Crosstalk

I’ve heard good things about Connie Willis’s writing and science fiction for a few years. Maybe I set the bar too high when I picked up Crosstalk, but I didn’t enjoy this novel. To me, it felt under-edited. The story meandered and certain elements were closer to tangents than something relevant to the plot.

Crosstalk is set in the future, when people are uber-connected to their phones and smart devices. Every single thought is conveyed immediately and no one has a private moment. Briddey, our protagonist, works for Commspan, a smartphone company that is competing with Apple. She is dating Trent, an executive at the company and he wants for them to get a device implanted in their brains that will allow them to share their emotions. When she wakes up from the procedure, she has full-on telepathy. Briddey struggles to come to terms with her new ability and gets help from her reclusive coworker, C.B.

I thought Willis was heavy-handed in her treatment of the interconnected culture that has emerged with new technology. It felt like the Old Man Yells at Cloud bit from The Simpsons. It seemed like this was the most important bit of the book to her and she repeated it time and time again. C.B., the most sympathetic character, hates the interconnected culture, even though he works to develop new technology for it.

Overall, I wasn’t impressed by this novel. The pacing was terrible and it felt like the author was just looking for an excuse to rant about how much she hates cell phones. This book did not inspire me to read any of Willis’s other books, which is definitely a disappointment.

2/5