Unlocked

[sawyl]

Feeling a little bit under the weather, I settled down with Unlocked, John Scalzi's short companion piece to his novel Lock In, due out later this year. The book is a World War Z style series of first person accounts of the history of Haden Syndrome, a flu-like disease with life-altering consequences, that strikes the world's population from nowhere. Actually, it doesn't quite come from nowhere: in typically Scalzian fashion, its initial spread is actually traced back to a intentional conference of epidemiologists.

After the initial pandemic, complete with nasty symptoms and a high mortality rate, some of the early patients start complaining of meningitis-like symptoms followed by odd neurological problems. In some cases, including that of First Lady Margie Haden, the patients enter a state of total paralysis, aware of their surroundings but unable to react in any way — the titular lock in syndrome of Scalzi's novel.

With his wife severely affected, President Haden ditches his fiscal conservatism to use every favour and blackmail note at his disposal to start up a Manhattan Project program to investigate the virus and deal with some of its consequences. But the crash program delivers in ways that no-one really expects, helping locked-in patients in innovative ways, while also unleashing a series of unforeseen social and ethical consequences.

Unlocked feels like a successful teaser for Lock In — I certainly want to know more about the world and the consequences of brain implants and robots and virtual realities and communities split across Haden lines — I'm not entirely convinced by the episodic structure. Being much shorter WWZ, Scalzi wasn't able to pull Brooks' trick of abandoning each narrator after a single chapter, making it harder to track the various different voices as they cut across each other.

Still, it's interesting stuff that left me wanting more — but I don't recommend reading it (a) on a plane, (b) in anything less than perfect health, or (c) at an international epidemiology conference...