John Scalzi, Lock In (2014)

British philosopher retires from empiricist speculation in order to open a pub: hijinks ensue, in ... LOCKE INN.

Of course not. It's actually a biographical study of the immediate family of American rapper Tone Lōc, LOC KIN. Not that either. In fact Scalzi imagines the Norse god of mischief, cloned 26 times, with each separate replica identified by a letter of the alphabet: but what is the mystery behind LOKI N? Not in the least. To speak truly, this is a near-future police procedural set in a North America that is dealing with the aftermath of 'Haden's syndrome', a flu-induced paralysis in which near-enough five million Americans are 'locked-in' physically whilst retaining all liveliness of mental function. Our narrator is an FBI agent, bodily locked-in but able to operate in the world via a wirelessly tapped-in robot body known as a 'threep'. Other 'Hadens' use 'integrators', real-life human beings, as their proxies in the world. The immediate backdrop to the story is the withdrawal of what had hitherto been fairly generous governmental funds into researching the condition and providing welfare for sufferers. The new austerity means lots of people are sniffing around for necessary money, and there's a new spirit of protest in the Haden community. Scalzi hangs the story on a rather bloody murder, apparently committed by an 'integrator', and investigated by our narrator Agent Shane and his partner, the prickly Agent Vann.

Lock In is written with Scalzi's combination of The Smart and The Charming. It manages to be thought-provoking without ever sacrificing its readability (which is no small thing), and it makes some righteous if perhaps straightforward points about society's attitudes to disabled people, as well as about our modern generation's retreat into virtual worlds at the expense of the real on the other (Hadens interact through a shared virtual reality called The Agora, and some of them prefer it). When I first set up this blog, I had occasion to mention Scalzi by way of pondering one key quality he possesses as a writer: likeability. Since I myself lack that core quality, I am full of professional admiration, tinged ever-so-slightly with envy, at how well Scalzi does Scalzi.

That said, I was more under- than over-whelmed by this particular novel. Partly, I think, this has to do with the main premise. Lives lived through technologies proxies is a cool conceit, and one commonly explored in SF of course; but Scalzi's particular set up here is too intricate and specific, and relies too heavily on a set of rather arbitrary rules. We could compare the simple metaphorical force and eloquence of The Matrix set-up with the rococo and laboured set-up of Nolan's Inception: the former is something the viewer connects with intuitively, and which opens effortlessly into a series of cool and engaging possibilities. The latter requires forty-five minutes of characters painstakingly infodumping upon one another in order to bring the viewer up to speed, which in turn fatally dilutes the rhetorical power of the film's symbolic world. (Indeed, the Matrix sequels were weaker than the first film in part because they got tangled in a cat's-cradle of new conceptual grace notes and complexifications). Lock In, alas, is more like Inception than The Matrix; and the story is hobbled, especially in the first half, by a debilitating combination of flatness and conceptual over-complication. This is a novel with much to recommend it, but in the end it is somewhat LACK ING. D'you see what I did there? Eh?

Eh?

Ahh! Puns.