Not so much a review as an appreciation . . . . while I’m not a big fan of science fiction, this one for some reason seems to transcend what I remember of the genre.
Shockwave Rider (sorry, no cover art available)
I read this book in high school not long after it came out and remembered it vaguely but positively. For some reason, it’s themes of ubiquitous data networking and worms (phages in the book) surfaced in my head a week or so ago and I dug a copy out of the library. It was better than I remembered and surprisingly prescient. Most of the reviews I read on Amazon talk about the eerie predictions of a worldwide data network (called the data-net) and how people are increasingly rootless in the physical and plugged into the virtual.
While that’s interesting — he gets a lot of it right, 20 years before most of us were exposed to the Internet — what I found more compelling is the central conflict of the book, the clash between the oligarchy that controls information and uses it against the rest of the world and one man, a renegade systems guru who was schooled in the oligarchy’s thinktanks but fell out with their philosophy.
While those in power throw money and human capital at the task of manufacturing wisdom (without actually understanding it), all the while manipulating the rest of the world’s perceptions and opinions, the hero devises a way of unleashing all the stored information that props up those in power. From detailed accountings of government corruption — with check numbers — to precise ingredient lists of tainted foods, everything everyone could wish to know about everything is available on ubiquitous public data terminals.
One of the related themes is how easily fooled those in power are by what looks like official information: if it comes off the net, it must be accurate. They lack the common sense — or wisdom — to question what they read and the book’s hero uses that against them again and again.
It’s the old theme of empowerment vs control, a well-used idea in speculative fiction, especially of the dystopian school (Brave New World, 1984, et al). But at the same time, it touches on the choices people make, how they live, and the fruits of those choices. Do we live our lives or the ones we’re told to live by advertisers and other models of behavior?
And any book that has a job title of “systems rationalizer,” truncated to “systems rash,” is worth a read.