WWW: Wake

By: Robert J. Sawyer

Narrated by: Jessica Almasy, Jennifer Van Dyck, A. C. Fellner, Marc Vietor, Robert J. Sawyer

Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math - and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind.

But Caitlin's brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes.

While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something - some other - lurking in the background. And it's getting more and more intelligent with each passing day.

BONUS AUDIO: Includes an exclusive introduction written and read by author Robert J. Sawyer.

©2009 Ace (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"The thematic diversity - and profundity - makes this one of Sawyer's strongest works to date." (Publishers Weekly)

"Unforgettable. Impossible to put down." (Jack McDevitt)

"Thoughtful and engaging, and a great beginning to a fascinating trilogy." (Robert Charles Wilson)

Fun first read of Robert Sawyer

What did you like about this audiobook?

I liked the narrators and the voices seemed to be suitable for the characters. The book did get a bit wordy without substance several times...like it was trying to teach the reader instead of inform the reader but overall great story

How has the book increased your interest in the subject matter?

I have a better understanding of search engines as a secondary benefit of reading a fiction.

Does the author present information in a way that is interesting and insightful, and if so, how does he achieve this?

The author has a few story lines and leaves you at the end of "Book One" not having a clue how they interrelate. I am beginning to detest publishers demands of trilogies instead of a good long novel.

Awesome

Would you consider the audio edition of WWW to be better than the print version?

I haven't read the print edition but I can't imagine that it could be better than the audible version. My life doesn't allow me much time to read, so audible has been an amazing way to enjoy many great books that I never could have experienced.

What other book might you compare WWW to and why?

Of course, the technical aspects made me think of Michael Crichton's books. The quantum physics and historical action in Timeline made it one of favorites and while not really comparable might be one that Wake listeners might also enjoy.

What does the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The readers did a perfect job of conveying the emotions of all the characters. There were times when I had tears in my eyes from the joy and wonder of Caitlin's first experiences with vision after a lifetime of darkness. I find Marc Vietor's voice mesmerizing and a great choice for Web Mind. I first heard him in !Q84.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

The Digital Evolution of Mankind

Any additional comments?

I did get quite bogged down in the technical descriptions of how the internet works. That there are people that do comprehend this, is just amazing to me.

Is there intelligent life in the internet?

This series drew me in with its multifaceted view of the situation: the emergence of an intelligence from the WWW. Although a few things annoyed me (I've known a few brilliant teens and none of them use the insipid language of youth that is portrayed in this book), the unneeded repetition of themes and plot, I sped through all three books in record time.

Was not for me

This was my 7th audible purchase and the first book that I did not finish. The first five hours were great, I found myself smiling and wincing along with the narrator. Sometime after that it seemed to get repetitive, it lost me. It's not bad, just not for me.

Mind Bender

This book was fantastic and the audio was very well composed. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Sawyer's worst book

I have read everything by this author, so obviously I think he is good, though not great. However, the qualities that made his other books so entertaining are completely lost in this one. I really can't sum it up any better than the following review from another reader, which I will provide in quotes - it completely hits the nail on the head:

'Sawyer has things to tell you, and nothing will stop him. Characters know things they don't need to know:

"Sho was aware that there had been a much earlier version by Simon and Garfunkel,but she only knew their names because of the chimp at Yerkes known as Simian Garfinkle."

Or sometimes they know things that they don't know:

"'Le'azazel!' exclaimed Anna; it sounded like a curse word to Caitlin."

And then suddenly a teenager in a high-school mathematics curriculum becomes a working expert on information theory and cellular automata.

When Sawyer can't plausibly have his teenaged protagonist discover all of computational linguistics, he hands off the exposition to a handful of interchangeable scientists. But there isn't a grain of characterization that doesn't feel obligatory; we feel the author straining to get back to the good stuff: summarizing papers and putting them between quotation marks.

The book isn't self-contained. Things happen, but no conclusions are reached. The Internet becomes self-aware, an ape paints a picture, a blind teenager's sight is restored. This might set us up for hijinks in the coming books, but it's not a satisfying read. We aren't even left with any urgent sense of events in motion; the book just ends.

The writing is engaging, once you stop trying to figure out why the narrators of the individual chapters all sound the same, and once you realize that it's okay to skim the chapters in which the Internet ponderously considers its own condition. But really, why waste your time? '

What an awful pretentious writer!

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Have a different author rewrite the story.

What could Robert J. Sawyer have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Nothing That I can think of.

How could the performance have been better?

It's very difficult to appreciate the readers when the material is so lousy.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

No. None.

Any additional comments?

The worst book that I have encountered in many years.

Dont waste your time or money.. THE WORST!!!

What disappointed you about WWW?

Nothing... i quit listening several times but told myself the entire audio cant all be this terrible... ha! It kept getting worse... sad disappointment...

What was most disappointing about Robert J. Sawyer’s story?

It attempted to explain the www and maneuvering as if you were a complete idiot. Even a complete novice would be insulted.

Would you be willing to try another one of the narrators’s performances?

I cannot believe the author has published more than one book... after my experience with www, i have no desire to checkout his other literary failures.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

All around disappointment...

Any additional comments?

Dont waste your time or money / credits on this audiobook... you have been warned!!

Totally, like, disappointing

Based on the summary, I expected an interesting story focused on the main character, Caitlin, interacting with a strange AI being and the story progressing to determine where it came from and what it wants or at least focused on conflict based around that AI or a cool narrative about exploring the Internet with a sci-fi feel. Instead, I got a book about a poorly written teenage girl obsessed with her LiveJournal blog, cut with side-plots of a very deadly bird flu mutation in China, a chimpanzee who knows sign language and paints a semi-realistic representation of one of his caretakers, and a startlingly boring AI becoming mindful of itself and its surroundings. Yes, those side-plots seem just as random and unrelated to each other in the book. And despite that, or maybe because of that, the story moves really slowly and doesn't seem to have much substance. It's only within the last 2 hours or or so that the AI actively tries to interact with Caitlin, and only the last 45 minutes that they truly interact with each other. By that point, the book seemed to have completely forgotten about the bird flu, and only occasionally referenced the chimp.

Granted, there are two more books that follow Wake (making it the WWW trilogy as the author points out in the introduction), and perhaps those two books tie the different stories together and offer the sci-fi story I was looking for, but at this rate I don't trust the author to do so or do it well, and unless they're offered at a very discounted price, I won't be reading them.

The sections in the AI's perspective are just so DULL (although it gets better during the last two hours) that I don't think they would have been entertaining even if the AI's narrator hadn't been so monotonous. It also really bothered me that this AI magically knew the proper words for everything and made connections so quickly ("one plus one equals.... two! Of course!"), although I understand it'd be difficult for the author to write it a different way and would have made the book much longer.

The author's clear lack of understanding of a real, modern teenage girl is just painfully obvious (although I suppose I should have expected that considering the author is a male in his late 50s). The "cool" things he had her saying come across as incredibly forced, like having her refer to her best friend as "babe" all the time, adding "like" to every sentence, or nicknaming the boy who likes her "hozer" (because haha he's Canadian, get it?) I genuinely cringed when Caitlin decided to call her new device that helps her see an "eye-pod" and her ability to see the internet "spider sense" (because it's "the web" of course).

I will say that at about halfway through, they start discussing some really neat scientific topics, like Conway's Game of Life and Shannon entropy, which I absolutely loved, and I learned some things! It also reminded me a bit of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in that way (and for another reason I won't spoil), so if you read Wake/WWW and liked the educational parts, you might enjoy it. (Heck, I fully recommend that book regardless lol). It did make me laugh when just as I was thinking of the similarities in theme between the two books, the characters in Wake actually reference The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

All that said, if you like how the sample sounds and the colloquialisms used and aren't expecting a hardcore sci-fi novel, you'll probably enjoy this book just fine. I find I'm particularly hard on books that focus on different themes than I'm anticipating, and this was definitely one of them.

slow

Slow, tedious, and unrewarding. When the ending came, I could not believe it... 'That's it?'