This review probable won't be useful, because it's for a book which is out of print and has been for a while. But one never knows, maybe there will be a revival or it'll be bundled into an omnibus edition. It's called Ability Quotient by Mack Reynolds. You might remember him from a previous review I did. He's an author China Mieville recommends to writers interested in Socialist themes.
The book itself is not a foreign idea. A protagonist is provided means to enhance his intelligence. It's been done many times since this book and several times before. What's different here is that it's starkly sketched in terms of whether the enhancements will be the dominion of a self-defined elite or whether it will be distributed to all. It's a short book, clocking in at 160 pages. I read it in less than twenty-four hours.
What I liked
- forward momentum the story had; it never dragged or really even paused
- the protagonist was likable and had more depth revealed over time
- the core conflict, which presages the current fuss over the Singularity
What I didn't
- the characters never really rise above being puppets in the shape of socks hastily pulled over animating ideas, with quirky buttons sewed on for personality
- kind of a rushed ending which makes me think this book either needed to be a short story or a longer book to give the idea time to develop
- the generic betrayal
- the generic love-story
- the generic settings
So, well worth the dollar I paid for it. Probably not anything anyone else would want to read unless they were trying to do a comprehensive study of attitudes toward the idea of humanity creating the next generation of humanity, for better or worse, in fiction.
posted at 20:45 PDT (-0700) (comments disabled) permanent link
