Lock In is a book like this, though it’s also a murder mystery. Agent Chris Shane, FBI, is the scion of a wealthy activist family and a survivor of a flu that left a small percentage of its victims (including Chris) “locked in” to their bodies — fully aware of their surroundings, but unable to move or communicate. This is called Haden’s syndrome, and elaborate robotic bodies, controlled by the minds of the Haden’s sufferers, have been developed to permit the locked-in population to live something like a regular life.

Scalzi obviously has so many ideas about what this world (ours, but with robots) is like. He touches on issues of disability, identity politics, government funding, bodily integrity, and a ton of other things, some of which necessarily get short shrift. But you get the idea that you could pull pretty hard on any of the many threads without making the story unravel. If the characters aren’t particularly well-developed, the ideas are more than enough to carry the story along.

The author’s also doing something rather cool with the identity of the protagonist, which I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an author try before. The book doesn’t draw attention to it, which saves it from gimmickry, and it’s clear from the reviews that many readers made it through the whole book without noticing that they lack certain information about Chris Shane. If it hadn’t been mentioned to me before I started reading, I can’t swear that I’d have noticed myself. It won’t make the difference to whether you love the book or hate it. It is just interesting.

Either way — notice or don’t notice — Lock In remains a tightly plotted mystery with only one really serious coincidence and lots of very cool ideas about the world of Twenty Minutes into the Future. And it made me want to hunt down Redshirts.

Other readers, did you notice the thing? Did it make you feel weirdly fond of John Scalzi, or did you think it was a weird and pointless exercise like the time that guy wrote that whole book without the letter E? Or both?

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