WWW: Wake (edition 2009)

I don’t remember how I first came across this one, but the basic idea is that the Internet becomes self-aware. It was an idea I have toyed with from time to time but never figured out how to turn it into a story. Sawyer did.

It’s mostly told through the POV of a blind teenage girl who gets an experimental implant to grant her sight, but there are also some other characters scattered around the globe playing their own parts. While the girl’s operation is at first deemed a failure, time changes that. I don’t want to say too much about that, because it’s a spoiler worth preserving, though I will say I was initially annoyed by what she sees via her implant. Still, I recognized it was required by the plot, but I was glad to see it go.

We also see some of the story told from the POV of the emerging sentience of the internet. While generally told in small snippets, I found that part very interesting. Over the book, it goes from a barely aware sentience to a fully self-aware, communicative mind. That in itself was an interesting journey.

So, overall I enjoyed it, with only minor points of nit-picking. It’s clearly the first in a trilogy, so I look forward to seeing where the rest of this goes. ( )

There's some really interesting speculation in this book about the nature of consciousness and intelligence. The central story about the girl blind from birth gaining sight is certainly full of all sorts of potential. And its not a bad story. Worth reading.

But in the end I found it a little bit thin and a little bit truncated. Three story lines may be too many for a book of this length because I felt like they all got short shrift to some degree. As others have pointed out, the story about the chimpanzee (although I liked it) is only very loosely connected to the other two - and none of the three stories actually reaches resolution. So although there's a lot here that is interesting, it reads more like a first installment - like there's a big sign at the end that says tune in next time to find out what happens to our intrepid crew. Which I don't love.

Also, although the characters are well drawn, at times they feel to me like they are present in the story primarily to explain things to the reader - to tell us how a bonobo differs from a common chimpanzee, or how a search engine works, or what Annie Sullivan taught Helen Keller. All of which is pretty interesting information, but as dialogue, it doesn't feel all that realistic. And it made the characters feel like mouthpieces rather than people with their own agendas.

So in the end, although I liked parts of this - it was just too didactic for me to love. ( )

An interesting and exciting look at the way that we might find out what happens with the computing power that is connected over the internet. While geared towards young adults, this thought-provoking book provides a scarily realistic look at some of the pitfalls and challenges of technology. Sawyer seamlessly weaves contemporary people and places into a world where not only has life sprung up on the internet, but where it is also closely monitored with government agencies being able to see everything and how those two worlds interact. ( )

Robert Sawyer's WWW trilogy is a story about the emergence of consciousness in the plumbing of the internet. Artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness is a well ploughed furrow in sf, and it takes a good writer to say anything new or interesting about the subject.

Sawyer's description of his entity's journey to consciousness does not bear comparison with the mind-bending tour-de-force in the prologue to Greg Egan's Diaspora. Where the books do score, however, is not in the hard-science technical detail (which is not entirely convincing), but in the warmth, humour and infectious optimism of the human side of the story. Some of the characters are thinly drawn, but their emotional world is well handled, and there are some very funny and some very moving moments. The use of a blind central character also allows for some intriguing exploration of the role of vision in consciousness.

One major defect, however, is that Wake does not stand well on its own - the trilogy has to be read as a whole. The subplots introduced in Wake do not really begin to make sense until book 2 (Watch).

Overall, Wake is a work of flawed, but uplifting and heartwarming beauty. Read it (and its sequels) if you want a book that will leave a smile on your face. ( )

A teenage girl, blind since birth, receives an implant designed to make her see. But instead of seeing the outside world, she develops the ability to “see” the Internet. Soon, she becomes aware of an increasingly intelligent presence growing from the Internet as a whole.

I enjoyed reading it well enough but did not find it as thought-provoking as his other stuff. Sure, it’s interesting to think about what it would be like to develop sight at the age of sixteen--for instance, Caitlyn has to learn to read--but I’m surprised that there was not more speculation about the nature of the artificial life, what his rights should be, and what the nature of his existence was. ( )