John Scalzi Built a Whole Body Out of Wi-Fi and a Murder

A flu that leaves your mind switched on and your body switched off

So the setup. A virus sweeps the planet. Most people get something like a bad flu. A smaller percentage get meningitis. And a still smaller percentage, but still millions of human beings, get “locked in”: fully awake, fully aware, fully themselves, and completely unable to move or respond. This is Haden’s syndrome, named after the First Lady who got it (a nice touch, that the disease is named after a famous victim rather than a doctor). Society, because it now has to, throws unspeakable amounts of money and engineering at the problem. So Hadens get neural implants that let their minds pilot “threeps,” which are humanoid robot bodies (yes, the name is a Star Wars joke, and yes, Scalzi knows it’s a joke). They can also borrow the bodies of “Integrators,” rare people who recovered but can host a Haden consciousness for a while.

Our narrator is Chris Shane, a rookie FBI agent, a Haden, and a mild celebrity because Chris was one of the poster children for the whole crisis growing up. Chris gets partnered with Leslie Vann, who is a burnt-out, chain-smoking, deeply unbothered veteran agent with a secret history as an Integrator. Day one on the job, there’s a body in a hotel room and an Integrator sitting next to it covered in blood, calmly saying he doesn’t remember doing anything. And off we go.

I’ll be honest about how I came to this one. I bought it in an airport because my flight was delayed two hours and I refused to pay airport-bar prices for a beer. Best twelve dollars of that entire miserable trip. I read the first hundred pages before we even boarded and genuinely resented the gate agent for interrupting.

What clicks, what stays cold, and one thing I can’t stop thinking about

What Scalzi is great at, and this book is a clinic in it, is exposition that doesn’t feel like exposition. There is an ENORMOUS amount of world to explain here. How threeps work, how the neural network works, the politics of Haden funding getting cut, the culture Hadens built in a virtual space called the Agora. A lesser writer drowns you. Scalzi hands it to you in dialogue and wisecracks and one genius move: he opens the book with a fake nonfiction excerpt, a little in-world history of Haden’s syndrome, so by the time the plot starts you already get it. I’ve seen people skip that opening thinking it’s boring throat-clearing. Do not skip it. It’s the load-bearing wall.

And the mystery itself is properly twisty. The blood-covered Integrator who doesn’t remember. A tech mogul quietly buying up the entire infrastructure that Hadens depend on to have bodies at all. A murder that only makes sense once you understand that a single Integrator can be piloted by different people at different times, which means “who did it” and “whose hands did it” are two different questions. That’s a genuinely clever engine for a whodunit, and when it locks into place I actually said “oh, come ON” out loud on my couch.

Now the criticism, and it’s a real one. Lock In is a little bloodless. Chris Shane, our narrator, is smart and dry and easy to spend a book with, and is also weirdly untroubled by almost everything. Chris grew up world-famous, disabled, piloting a robot, watching a whole civil-rights struggle happen around a body Chris can’t move, and none of it seems to have left a mark. Vann, the partner, has more damage in one scene than Chris has in the whole book. There’s a version of this novel that sits inside what it would actually feel like to be a mind in a rented machine, and Scalzi mostly waves at that and gets back to the case. The plot is a beautifully built clock. I just kept wishing the clock had a pulse.

Here’s my tangent, bear with me. Scalzi did something with the audiobook that’s smarter than most of the book’s marketing gave it credit for: Chris Shane’s gender is never specified. Not once. And so the audiobook was recorded twice, by Wil Wheaton and by Amber Benson, and you can pick. I didn’t notice on the page that I’d assigned Chris a gender until a friend mentioned they’d pictured the exact opposite, and we both got a little quiet about it. That’s the book working on you without announcing it. That’s the emotional intelligence I wanted more of everywhere else.

Am I being unfair? Maybe. I question my own taste here, because I know I have a bias: I always want the sad, interior, aching version of a premise, and sometimes a book is allowed to just be a great ride. Lock In is a great ride. I think I’m docking it for not being a different book, which is not entirely a fair thing to do to a novel. But I felt what I felt.

The prose is Scalzi-clean, which is to say fast, funny, almost invisible. If you want sentences you’ll underline, this isn’t your book. If you want to turn 400 pages in two sittings and understand a very complicated world without effort, it absolutely is.

The best trick in the book isn’t the robots. It’s that “who held the knife” and “who committed the murder” can quietly become two different people.

About John Scalzi

Scalzi is one of the most reliably readable people working in science fiction, and I mean that as high praise and a tiny bit of a jab. He came up blogging (Whatever, one of the longest-running author blogs on the internet), broke out with Old Man’s War, and has since become the guy publishers hand you when they want SF that goes down like water: propulsive, funny, humane, never showing off. He’s also genuinely good at Twitter-era public thinking and picking fights worth picking. Some readers find him too breezy, all plot and banter and no ache. I get it. But when he’s on, he makes hard ideas feel weightless, and that’s a rarer skill than the literary crowd admits.

If this one hooked you, read these next

• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi — if you liked the voice and want the book most people consider his best; military SF with real heart under the jokes.
• The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells — the other great modern “what does it feel like to be a person in a machine body” series, and the one that actually delivers the feelings Lock In holds back.
• Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan — if the “consciousness separated from body” idea grabbed you and you want it done darker, dirtier, and much more violent.
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi — for a near-future thriller where the world-building has the emotional weight and grime I kept wishing for here.

Grab Lock In by John Scalzi on Amazon if a smart, fast SF procedural sounds like your idea of a good night.

For your book club

1. Chris Shane’s gender is never stated. What did you assume, and what does your assumption tell you about you rather than about Chris?
2. Haden’s syndrome is named after a famous First Lady who got it. How does a disease’s name change how a society treats the people who have it?
3. The book treats bodies as rentable, borrowable, and swappable. Where does personhood actually live in this world, and did that answer satisfy you?
4. Vann carries visible damage; Chris carries almost none. Is that a flaw in the book, or a deliberate choice about how Chris copes?
5. The plot hinges on money and infrastructure being pulled out from under a disabled population. How close does that feel to real life right now?