WWW: Wake (WWW Trilogy)

This sounded like an incredibly interesting read. I have always been fascinated by the idea of information structures becoming sentient. This was a great book that delves into deep topics of consciousness and humanity while still providing a very approachable and engaging story. I listened to this

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on audio book and it was one of the best audio books I've listened to yet; they provided different readers for different parts of the book and did an excellent job with the whole thing.

This story has a lot of threads to it, but the main one follows Caitlin a fifteen year old mathematical genius who is blind. Caitlin is contacted by a Japanese scientist who thinks he can help her to see; in the beginning she does start to see but what she sees is not what she expects to see. Entwined with her story is the story of the World Wide Web; the Web is gaining some sense of self and is beginning to recognize itself as an entity. Additional side stories are the story of an orangutan hybrid who can paint, a Chinese dissident who blogs about the injustice of the Chinese government, and an outbreak of a very contagious strain of bird flu.

This is a fascinating book. Sawyer deals with the "curing" of Caitlin's blindness and the awareness of the Web in ways that are realistic and believable. I was absolutely intrigued by how the Web gained a sense of self and started to draw conclusions about the world around it. I was impressed with how methodically this was laid out and at how much sense it made.

The overlying theme throughout this book is that of the emergence of consciousness. This theme runs through Caitlin gaining the ability to see, the Web realizing that it is part of a bigger world, and the monkey realizing he can form images with paint. The Origins of Consciousness is a book that is frequently referenced as are Helen Keller's books.

I don't want to make this sound like a text book though...it really isn't. It is a very engaging story. The characterization is extremely well done and the plot is very engaging and propels the reader through the book. It was a very hard book to put down. Caitlin is an intelligent young woman who is easy to relate too. She has to go to school and has problems with boys; but her main drive is to understand things. I think she is a person a lot of young women, and people in general, can relate to. I loved that such a great character is bringing us into all these deeper topics. Many of the side characters were also intriguing and well-done.

I really loved this book. You don't get a ton of closure at the end of it. So it is definitely a "to be continued" type of thing. Although it didn't end in an annoying cliffhanger either. I am planning on starting the next book WWW: Watch soon. There really isn't anything I would change about this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with even a hint of curiosity. It does an excellent job of using interesting characters and a great plot to bring up complex issues, such as the origin of consciousness, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and the way data is processed by the human brain.

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Sawyer is almost the only author still writing toe-curlingly good SF. This novel, the first volume of his third trilogy and the 18th book of his that I've read overall, is typically set in Canada (Waterloo, Ont). A blind girl is given "websight" and the Web starts becoming conscious .... Objects of

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my future praisings, I expect, will include 2010's _WWW: Watch_ and 2011's _WWW: Wonder_.

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The ideas in this book were quite interesting and I was definitely drawn into all the three of the main story lines. I just didn't enjoy Sawyer's writing style all that much. I've read a couple of his other books and have felt hints of this, though never as strongly as in Wake.

Maybe it's because I

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live in Waterloo region (the primary setting for this novel), but I couldn't get over the feeling that he was "name dropping" with many of the locations and people that were thrown into this. It always seemed to feel forced; like he was mentioning places simply to assert his Canadianism - as if he were trying to play to the "hometown Canadian" crowd. Did writing that the breakfast sausage was from Schnieder's or that the cookies were from mennonites in St. Jacobs really add anything to the story?

I also didn't buy his take on a 15-year old girl. Most of Caitlin's internal dialog and conversation felt more like a middle aged man's impression of a young woman rather than an actual 15 year old. I found myself rolling my eyes at much of it.

All that said though, I still thoroughly enjoyed the ideas presented and will certainly be on the lookout for the followup novels in this trilogy. I'm hopeful that Sawyer's writing style matures along with Caitlin.

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I really enjoyed this book, so much so that I gobbled it up in one day! Generally, it is about the simultaneous dawn of new levels of consciousness for a blind girl who is granted the ability to see with a special implant, a chimpanzee who begins to understand a new level of abstraction, and a

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sentient entity on the internet. The topic matter is a perfect storm of my interests : sociology, artificial intelligence, biology, the brain, and the East. Throw in some timely discussions regarding the "Great Firewall of China" - very timely with the recent squabble with Google - and some references to other science fiction literature (another of my recent favorites, Oryx and Crake : apparently these Canadian science fiction writers hang together) and this book has a strong "suspension of disbelief". Can't wait to read more by this author, specifically the next in the series!

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It has been a long time since I read a science fiction book with such joy as "Wake". This is science fiction as I want it to be: human, accessible, exciting, challenging, educative, serious, funny and fast-paced.

Of course, I fell in love with Calculass - the fifteen year old math genius who is

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given technology meant to let her see the real world for the first time. If she really had a LiveJournal blog, I would be a regular reader.

I loved the web-native view of the net, which captures what it feels like to be on-line as well as explaining the technology simply and without becoming boring.

I enjoyed the humour that peppers the book, including some of the reference that only old folks like me who've been on-line since the 80s (when there was no W.W.W.) will understand.

The pace of the ideas and the action and the geographic sweep of the converging sub-plots kept me turning the pages rapidly.

Wonderful, wonderful stuff. I will definitely read the rest of the trilogy and I hope someone good (preferably Canadian or British) makes the TV series that this deserves to become.

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WWW: Wake is a coming of age YA novel by one of my very favorite scifi authors, Robert Sawyer.

Caitlin Decter, a precocious and witty fifteen-year-old, has been blind since birth because of scrambled coding in her visual-processing system. When a Japanese scientist offers to test an experimental

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“eyepod” on her that will remap the signals from her eye to her brain, she jumps at the chance.

Dr. Kuroda misses an important coding sequence on the first try, and what Caitlin sees is not the structure of the world, but that of the world wide web, which her brain has adapted to use since she was small. He figures out how to change the code, and Caitlin is able to see "real life" for the first time. She can still toggle the eyepad back and forth, however, to see just the web. And what she discovers there is a primitive-seeming intelligence that is trying to communicate with her. Inspired by Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, Caitlin makes it her mission to reach out to this "other," and bring it to whatever self-actualization it can accomplish.

Discussion: I loved the use of Caitlin’s blindness to “see” through the preoccupations of the sighted world. In this passage, Caitlin and her friend Bashira are discussing a boy who has shown an interest in Caitlin, after he walks away from their cafeteria table:

"…Bashira said, ‘He’s hot.’

‘He’s an asshole,’ Caitlin replied.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Bashira, ‘but he’s a hunky asshole.’

Caitlin shook her head. How seeing more could make people see less was beyond her.”

And Sawyer has a bit of fun with the status of the scifi genre, in this passage from Caitlin’s LiveJournal (entries for which are interspersed throughout the text):

"Back in the summer, the school gave me a list of all the books we’re doing this year in English class. I got them then either as ebooks or as Talking Books from the CNIB [Canadian National Institute for the Blind], and have now read them all. Coming attractions include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood .... In fact, I’ve already had an argument with Mrs. Zed, my English teacher, about that one, because I called it science fiction. She refused to believe it was, finally exclaiming ‘It can’t be science fiction, young lady –if it were, we wouldn’t be studying it!’”

Caitlin’s other journal entries seem delightfully apt for a fifteen-year-old, with just the right blend of humor and bravado. And I loved experiencing the sensations with her when she gets to see for the first time: her mom! her room! her own face! (and, OMG, she has acne!)

I loved all the discussions among the characters about the nature of consciousness, a subject that has always interested me. As part of Caitlin’s research into contacting the other, she reads [the real book] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, and quotes extensively from it. (This 1976 book argued that the sense of self emerged only as recently as 3000 years ago, when the left and right sides of the brain became integrated into a single consciousness.) Dr. Kuroda also explains to Caitlin other ways to measure consciousness that have been used to test animal intelligence. These fascinating discussions do not seem didactic at all, but rather are integrated into Caitlin’s quest to contact “the other.”

Evaluation: This is the first book of a trilogy, but unlike other book continuations, it seems perfectly complete the way it is. However, I enjoyed it as both a YA book and a scifi book, and will definitely be reading the next two in the series.

Note: This book won the 2010 Prix Aurora Award (given out annually for the best Canadian science fiction and fantasy literary works) for best novel in English, and is a nominee for the 2010 Hugo Award (the analogous award in the U.S.).

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A fun read, featuring intriguing speculation and plenty of nods to web-savvy folks. What happens when a young blind girl is hooked up to experimental equipment that may help her see? She gets a most unique view of the Internet - something no one else can "see" - and comes to realize there's

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something out there, waiting to make contact. Things I enjoyed about this novel: the speculation on technology, and the way the protagonist "sees" the Web are genuinely intriguing, as is her perspective on regaining sight. There's plenty of interesting science theory in here (how "good" it is, I don't know. I'm not a scientist) that's written simply enough for us plebes to grasp. :)

I do have a few quibbles though. Firstly - warning: this is the first in a trilogy, as I didn't realize until I was most of the way through the book and wondered how on earth Sawyer was going to wrap up the various storylines before it ended. The answer: he wasn't. One of the recurring characters drops out about halfway through the book and we hear no more from him. Another storyline is left entirely in limbo. Basically, there are three separate storylines going on in the novel, and two of them are left basically at cliffhangers. Makes me a tad grumpy.

Still, an engaging read. You get a real sense of an intelligence growing and developing as the novel progresses, which is most interesting indeed. I'm not exactly sure where he can take that particular storyline in the next two novels. I guess we'll see.

I'd recommend it, but be prepared to have a lot of unanswered questions at the end.

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This book was fresh and different. I do not read science fiction and if I were asked to describe the genre, I'd probably think of something involving space travel but that has all changed now. This is definitely the kind of science fiction I'd like to read more of - fiction about science with great

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characters written for the non-science fiction reader. Good stuff!

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This is the type of Sci-Fi I enjoy - sciencey stuff set in the here and now. I was a little bummed that the problems in China were not touched on at all in the latter half of the book, but as this is the first in a trilogy, I know all the storylines will eventually connect - and I hope Hobo's is a

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happy one!

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Classic Sawyer. This book draws you in and doesn't let go until the very end. The story is well told, the characters are interesting enough to keep you reading but not so complex to lose you in complexities. Also classic Sawyer in that his Canadiana was distracting at times and it definitely felt

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as though he was continuously namedropping.

As a technical aspect (minor spolier), I found that his description of the "main event" was weird coming from a neuroscience and cognitive science background. As the consciousness emerged, why could it perceive it's individual makeup? As he even says later, we don't perceive ourselves as neurons and axons!

I'll be reading the rest of the series.

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Much of what goes into a review, if we’re honest, is about personal taste and preference, bringing to that our own world view. In a way, it’s that latter point that underpins Sawyer’s much-acclaimed novel, Wake.

I have to admit I wanted more. And by more I don’t mean quantity. Not even do I

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necessarily mean quality. What I wanted was more depth. But, again, that’s a point of personal preference.

Still, it was that superficiality, that lack of depth, that kept me from completely engaging with the story Sawyer crafted. There were pages, even whole chapters, spent on geek-speak, which for geeks is great (I am reminded of the quartet of Big Bang Theory), but which for me caused a complete arrest of the plot, action, and character development, to the point I found myself skimming. Again, I must mitigate that statement with the caveat this is purely personal taste. I know, simply from the astonishing sales numbers for the novel, there are thousands out there who would disagree with my point of view.

This is my review, however, and so I can only bring to that review my own perspective.

Having said all that, I found the underlying concepts of the story – an awakening artificial intelligence, and the moral issue of allowing artificial intelligence to propagate – concepts which have been dealt with previously. And so, if I’m going to read about something that has previously been explored, I’m hoping for something new to be introduced to the discussion. Again, that lack of depth, that lack of uniqueness, left me hungry.

It wasn’t until the last 10% of the book I found myself absorbed by relationship dynamics and characterization, and the tension around that relationship. Much of the emotional depth of that last 10% could have been infused throughout the previous 90%, and had that been achieved, the fact little new had been added to the lexicon of artificial intelligence would have been completely mitigated by a profound story about defining relationships between alien species.

But, then, maybe that’s an entirely different story than the one Sawyer wished to tell.

Would I recommend Sawyer’s novel, Wake? Sure I would. If you love SF and aren’t interested in the touchy-feeling aspects of literature, then yes Wake is for you. If you want something else, if you’re looking for profundity and provocation, then no, Wake isn’t for you.

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This is certainly not the best writing by Robert Sawyer. There is some interesting background information about consciousness but the chapter preambles are extraordinarily tiresome. Then there are a couple of odd ball side stories thrown in which, to me anyway, just muddle the main dialog.

This is

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the first book of the www trilogy, and, hopefully, the next volume will come closer to the excellent writing he has done for prior works.

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Nice readable, very much (too much) a first of a trilogy; good characterization of the protoagonist. Will read the others.

I enjoyed the premise of the book,and read it excitedly. Unfortunately, I was a little underwhelmed by the ending . I think this is not necessarily the author's fault, I think it is the fault of the publishing company's jacket blurb that made it sound as if something vaguely sinister was going to

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happen--and it never did. Also there were two interesting, but mostly unrelated subplots, that seemed like "red herrings" to me while I puzzled out the plot. The protagonist is an interesting and smart teenager, and there's enough--but not too much--intriguing technology info and applications for plausibility. I especially enjoyed the parallels drawn between Helen Keller and our protagonists.

I would recommend it to others, but I don't believe it is Mr. Sawyer's best book.

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Normally love/ingest Sawyer books. This one made me skip ahead and check my watch to make sure it hadn't become tomorrow already. The chatter just didn't engage me and there is a hell of a lot of name-dropping. It seemed like every other page included a reference to a real person and the protag's

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remark about how 'cool' that person was. I stopped counting at ten.

I don't know. I'll probably try the next one, but I won't have high hopes. Definitely a library read rather than a book bought. Time to re-read the Neanderthal trilogy ...

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Wake contains two stories which dance alongside each other until their collision in the latter part of the novel. The first plot follows a web-savvy blind girl who becomes the recipient of an experimental implant. The second strand follows the emergence of something within the web-space itself.

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Whereas Caitlin's story is full of emotion, interesting characters and creative near-future ideas, the other story is cold and calculated, rooted in maths and science and feels sterile alongside a tale rooted in humanity. This creates an imbalance, although deliberate, which is distracting. Caitlin's tale could have been a standalone tale and although it may not have contained as much science fiction, it would have engaged the reader with a more captivating story.

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I don't read a lot of sci-fi, and then it's mostly on a theme - intelligent machines, dystopian future - but 'Wake' didn't do it for me. A thought-provoking concept - a blind girl with a retinal implant can 'see' the Web, and some kind of artificial intelligence lurking in the Internet is learning

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through her - but the story itself was drawn out, convoluted (why the subplot about a hybrid ape?), and an uneven combination of infodump and popular reference. I enjoyed Caitlin's world of LiveJournal, iTunes, Wikipedia, etc., and learned a lot about how the eye works, how information is sent over the Internet, and even what 'Yahoo!' stands for, but none of the characters seemed real to me. Even Caitlin herself is more of a device for explaining complex IT and scientific theories (she is a maths whizz, after all). And please, stop prefacing every line of dialogue with 'um' - I know that's how people speak, but it's not necessary to write it all the time (even Caitlin points that out, when talking to her Web phantom!)

An informative way to pass the time - slowly - but I won't be reading the rest of the trilogy.

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For a start let me adapt a line said by one of the characters in the story, to let you know how I really feel for this book. Here is goes:
This book is made out of awesome!!

Why?

Well... the concept - the idea - that an artificial intelligence or a non biologic, digital life form CAN evolve by itself,

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CAN learn and develop on its own, has already been introduced in the movie version of "I, Robot" - not to be mistaken with Asimov's work with the same title, even though there are similarities - but this is truly something new. Or for me, at least, the mere thought of the birth of a digital entity is...

Amazing!

The book is really easy to read, yet keeps one's vocabulary "fit and in shape", as it introduces the reader to a few scientific and mathematical facts and theories in a way that will keep you pinned to your chair/bed/couch/wherever you read...
And the best thing: the characters are alive! Unlike many sci-fi novels I have read before (well, the number is not that high, but it keeps counting...), the characters do have a life; they do have thoughts, not to mention feelings. They don't just follow procedures, "voices form gods or higher entities", calculations or the environment, but they do get happy, they do cry and get sometimes really upset, and puzzled even by events they cannot understand.

And Sawyer wrote this all down so well that sometimes it made my heart shrink...
No, that's not the word...
Yes! Yes! Yes, it got squeezed!
But still there is another... a better word...

Oh, got it!

My heart got so overwhelmed... yes... overwhelmed... emotionally overwhelmed not by sorrow, but by joy, that I found myself wiping teardrops off my cheeks as I felt really happy for Caitlin in one particular scene, where she...

Oh! But you have to read it for yourself to fully understand... :)
To feel what I felt...

For this book really is made out of awesome!

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Big, big meh on this book. I think a lot of the meh comes from the fact that it's the first in a series, so it reads like a very extended prologue. It's just all set-up, set-up, telling, telling, more set-up. Nothing terribly objectionable, but I kept wanting it to get around to the story

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already.What story there is...is also meh. I feel that the ghost in the machine has been done to death, maybe not in fiction but certainly in popular imagination. The circumstances that lead to the machine intelligence's creation are somewhat interesting, but still kind of blah. And the first person parts from the 'ghost's' perspective - bleah. Detailing the experiences of a nonverbal intelligence using verbal means - this always ends up reading cliched and awful. The part of the plot set in China was the most interesting bit, but it turned out just to be a device for setting the rest of the lackluster plot in motion.Really don't understand why this deserved a Hugo nom. I will not be reading the rest of the series because I just don't care that much.

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Another page turner taht is very enjoyable to read. Kind of funny that in retrospect there was not that much groudbreaking to remember from the book, but still so much fun to read. Looking forward to the evolution of the trilogy.

I must admit up front that I'm not a science fiction reader and only read this for a book club discussion, I did enjoy the story, and found many of the ideas of intelligence and the awakening of different kinds or levels of awareness very interesting! On the down side, this is the first book of a

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trilogy and the author used it partly to set up the other books (I assume). There were two subplots, one of which ended abruptly and the other not integrated into the main story. On the other hand, the main story did come to a satisfactory ending in itself, even though there is obviously room for the story to expand in the rest of the series.

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I found myself feeling incredibly unintelligent for a large part of the book, then all of a sudden, it clicked. This is an excellent job of writing! A young, blind girl is given the chance to see, with astonishing results. What's interesting is that it all sounds so plausible. This book will leave

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you thinking about artificial intelligence, whether you've ever thought about it before or not. There are, I believe, 3 books in the series; this is the first. I highly recommend this one. If you don't like science fiction, don't worry - it's not my favorite genre either, but Sawyer makes it worth your time!

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A very intriguing story about a blind girl who gains sight of the web and of the real world through an implant. This implant lets her discover an artificial intelligence forming in the world wide web. The story is clearly geared towards a second book and even though the main plot comes to a nice

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conclusion, some of the sub-plots end a bit abruptly. The audio recording is amazing with multiple narrators and discreet sound effects.

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I've never read a book quite like this one. A little past half way through I realized this book contains hardly any conflict. And yet I devoured the whole thing in two days. Sure, there were a few problems and difficulties for the characters to overcome, but they were relatively minor and easily

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sorted out.

So how can there even be an interesting story without conflict? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it simply had something to do with the subject matter, and the way Sawyer wrote. One of the main plot lines involved an entity coming to consciousness in the reality of the internet. I found myself repeatedly grinning, excited, thrilled, HAPPY as its mind took shape. I thought stories could only have you afraid, worried for the characters, but apparantly being purely happy for them works too. This book was a joyous, wonderous surprise, so I think I can forgive it for having no conflict.

One thing I'm not ready to forgive however was the lack of depth in the characters. I read the entire thing and felt almost nothing for the main character. I didn't know her, didn't understand about her, but more importantly I didn't CARE beyond a vague and general sympathy. The same went for the others, all shallow, simple. I felt no real connection with them, which would be the death warant for any other book to me.

Regardless, I still thoughroughly enjoyed this book and will no doubt be searching for the second installment on my next trip to the library. I want to see if he can pull this off again. Bravo, Sawyer.

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