After the Faulkner fiasco, I wanted something of a break from whatever that was. Minimalist literary fiction. I went to the library and found Society of the Mind by Eric L. Harry, something I picked up off the shelf because the title intrigued me. It is billed as a cyberthriller, something I have not read before. The word pretty much explains what Harry was going for, though: computer-style science fiction that is also a thriller.
I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars on Good Reads, but if I could have, that would have been 3.5 stars. I loved reading this book, to the point that I was thinking I maybe wanted to own it for myself. The ending flopped, though, and it has almost ruined the book for me.
Perhaps the coolest aspect of this book is that our main character is a female psychologist trying to analyze a computer that has gained consciousness. I have never seen this angle before and it was cool to watch things progress. Sure, we've got the cliche rich guy who owns and lives on a volcanic island, where he has robots doing nearly everything for him. The beginning actually had a Beauty and the Beast feel, with her being taken into a manor and not seeing her host until an invitation arrives for dinner, with only two or three other humans to be seen. This worked well for it, and the psychologist bit helps make all this familiar stuff new. Originality is (usually) nothing more than making connections others have yet to make, and Harry does this all over the place.
Society of the Mind was published in '96, and it was fun to see the differences between then and now, with Harry writing futuristically. For instance, the main character, Laura, is terrified by the self-driving car she rides near the beginning. As a reader now, I was mentally telling her to calm down. If I were to ride in a self-driving car, I don't think I would be too amazed at this point, much less terrified. There's also a moment when she says something about the Internet not being the revolution people had said it would be--as she sat in the library so she could have Internet access on an incredibly slow computer. Oh, and the TVs that made the rich guy rich? They sound just like your average high-def flat screen.
The book also includes moments like these:
"Get her a weapon!" (Gray) snapped angrily, pulling the bolt back on a machine pistol he'd been handed, to chamber a round.
Hoblenz handed Laura an identical weapon. "I don't want this," Laura said.
"If you're going with us," Gray said sternly, "you're taking a weapon!"
"I mean I want a bigger one. One of those rifles," she said ...
Which is just awesome. She is regularly the anti-violence member of the cast, making it even better.
To those writers who gasped at the speech tags and adverbs: get a grip. He uses them. I did not have a problem with it.
Some things I didn't like, however, but which did not seriously impede the story for me, included some foreshadowing that did not pan out in the end (like, it was obvious foreshadowing for something, but nothing came of it), the way the main character was always flipping out, and the fact that Harry does a much better job with the science fiction aspect than with the thriller aspect. He goes a bit too far for me, actually, in explaining all the science of the world he has created, and I was hoping there would be some reason he went on for pages and pages about it. I'm sure some of the detail could have been cut for the sake of moving the story along. I prefer hard science fiction to soft science fiction, but this book went a bit overboard. Even the main character tunes a lot of it out. As for the thriller bit, here's an excerpt that should let you judge for yourself how well Harry does.
"She cringed at the fleeting glimpse of a (robot)'s legs as they flashed in front of the windshield. A crashing explosion of sounds preceded the gut-wrenching flight through the air of the tumbling car. The screeching and tearing of metal and violent jerks of her body against the seat restraints went on forever as she waited helplessly in anticipation of the end.
All was still. Laura lay on her side. She had been in a car that had gotten into an accident, she remembered. ..."For me, if a writer has to clarify "she had been in a car that had gotten into an accident," he obviously did not do a good job of letting the reader see the accident. When I first read it, I did need that sentence to clarify. His thriller aspects, the moments that are supposed to be full of adrenaline, are a bit fuzzy.
To top it off, when I said the ending flopped, what I mean is it ends in a lecture. Science fiction is supposed to reflect societal issues, and Harry used that and then shoved the reader's face into it. It's a giant "and the moral of the story is" bit. Like a good joke, he shouldn't stop to explain himself afterward.
That all said, I'm a bit sad that this post seems so negative. I honestly enjoyed 80% of this book. Most of the things I mentioned were overshadowed by the great story and imagination of the author. I do recommend it. Just don't expect to be satisfied by the ending, and be willing to make some excuses for Harry. Oh, and don't read it as a thriller. Think of it as cyber science fiction that has violence involved.
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