The trilogy is made up of three books, The stories take place in the “near future” when certain areas of the world have been destroyed by massive fires due to climate change. Specifically, in California San Diego has been reduced to a scorched area and Los Angeles continues to burn. People can’t live there at this point. There is a global confederation creating a situation where no country governs itself but is under the laws propagated by the confederation. Everyone has a continuous feed in their brains (I think), so email, phone calls, texts, news reports, and everything we normally store on our computers come directly into consciousness. A global corporation maintains the feed.
The three books share characters but each book focuses on one character. The first is Dag, who is a lobbyist. The second is Diane, who worked for the CIA. The third is Emily, who put together a team that found a “back door” to the feed.
I’m not going to review the books, but I have included links if you’re interested in more detail. I will say by way of review that the characters and narrative were compelling enough to hold my attention to the end.
My first frustration with the trilogy was that there was no explanation as to when and how people got feeds directly into their consciousness. I mean, we’re all used to having our phones connected to our ears much of our waking hours, but it seemed far fetched and distracted me from the story lines.
However, a couple of months after I read the three books, Elon Musk announced that he hopes to have a chip implanted in humans in a year through his corporation Neuralink!!! What???
His goal is to achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence. And he started this in 2016, so, it’s not really a startup, folks. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-neuralink-implants-link-brains-to-internet-next-year-2019-7
My second thought was that the books were a little “preachy” on the issue of climate change, and since I was listening to them, I couldn’t just jump ahead or skim, the way I would an actual book. I agree with the author’s take on most of the issues, but I just didn’t feel like I needed to have the “message” repeated… repeatedly. The burning of the rain forests in Brazil is a reminder, however, that the “near future” portrayed in the books may be closer than we think.
The third aspect that troubled me is that the main characters are portrayed as being super human. For example, the lobbyist is forced to perform extraordinary physical feats in order to do his lobbying job or track down an adversary. Diane has some pretty mean survival skills, too. And even flies a plane! Emily is engaged in “to the death” fight clubs (and, spoiler alert, doesn’t die). She also is able to figure out how to disrupt the corporate feed with a little help. And the villains are super villain-y (and not attractive, like our heroes).
And sex was used in a manipulative way, which I found annoying. (In one instance, our protagonist Dag was allowed to have sex with a woman as a reward, his attraction to a certain type of woman having been manipulated via the ever-present feed.)
Here is an interview with the author that explains how he looks at the world that would produce the story he’s telling. https://chireviewofbooks.com/2019/04/04/eliot-peper-imagines-a-future-ruled-by-social-media/
Bandwidth http://compellingsciencefiction.com/reviews/2018-09-28.html
Borderless (https://chireviewofbooks.com/2019/04/04/eliot-peper-imagines-a-future-ruled-by-social-media/
Breach (https://robwolf.net/2019/07/04/worse-than-the-french-revolution-eliot-peper-tackles-income-inequality-in-his-latest-techno-thriller-breach/)