Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent's head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are "threeps," robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden's Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth--and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.
The first one in the series was better. I like the funny dialogue and the comical details, but this is mostly a detective story in disguise with some American politics thrown in for good measure.
The sequel to Lock In is a fast read with an interesting mystery, fun characters, and intriguing concepts. More than the first book, it fully explores the societal impact of both large scale lock-in and the technology used to deal with it.
It continues with the POV of locked-in FBI agent Chris Shane, this time investigating the death of a locked-in athlete.
In this near-future, 10% of the world's population have been locked into their brains by a pandemic. Virtual reality and remote robot piloting enable them to interact with the world, and there are even specially designed "threeps" (named after a well-known droid) for different tasks. Among them: the battle threeps used for a sport more violent than could be played with real human bodies.
Hadens spend most of their lives interacting through simulations or mechanical avatars, which changes a lot about identity presentation, travel, location, disability and prejudice. …
The sequel to Lock In is a fast read with an interesting mystery, fun characters, and intriguing concepts. More than the first book, it fully explores the societal impact of both large scale lock-in and the technology used to deal with it.
It continues with the POV of locked-in FBI agent Chris Shane, this time investigating the death of a locked-in athlete.
In this near-future, 10% of the world's population have been locked into their brains by a pandemic. Virtual reality and remote robot piloting enable them to interact with the world, and there are even specially designed "threeps" (named after a well-known droid) for different tasks. Among them: the battle threeps used for a sport more violent than could be played with real human bodies.
Hadens spend most of their lives interacting through simulations or mechanical avatars, which changes a lot about identity presentation, travel, location, disability and prejudice. It's the kind of thing that might be nodded to in another book that wanted to focus on the technology, but all these implications are woven throughout the story and key to a lot of it.
(Adapted from the Mastodon posts I made back when I read it, cross-posted here and on my website)
I like the general setup established in the first book, but the central story here didn't grab me nearly as much. I hope if Scalzi revisits this world again it has some of the emotional energy of the first book.
Even better than Lock In. Scalzi finally is getting the hang of dialogs, they sounded a bit less stilted than in Lock In, yeay. Actually, they were hilarious in this book.
Audiobook
Good Follow up to Lock In. I find the threep situation extremely interesting.
