Badass Neuro Shit - Part Deux

A few days ago,  I wrote a blog entry about a novel I just read titled, Nexus. It is the first novel written by a very gifted writer named, Ramez Naam.  I found that story so compelling that I went out and got a copy of the recently published sequel to Nexus, which is titled Crux.   This morning (three days later), I finished reading Crux. At 500 pages, Crux is a daunting read. But, having been drawn into the world Ramez Naam has created, I found myself unable to put the book down.

Nexus and Crux are set in the near future, the year 2040. The world Ramez Naam creates is based on real science, seriously advanced from where we are at the moment, but eminently plausible given what we already know.

If anything, Crux is even more of a wild ride than Nexus.  At the core of this relentless action adventure is a struggle between humanity as we know it, and the emergence of a new augmented reality; post-humans with strength, intelligence, resilience, capabilities far beyond the mortal limitations of the homo sapiens species that has dominated the Earth and the biosphere for the last 250,000 years.

In the future Ramez Naam as created, the ascendance of post-human intelligence is taken as a mortal threat to the cultural status quo. The established powers that be are determined to strictly limit access to advanced neural, nano, and human augmentation technologies,  except where they can use these technologies to stifle descent and manipulate history for their own benefit.

If anything, Crux is even better that it's predecessor, Nexus. The writing is crisp, lean, thoroughly engaging.   The action is gripping. The characters terrific. The abuse of power is like a dark spector driving the plot forward in both of these stories.  As with Nexus, there is much in Crux that one can see at work beneath the everyday headlines of our current era.

Crux is much more than just an entertaining read.  For that reason, like Ramez Naam's first novel, Nexus, the sequel Crux, gets five stars from this reader.  If you like science fiction, Crux is  a must read.