I’m sure the last thing Robert J. Sawyer needs is another review of Wake. The book was published in May and has received plenty of well-deserved attention and quite a bit of praise already. But heck, Rob is my friend and the editor of my first two novels, and I’m just as excited for him, personally, as I am about his first book in his WWW trilogy, so I guess he’s getting another review whether he needs it or not.

In general, one of the reasons I always read Rob’s novels is because he has a knack for asking the interesting high-concept questions.

Rollback: What would we do with our lives if we could be young again?

Mindscan: Would you scan your mind into an android body if you could leave all your troubles behind?

Flashforward: What would happen if, for just a fleeting moment, people saw a flash of their own personal futures? (ABC is set to ask this very question with a new TV series based on Rob’s novel this fall.)

Wake: Is it possible for the Internet to gain consciousness?

I’m oversimplifying, certainly, but Rob gets an incredible amount of value out of turning high concepts into novels, and Wake is another prime example. The Internet has recently developed as many connections as the human brain; does this mean it’s capable of making the intellectual advances that humans needed to make to become self-aware? And if it is capable of doing so, how might it be done?

The answer to the first question is obvious in Wake, or there would be no book. Rob mainly concerns himself with the second question: How will the Internet come awake? As Rob has mentioned in several interviews, he compares the Internet’s journey toward consciousness to the road Helen Keller travelled when she eventually learned how to interact with the world. (Helen Keller lost her hearing and vision when she was barely more than a year old.)

But as with Helen Keller, it doesn’t just happen. To help the Internet along, it takes the right person, at the right time, with all the right qualities, and in Wake, the person who first becomes aware of the Internet’s presence and figures out how to literally “wake it up” is Caitlin, Rob’s fifteen-year-old blind, female protagonist. I don’t want to give away too much of the story because, as with all good novels, the discovery is a big part of the fun, but I will say that Caitlin’s search for vision mirrors that of the Internet’s awakening; there is a direct, technological connection between Caitlin and the Internet as well as an instinctual, human connection, both of which are necessary to make this novel work. Rob manages, with cleverness, wit, and drama, to not only lead the reader through several extraordinary plot twists, but to keep us turning the pages, wondering where the story will go next.

As with Rob’s other books, the moral and philosophical issues surrounding the concept, the issues that make science fiction fascinating for many readers, are also thoroughly explored. Rob is one of the best at this sort of thing, and SF fans will not be disappointed: Highly recommended.

To learn a bit more about this book, check out the totally cool video clip of an animated Rob chatting it up.

Curious about the book deal? You will find this article veeeeery interesting!