Badass Neuro Shit

So, I just finished reading Nexus,  a new (2013)  sci-fi novel, the first by former Microsoft executive Ramez Naam.

Here is the tease from the back cover flap...

In the near future, the experimental nano-drug nexus can cause humans to link together, mind to mind.  There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who want to exploit it.

When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he's thrust way over his head into a world of danger and international espionage, for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes.

Crisp, intelligent writing, delivered in highly engaging fashion.  Nexus is the badass neuro shit the story is built around. If you believe what futurists like Ray Kurzweil say,  the kind of neural connectivity fostered by Naam's fictional nano-drug, Nexus could become a reality, perhaps around the year 2040 as postulated in this story. The ramifications are mindboggling. That is precisely the point presented very effectively in this entertaining yarn.

Nexus is  Ramez Naam's first novel.  It's a very auspicious beginning.  While the story takes place about 25 years in the future,   the morality questions at play are not new. In fact, the good versus evil ambiguity at work in Nexus is very much at play on the global political stage we know today.  The most obvious similarity is in the feckless 'War on Drugs' that has devastated American society since Richard Nixon was President.

The fictional scenario Ramez Naam presents in Nexus could become a very unsettling part of the cultural landscape within a few decades. If so, will this brand of augmented reality become accessible exclusively to a privileged few or be something available openly for the benefit of society as a whole?  Will it make the world better or worse? Ramez Naam's Nexus offers useful insight into those questions, while holding the reader's attention with a relentless succession of twists and turns, punctuated by lots of pulse-pounding action.

Five stars for Nexus by Ramez Naam.