Björn recenserade Den levande av Olga Sedakova
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3 stjärnor
In the end, I think it's the good kind of disappointment. The kind that comes from a writer having a good idea and overreaching rather than underachieving. Because Starobinets has a great idea here; a post-singularity novel, set in a world where the entire world population ("The Living") is tied together with Facebook a social network that's implanted directly in their brains. Few people even visit the "First layer" (what 20 years ago would have been called "reality") anymore, instead they spend their lives watching serials, speaking in memes and having cybersex. Well, the ones who aren't "robots" at least. And since everyone's profile is always saved to the cloud, everytime someone dies they're instantly reborn and assigned their old profile, memories and all. Until one day, when Zero is born - who doesn't have a previous profile, which should be impossible, and who therefore cannot possibly be let into …
In the end, I think it's the good kind of disappointment. The kind that comes from a writer having a good idea and overreaching rather than underachieving. Because Starobinets has a great idea here; a post-singularity novel, set in a world where the entire world population ("The Living") is tied together with Facebook a social network that's implanted directly in their brains. Few people even visit the "First layer" (what 20 years ago would have been called "reality") anymore, instead they spend their lives watching serials, speaking in memes and having cybersex. Well, the ones who aren't "robots" at least. And since everyone's profile is always saved to the cloud, everytime someone dies they're instantly reborn and assigned their old profile, memories and all. Until one day, when Zero is born - who doesn't have a previous profile, which should be impossible, and who therefore cannot possibly be let into the network... Dun-dun-DUUUUN!
Trouble is, Starobinets doesn't know when to quit. She keeps on adding complexities to her story (immortality secret councils body surfing hidden histories Dark City newspeak death camps christ metaphors Inception web wars post-soviet power struggles Matrix reincarnation angst dissident groups dogs trolls bug drugs bozhe moi) that sometimes work really well (and sometimes very underdeveloped and obviously satirical) but when taken all together just turn into... white noise. Information overload. At no point do I feel like I understand this world (ETA: Or the characters - there's probably a good reason I didn't even remember to mention them); it starts out weird in medias res, which is fine, but being told from the perspective of people living in it for centuries, it never really pauses and lets us catch up. I spend too much of the novel just watching people do stuff I have no idea why they're doing or even what it's supposed to signify. And for a novel about a world tied together by a social network, it's remarkable how little we see of the world outside our handful of main characters... of course, that may be the point.
It's too bad, because there are things in here that really are quite clever; it's a cyberpunk novel in its purest form, where "humanity" is literally reduced to input and output of information, and it's very timely as well. "He +Liked Big Brother." But there's a fine line between "complex" and "confusing", and Starobinets has way too many underdeveloped threads going in this novel to see it.