WWW:Wake | Robert J. Sawyer

Being Part III of my yearly round-up of the Hugo-nominated works for Best Novel.  You can find Boneshaker by Cherie Priest reviewed here and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl reviewed here.  Apologies for not posting in the last few weeks - vacation and other assignments have been taking up my time, and with so many great writers and articles here, I didn't think I'd be missed too much!

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The other day I was having a discussion with a friend over whether or not a particular book was considered "Young Adult" fiction* and what started out simply enough devolved into an argument over marketing categorization, authorial intent, and whether something written about young people automatically makes it a Young Adult book.  And so rather than waste a lot of time crafting a boring essay explaining my particular views on the specific argument as well as my stance on Young Adult literature in general, I thought a review of  the excellent Robert J. Sawyer novel WWW:Wake might serve in its stead.

Damn. I gave my opinion of the book away, didn't I?

WWW:Wake is the first of a planned trilogy of novels that deals with the realization of the World Wide Web as a conscious entity, as discovered literally through the eyes of young Caitlin Decter, a 15 year-old girl blind since birth who, after receiving an experimental implant in her eye, is able to see not just the physical world, but a visual representation of the Internet.  At the same time, a massive genocide in China serves as the impetus for the Chinese government to temporarily shut down all Internet traffic in and out of the country, which has the added effect of shocking the 'Net into sentience.

On the surface I don't know how appealing the above sounds.  In the wrong hands these elements could come together as just another SyFy Original Movie (possibly starring Antonio Sabato, jr.).  But in Sawyer's deft hands the novel is a thoughtful, delicate examination of being a teenager growing up and struggling to understand your place in the world.  Caitlin's blindness and her descriptions and rumination on being blind, based in part on Sawyer's own experience being blind when he was younger, are incredible - vibrant and touching and exacting in giving the reader a view into that world.  Likewise the passages that deal with the "awakening" of the Web, called in the novel Webmind.  In these passages we get a sense of the nature of consciousness, and Sawyer mixes equal does of scientific reasoning and imagination to postulate what it might be like for something that has awareness of itself to suddenly discover its own existence.

As far as plot is concerned, there's not a lot of action.  WWW:Wake is more concerned with getting you firmly inside the head and on the side of Caitlin, and the novel becomes the journey of both her and Webmind's arrival into the world.  It deals with real issues that teenagers go through, and handles those issues in as real a way as possible.  But is it Young Adult fiction?  Sawyer has his own answer to that question, and it nicely encapsulates my own thoughts on the matter.

The long and short of it is, WWW:Wake is an amazing intro into a world I am looking forward to exploring at length, and I would say that while it's not written as a Young Adult book, it should certainly be read by any young adult out there interesting in seeing from another perspective that turns out to be an astute reflection of ourselves.  Three books in (four, actually, and my next entry will be up in a few days), this is my personal favorite for the Hugo.

* The book in question was Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, the sixth and final volume in the Scott Pilgrim series of graphic novels.  If you've read the series, what do you think?