I picked up The Somniscient, by Richard Levesque, looking forward to an interesting read. After enjoying his prior work in Strictly Analog, this story’s blurb promised more of the same fun insight. In general I wasn’t wrong.

I will note at the outset that in places, the story lagged a bit. Starting with a tad too much exposition in the first chapter, and stopping here and there to mask exposition in lengthy explanatory sections of dialog, I didn’t feel as in the moment as I prefer. Add to this one too many of what I call short-term flashbacks—recounting of events that happened within hours or minutes, and hence could have occurred in the inline narrative—and I must say regrettably I struggled to get through certain parts of the story.

But here’s the thing… I don’t read book merely for entertainment value, or to get dazzled and pizzazzed by an author who cliff-hangs and twist-turns a story with ease. I read to examine. I read to be confronted and challenged with fresh points of view and ideas that demand my attention. On that front, The Somniscient delivers a tale that disturbs and rattles my notions of the world I inhabit. Without preaching me into a Luddite state of mind, this story makes me think anew about how technology and people are becoming inextricably intertwined, and what implications that holds for our freedom, our identity, and our very humanity.

Levesque presents us with his concept for a new world with what feels as new, futuristic, and far-fetched. But it brings insight through a simple question: is it much different than what we experience today? For instance, the way humans are “looped” into a future version of social media and the way they escape dreary reality through the fluff of false dreams—is it any different than the way many of us waste away in social media or binge on streaming TV? Is the way people enslave themselves in exchange for payment units that translate into sleep any different than the way we mortgage and second-mortgage our lives?

This is where science fiction shines for me, not in the construct of rapid-fire stories that take us to another world for a mere fun trip, but which by separating us from current reality brings us face to face with the very problems and promises our present reality holds. By stripping away the superficial constructs of our world, a story like this one makes us face the deeper meanings and realities that undergird it.

Viewed this way, The Somniscient is a worthy, perhaps even a must, read, and in the grand total of things, a fun one, too.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars