Apex: Nexus Trilogy Book 3 (Nexus Arc)

"Nexus" is, and always will be, the best book in this series for a variety of reasons, but "Apex" is right behind it in quality."Apex" is a whirlwind of cutting edge sci-fi, political intrigue, action, and ethical quandaries. While "Crux" was perhaps the best in the series at really digging into the merits and pitfalls of competing idealogies and ethics surrounding this technology, "Apex" is a good follow-up to that. But the action, the pace is what steals the show in this book.The primary villian in this book is The Avatar, the cy-borg like shard of Su Yong's broken mind. The PLF factors into this book as well, with a somewhat satisfying turn of events involving them at the beginning. However, the primary scene of focus is Shanghai and China and events escalating there.Overall, a very good book. A very good conclusion to the story and world of Nexus. The ending is very bitter, somewhat sweet, and very sad; it may in fact bring a tear to some eyes. But just about everyone's story gets a final send-off before the last page.A few problems with this book, though, none of which necessarily hamper the overall story. Of course, my biggest problem with Nexus has been the bandwidth problem. Shortly after the movie "Avatar" came out, scientists pointed out that we do not, nor will we have any time soon, the necessary wireless fidelity or bandwidth to transmit human consciousness; there's just too much simultaneous data. Now you could say, "Yeah but human consciousness is just a fraction of the entire scope of the human brain, and at any given time you're only 'sending' so much". True, and this is my other issue with the books: if Nexus had been limited to basically a cell phone in the brain, it would have been fine. But the ongoing issues of turning people into zombies with Nexus, with pushing emotions and vision and full sensory data over things like a CELLULAR network is a bit hard to accept.Finally there's the issues of sharing all of this brain data through cellular and other wireless networks. This book of course assumes that our wireless networks will become flawless in the future (HA!), that somehow everyone everywhere would, in mere months or weeks, figure out how to proxy this data through the Internet, that the Internet would be able to support this extra load, that authorities wouldn't be able to easily detect those kind of data streams and shut down servers or even trace them back and arrest people, and that various other bits of infrastructures would come to exist so quickly.To be clear, I would have been just fine with the ideas dreamed up in "Nexus", of people just being telepathic when near each other, of close-range peer-to-peer mind sharing. It's when you get into the whole worldwide mind-streaming thing that things get strained and you have to have to suspend a lot of disbelief. This is of course not even touching on the fraility of human memory and that eyeballs are not camers ...Despite all that, again, 5 star book. Not enough problems to really warrant any loss there, and what the book strains in believability, it more than makes up for in emotion and action and pace. Definitely a good close to the series. I look forward to Ramez Naam's next story.

I was a fan of Nexus and wrote a critical review of Crux. Apex is a big improvement over its predecessor, but still suffers from some of the problems of the earlier books.Let's start with the good. There are several(!) members of the U.S. government that are not corrupt and evil this time, and the most rewarding plot twist of all revolves around the President, who kind-of-sort-of redeems himself at the end. There's much more time for more realistic politics as well, and Naam has taken pains to give even the most obvious villains some reasonable motivations. Some characters pull this off better than others, but the effort is appreciated in all cases.Also good: the world is literally saved by a bunch of monks meditating. Not remotely realistic or plausible, but a genuinely novel idea that mostly works.Then there are some things that don't work so well. The biggest problem is the writing style. Naam consistently turns out really great, well-written, engaging nonfiction, but resorts to cliches and stock phrases throughout this trilogy (actual quote, from a government official: "I want to talk to this Lisa Brandt."). This is a long book, and in order to keep the tension building towards the climax, things tend to go wrong in the worst possible way at precisely the worst possible moment. This happens a lot in fiction, even good fiction, but it gets a little hard to swallow after a while here. The hero sacrificing himself for his cause is another cliche, one that could have been pulled off well but seems a little obligatory and senseless.The writing is also what I would call "pulse-pounding prose." There are a lot of short, declarative sentences strung together, especially during action sequences. They use a lot of military and tech jargon, and it seems like it's meant to keep readers on the edge of their seats. It came across as jarring and distracting to me, though, more like reading the screenplay for an action movie than a novel.Also, Sam. Naam has no idea what to do with her this time, so she mostly sits around thinking about how much she loves children and agonizing over the fact that she can't hear their beautiful voices in her head anymore. She gets a few obligatory fight scenes, but she doesn't contribute much to the plot, and doesn't develop at all, unless you count slowly deciding that maybe she should take Nexus again. I suppose her full circle on human augmentation is intended to be thematically important, but it comes off as an unconvincing afterthought.The bottom line is that Naam is still working with a lot of brilliant ideas, and is earnestly imagining a potential (worst-case) showdown with human augmentation and the world's existing systems and institutions. It's imaginative, interesting, and very good, but Naam doesn't quite have the fiction chops to handle the epic scale he's aiming for, or make the whole thing hang together.

Somewhat difficult to follow, all the jumping back and forth between a dozen different perspectives, but all the more realistic as a result. I appreciated his closing with a wrap of all the characters since I had grown so fond of each of them. I think this is maybe only my 10th 5* review ever.

If you can temporarily suspend concern about GMO's, the Nexus trilogy is very good hard science fiction. At first we see young people researching an illegal party drug, but this is much more. Forget the internet of things, this is the internet of human brains. Over the three books, the author explores the ramifications of this, and the ramifications of the rise of India and China in this century. We see enhancements in weaponry, technological and biological. The plot is a quest, and it keeps developing plausibly, and it keeps us considering important ideas, on what it means to be human.The story in the trilogy is big, with several plot lines and many characters. Still, it is focused. For all the plot twists and personal trials, this is about humans and post humans. It is so well developed, that it could have gone on many more tangents.For example, getting back to my crack about GMO's, one thought that kept bugging me was, there are other creatures with nervous systems. People would have tried the drug on their pets. K9's would have been enhanced. And so on and so on.

Non ho mai affrontato la lettura di romanzi in inglese ma dopo aver letto Nexus non ho potuto fare a meno di proseguire con Crux e Apex, anche se disponibili solo in lingua inglese (o meglio, disponibili in varie lingue ma non l’italiano, ma io conosco solo l’inglese). In Apex gli eventi prendono una piega molto pericolosa a livello globale, la storia diventa sempre più avvincente e non posso fare altro che consigliarvi questo romanzo. Se siete nerd e appassionati di informatica, lo adorerete (hackers, interfacce neurali, computer quantistici), ma se avete letto Nexus lo avrete già capito che è il caso di proseguire nella trilogia. Sinceramente spero che Ramez Naam produca qualche sequel perché la storia mi ha intrigato molto e potrebbe proseguire ulteriormente, quindi spero che questa conclusione di trilogia in realtà non sia una vera e propria conclusione. 5 stelle perché di più non posso.

To be alive in an era where this can certainly be understandable and foreseen in the not to far future is a frightening, yet intriguing thought that blurs the lines of this fiction with non-fiction.

super bouquin qui fini la trilogie. bravo

Deze serie is zowel hartbrekend als hoopgevend. Het laat het beste en het slechtste in de mens zien zonder daar een oordeel in te hebben. Technologie is niet goed of slecht. Wij mensen bepalen dat.

Good, thought provoking work of science fiction. It is uncanny how much of the world we live in Ramez has actually somehow predicted. Just swap Nexus for lover tech called social networks and there you go. Outrage, emotional manipulation, resurgence, politics, AI, climate change. Ramez paints the beauty and the horrors which are not only coming to us, but which are already here in some shape or form. Excellent trilogy, will be looking forward to authors next books.