Wired

Just finished reading Wired by Richard E Douglas on Kindle (on my phone).

Lately I've been working my way through the cheap Kindle titles and have had some luck. For example the Star Force series by B.V Larsonm while not fantastically written, is pretty entertaining. In other cases I've not been as lucky and I feel this is one of them.

On a side note - has anyone else noticed how the $0.99 books all became $2.99 books? And how the new releases for $9.00 all moved to $13 and higher? Did you notice this increase in price was timed to be just after the demise of the major paper book retailers? (Especially in Australia).

Anyway back to the book (some spoilers) - the basic premise is that a slightly damaged ex-special forces dude gets brought back out of retirement to hunt down a scientist that has gone rogue and is threatening mass destruction. He discovers she has actually developed technology to massively enhance her intellect for short periods (among other things). She has been setup and they (the special forces dude, the scientist a hacker and another army guy) all go on a meandering journey to find who set them up and right the wrongs.

The pace of the book is excellent and certainly at the start some of the situations setup by the scientist to avoid capture were very clever. The action scenes are tense and occasionally the characters are in some pretty tight situations. As the book progresses it relies more and more on the brain enhancement tech to get the characters out of trouble which quickly gets tiresome.

I have a bunch of problems with this book. The main one I think is that for whatever reason I found it hard to accept the basic premise of brain enhancement implemented *genetically* via a retrograde virus. The capabilities they had just seemed implausible and at the end of the day no matter how big or fast your brain is  you can't know what you can't know. Sure the capability gives them perfect and total recall but occasionally I feel the result doesn't follow.

Now let me preface this with the fact that whilst I was brought up a catholic that my views on religion are at best quirky and probably undeveloped. The book however argues that the more intelligent people are the more anti-social they become. Super-enhanced people begin to see the people around them like normal people would apes. Furthermore it argues that if you are super-enhanced you see the fallacy of after-life and therefore tend to be less altruistic and more selfish. Then having absolute power (cough) and a sense of limited time compels you to act more selfishly as there are no risks associated with this behaviour.

First of all there is just so much research out there on co-operation and how it increases the overall effectiveness of a group that I would have thought a hyper-intelligent being would see this. Secondly if the author argued religion was invented so people could cope with their own mortality or loss of loved ones or if the author said religion was invented to explain the reason of your existence I could bite but really, there are enough examples of humans acting selflessly independently of religion. Even arguing religion was constructed to enhance altruism is a stretch if you consider early religions.

Overall I was pretty disappointed and won't be going back for the sequel.