The Uploaded by Ferrett Steinmetz

I've read Ferrett Steinmetz's blog for several years and follow him on twitter, and have always enjoyed his writing in those formats. Knowing that he'd published a few books, it was always in the back of my mind that I should read them, but they hadn't popped up on any of my lists, and I so rarely buy books that unless our library gets a lot better at getting science fiction beyond the big releases, it wasn't going to come up by accident.

Then I was on a trip to Toronto, and my sister and my husband made the tactical error of taking me to Bakka Phoenix, where I spent quite a long time looking at every book on every shelf. In an effort not to add a huge book debt to my looming student debt, I told myself I could buy just one book. Maybe preferably a mass market or trade paperback - I might covet the nice hardcovers, but space is a serious consideration in our house.

Right up at the front in a display of new books, was The Uploaded. Because I'd always meant to get to Steinmetz's books, this caught my attention, and jumped right to the top of my list for the one book I could buy. The decision paralysis created by an entire store of SF/F meant that the first impulse was the one I went with.

I am glad I did! This is a very solid science fiction book, engagingly written. I don't feel like it knocked my socks off and left me breathless, but I'm certainly looking forward to reading more of Steinmetz's work.

In The Uploaded, the vast majority of humanity now lives online only, after brain uploading technology became both common and easy. It's accessible to everyone still living...well, sort of. You see, the dead need the living to take care of the outside world to keep their servers running, but they've stopped caring about the day-to-day needs of the living - after all, they've got the promise of eternal life and happiness in a virtual world to hold out to those who grind through years of horrific treatment and trauma to get there.

But only if you die naturally - suicide is still a mortal sin, and individuals still need to "Shrive" to see if they're the sort of people the dead want to let into their afterlife. I mean, you wouldn't want people who do horrific things around, would you? (Even though you can block them if you wanted.) And really, not only those who do horrific things, but also those who merely do not great things, like despair. Or even...question things a little too much. Or aren't enough like the dead.  Of course, the dead are living really cushy lives, and don't understand the hellhole of the real world and the choices staying alive might foist on the living, but that's a minor fact. The important thing is that the neighborhood stays respectable. And these choices all come from the dead's subconsciousnesses, so it's not like they even know they're making morally questionable decisions. And they have more important things to do, like winning another level in a virtual reality world.

This is an interesting world, a great dilemma to throw characters in and see what it does to them. On that front, we have Amichai Damrosch, whose parents only rarely remember to call the living world and check in on their two children. They are frequently distracted by what appears to be a World of Warcraft derivative. Amichai wants to survive, to be uploaded, but in the meantime, he wants to make sure his sister Izzy doesn't despair. She was infected with some horrible bio-something, but not quite badly enough to make her a candidate for euthanasia. Instead, she's being kept alive with the promise of a gruelling job making circuit boards for the next 40 years.

To cheer her up, Amichai gets a genetically altered pony and rides it into the hospital. The videos of this make him a viral hit. And then things get bad. Amichai, his best friend Dare, and Dare's sister Peaches, get pulled into a growing resistance on the part of the living against the heavy hand of the dead, who hold many more votes in the political system. Amichai gets sent on a raid with his arch-nemesis from the orphanage, a young man he always refers to as Gumdrool, who truly believes in the Upterlife, and keeping it pure. On the raid and in the aftermath, they run into a young, beautiful neo-Christian girl, Evangeline, part of a sect that believes that the dead are just programs on a computer, soulless beings who have been handed the keys to the functioning of the world.

I particularly enjoyed the sections on the neo-Christians - bringing them into this picture made perfect sense to me, and provided a nice tension in the growing resistance between factions, which also feels all too familiar, but also perhaps inevitable. 

There are so many ideas in this book, many of them good! Reading a few other reviews, it sounds like people got stuck on why Amichai did what he did, and they're not wrong when they say a lot of them are bad decisions that look like pranks. But none of them felt unrealistic to me - when you're stuck in a system like the one he is, a little irrationality can be good for the soul. When your power to change things is limited, your actions aren't always entirely thought out.

So I was in for the whole book - it was a quick, easy read, and I enjoyed the way things went. If you want characters who always do exactly the logically correct thing, this might not be the book for you, but if you want to embrace the messiness of life, including pettiness, stubbornnness, ridiculous heroism, and a little bit of topsy-turvydom, you might enjoy this book.