Influx Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I9IF078 | Format: PDF
Influx Description
What if our civilization is more advanced than we know?
The New York Times best-selling author of Daemon - "the cyberthriller against which all others will be measured" (Publishers Weekly) - imagines a world in which decades of technological advances have been suppressed in an effort to prevent disruptive change.
Are smartphones really humanity's most significant innovation since the moon landings? Or can something else explain why the bold visions of the 20th century - fusion power, genetic enhancements, artificial intelligence, cures for common diseases, extended human life, and a host of other world-changing advances - have remained beyond our grasp? Why has the high-tech future that seemed imminent in the 1960s failed to arrive?
Perhaps it did arrive?but only for a select few.
Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves what they've been working toward for years: A device that can reflect gravity. Their research will revolutionize the field of physics - the crowning achievement of a career. Grady expects widespread acclaim for his entire team. The Nobel Prize. Instead, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organization whose mission is to prevent at all costs the social upheaval sudden technological advances bring. This Bureau of Technology Control uses the advanced technologies they have harvested over the decades to fulfill their mission.
They are living in our future.
Presented with the opportunity to join the BTC and improve his own technology in secret, Grady balks, and is instead thrown into a nightmarish high-tech prison built to hold rebellious geniuses like himself. With so many great intellects confined together, can Grady and his fellow prisoners conceive of a way to usher humanity out of its artificial dark age?
And when they do, is it possible to defeat an enemy that wields a technological advantage half a century in the making?
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 13 hours and 45 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Penguin Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 20, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I9IF078
I have had experience with Mr. Suarez' novels before. I read Daemon and Freedom and thought both were excellent reads, full of fantastic ideas and executions that went deeper and further than I had any reason to expect. Kill Decision was not one of my favorites, but I was hopeful for Influx.
Influx has a lot of big ideas. At its core, and as in his previous novels, the notion that technology advances can be disruptive and destructive prevails. In the novel, Influx, the BTC (Bureau of Technology Control) keeps a firm hand on new, distruptive technologies. When a new technology is discovered, its inventor (along with us, the readers as witnesses) is pulled into the BTC's orbit. These are not spoilers, there is nothing here that is not revealed on the back of the book. But there are intricacies within the plot and the same kinds of twists and turns as in Daemon and Freedom.
There are some great ideas at the heart of the novel, but the execution could use work. Some of the dialogue contains some howlers (the use of 'my dear,' probably sounded patronizing when it was in common usage (which was when, exactly?) but there is a character that uses this many times. I lost count at 12 and then another character started doing it too). To me, the test for dialogue is to read it out loud. If you can make it fit in your mouth and sound good, it works. One author that really gets it right is Stephen Gould with his Jumper series, real emotions, real dialogue, real characters. And he makes the villians work too.
The comparison on the cover between Suarez and Crichton is probably worthy, but Suarez' novels suffer from the same problems as Crichton's. The villians are wooden, moustache twirlers, the heros are clueless until they're not and then they are cardboard cutouts.
This is the kind of book that keeps you up half the night turning pages until you finish it, but the next day you've mostly forgotten it. It's a pretty good techno-thriller, but it relies pretty heavily on the tropes of the genre. There's the brilliant-but-different scientist, the evil head of a government organization that wants to use him, the smokin' hot young female assistant, mysterious agents trying to aid the scientist who may or may not be working toward their own ends, etc etc.
The action is tense, the descriptions of combat detailed enough that i had a sense of what was going on without it getting dreadfully technical or wallowing in the carnage.
Oddly, the technology was somewhat under-described. The effects got their share of ink, but the devices were often mentioned only in passing. And given the premise of it being way beyond what we consider 'modern', the only thing that makes this Science Fiction instead of Fantasy is that the narrative insists that it's scientifically derived. Plenty of 'modern fantasy' books have nearly the same results, but instead of turning on a deflector machine that miraculously protects the wearer from bullets, in the Fantasy version they wave a wand or recite a spell.
But that's not the point, really. It's a David vs Goliath affair, our differently brilliant scientist going up against technology decades or centuries beyond him. And while the means by which the story progresses did surprise me a few times, the overall arc of the story was a copy of many others in the genre.
So four stars for being a good, engaging read. I enjoyed it. I might even recommend it. But it's entertaining the way an action movie is, you just shut your brain off and go for a ride.
Influx Preview
Link
Please Wait...