ChapterZero

I finished reading “Lysergically yours” in about an hour and a half… I was not impressed with almost any aspect of the book. The plot was highly unoriginal: government goons chasing deceptively knowledgable punk rocker with a checkered past, but a heart of gold; the only saving grace was that, instead of stumbling across a new weapon’s technology, he stumbled across a recipe for a new form of LSD which allows the user to make almost preternatural connections. In more than one scene, the protagonist reads incredible amounts of information from the movement of wisps of air. Other than this slightly original twist, the book is cookie-cutter, wanna-be Neal Stephensonesque crap. Well, there is one other point worth mentioning, and probably the only point worth taking from the book: in the end, the protagonist realizes he’ll never be able to run fast enough or far enough, so he releases a virus to spread the information over the Internet. Of course, the author makes a point of how easily and quickly said virus is created and disseminated— there is a lot of techno-savvy elitism in this book—, but what I thought was important about this is the idea that the whole plot in the book couldn’t happen. With access to the Internet, it is impossible to kill people to keep knowledge secret, provided that they have advance warning: all they have to do is post it far and wide. Not even the US government has enough control over the spread of information on the Internet to contain it.

I’m not sure what the moral of the book was, but I’m pretty sure it was intended to have one: either the idea that by restricting drug use, we are limiting our potential for development, or that the coming of age of the Internet destroyed the idea of government repression of sensitive information. The former was indicated on the book blurb, but the latter is the only one that the book even comes close to supporting, realistically.