WWW: WAKE. By Robert J. Sawyer. Ace. 368 pages. $24.95.
Robert Sawyer is a Canadian, a winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards in science fiction. In fact, he is one of only seven writers in history -- and the only Canadian -- to win all three of the world's top science-fiction awards for best novel. In addition to the two above, he garnered the Campbell Memorial Award. He joins luminaries such as David Brin, Arthur C. Clarke, Joe Haldeman, Frederik Pohl, Kim Stanley Robinson and Connie Willis.
This, his latest work, is, in the modern fashion, the beginning of a trilogy and concerns the Internet. The focus is interpersonal relationships, again part of contemporary SFF's (Science Fiction and Fantasy) attempt to gain acceptance in the mainstream, the futile hope of all futile hopes.
In a literary universe, what a SF writer might deem "L-Space," where most of the top box-office movies are SFF, where speculative fiction is the baseline for fiction from comics to video games, the rule is: "If it has merit, it is not science fiction." Regardless of Gulliver's Travels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Margaret Atwood, the fact is that speculative fiction is never worthy of critical attention, no matter the inherent merit. So the "sensawonda" and the "world building" of naïve classic SFF is usually missing in recent works. Too vulgar.
This book is so determined to not be trapped inside the SFF ghetto that it almost completely vitiates itself with its insistent focus on the homey, the poignant, the sensitive. No planets blown up here; Bug-Eyed Monsters need not apply. Slime-dripping evil creatures would be politically non-correct. We have instead very nice people all doing their best, even while facilitating genocide.
The protagonist is an adolescent female, Catlin, mathematical wiz, snarky blogger, profoundly blind. Her scientist father, complete with Aspergers, and self-sacrificing mother are right out of Central Diversity Casting, as is her BFF, a dark-skinned Muslim. There are a plague in China, a Japanese scientist with a magic box, Chinese dissidents and a chimpanzee who paints. Helen Keller is cited frequently.
There is also a "Mysterious Stranger," who evolves before the reader's eyes to become a … never mind. No sense giving away what little suspense exists in this book.
However, the term Deus Ex Machina has literal application. We see the metaphor between Helen Keller and the emergent intellect, who has all the chapter intros.
This is not a bad book, certainly deftly written, the prose amusing, characters well delineated, the conflicts engrossing. However, the market these days is for blockbuster half-a-million-word epics, so this first book is mostly scene setting and character building. The Chinese characters, for example, take up a fifth of the book, especially in the first hundred pages, then vanish, never to be seen again, at least not until the second volume.
If this is the kind of book you like, this is as good an example as any. If not, not.
Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.
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