Name: Influx
ISBN: 9780451469441

Daniel Suarez

"Physicist Jon Grady and his team have discovered a device that can reflect gravity. But instead of Grady getting acclaim, his lab is locked down by a covert organization known as the Bureau of Technology Control. When Grady refuses to join the BTC, he's thrown into a nightmarish high-tech prison. Now Grady and his fellow prisoners must try to expose the secrets of an unimaginable enemy"--Back cover.

Influx

A tale set in a world in which technological advances have been suppressed finds particle physicist Jon Grady helping to innovate a device capable of reflecting gravity only to be targeted by a shadowy organization from the future. By the best-selling author of Daemon.

Good detail, the story building left me wanting more. Technobabble felt like an attempt at Andy Weir style realism… but deus ex machina solutions

Steve C

Carlo Zottmann

Couldn't bring myself to finish it, stopped reading halfway through. It just couldn't hold my attention. It's not bad but it didn't grip me at all.

Change is dangerous, technology lethal. So what if our civilization is more advanced than we know?

Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves a major breakthrough: a device that can reflect gravity. Their research will revolutionise the field of physics. But at Grady's moment of triumph, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organisation whose mission is to prevent the social upheaval caused by sudden technological advances - advances they use to retain total command.

They are living in the future we were promised.

Now Grady finds himself in a nightmarish high-tech prison built to hold other rebellious geniuses. Can he and his fellow prisoners escape? And even if they can, is it possible to defeat an enemy that wields a technological advantage half a century in the making?

The dark ages are ending. Our future is here...

Anna Pinto

Reads like a movie. Since the movie rights were grabbed by Fox, I can't wait to see the special effects on the screen.

(view spoiler)[ I couldn't help but hear GLaDOS' voice when reading Varuna's lines. I hope they get Ellen McLain to play her in the movies (hide spoiler)]

Les Reynolds

Really entertaining read, and finished well. A lot of the book felt like it was preparing for something, with the main action mostly at the end. Not quite as good as his earlier work, but less violent.

Bryan Alexander

A fun read animated mostly by a single idea.

Influx posits that human ingenuity has actually proceeded much further along than we believe. A secretive United States government department has been quietly capturing new innovations, sequestering them away while removing their presence from the world. The Bureau of Technology Control (BTC) does this for our own good, they say, believing that the negative impact of these new ideas would cause too much damage to American (and the world's) social order.

It's a nifty concept, a kind of alternative history tale embedded in our own world. It lets Suarez have fun with intelligence agencies as they try (and fail) to bring BTC to heel. There's also hard sf delights in seeing which inventions have already occurred -strong AI! antigravity! human lifespan extension! Suarez also gives BTC a fun villain in its leader, a power-crazed guy with a dry (perhaps accidental) sense of humor. A very good dystopia boss.

Unfortunately for fans of Suarez' first two novels, especially Daemon, the ideas run out about half-way through. The first half offers some great scenes with reversals and mysteries, including, ah, spoilers: (view spoiler)[... a cruel prison for inventors, with some stark medical horror. But once we see the picture, Influx becomes 99% action thriller. The hero escapes and fights to remain free. He hooks up with allies and they figure out how to break into BTC HQ. A fun heist/battle ensues. A family plot is literally tacked on at the end. We see no new inventions. No signs of impact on the world. No rug-pulling-out-from-under-you plot twists. (hide spoiler)] In Graham Green terms, Influx starts off as a novel, then ends as an entertainment. It only begins with the promise of Daemon.

Other problems: the depiction of Detroit is far too thin. There's very little sense of the city, despite half the book being set there. (My hardcover edition has a hilarious cover showing Detroit as something like Metropolis) It could be set in any other city, really. Which is unfortunate, since there are some interesting resonances between Detroit's sad post-WWII history and what BTC does to the world. There is also a too-convenient character in the book's second half who is far too powerful, more of a plot device than a person.

On the positive side, the book avoids cliche traps. The hero, an eccentric inventor, never becomes an action hero. His main physical achievements include hiding, being captured, showing his wounds, and being captured. The main, inevitable romance is very lightly touched on. And the science is a lot of fun, for those of us who like that sort of thing.

Influx

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