WWW: Wake by Robert Sawyer

LOVE LOVE LOVE Robert Sawyer and his great science fiction.  Starting with Rollback, I've enjoyed several of his books, so I jumped in and bought all three in this series.

Well this one was really strange.  Not that his other books weren't strange - following the Neanderthal branch of evolution for example - but this one was really unique.  The story follows a teenage girl who is blind.  She's well-adjusted and settled into her life with a loyal best friend and plenty of technology to enable her to be connected to blogs, friends, and other resources online.  However, when she is offered the chance to try a new medical procedure to restore her sight, she takes it.

After this procedure, she can't see our world, but she can see some organized sets of images in her head.  Through the help of her physicist father and her doctor, she figures out that the most immediate effect of her operation is that she can "see" the structure of the Internet.  Not the EM fields in the space we live in, but the logical connections between sites and pages.  To tell you anything else about the book would ruin it, but it gets a lot weirder after that.

Reading this book was pretty quick - I get the idea that this book was written as Young Adult sci-fi.  That didn't bother me because the concept was cool, but it did make for a slightly less sophisticated book with less social commentary than his other novels.  If you haven't read Sawyer in the past, I'd suggest Rollback, Flash Forward, or Hominids as better places to start. 

I am interested to see where Sawyer takes this story in the two sequels.