WWW: Wake (Unabridged‪)‬

Narration Is Fantastic!

WWW: Wake is book one in a trilogy by Robert J Sawyer.

WWW: Wake tells the story of fifteen year old Caitlin Decter, who has been blind since birth. A new implant technology changes her world forever. Not only does her new implant begin to allow her to see the world around her, it also allows her to visualize the world wide web. This book’s focus is clearly on Caitlin and her new found senses but is also filled with a great supporting cast of characters.

Meanwhile, hidden deep within the world wide web’s data stream is a sentient program that has just become self-aware. It reaches out to make contact with it’s surroundings and comes into contact with another intelligent being. Caitlin.

The book focuses on Caitlin and her new found senses. The author does a fantastic job handling the blind girl’s discovery of light and the sense of sight. You feel like you are right there inside the blind girl’s head experiencing shapes and colours for the first time. Helen Keller is referred to quite often, and for good reason. There are a lot of similarities between the story of Caitlin and that of Helen Keller.

Caitlin’s journey from darkness runs in parallel to the sentient program, who itself is also journeying from darkness to a state where it can interact and “see” the world wide web and through Caitlin’s implant, the real world itself. Having both emerged from the darkness together, I can see these two becoming quite a team in the future novels.

All technology in the novel is described correctly, and Robert J Sawyer manages to throw in quite a few mentions of current web technologies and web sites. He’s obviously tech savvy or a good researcher.

There’s a few scenes and threads of the story (events in China, and events with primate research) that don’t seem to gel with the rest of the novel, but this being a trilogy I’m sure Robert J Sawyer was laying some ground work for future events in the series. Perhaps these scenes will play a part in the big picture.

The audio book (produced by Audible / Brilliance Audio) is very well done and presented in a multi-voice style. Throughout the book, when a majority of the dialogue in a chapter is by one character a new voice is heard. Multi-voice. The audio book could have been so much better had it been done in an “Audio Drama” style instead, with each character in the novel being read solely by one voice actor, still they do a great job of breaking up the chapters by voice actor.

The narration by Jessica Almasy, Jennifer Van Dyck, A. C. Fellner, Marc Vietor, Robert J. Sawyer is fantastic, if you enjoy this one. Be sure to search Audible by voice actor and find other books they’ve narrated!

I don’t want to spoil too much of the book, but let’s just say that WWW: Watch (The second in this trilogy) is on my to read list. Can’t wait to see what the author has in store for us in the second book!