enough to lock this series down for the long run, because I need more.”
– SF Signal
“Ramex Naam’s Crux, a follow up to his thriller Nexus, is just as exciting as the first book and will take the reader on a real thrill ride that is terrifying and gripping.”
– Looking for a Good Book
“The book quite liturgically got my pulse up and the first night I read it, I had to set an alarm or I would not have gotten any sleep. this is a very compelling near future science fiction thriller!”
– Brewing Tea & Books
About the Author
His non-fiction book More Than Human won the H.G. Wells Award.
His novels has been nominated for the Kitscie Award for Best Debut, the Prometheus Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is a 2014 nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
- Print length512 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAngry Robot
- Publication dateAugust 27, 2013
- Dimensions0.04 x 0.04 x 0.04 inches
- ISBN-100857662961
- ISBN-13978-0857662965
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Product details
- Publisher : Angry Robot (August 27, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 512 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0857662961
- ISBN-13 : 978-0857662965
- Item Weight : 0.035 ounces
- Dimensions : 0.04 x 0.04 x 0.04 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,826,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,748 in Technothrillers (Books)
- #7,794 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #9,808 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Ramez Naam was born in Cairo, Egypt, and came to the US at the age of 3. He's a computer scientist who spent 13 years at Microsoft, leading teams working on email, web browsing, search, and artificial intelligence. He holds almost 20 patents in those areas.
Ramez is the winner of the 2005 H.G. Wells Award for his non-fiction book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. He's worked as a life guard, has climbed mountains, backpacked through remote corners of China, and ridden his bicycle down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast. He lives in Seattle, where he writes and speaks full time.
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In its own way, Crux, as the sequel to Nexus, answers this question.
As a continuation of the ultimate open source release of a hybrid wetware restructuring drug called Nexus 5, Crux is more of the same action and thought centric story telling. The question being toyed with is who should control this powerful mind linking and controlling tool. Everyone has a motivation for wanting that power. Kade, as the central character, believes, despite the nefarious motivations, that the open nature of Nexus 5 will change the world for the better. The ability to communicate with autistic children provides the most obvious counterpoint to mind controlled assassinations and totalitarian rule. At the same time, Kade uses his own backdoor(s) to neutralize the more obvious threats and exploitations of Nexus 5, while literally asking himself why he alone should have the power to do this.
Crux also provides a barrage of new ideas about rewriting genes to change human function, structure, and appearance. Greater hive intelligence, faster reflexes, the ability to resolve brain or bodily difficulties, and all sorts of other "just on the horizon" of current science is part of what makes Crux a fun and intelligent read. Near future sci-fi is always some of the best because it is not quite so far out there that current tech provides the base of credibility.
There are groups embracing this new technology, and those that choose to opt out and not experience this new openness. Additionally, there are those that download Nexus 5, use it for a period, and then purge it. This ability to opt out removes much of the tension that a reader may have about a permanent change. The dystopian totalitarian super-person viewpoint is counterpoint to the more optimistic transparency providing societal clarity, understanding, and problem solving.
Crux is a fast moving reading experience. The multiple storylines converging into one is typical of the sci-fi suspense novel and author Ramez has mastered this successful plot structure. Crux is a relatively easy read, and as the reader approaches the mid-point in the book, may find it difficult to put it down.
Crux takes the ultimate answer of who should control Nexus 5 almost to the end, while leaving a great opening to another third book to provide further closure about who may control Nexus 5 in the future.
Mr. Ramez--please release the third book sooner rather than later!
Incidentally, based on Amazon's "customers who purchased this also purchased"... Dave Egger's The Circle is an interesting read on a slightly different angle of the same questions posed in Crux and also comes recommended, especially rewarding after reading Crux.
"Nexus", in my opinion, was a perfect near-future techno-thriller. Everything about it, from characters, to pacing, to techno-jargon, to concept building, to interweaving plots, was fantastic. It was, and is, one of the best books I've read, and I'm a major fan of Ramez Naam.
That said, "Crux", is a somewhat weaker follow-up to that debut novel.
Events start out about six months after those of the first book; the Nexus 5 OS has been released to the world at large, Kade and Sam are on the run in their own parts of the world, various factions are maneuvering to take control of Nexus for their own nefarious purposes, and things are generally not going well.
"Crux" loses some of the pacing that made "Nexus" so irrestible. The book starts out on a somewhat spastic foot, with the narration flipping quickly between characters in the span of a half dozen or so pages. Further, several characters introduced during this prologue end up being just "extras", and yet they receive copious amounts of description. I understand what Ramez was doing here (trying to quickly establish the state of the world as it is now), but a little more focus, or, conversely, a bit of a more detached perspective, could have made that easier to read.
But it's not just the prologue that suffers; the rest of the book continues to switch perspectives a little too frequently (and on the Kindle Edition, this is not helped by a lack of paragraph breaks, indentations, or even, proper paragraph formating. PLEASE FIX THIS AMAZON). Coupled with this is a tendency to not set up some of the scenes very well. In one hand I understand this is an attempt to keep to the point of the situation, or to keep the pace moving, but at the same time, sometimes scene-setting is a forgotten art; at times, I could barely imagine what was going on from the lack of any tactile description.
The other thing this book suffers from is a lack of limitation to the power of Nexus. In the first book, Nexus 5 was new, the concept of the OS operating it was COMPLETELY new (before, Nexus was more a synthetic drug than a sort of brain-augmentation), and thus, for a large part of that book, the characters with Nexus were learning about how Nexus worked as much as the reader was. There were clearly stated limitations, some people were more capable at certain aspects of it than others, there was room for discovery and mystery. It was like the first "Matrix"; Neo is new to the concept, the audience is new to the concept, and we get to live the experience of the Matrix through the character as he learns and grows.
However, by the time of "Crux", many of the characters have achieved an almost god-like power with Nexus. Obviously, things are still limited by the have's and have-not's (that is, a person with Nexus has no power whatsover when facing someone WITHOUT Nexus). But for those with Nexus, there seems to be almost no limit to what they can do: remotely cruising the internet, disabling security cameras, sending out an EMP-like burst of energy, viewing another person's memories at will, readily recording everything they see and hear, and taking control of people's bodies entirely, turning them into not much more than fleshy robots. This last element is one of the central driving conflicts in "Crux", and for the most part it DOES setup a decent amount of tension for the plot. But just how there is an entire camp of people who like comic book superhoes but hate Superman because he's so invulnerable, I did not like some elements of "Crux" because of the "quasi-god versus quasi-god" in some scenes. Conflict in narrative is richest when it has sharp edges and well-defined borders, but many times, the central characters seemed to just be able to do what they want when they want.
--- THE GOOD ---
But despite all that, I did enjoy this book. It continues the ongoing conflicts setup in the first book in a realistic way, and introduced a new antagonist that is about as morally ambiguous as you can get. The first book painted most of the factions in shades of black and white, but "Crux" expertly and cleverly introduces a new faction that is entirely gray. Right up to the final conclusion, the antagonist is not quite bad or good, and this serves to illustrate a very clever point only hinted at and discussed briefly in "Nexus".
Character building is not quite as rich as it was in "Crux", and for the most part the plot sticks with existing characters from "Nexus", but their personalities are further developed and explored quite-well in "Crux". Indeed, you'll find that, with the brave new world that the protagonist, Kade, as created comes a whole new set of ethical quandries and moral dilemmas that effect each character in their own unique way that is enriching to read about.
QUICK NOTE: At least one review on here has complained that this book deals heavily with global warming and has an agenda as far as that is concerned. That is blatantly untrue. Over the course of this entire novel, Ramez spends a dozen, maybe two dozen pages SPECIFICALLY mentioning global warming as a concept or the effects it's causing. Not only does he not pursue an agenda as far as that's concerned, but the primary purpose of this element is to serve as one of several motivating factors behind a certain character's actions.
FINAL VERDICT: If you've read "Nexus", and liked it enough to want more, then "Crux" is the logical next step in the ongoing story of Nexus. If you LOVED "Nexus", however, in several ways "Crux" will be a bit of a step-down in overall quality. In any case, "Crux" is a good book, a rare sci-fi thriller novel that excites as well as makes you think. It is a high-concept, but well grounded exploration of a near-future world that could one day be real.
Top reviews from other countries
人間の脳と、液状で飲むことのできるOS(ネクサス)が融合した世界を描く。
1作目は翻訳済み(ネクサス-ハヤカワ文庫SF)。私は1作目は翻訳を手にし、夢中になって読了。続きを味わいたく2作目を手に。三部作ゆえ2作目はストーリーをどこまで拡げることができるのか...という点では満足して読める仕上がりになっている。
読み始めて1/3くらいまでは話が広がるための下準備。それ以降は、1作目の話としっかりつながりを見せてくる。よって、著者には三部作構想があったのだなと、先のスケールに期待を抱いてしまう。つながりがパッときらめくあたりはサイエンス・フィクション小説というより推理小説の謎解きのよう。思わぬたのしさも味わえてしまう。
なによりも、本作では主人公ケイドの心情描写が読み手のこころをつかんで離さない。1作目はゆれうごくケイドだったが... 三作目(最終巻)でケイドはどうなるのであろう。
スケールのあるシリーズでよかった。安心の2巻目。




