Ramez Naam's CRUX

As was true of its predecessor, Nexus, there is a wonderfully thoughtful, speculative exploration on the real world implications of a technology that can connect human minds to the internet of things and to each other buried within Crux.

Deeply, deeply buried to the point of almost being lost.

Which is to say that Crux could have gone one of two ways: it could have fully embraced the neuro/cyberpunk genre it had so much potential to be the greatest new example of, or it could have sunk to the level of techno-thriller with some trace transhuman elements for color.

Crux is, for all its concern with the fate of several groups of cybernetically and neurologically linked children (the Nexus technology, street drug and brain operating system in one, having been seized on early on as a breakthrough therapy for autism, causing thousands of parents to become rogue Nexus users that they might finally communicate and share with their offspring), an action thriller. And a bit of a hot mess of one at that, once it gets going.

For where Nexus contented itself with telling a few people's stories, chiefly Kade's and Samantha's and, to a degree, Su-Yong Shu's, Crux frantically struggles to tell all of the stories, cramming several novels' worth of narratives and ideas (all of which deserve to have been developed at a more leisurely pace, such potential for greatness do they have) into one book and switching, ADD-style, rapidly between storylines, jumping from character to character for just a page or two at a time until the frustrated reader has lost track entirely of what any of these people might remotely have to do with each other except Nexus. They all have something to do with Nexus. Yeah. OK. But wait, what? Who is this person again and why do I care? I thought this chapter was about this other person two continents away? No seriously, who is this person and why do I care?

It got so frustrating I had to put this one down for a while, because I was even losing track of, and sympathy for, the main characters from Nexus. And, of course, tapping my foot through the protracted and frequent bouts of ACKSHUN! Which, admittedly, Naam writes well enough. If you like that sort of thing.

But, I was still curious to see where things were going. And, after all, I liked Nexus enough to name it as an honorable mention for my Definitive Top Ten All Time Desert Island Works of Speculative Fiction list. And the story of Su-Yong Shu, revealed as the first stable uploaded human who had just been walking around in a cloned body in Nexus, and her daughter Ling, was still really moving and compelling and I held out the hope that sooner or later the narrative would get back to them, maybe once everybody else was done shooting everybody else. Which it did, spectacularly if swiftly, setting up a whole new threat for the next novel.

For ultimately, most of what bugged me as I read Crux arose from classic middle chapter problems. The Fellowship, once established, gets broken and everybody has to have his own adventures for a while before the battle at the Black Gate and Mount Doom and the Eagles. The reader must just have faith that all these stories are going to knit back together in the last volume.

Maybe I'm just sick of everything being a trilogy?

Anyway, Crux isn't what I'd hoped it would be, but it's still a cracking good techno-thriller if you're in the mood for one. It's fast paced, full of fighting and explosions and dire threats and drone attacks and stealth goggles and unlimited bandwidth (for me, living in a Wyoming that is still riddled with spots where one can't even get first generation cell service, perfect global connectivity seems the most fantastic element of all) and hey, for what it's worth, no romance, which gives it an extra star right there, from me.

Ramez Naam's NEXUS #OneBookAtATime

I think I do a pretty good job of keeping up on developments in art and science via my RSS feeds, but somehow I seem to have missed the news that Ray Kurzweil and Robert Ludlum had a bastard child together and sent him back in time to grow up as a little Egyptian boy. But, you know, I can't keep track of everything. And better late than never, on such discoveries, I say.

Fortunately for me, I'm not dependent on myself alone to stay on top of matters. I have people like Lee Harris and the rest of the gang at Angry Robot books on my team. And boy, am I glad they found this Ramez Naam guy.

Nexus is that rare treat, a serving of what I can only call neuropunk, a still unusual genre, the best other example I can come up with is probably Bruce Sterling's Distraction (which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite novels), though a case could certainly be made for Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiner-heavy Redemption Ark as well.* Like Distraction, Nexus concerns itself with human enhancement technology that poses some sticky ethical, legal and political questions but is out there in the world regardless, and gaining traction. But where Distraction takes place in an America that is so close to being a failed state as makes no odds, and deals at least in part with political figures who are exploiting the tech for various ends, in Nexus, the American government is still iron-strong and opposes the tech with all its military might, repressive policing and scare tactics. It's impossible, therefore, not to see parallels to the "wars" on drugs and terrorism in which our country is still engaged.

Which is where the Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy DNA comes into the equation, for while one hero, Kaden Lane, is a neuro-hacker extraordinaire, who has, with the help of a small team, added so much functionality to a mindlinking nanotech street drug (that would be Nexus) as to make it a whole new thing, our other is a government agent Samantha Catarenes, herself cybernetically and biotechnologically enhanced to the eyeballs because sometimes to fight monsters one has to become a bit of one, who is so ideologically opposed to what Kade and his people have done that it's a wonder she doesn't claw his eyes out on their first meeting. Nexus has already shown tremendous potential as a tool for coercion, after all. The irony of a government using old-fashioned forms of coercion to suppress a new coercion tech that they don't control is addressed, but only barely; the tension is mostly between those like Kade and the ambiguous pseudo-villain Su-Yong Shu (a Chinese neuroscientist who seems suspiciously way smarter than everyone else on earth) who value its potential to liberate and enhance and transform humanity, and those like Sam and her masters, who are hung up on how much worse it could make life for those who don't choose to take advantage of its offerings. As if anyone wouldn't, am I right?

But never fear, the novel rarely sinks to didacticism. It's too busy also being an action thriller! There are lots and lots and lots of fight scenes, with everything from fists to stealth helicopters. Being the sort who twiddles her thumbs through big explosive action scenes in movies, I could have done with a bit less of this, but I understand why it was there; most other people twiddle their thumbs through the parts I find interesting. And some of the action scenes are quite important to the plot, and to the plot of the book's sequels, to which I am eagerly looking forward.

Some of my friends have complained that there is too much infodump in Nexus, but aside from the unnecessary and distracting "Briefing" interludes**, I didn't see that. Briefings aside, it was just right, balanced out by some nice character moments and some themes I wasn't expecting to encounter here, like the potential dovetailing of Buddhist practice with neurotech (most of the story takes place at a giant international neuroscience conference in Bangkok), though this last element made the excruciatingly long and over-the-top fight scenes all the more jarring.

This first novel is obviously just laying the groundwork for potential big, big stuff in Crux***, due out in September. And a lot of how I'll ultimately evaluate this novel will depend on what Naam does in the sequel. If it's just another violent technothriller with cool transhuman elements, I might be disappointed. At this point, though, I have faith that Naam has something more interesting in mind, that he's brave enough to try really exploring how tech like Nexus (which is not as far-fetched as some might think, as anyone who follows a science blog or two, or who reads Naam's non-fiction More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement [which I declined to finish because I sing in the choir he's preaching to there, and because his publisher apparently blew the editing/proofreading budget on whores and coke or something, but which you might still want to check out if that doesn't bother you as much as it does me] will know already) might fundamentally change our world. All signs point to that being the case, so far.

*In fact, one could read Nexus as a sort of earthbound version of the origin story of the Conjoiners without doing oneself any great mental violence. Har har.

**Why are so many authors relying on this device of fictitious "documentation" these days? It looks to me almost like a lack of confidence in one's storytelling chops, if not an insulting attitude towards readers who "aren't getting it." Authors, once you've earned that willing suspension of disbelief (and Naam did, right away, with a gloriously bizarre and hilarious first scene that I'll remember for a long, long time), readers happily fill in the blanks themselves. They might not fill them in exactly the way you want them to, but that's not your call! Give it a rest and just tell us a damn story.

***And I, for one, am grateful that the sequels won't be Sexus and Plexus. What whaaat?