Not Exactly SF (and not in a good way)

John Scalzi's Lock In is a near-future speculative novel where most pandemic survivors live with what is known as the Haden Syndrome–your mind is active, but your body is paralysed. There's no cure. But the government has subsidised research and production of assistive technology, creating an entirely new sector based on improving and normalising the life of a Haden. The narrator is a Haden who, like many others, animates a cyborg body to interact with the physical world. On his first day as FBI, he gets a murder case that sends tremors within the Haden community and soon threatens to upset the post-pandemic status quo. 

I was expecting something in the vein of Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix with the zeitgeist of Black Mirror. In the end, my expectations weren't as much crushed–they simply flatlined. Maybe cos, I don't know, the protagonist has the personality of a potato. He's privileged and indifferent but has zero suave. He speaks in such a matter-of-fact tone that 1) he gets more boring as the story progresses and 2) I start to think I'm giving the author too much credit by assuming it's an intentional quirk of Chris's cyborg fusion. 

I also have to mention we never find out what is Chris Shane's ideology & identity definitively. We find out about Chris's dad's race so we can work with that. But other than that, nothing. Male or female or something else? Dunno. Black? Maybe mixed? We don't anything about Chris as a person other than they're rich. Whatever Scalzi's intent is or whether this is even deliberate, I wanna call his bluff. It is uninspiring to write a story featuring disability and technology but take out all the intersectional complexities e.g. a female black person's experience of cyborg life is going to be vastly different from a male white person's. But nah. Scalzi bypasses all and erases any kind of ambiguity that might exist. The result is something eerily like that line, "I don't see colour." Yeah right.

It's also cheating to say, Oh, the Haden's experience of virtuality is so unlike anything we've ever imagined it's useless of me to describe it to you because you're a non-Haden. And then when we get a glimpse of the Agora, Hadens' virtual space, it's basically Minecraft but with smoother lines.

This review may seem filled with a lot of personal animosity but let me just put the emphasis on 'personal'. I've read some helpful reviews that orient the reading using, for example, disability studies and they make sense. But as a reader on my own terms, I couldn't stand this. My own personal standard for any sf is this: what is it doing? A sf may say one thing but do another: it may be articulating a drastically radical vision of techno-body fusion but as for what it does? It is merely affirming what we already know, perpetuating a delusion of superiority and complacency. In the case of John Scalzi's Lock In, I find nothing new in what it is saying or doing. Just cos a novel uses a lot of medical and scientific terms and locates its murder plot in the future it doesn't automatically qualify as science fiction. What I'm saying is, Lock In is more police procedural than science fiction, since it uses the latest tech to restore the world to a pre-crisis norm. And to me, there's nothing speculative about that.