I’m very glad that I didn’t immediately post about my latest book right after finishing it. I’m glad that I looked into the back story a bit more, because I learned that Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, WWW:Wake, is the first in a planned trilogy of books. That makes things a lot more understandable. Well, okay, it doesn’t really. But it does at least explain why so many story threads in this novel were left dangling in front of me in such an irritating way that I wanted to reach out and rip them to shreds like Blondie told me to a long, long time ago.

I’ve read Sawyer once before during this year’s challenge and I very much enjoyed what I read. I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much, but it’s still an interesting read. The fact that it’s only part of a proposed series is something that they might want to mention in the first novel. It makes all the difference between thinking that Sawyer got really lazy toward the end and knowing that Sawyer is simply laying groundwork for future portions of the story. Also, it took a bit of doing to get used to Sawyer writing as a 15-year-old girl. I have to admit that I started imagining Sawyer going into chat rooms and pretending to actually be a 15-year-old girl, in an effort to perfect his cadence and grasp of all the hip young people slang. That by itself was really creepy and disconcerting.

Anyway, basic plot outline: Caitlin Decter, the young protagonist in question, was born blind. Her blindness, however, is due to Tomasevic’s syndrome, “which was marked by reversed pupil dilation: instead of contracting in bright light and expanding in dim light, her pupils did the opposite,” according to the novel. A Japanese scientist, Dr. Kuroda, has developed a signal-processing device that can be attached to her optic nerve with the hope that it can correct the syndrome and begin to correctly process visual input and allow her to see. She goes through with the surgery to have this device implanted…and things proceed to get very sci-fi weird from there.

Caitlin can’t see “normally” at first. Instead, she starts to see what everyone soon determines is a visual representation of the World Wide Web. They deduce that it’s because she grew up as a child of the online revolution and she spent so many hours in front of a computer (never mind that she was blind and staring at a monitor usually in the “off” position). Things may or may not sort themselves out properly. I’m not saying…you’ll have to read the story yourself.

There are also parallel stories about a videoconferencing chimpanzee hybrid named HoBo and a Chinese dissident blogger as well as a disturbing Chinese cover-up, but none of these stories is resolved in this book. Neither, really, is Caitlin’s story.

I think the book was intriguing enough that if I see the sequels pop up at my library, I’ll probably check them out. But I don’t think this was captivating enough that I would purposely seek out the sequels. I apparently am that fickle a fan.

Final score: 3/5. Not a bad read (and very quick), but I definitely enjoyed Sawyer’s Calculating God much more.