I just finished this book today, and I wrote a smaller review on GoodReads already. But it actually made me think and feel quite a lot over the past few days. Here’s a review that’s a little more in depth.
The premise is the creation of collective consciousness, where everyone shares their thoughts and memories they’ve had all through life. This also allows everyone to hear what they’re thinking, or feeling even. The book follows the main group of people who started it, and their lives over a period of a few decades, including some origin stories. Each chapter is told from the POV of a character, and the end of the chapter links to the next character in an adjacent degree of relationship.
Within this collective consciousness, there are some who do not agree with it, and they are noted as eluders, because they elude the visibility of everyone else. There is a state or country somewhere, that does not subscribe to it, and is ruled by a general. I might have missed the link of who the general is, in reference to the character developments.
I sense a deep feeling of shame each of the characters deal with when they uncover or think through their different memories and feelings. There’s this sense of putting up fronts, and also being afraid of what people will think about them. Each of them wanted to be something, or hoped for it. There were moments of hallucinogens, and how it changed the way some of them thought or saw their lives. And of course, its effects on their families after that.
I enjoyed the portrayal of humanity in its fragile state: people who did not know what they were doing, and struggling to understand the life around them in any desperate way they can. It was quite tragic actually, and painful. But a good book helps you feel those things I guess.
My favourite chapter was this one where email correspondences were written out between the characters. It was funny to read the back channeling, and the messages aside to and from the different people. It was comedic. There were also gaps where you needed to fill what was happening in real life between the emails, and it made the story telling even more fun. It was a very well written chapter.
If we could put our consciousness online, and available for all to see, would we? In the book, it proposed the result of having missing persons all found (because you could look at another person’s memories to track other people down), and child pornography was zero-ed (because your thoughts were obviously exposed, so the pervs could not be pervs basically).
I think a glimpse of it happens now already, with social media and online presences. I actually try to write and share my thoughts openly here, and it’s also because I know very few people read this. I don’t know how I would feel if all my 1,500 followers on Instagram read these posts, or even my Medium posts too. It’s something else when the number is so much bigger, or accessible to strangers.
Privacy is probably a lot more important to us in real life, and unlikely for us to reach a showcase of privacy to that level. But it’s still an interesting thought experiment to go through.
I think the book is not bad, quite a fun read. I saw a peek of another person’s review, and they called it the book version of a Black Mirror episode. But we all know Black Mirror is already here in our current world, so I guess this book is just hinting at another possible future nearby.
Leave a Reply