Review: [SPOILERS] Loved the technology, hated the premise.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2014
[SPOILERS]This was an odd book to me. It dealt with a future Earth in which everyone was perpetually connected to each other with wireless internet implanted in their temples. This is a cool concept for me, but there were these "pins" which others could basically eject from your temple to delete stored data, for example. This is a ridiculous security risk, and I think that in a future with tech at that level, we could at least prevent the ease of that happening...This future world had these matter fabricators which anyone could simply ask for whatever they wanted, and the fabricator would generate the item and give it to them. Supposedly, this created a society where there was no longer a need for money, which ended up leading to everyone being basically lazy and lacking in creativity, etc. I liked the notion of this effect, but I'm not sold on the author's idea of how it would cripple society (I agree it would cripple it in some ways, but not quite the same as the author had made it out to be).There were also these celebrities who lived in a secret mansion together or something. The population of the world seemed to be a fan of only one of these people, and followed them as though it were a religion or a nation's leader or something. Really strange, and I just couldn't wrap my head around the feasibility of that. Sure, we have celebrities that people admire and stuff, but for it to become so extreme as to be like a cult - that's just not normal for the average person, lol.I don't see myself reading any more of the series (this was book 1) unless it was free on a sale at some point maybe. I wasn't impressed overall, and the last 25% of the book was just bad IMO. Even so, I enjoyed the technology and the idea of the matter fabricator's impact on society, so the read was not a complete failure.