Review of WWW Trilogy, by Kron Kyrios
This review is from: WWW: Wake (Hardcover)
Personally, I see this as one long story, and would not recommend simply reading any one or two volumes of this trilogy. Therefore, I am writing my review of the whole story and posting it identically as a review of each book.
Robert J Sawyer has soared to the top of my favorite author list, and this trilogy is now my number one favorite story. I particularly like how thoroughly he has researched the sciences, technologies and cultural aspects he writes about. Yet, his writing style makes it easy for the average reader to understand the topics being discussed. A few points in the story felt a little cheesy or Hollywood-like, but overall it was very realistic. I like how, for much of the story, we don’t know if some of the characters are antagonists or protagonists. This adds to the realism. Real life doesn’t typically offer clear cut heroes or villains like we see in other works of fiction.
It is refreshing to see an optimistic view of the future. The concept of a Super-Artificial-Intelligence is a difficult one to write about. Writing an entire thread of the story from the Super-AI’s perspective must have been daunting. This is true of the other “foreign” perspectives he wrote about as well: a blind person, a math genius and a teenage girl. Personally, I love math as a passion, I have spent a great deal of time pondering Super-AI’s, and I have personally worked with blind people, helping them with their computers over the last 15 years. On those subjects at least I can attest to his accurate portrayals. As for teenage girls, I can’t say from personal experience, but it seemed genuine enough that Caitlin Decter and friends felt real to me.
As an optimist and a futurist myself, this story described a future I have long dreamed about. In fact, for a couple months before I had heard this trilogy, I was actually preparing to write this story. I had laid out all the major concepts I wanted to cover, and was starting to do an outline. Then I found out about this story, from an author I already admired. The characters and the progression of the novel I intended to write were completely different than my story. But, it was amazing to see how, as I read, Mr Sawyer had covered each major point of consideration I had laid out (and a number of important points I had missed). In nearly every case, he had more elegant solutions than I had decided on. He used even more viewpoints which I have knowledge of from my own life and my friends’ lives than I had planned on using in my own book. No wonder why I love this story so much!
Now I wonder if my story would appear to be a hack of his… Maybe, I should write the remaining ideas of my story which he did not cover as a fan-fiction of his story. In any case, this is a story that desperately needed to be written, and I tip my hat to Robert J Sawyer for spending 6 years of his life doing it.
I could go on and on about the details of the books, but the other reviews do a fine job at discussing plot points. No need adding to what has been said.
http://www.amazon.com/WWW-Trilogy-Robert-J-Sawyer/dp/044101853X
