Robert J. Sawyer tackles a blind teenage girl and  . . .

Wait a moment.

Robert J. Sawyer’s new novel, Wake, is about a blind teenage girl and the internet.  (As well as a sign-language using chimp and a disease outbreak in China.)   It’s  the first instalment of the www. trilogy; a series dealing with the internet gaining consciousness.  Although it tackles a difficult subject,  Wake is a clearly written and engaging book.

But all of Sawyer’s books are that, at least.

He’s passed into that dread phase of success where he must compete with himself.  Having produced one book (Calculating God) and one trilogy (The Neanderthal Parallax) that I consider to be  unquestionable masterpieces of science fiction, as well as a whole catalogue that never dips below a certain level of quality –that level being Illegal Alien– a Robert J. Sawyer book can now only be considered good if it’s great.

It’s unfair but I know how he must feel.  I have the same problem every time I pick out a tie.

So the question in reviewing Wake is not whether it is a good science fiction book.  And it’s not whether you’ll be entertained and enlightened if it’s your first experience with Robert J. Sawyer.  Those are givens.  The question is — where does it rank in the pantheon of his work?  Just as every Arthur C. Clarke book must be compared to 2001, every RJS book must be compared to The Neanderthal Parallax and Calculating God.

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Like all of Sawyer’s books, there’s as much fun to be had from the things you learn as there is from the story itself.  There are two types of writers - those who make the simple appear strange and those who make the strange appear simple.  Robert is of the latter camp.  He has an unerring ability to take some of science’s most complicated ideas and explain them in plain language.  He makes you feel like an expert in things you know nothing about.

Yet, the most significant work that deals with artificial intelligence in cyberspace, Gibson’s Neuromancer, is written by the exact opposite sort of writer:  One that takes the normal and makes it weird; one who writes in convoluted prose and one who has a much darker view of humanity and its machines.  A very different writer than Sawyer.

But one who, given the subject,  must be engaged.

Wake often feels like a counterargument, both in style and content, to Neuromancer.    One hopes that the next two volumes will step out of Gibson’s long, dark shadow and build on the solid foundation laid in the first book.  If Sawyer succeeds in this, the final nail will be hammered into Cyberpunk’s coffin and the world will have a new way to write about the Internet.   If he doesn’t, we may be stuck with teenage, male angst for some time to come.

I’d say that sort of angst is in some danger.

“Wake” is a major work by one of SF’s heavyweights.

(And I’m not just saying that because you can find my name in the acknowledgements.   I’m not even entirely sure why my name is there.  Maybe it’s because the protagonist’s cat and my cat share the name of Schroedinger.

Although I’m also unsure of how my cat feels, I’m quite proud to have my name anywhere in this book.  It lives up to “Ryan Oakley.”  And that’s something Ryan Oakley often fails to do.)

The  most daring aspects of this novel are the sections written from The Internet’s point of view.  It is conscious but not yet able to use language.  When one considers that a book is made from words, the difficulty of writing this sort of thing becomes apparent.

Robert decides to just go for it, trusting that the reader will understand that the machine is not usually thinking in language.  This approach, coupled with his clear prose, serves him well, though there are a couple of tiny but disruptive missteps where he brings too much attention to The Internet learning to choose its words.

Those nitpicks aside, this creature does rob Sawyer of  my favourite component of his writing.  He has crafted some of the most believable and well-rounded aliens in all of science fiction.  They’re always just human enough to be very strange and strange enough to show just how odd we humans actually are.  They are possessed not only of the characteristics of a species but also of individual quirks.  His expertise in rendering these creatures is why I rank him among the greats.

Of course, writing a pre-linguistic consciousness is difficult.  Writing one that has a personality would not only be impossible but ridiculous.   Still, it’s like watching Ali, knowing that he might be able to sting like a bee but is unable to float like a butterfly.  Sawyer, in this first volume, is not allowed, by the subject, to use his greatest strength.  And yet, like Ali against Foreman, he not only recovers but delivers a knock-out blow.

He solves this problem by turning The Internet’s dawning consciousness into a sort of running metaphor that examines, step by step, how consciousness must occur.  We are given a peak behind the curtain, not only at cyberspace but also at the mind of our ancestors.   This might not be his most personable alien –yet– but it is his most interesting.

As The Internet learns how to think, Sawyer employs a chimpanzee sub-plot, the blind protagonist’s gaining of sight and numerous references to Helen Keller to look at the same problem from different angles.   If Gibson is futurism, then there is something of the Cubist in the construction of this book.

Consciousness is a type of awareness –of one’s self, of others and of the environment- and the content of this book is mirrored, not in dark shades, but in the style of the novel.  As the plot comes together, as the characters grow more aware of each other, as their stories lines hypertext and entwine, the actual awareness of the characters increases.

Reading this book feels like watching a magic trick.  Sawyer starts with a few pieces of string, shows you what’s up his sleeves –nothing– and then starts tying them together.  He steps back, gives the ropes a good yank and – Ta-Da- you have a tidy knot in the shape of a brain.

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“That’s impressive,” you say.

“Wait until it does your math homework,” he replies.

But this would hardly be a Grumpy Owl review if I didn’t fly off on a beak snapping rant.

If I have a pet peeve with literature (believe me, having spent too many evenings at garbage readings by garbage writers for people whose wealth and education exceeds their intelligence, I have more than one) it’s that the literati could very well be, to  a person, too bloody stupid to see any of this.  They seem to think that a tight plot construction and a clear prose style are inartistic.  Meanwhile, very few of these people can write a straight sentence let alone a straight novel.

Sawyer gets a lot of well-deserved respect as a storyteller and as a science pundit but not enough as a prose stylist.  It should not be overlooked that he is a science fiction writer.

In Wake Sawyer attacks the novel from different points of view, using different styles and narrative tools; creates suspense while never employing an antagonist, tells history through a symbolic representation of consciousness and creates a character out of nothing.  He does all of this so well and layers in so much page-turning, forward thrust, that the extent of his style is invisible.  The fellow even manages to weave in a metanarrative about the science fiction genre, which probably runs less than 200 words spread out over 350 pages and reaches its own satisfying conclusion.

For now, it’s impossible to say just where this trilogy will rank in the RJS canon.  But the first book is a promising start and a definite shot across the bow of cyberpunk.   That might piss a few people off.  Buty, let’s face it, some optimism about the internet and the power of intelligence is long overdue.  WWW looks to provide that and it could be  one of the most important, divisive and debated science fiction series of the next few years.

I, for one, welcome our new internet master and look forward to the fray.