“Brief summary of the first dozen pages:
Super logical engineer dude gets his leg crushed in an industrial accident, loses it. The prosthetics heâs presented with are crap, so he builds his own new leg. He then find his flesh leg inferior and incompatible with his new leg. Whatâs a fella to do?
I had fun with this book. Max Barry knows how to write something that keeps moving along without being completely plot-driven.
Some would say itâs philosophy 97 (4 less than 101), but Iâd say the idea of whether a person is a body or a body a person is something that warrants reexamining as technology progresses.
The most interesting theory in this book is the question of why we create mechanical and technological substitutes for things only to mimic their biological or natural counterparts. How much money did someone sink into creating e-ink when we already had ink, and why didnât they try to come up with something altogether new an improved?
Like Iâve said, author/idol Tom Spanbauer always says writers should do three things to an audience: Make them laugh, Teach them something, and Break their hearts.
Make Them Laugh:
Main Character on Love: âI had gone seven years without kiss and now Iâd had two in a week. It was the kind of data event that implied serious contamination of laboratory conditions.â
Teach Them Something:
Main Characterâs Speech to Girlfriend After She Hangs Onto the Salt at the Dinner Table: âEverything is a system. Look.â I leaned forward. âWhat if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didnât because you were waiting for the water? Itâs a deadlock, thatâs what. Itâs catastrophic system failure. And youâre probably thinking, âWell, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.â But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violates process encapsulation. Iâm not saying itâs a big deal. Iâm just pointing out that locking the salt like that in incredibly inefficient and systematically dangerous.â
Break their Hearts:
[Iâll leave this one alone because I donât want to give out all the details here]
Fun book. It sags somewhere near the end when it turns into an all-out action film and loses some of that emotional core. But itâs close enough.
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