A review by ninjalawyer
Headlong, by Simon Ings
3.0
An interesting book that hasn't aged well.
In this book, Christopher Yale learns of the (somewhat suspicious) death of his ex-wife Joanne in the UK, leading him to investigate. A bog-standard setup, made more interesting by the fact that Chris and Joanne were, when they were together, living on the moon, their heads stuffed with high tech hardware that allowed them access to a myriad of extra senses and direct access to city-building AIs and robots.
When the story begins, Chris is living in the UK, and is a severely broken man, suffering from an extreme form of what is essentially PTSD from having his post-human hardware extracted from his head when he was recalled from the moon.
Chris is essentially a post-post-human, and investigates his ex-wife's death like most regular people would: by meandering about randomly, wallowing in self-pity and being generally ineffectual. This is both interesting in how it subverts the normal suspicious-death storyline, but also leads to about a third of the book having not much happening. Really, it's not until Chris flashbacks to his time on the moon with Joanne that I became interested in the character or the plot.
This is made worse by the fact that throughout, but in the first third in particular, the book feels much older than something written in the late 90s. In a future where architects with neural-enhancements can be rocketed to the moon to build cities, it strains believability that the UK seemingly has payphones everywhere and the only portable tech used is pen and paper. Some of this can be explained as the UK having gone through a civil war, but when you see images of real life refugees holding cellphones, it seems a little too convenient that most of the hardware available is what we had in the 90s. Convenient, but also a failure of worldbuilding.
There are a few interesting lines about what the machines on the moon are doing without their human masters, but almost nothing is done with this for the vast bulk of the book. At best, this can be seen as the beginning of what could have been an interesting exploration of creating machines we can't fully understand or control, but it's never that relevant to the story. Other scifi books have addressed this in much more interesting ways.
Overall, the book became interesting enough for me to want to finish, and the author manages some great descriptions, but I can't really recommend it. The world building feels musty when it's not feeling disjointed, and there's no greater depth here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
In this book, Christopher Yale learns of the (somewhat suspicious) death of his ex-wife Joanne in the UK, leading him to investigate. A bog-standard setup, made more interesting by the fact that Chris and Joanne were, when they were together, living on the moon, their heads stuffed with high tech hardware that allowed them access to a myriad of extra senses and direct access to city-building AIs and robots.
When the story begins, Chris is living in the UK, and is a severely broken man, suffering from an extreme form of what is essentially PTSD from having his post-human hardware extracted from his head when he was recalled from the moon.
Chris is essentially a post-post-human, and investigates his ex-wife's death like most regular people would: by meandering about randomly, wallowing in self-pity and being generally ineffectual. This is both interesting in how it subverts the normal suspicious-death storyline, but also leads to about a third of the book having not much happening. Really, it's not until Chris flashbacks to his time on the moon with Joanne that I became interested in the character or the plot.
This is made worse by the fact that throughout, but in the first third in particular, the book feels much older than something written in the late 90s. In a future where architects with neural-enhancements can be rocketed to the moon to build cities, it strains believability that the UK seemingly has payphones everywhere and the only portable tech used is pen and paper. Some of this can be explained as the UK having gone through a civil war, but when you see images of real life refugees holding cellphones, it seems a little too convenient that most of the hardware available is what we had in the 90s. Convenient, but also a failure of worldbuilding.
There are a few interesting lines about what the machines on the moon are doing without their human masters, but almost nothing is done with this for the vast bulk of the book. At best, this can be seen as the beginning of what could have been an interesting exploration of creating machines we can't fully understand or control, but it's never that relevant to the story. Other scifi books have addressed this in much more interesting ways.
Overall, the book became interesting enough for me to want to finish, and the author manages some great descriptions, but I can't really recommend it. The world building feels musty when it's not feeling disjointed, and there's no greater depth here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.