I have a serious love for good sci-fi. On the other hand, I really can’t stand bad sci-fi. So when my buddy handed me Infoquake by David Louis Edelman in a stack of Palahniuk books, I was a bit cautious. I didn’t exactly pick it up and tear it open right away.

Granted, I was also too busy zoning out in front of the TV for the past 2 months, so there was that. Something happened to me in the last fiscal quarter of 2009: I became much more interested in buying books—stockpiling them, like some mad survivalist, out in the country, slowly going crazy—than actually reading them.

But guilt is a funny thing. After all, I HAD foisted my Klosterman library onto him, the least I could do is take his goddamn recommendation and read the thing. So I did. And I am glad.

The first thing I noticed about Infoquake is that it wasn’t necessarily ‘hard’ sci-fi. I’m trying to think of a book or books that would qualify as hard sci-fi—you know, so I can paint you a picture—but I just can’t right now. I guess that means that I don’t really read hard sci-fi.

To be totally honest, this might actually be a cyberpunk book, come to think of it. Either way, it’s got that ‘just-right’ mix of future-tech exposition, socio-economical presupposition, and snarky anti-anti-heroism that is the hallmark of a good Gibson or Stephenson tome. Come to think of it, it’s very much in the same class of ‘scientific-adventure-with-a-touch-of-technological-hypothesis’ that Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America is. I’ll go out on a limb with a block-quote, from me to you:

This book is equal parts Liberation: and Snow Crash. With maybe a slight dash of Neuromancer. Maybe.

So if that sounds like something you’d be into, then, well, I’d say dive right in. The good news is that it’s part of an ongoing series, so if you’re left hungry for more, you can go back to the well. I’m cracking the second book—MultiReal—right now, and will be sure to let you know how it goes.

Start Rant:

You know, just to be fair, I’ll say this: much of what you might not super-like about the abovementioned books is here, too. Cyberpunk books are notorious for their attempts to imagine some lofty change in the way we as humans experience computers. The way we communicate. The way we program. This book has that. Some of the stuff really works and is very much core to the plot and feel of the book, but, alas, there are some core things that are just too wonky. The real kicker is that Edelman is a programmer by trade…he should know better. BUT! There’s a reason why, whenever you see a movie about ‘hacking’ or ‘nets’ or matrices of some sort, they have some outlandishly visual and visceral representation of what that is.

That reason is simple: watching a dude type, read email, and/or drink Mountain Dew in his bathrobe is not necessarily something anybody would want to see or read about. It is, however, what hacking or nets or matrices look like, by and large.

Still a very good book, however.

/End Rant