Review: 100 Suspicious Acts in Progress
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 13, 2011
If microscopic tracking chips, or "tags," sub-dermally embedded into the body of every citizen of a global nation-state doesn't sound scary, it's probably because you live there.In his sci-fi thriller Tag, author Simon Royle shows readers a frighteningly Orwellian world where even the brightest legal minds happily concede it's the "right" of the state to know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and when-with an efficiency that allows agents in Trace Operations (what used to be the FBI) to monitor and track how many suspicious behavioral patterns are happening at any given time.  And with the conspiracies rocking Royle's 22nd-century globe, I'd be surprised if there were only 100.Royle's prose and characterization is strong, but where he truly excels is in building the world of Jonah James Oliver and the "Tag Law."  The politics, society, and technology of New Singapore in 2110 are not only believable, but thought-provoking as well.  I'm not about to shut down the blog, but it makes you think about what kind of privacy one can reasonably expect in a modern world.Reading Time: 2+ weeks (it's 7,000+ locations on the Kindle, which would roughly translate to 700 pages in the real world)Recommendation: Somewhere between hard SF and police dramas...along the lines of Fringe or The Event, with less biological mutations and more sinister backdoor politics.  Did that make any sense?