This book was just fine. Nylund tells a good story, and his style keeps me turning pages. Also, he knows how to tell a good story. However, the compelling nature of his story seems to be based not on any new ideas he presents, but rather on his command of a whole series of time-tested storytelling techniques and science fiction topics.

Here’s a high-level overview. In the future, things are bleak. The hero is a smart man, who has achieved his high-ranking academic position because he has figured out how to work the system, how to cheat when he needs to. The hero has a friend, a woman who brings to the story a challenge to the hero’s techniques (not to mention a sliver of sexual tension).

Then one day, the hero is drugged by a villain. When he awakes, the hero discovers that the villain has cracked his skull and put in a brain implant. Crippled by migrane headaches, the hero learns the nature of the implant, and finds that while he has been injured, he has also been endowed with a new power.

Meanwhile, the woman, the bringer of challenges and sexual tension, as well as an old Arab friend, have pooled their talents and resources and have developed a gene-editing enzyme. Anyone who takes this enzyme might die, but if they don’t they will have an essentially unflawed genetic structure. The story then progresses in very conceiveable ways.

Now. I realize that I’m sounding glib as I write out this story structure. And I only halfway mean to. Because while Signal to Noise is not in any way an original narrative, it was also thoughtful, and it just simply worked as a story. Which is not an easy thing to do -- you don’t have to look far to find a book in which that doesn’t happen.

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Signal to Noise :: by (published 1998) read: 2 February 2003 rating: [0]

Signal to Noise ::
by (published 1998)
read: 2 February 2003
rating: [0]