- Title:
- Superposition (Superposition, #1)
- By:
- David Walton
- Pages:
- 303
- Rating:
- 5
Jacob Kelley’s family is turned upside down when an old friend turns up, waving a gun and babbling about an alien quantum intelligence. The mystery deepens when the friend is found dead in an underground bunker…apparently murdered the night before he appeared at Jacob’s house. Jacob is arrested for the murder and put on trial.
As the details of the crime slowly come to light, the weave of reality becomes ever more tangled, twisted by a miraculous new technology and a quantum creature unconstrained by the normal limits of space and matter. With the help of his daughter, Alessandra, Jacob must find the true murderer before the creature destroys his family and everything he loves.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
The courtroom drama aspect and the sheer quality of the writing made me feel like I was reading a Robert J. Sawyer novel, and by the time I’d finished it I had a nod to Douglas E. Richards. It was a very well-put-together story, and although the chances of me reading two stories about the birth of quantum technology in a week are hard to quantify (see Timeline) what are the further chances that both would have a very likable character called Marek in them? How ironic is that.
The science here was interesting, although the intelligences we see are never fully explored and it’s therefore as much an adventure/thriller as much as anything else. I really got into it for some reason,Jacob, perhaps because of his flaws, seemed much more Human than he might otherwise have done. If you’re into science at all, it’s a light but pleasing story with enough futurism to get you going. The smart paper was fascinating, the concept of Viewfeeds and Eyejacking quite brilliant, and the teenage side of it explored with an E.C. Myers or Cory Doctorow-like frankness.
At heart, though, I felt this had a lot to say about the power of family, about disability, about the future of technology and today’s precepts and concepts thereof. it doesn’t push the hard science, which at first thought may be a turn-off to one used to that, but it does have a message to impart, and just because that message is as much about the people than the technology, it’s no less valid. I see Walton’s got many other books out and I’m looking forward to reading more of this very readable writer’s produce.