They can use droids that are uploaded with their consciousness to move around in the physical world. Enter FBI Agent Chris Shane who has been a Haden since childhood and is now working for a team specialising in Haden related crime.

The book opens with three pages of a Wikipedia-type article about the incidence of and "treatments" for Haden's Syndrome. But this gets better because they can swap robots like we can exchange hire cars and in this way can leap about the globe with some ease and at rapid pace. The acceptance of the Agora as an acceptable alternative to the physical world is akin to Ready Player One and / or Neuromancer. Some of the technologies we use are necessary for critical functions like security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and to make the site work correctly for browsing and transactions. It is a mocumentary of how it set on, the way they dealt with it and the way it affected society as a whole.I was hooked by the situation, but infuriated by the constant and very crass exposition (for which I downgrade the book), and not very interested in the investigation at its heart (which is perhaps more due to my general lack of interest in detective fiction, rather than an objective weakness of the book itself). He is truly a classic version of the “speculative” science fiction author in that he hypothesizes where the human race may go to next while still concerning himself with how we operate as individuals and as a society right now.

A controversial law has passed, severely limiting government assistance for the Hadens, cutting the enormous flow of social support that many of taxpayers have found, well, taxing (a frequent sentiment in the US, as we know). Indeed, Lock In is also quite different from all of Scalzi’s previous books – its tone is perhaps more pensive and serious, with a few scientific and technological concepts that are more complex and may be a little more difficult to grasp. The story is at some time in the future in the good old USA, and some years after a plague overtook the world and killed a significant amount of the population. The brains of those locked in were essentially linked up to humanoid personal transports affectionately named “Threeps” (after C-3PO of Star Wars fame), allowing them to interact with the world once more. Whereas a different author could craft a good image of a character in a reader's mind in 10 or 20 pages - it takes Scalzi 90 or even 100.

But it's not quite as disastrous as this sounds as the locked-in people are able to use one of two options (or maybe both of them) to live a life much closer to normal than one could imagine. It so happens that the same day he starts work, the Hadens decide to protest and strike against a new bill in Congress which affects them negatively. I couldn't envisage the future of this world, though: Hadens' bodies age, and one male patient fathers children by semen extraction and IVF, but as the number of patients declines through deaths of longstanding patients, coupled with fewer new infections, what then? The care of these people’s bodies, known as Hadens, is subsidized by governments, and full rights are given for their personal drones, or “threeps”, to operate and function in jobs in society on behalf of their owners. I wasn't all-out crazy about it, due to what I felt was the excessive use of "he saids" and "she saids" in the narrative, but I recognized interesting world-building and great story-telling skills and wanted to try more of Scalzi's work.

It's not that I think it a bad book, rather I think it's a book I was incapable of fully appreciating. After listening to Scalzi's Redshirts, (also narrated by Will Wheaton), I knew I would be reading and/or listening to more of his books in the future.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I love science fiction traditions for exploring such themes as science is beginning to make some of their elements a reality. The issues raised for the psychology of identity and meaning in life for the lock ins reminds me as well of Varley’s “Persistence of Vision”, which deals with a unique society formed by victims of a virulent measles epidemic which creates the birth of thousands of people who are blind and deaf.

If you have small valuables that you need to conceal, then this book safe is made for you, it is completely portable making it ideal for use on holiday, in dorm rooms, nursing homes, in the home or office. This is also vaguely reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s Harvest of Stars books where consciousness can be loaded onto a computer / android. If you're not up to reading articles about it, try The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death - it gives you a good idea of what it's like. It also covers the politics: the huge investment in (and therefore profit from) treatments, followed by the recent Abrams-Kettering bill, meaning there would be huge cuts in US government funding. When the first neural networks for introduced hackers naturally tried to exploit them for fun a profit.This book took me too long to read, so important characters introduced in the beginning of the book were meaningless to me when I reached the solution. Life itself is hard, of course, with its everyday pitfalls and each individual’s long-term ambitions and disappointments… but for humanity that difficulty is compounded by all of the –isms that exist to divide humanity from itself.