Daniel H Wilson has done it again, following his previous book Robopocalyse, Amped is another fast paced, sci-fi tale, that is both enjoyable and though-provoking.
Essentially, the story revolves around people have neural-implants for medical or just to make them smarter. It starts with the children with these implants being denied access to free education because they are smarter than non-implanted children, and therefore this not fair on the non-implanted children. Very quickly this moves to discrimination of the 'Amps' (implanted people), ghettos of Amps, and resistance movement. Political manipulation of the situation plays a central role in this, but there are other themes running through this. First, what is a definition of a person and what does it mean to be human? Is this form of technology 'right' or does it dehumanise people or does just enhance what is already there?
This book is a good, enjoyable read, with some though-provoking ideas.
Another recent book Departure by Neal Asher has elements of this story; in particular the effect of implanting technology within someone, though in that story there were only a small number of implanted people.
No comments:
Post a Comment