Erik's Reviews > The Shockwave Rider

So… a bit dumb.

One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong conclusion and says, “Oh I really overthought that one.” You… overthought it? You made a mistake because you thought too deeply about it?

Unless your name is David Foster Wallace or Socrates, it seems unlikely. So here’s what actually happened: You thought poorly, and that is why you were mistaken.

Well, the Shockwave Rider is the book equivalent of “I overthought that one.” It is the novelization of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It thinks it is incredibly smart. It is, in fact, quite dumb.

Here’s what happens: There’s this guy who is INCREDIBLY SMART, which we know because the book tells us so. Often. Well this super incredibly smart person gets recruited into a secret school for training super smart people to become future leaders. He gets upset when he realizes that people are mostly amoral bobble-heads and goes rogue. Which involves him running around playing an extended game of charades, using a super secret internet code that lets him alter his identity as needed. So he’s a weird cult leader one moment, then a super-star programmer the next.

However, he encounters a MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL! Yes indeedy we have an MPDG and not in the self-aware ironic deconstructive sense. So, of course inspired by our good little MPDG, the protagonist realizes the emptiness of his life and decides to do something MEANINGFUL. This aspiration reaches its apex point when he encounters a LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA, whose primary service to society is a form of non-responsive therapy!

But alas the Evil Government catches up to him (note: no spoiler here, the whole book’s framing is that our protagonist is being interrogated in a government prison). And the Evil Government decides it hates that libertarian utopia and wants to destroy it! Because the Evil Government just cannot stand not having control over everything. But then computer virus! Happy the end.

There’s a lot of jibber jabber in this book on academic topics like intelligence vs wisdom or the means of proper governance or the sociological effects of the erosion of community, but there’s practically zero reference, either explicit or implicit, to any of humanity’s works on the matter. Like you’d THINK that maybe there’d be some reference to the many theories of intelligence that the psychological community has created. But nope. Nothing. The result is not particularly enlightening or interesting to read.

It’s like… you know when someone who knows nothing about a particular problem drastically underestimates its complexity and offers facile solutions? Like someone who says, “Well you can solve homelessness by building more houses, right? There you go, problem solved.” Or, “Oh our education system has a lot of troubles. Let’s just privatize it and the market will sort it out.”

That’s what the whole book feels like. Every discussion, every discursion, is sophomoric – and there’s A LOT of them. Such digressions from the narrative really are the meat of the book.

So there’s that.

Which would be more palatable if the book had any sort of style to it. But despite ostensibly being a ‘cyberpunk’ novel, it is about as far from punk as I can imagine. Better to call it a ‘cryptobro’ novel: a frat boy who thinks he’s a geek and wants to be a geek but is not a geek and does not, in fact, actually want to be a geek. Replace geek with ‘cyberpunk’ in that sentence and you have a decent summary of The Shockwave Rider.