I’m struggling to remember where I bought this book. I don’t think I borrowed it from someone, but it’s entirely possible that I did. If it was you please let me know, I’ll need to return it. Having looked at the back of the book I see it was bought from Mary Martin Bookshop. Sadly, their sticker doesn’t include which location. They have a shop in Southbank and another in Port Melbourne. It’s entirely possible I bought this at the Southbank location, but my memory escapes me. And that makes me sad because I’ve started asking booksellers to recommend books for me. I’ve had such success with buying good books that way. What doesn’t escape my memory is this book. I finished it a few days ago and was really impressed with it.
I’ve only made a couple of notes while reading. It was a real cracker to read. I found it very hard to put down and it made getting a good night’s sleep a bit of a challenge. Not that the book is in my dreams, more that it was so easy to read ‘just one more chapter’. Some of the chapters are very short, ranging from half a page to several pages. Reading a chapter composed of half a page makes it very easy to say ‘I meant a longer chapter’, and to just keep going.
AI is in the news a lot lately. This book shows that AI can sometimes be good. We see everything through the eyes of a computer. It’s a computer that has some self direction and that can talk to almost every person. Sometimes we see the conversation the people are having with the computer and sometimes the computer shows us what is happening.
There was an info dump near the start. I read that and wondered if this meant the book would be more tell rather than show. I need not have worried. It turns out that we really needed that info dump to start understanding the world. The rest of the information was given to us in dribs and drabs throughout the book. There’s a mixture of show and sometimes tell so that we can understand how the world has been affected by a fog. And also how the people are coping with the fog.
I loved this book. I put it down for the last time with a feeling of both sadness and completion. I felt it was nicely written. For me, it was a good mix of detective and science fiction. One of the villagers was charged with finding out who murdered the scientist. But she only has 107 hours in which to do this before the fog engulfs the island. I hear you yelling at me about the computer. Surely it knows what happened. Normally, yes. But in this case someone has ordered it to wipe the memories of everyone on the island and also its own memory banks for several hours. No-one remembers doing things and it’s only Emory, remembering Sherlock Holmes, who is able to start piecing together the clues.
Anyway, more than that will be spoilers so I’m going to have a look at my notes and see what I can make of them. There’s only two notes, on pages 226 and 255. It took me until two-thirds of the way through the book to be able to take time to make notes.
Page 226 is about this paragraph.
She never learned how to read people, how to pick up the corner of a sentence and peer underneath.
I loved this sentence. Yes, one sentence is one paragraph. But, unlike Charles Dickens, it’s a short paragraph. It feels like people pick up the corner of the doona (or duvet) to look underneath and see what’s there. Or the corner of the rug to see the dust someone’s swept underneath. Yes, some sentences can be super loaded with innuendo and others can be straightforward. It’s just like people sometimes they say things that can have more than one meaning and other times what you hear is exactly what it means.
And page 255 has another paragraph.
A death in service to others will always mean more to him than a life preserved in service to himself.
This sentence pulls at me. It illustrates why some people will put other’s lives ahead of their own. And yet there are some people who will hide behind someone in order to save themselves. There are so many stories of both sides to this if you look at the sinking of the Titanic, or at any large tragedy.
That’s just my thoughts about this book. Not sure if I’ll read it again, there’s so little time and so many books. But I’ll be happy to read his other books. If they’re anything like this then I’ll enjoy them tremendously.
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