New York: Tor Books, 2014; $24.99 hc, 336 pages

If you take John Scalzi’s Lock In simply as a genre exercise—specifically, as an FBI thriller/procedural with sf trappings—you will likely find it fast-paced, reasonably ingenious, and snappy in dialogue though lacking in finely shaded characterizations and maybe a little too neatly constructed, with at least one scene that is clichéd despite the fact that a character exclaims, “Straight from the cliché checklist!” (152). But if you take it as an exploration of an sf novum with the thriller structure as a mere convenient skeleton on which to drape the material, you may find it rather more exceptional.
Part of the pleasure I got from the book is its unmocking assimilation of Golden Age traditions. It reminded me a good deal of The Caves of Steel, not only in the deadpan flatness of its style but also in its plot setup. Isaac Asimov’s novel uses a police-detective thriller structure, partnering a human and a robot to explore sf topics, chiefly the future city, artificial intelligence, and prejudice against the technological Other. Scalzi offers a comparable crime-solving partnership, in a society where very similar prejudice is to be found, to explore interests of his own, including but by no means limited to mind-machine intersections, virtual realities, and the tricky relations between politics and technological development. To be sure, Lock In’s perspective (first person) is that of the “mechanical” partner rather than the initially skeptical human. (Is it more typical of a contemporary novel to make the Other rather than the societal norm its protagonist? Examples starting with van Vogt’s Slan [1940] and Sturgeon’s More Than Human [1953] suggest otherwise.) More significantly, Lock In’s robotic entities—properly called Personal Transports but nicknamed “threeps” and derogatorily “clanks”—are not robots, even though many of them look like classic visualizations: picture the police “men” in THX1138 or the Metropolis robot before its lab work or the annoying but lovable tin man after which/whom the threeps are nicknamed. Rather, threeps are avatars, to borrow James Cameron’s term: a physically disabled human is operating, really “inhabiting,” each mechanism.
Without (one hopes) being too presumptuous, one might imagine a thought process leading to this particular novel. The threep novum is an extrapolation from several related developments: advances in prosthetics, studies identifying brain patterns connected with motor control, and Google Glass technology. But if any human being could—granted the necessary affluence to rent or purchase and operate the “equipment”—inhabit any ready-to-go mechanism for any purpose, this would mean quite an overwhelming change in a posthuman world. So let us limit the practical possibilities: imagine a near-future world where a meningitis-like pandemic has reduced many of its victims to complete physical incapacity but continuing consciousness (“lock-in”); imagine the money that would be poured into developing and maintaining the avatars, especially if the disease struck both the U.S. President’s wife and the child of a billionaire former basketball star (now real-estate mogul and senatorial candidate). Those victims become poster children for acquiring tax dollars and corporate support, leading to threep technology being not only developed but government-regulated and available only to “Hadens,” the victims of Haden’s syndrome.
Now imagine a generation later, when the American public has grown tired of funding the Hadens and started to feel hostile toward the sizable and growing—to them, “threatening”—minority of threeps among them. (Compare Odd John, Slan, Alien Nation, and many others.) Congress is cutting the funding; corporations involved in the technologies of the threeps are getting nervous; and social unrest is brewing among the Hadens themselves, who communicate with one another not only via their threeps but in a vast, virtual chat room, “the Agora,” and in private ones, where they can imagine any body for themselves they like. Now, things get really intricate: imagine a murder conspiracy dependent on someone’s deep knowledge of the technology that makes Haden-threep interfacing possible, and to solve the crime, imagine that the child of the billionaire basketball star has grown up to become a rookie FBI agent with friendships with techies who can be helpful in figuring out the rogue developments of that technology. Add a group of “Integrators,” humans who once had Haden’s syndrome just severely enough to have their “brain structures altered” to the point where they are able to rent themselves out to Hadens as human threeps—comparable to the “meat puppets” in William Gibson’s Neuromancer but with more volition over what their renter wants them to do. Perhaps Integrators could even rent themselves illegally to fully functioning humans who are wearing black-market “scanner caps” rather than the brain-installed wiring of both Hadens and Integrators.
Next, for plot compression and entertainment, have the rookie’s partner be a former Integrator herself as well as someone with personal issues with the hostile-to-FBI local police. And turn up the politics another notch, extending beyond the Congressional budget cuts to the tensions existing between a “pharma” researching a cure for Haden’s syndrome and (A) tech industries lucratively providing support to existing Hadens and (B) some Hadens themselves, who resent being called “victims” and want instead to develop their own culture in the virtual realm of the Agora. (They also prefer “nonphysical” to “virtual,” since their entire lives are in a sense virtual, whether lived via threeps or Integrators or in their cyberspaces.). Washington D.C. would be an ideal setting for such a tale: beyond being the home base of the political controversy, it’s where massive threep street demonstrations would most likely happen—complicating the lives of our FBI partners who also have murders to investigate and turf wars to fight with the local cops, who hate the feds in classic thriller mode.
Of course, I’m not claiming that Scalzi must have used any such thought process. My lengthy survey of plot elements—in quite a different order from the way they are exposed in the narrative—is meant to stress how the detective-thriller structure very neatly serves the massive amount of exposition called for in the author’s working out the implications of his novum.
To be sure, the book still does have a massive amount of exposition scattered through it, conveyed mostly through the dialogue. A typical passage:
“I thought every neural network was unique,” I said. “They adapt to the brain they’re in.”
“Right, but every model is the same before it’s installed,” Tony said. He pointed at my head. “The Raytheon in your head is the same as every other version of that model. Once it’s in your head the tendrils and receptors are placed in ways that will be unique to your brain. But it’s still the same hardware and the same initial software.”
Vann pointed at the network on the screen. “And you’re saying that this one isn’t any of the current commercial models out there.” (208)
It’s not a problem for readers who accept this convention because they find it fun to process information that helps build up an sf world (or they like techno-crimesolving plots). But it will be interesting to see how a planned TV adaptation will handle it all.
All sorts of details and ramifications follow from the basics of the threeps and the detective plot. For example, the protagonist, Chris Shane, needn’t take a plane to Phoenix or Los Angeles to pursue leads on a murder case: a Haden can simply transfer his or her mind to a spare threep stored in the local FBI agency or police department—or can rent a threep from the local Enterprise or Avis agency if the Bureau or cop-shop spare turns out to be a clunker. (There is quite a bit of detail on threep brands and models from luxury to “Pintos,” as there is also on the housing market for Hadens and threeps in the D.C. area.) Furthermore, threeps are like walking smartphones: they can get “pinged” by incoming calls and messages, and they can internally access information that ordinary humans must seek on their gadgets. In a movie version, we would surely see the POV shots with readouts that have been omnipresent in movies from Robocop to the present. And there are yet more threep features: “I dialed down my sense of smell” (19), Chris tells us when his partner, Leslie Vann, lights up a cigarette. Scalzi is good at casually tossing in such details, which extend to non-Haden-related matters like Bureau cars with untrustworthy autodrive functions (a point that is later worked into the plot). In the second half of the novel, we learn a great deal about the neural networks installed in the brains of Hadens and Integrators and how they can be hacked like other computers and need security updates—and this in turn raises questions about who besides the government might pay for those updates, not to mention for maintenance of the Agora. Quite a lot to pack into a fairly short novel!
Of course, there are yet more ramifications or implications that one short novel couldn’t cover. We don’t learn about the politics and possible illegal operations in foreign countries; nor do we explore much how the technology might be shared with other physically impaired humans—or, indeed, unimpaired ones. Questions of sexuality among Hadens (who may have contracted the disease anywhere from infancy to full adulthood) are also unexamined: Chris briefly alludes to “how we are intimate with each other, sexually or otherwise” (157) in the Agora, but is at a loss for words to explain it to non-Hadens. To go in any of these directions would doubtless turn Lock In into a very different kind of novel, perhaps one where a genre pattern other than that of the procedural/thriller would be needed or useful. A hint of what such a novel might be like comes when Scalzi creates a strange and memorable voice for a social-activist Haden whom Chris meets late in the novel. She was inflicted with the disease in the womb, survived, and has grown up living entirely in the Agora and her own private space without ever using a threep or Integrator.
The end of a review may be an odd place to issue a major spoiler alert, but the topic of sexuality leads us to it. To be sure, the secret is already “out” on Scalzi’s blog <whatever.scalzi.com/2014/09/22/in-which-tor-com-reveals-a-thing-i-did-with-lock-in-lock-in-spoiler-thread/#comment-761615> and in a Tor.com article by Chris Lough <www.tor.com/blogs/2014/09/lock-in-john-scalzi-chris-shane-gender>. And anyone might have guessed the secret as soon as the novel came out some weeks earlier with a choice of two audiobook versions, one with a male, one with a female reader.
The fact is: Scalzi does not specify the sex/gender of Agent Chris Shane (a bit easier to do in print when your character is the narrator but still doubtless a challenge, as I found even in the few preceding paragraphs), and he claims that he himself doesn’t know whether Chris’s body is male or female. In his blog, Whatever, Scalzi gives the figure 70/30 (derived “anecdotally”) for percentages of readers who took Chris to be male/female; the dozens of reader responses on the blog seem roughly to support that figure, though I haven’t attempted to count. I fell into the 70% block myself, probably for some of the reasons suggested by Scalzi and several of his readers, including a biased default reading of a “Chris” as male plus genre expectations that a female FBI agent (introduced on the second page of Chris’s narration) would be partnered with a male. Some of the responders argue that the author tends to “write like a male,” and one could add that studies of colloquial American English have suggested that there are locutions that are more typical of either males or females. More than one reader cites the expression “I’m not going to lie,” which Chris uses in his first sentence, as more typically male. Maybe it is (I’ve noted Jonah Hill using it on talk shows), but it must be pointed out that Chris’s partner uses the same expression later in conversation. Both Agent Vann and her antagonist, female D.C. Police Officer Trinh, are “tough talkers,” which problematizes any attempt to read our narrator’s voice as male or female. (It would be interesting to learn how a Japanese translator would handle Chris’s dialogue, given that conversational Japanese is said to display marked differences between men’s and women’s speech.) Reading the novel a second time, now with awareness of authorial intention, I found myself still reading Chris as male—possibly because the voice reminds me of the young male characters in Scalzi’s previous novel, Redshirts.
In any case, Scalzi’s blog comments indicate that he did not see sex and gender as a central focus of the novel. This is not to say that the novel is oblivious to such matters: in Lock In’s near-future world, gay marriage is mainstream enough to be practiced by pharma CEOs, and at one point a male heterosexual lawyer uses a female Integrator—a situation whose psychological ramifications might be fascinatingly explored in another and perhaps generically different novel.
Joe Milicia lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
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