Veracity Book

Laura Bynum's Veracity was disappointing - I picked it up because of Elizabeth Moon's nice blurb, but it did not justify the expectations. The book reads like a cross between a realistic science fiction story and an allegory - imagine Michael Crichton writing A Handmaid's Tale or 1984, and you're in the right ballpark.

Sadly, Bynum is too reliant on taking the paths others have tread before her in this regard - the totalitarianism depicted is too precise: Orwell and Atwood leave the actual mechanism of action nebulous, and that helps their works remain fresh. Bynum posits a recording device implanted in every person such that all of their words and deeds are recorded, which is sufficiently powerful that it can prevent certain words from being spoken.

The problem is that she starts with this interesting idea as an enabling premise for a totalitarian state, but doesn't actually go far enough with the implications. As an example, it's easy using today's technology to cause muscles to seize up using a simple electric current. So if their technology is so advanced that it can pre-censor words, why would a person be able to leave the permitted areas? Why wouldn't the (presumably) continually-updated location technology just make the person's legs freeze up? The vast quantity of information logged from each individual would swamp any recording technology. This is obvious to anyone who's ever worked with firewall or network management systems - the volume of telemetry data generated is monumental, and those are by systems which are vastly lower resolution than the human brain. I'd have an easier time believing an implant which was autonomous and would alert authorities when it detected than one which is logging everything.

So in short, not recommended.