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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Book may be Amped, but it should stop for breath
Book review
Amped
- By Daniel H. Wilson
- Doubleday, 288 pages, $20
Pittsburgh school teacher Owen Gray is having just about as bad a day as a teacher can have -- and it's going to get a lot worse for the neurologically enhanced young man.
Gray starts the day on the school roof, trying to talk a 15-year-old despondent fellow "amp" out of jumping, and soon after watches his scientist father's amplification-technology lab get blown up by right-wing vigilantes. By nightfall, he is a federal fugitive trying to reach a rumoured sanctuary in an Oklahoma trailer park.
And that's just in the first few pages.
Amped is the latest scientific-medical thriller from American robotics scientist and author Daniel H. Wilson, whose works have included How to Survive a Robot Uprising and the 2011 bestseller Robocalypse, the latter being turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg.
Wilson doesn't believe in slowly building up to his story. From the first paragraph, the reader is into what's rapidly becoming a civil war between people who've had implants to overcome illnesses or physical and mental disabilities and regular human beings.
Gray doesn't know it on Page 1, but when his father implanted him to control his epilepsy, he added a few extra gadgets that will seriously enhance his son.
Dad, after all, created the technology to amplify soldiers -- does it come as a spoiler that the government would weaponize technology?
Think it's possible that those super-soldiers will factor into the plot somewhere, like, for instance, an Oklahoma trailer park?
The Pure Pride regular humans are being whipped up by a demagogue senator, straight out of the Joe McCarthy template.
Regular folk are told that the amps will use their manufactured abilities to take away normal humans' jobs, to get a leg up on their kids in school, and to foist a secret agenda on the American people.
The reader is invited to draw parallels to real life issues and artificial social divides engineered and exploited by the hateful. This is easy, even if you haven't seen a single X-Men movie about humans and mutants.
The parallels are also easily drawn between Wilson and the late Michael Crichton, who wrote a couple of dozen novels in which medicine and science go a step or two beyond what's possible today, with frighteningly bad results.
Crichton went from writing real books earlier in his career to writing outlines for screenplays in the guise of novels, and Wilson is pretty close to doing the same.
Amped is short, heavier on action than on character development, and rarely stops for breath or introspection.
It's the kind of book that could use another 100 pages of serious navel-gazing about just what it means to be human.
Nick Martin is a Free Press reporter.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 9, 2012 J9
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Publisher: Sen. Elizabeth Warren has book deal; release planned for spring 2014
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