Michael's Reviews > Head On

I’m so glad that Scalzi returns to the fascinating near-future world of Hadens, people representing about 1% of the world’s population who were stricken with an epidemic causing neural damage in a pattern leaving them totally unable to move. This state, called “Locked-In”and used for the earlier novel’s title, was the target of a massive, “moonshot” of government sponsored research efforts and subsidies which led to the development two avenues for the disease victims to live effective lives. One was sophisticated neural implants allowing their immobile selves mental control and emulated sensory input from android robots, as connected via a super, universal-sort of WiFi. The second was a special online virtual world where many Hadens prefer to spend the majority of their time in the company of their peers.

Our hero Chris is a famous Haden, the son of a wealthy couple who helped lead the policy initiatives behind the life-giving technology innovations. He humbly and effectively serves as an FBI agent dealing with Haden-related crimes, partnered with a tough veteran female agent, Vann, who complements Chris’ insight-based ethical approach with a sarcastic, no-nonsense style. The case that kicks off the story here concerns a Haden, Chapman, who dies while remote-piloting his specialized combat android in a professional stadium game called Hilketa. This lucrative team sport sounds like a no-holds barred kind of rugby in which points are scored for taking off the head of an opponent and moving it to the goal. The physiological monitoring system suggests an epileptic-like disturbance preceded his death. The league’s owners are concerned that the investigation will conclude that the sport is dangerously stressful to the participating Hadens experiencing the sensations though the virtual sensorium. If instead someone has put an additive into the Haden’s IV supplement, it would suggest someone may be trying to sabotage their gravy train, right when companies involved are trying to expand the league to Asia and Europe for a big new surge in profits. When one of the company executives turns up dead from an apparent but suspicious suicide, corporate corruption and greed seems to be at play somehow.

A third alternative is that the player who died was killed somehow for personal reasons. His estranged wife of the dead player, a regular human, in fact clues Chris into the affair her husband has been having with another Haden. How is that possible with Hadens? Via sexbots! Now Scalzi is giving us an innovation of plausibly large economic interest. It is a fair projection that lots of normal humans might be willing to get the same neural implants as the Hadens if they could act out and feel things via their choice of anatomically correct (or fancifully equipped) android avatars for outrageous sex. He doesn’t have to immerse us much into the details to convey some interesting possibilities. They outshadow the potential of normal humans with implants for pursuing play in the Hilketa league.

All these novel motivations for murder and its coverup are like new wine in the old bottles of a traditional police procedural. Ditto for the police-buddy teamwork of Chris and Vann, replete with snappy jokes, one upmanship, and good cop/bad cop routines in interviews. At the same time, a regular human detective partnered with an apparent robot harks back to the flavor of Asimov’s “I Robot” series. The ability of Chris, lying in a bed in his parent’s house, to essentially leap across distances to “appear” in the control and form of different android machines in various locations leads to a lot of exciting surprises in the action. Like a cop whose bravado gets him in trouble for wrecking too many vehicles, Chris has a patterns of frequently getting expensive departmental models wrecked, burned up, or run over by vehicles. And Haden criminals hiding out their selves in expensive simulations in the Agora virtual world can be tracked down there by Chris. I’ve always loved sci fi exploration of personalized places in computer networks, starting with Gibson and Stephenson’s work that predates the internet. Here we are treated to some fun with some fascinating variations.

This book was provided for review through the Netgalley program.