VLK249 reviewed Shiny Metal Boxes by Tim Ruel
Review of 'Shiny Metal Boxes' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Shiny Metal Boxes, love it when the title shows up somewhere in the story, although until it does, "Why Shiny Metal Boxes?" Because... no wait, that's a spoiler.
This book is very thriller with elements of hard sci-fi. If you're an IT type person who loves future-tech documentaries, you'll appreciate Ruel's writing and world building. Though optimistic pessimists such as myself hope that an universal monopolization of people's corneas will never, ever be a thing. It's around the late 2070s. eyeGo has almost universally installed their devices into everyone's eyeballs, and humanity is so desperately dependent on it that even when people are getting sick in droves presumably because of it, the devices remain. Emma is a health technician for the company, tasked with documenting the condition (Jobs Disease) that no one quite knows the cause of, and definitely not the cure. She and her friends go into fight mode …
Shiny Metal Boxes, love it when the title shows up somewhere in the story, although until it does, "Why Shiny Metal Boxes?" Because... no wait, that's a spoiler.
This book is very thriller with elements of hard sci-fi. If you're an IT type person who loves future-tech documentaries, you'll appreciate Ruel's writing and world building. Though optimistic pessimists such as myself hope that an universal monopolization of people's corneas will never, ever be a thing. It's around the late 2070s. eyeGo has almost universally installed their devices into everyone's eyeballs, and humanity is so desperately dependent on it that even when people are getting sick in droves presumably because of it, the devices remain. Emma is a health technician for the company, tasked with documenting the condition (Jobs Disease) that no one quite knows the cause of, and definitely not the cure. She and her friends go into fight mode the moment one of their vibrant friends becomes so sickened she ends up in a coma. Sleuthing, investigation, and explorations into technology, the hows and whys, and who is really beyond a disease that has sickened tens of millions and makes Covid look as inconvenient as a tiny sniffle. Yeah, please don't touch my eyeballs.
Ruel loves his tech and his world building, the first third of the book however is plentiful in info dumps and less so in plot. I like technology info dumps, they make me happy. But, the inciting incident only comes once CynCyn's condition advances to stage 3/4. There is a fight here between giving the reader the needs of a good story, and the author wanting to indulge their readers with a dynamic and somewhat strange world. Mentions of Mars have no relevant impact on this part of the series, nor do the in-depth annoyances of the technology involved in Emma's delayed commute to work. Readers who want to dive right into the thriller narrative would find this frustrating. Again, I didn't, but it made me start to worry the book would be all world building and very little story.
The author's humor is cutting, ridiculous, and at times sublime. They are a narrator with liberal values, a cynic bent, and a cheeky way of thumbing to relics of the old world as well as hypothesized ghouls of a corporate future. Good style, great dialogue, smart and intellectual work. This may be the only story that I can say that the use of Wingdings font was relevant and refreshing. Something I'd never thought I'd praise in a review.