Last Tango in Cyberspace

The Future Of Empathy

A fun ride into a techno futuristic thriller with wonderful characters who provide color and fast moving creative images. Unlike Kotler's other non-fiction works, he plays with the emerging world beyond cognitive powers and more about the environment where we live more connected with creatures around us. Kotler always has amazing research and the main protagonist shares this is knowledge bombs. What happens next.?...😁

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An uncomfortably believable world. Powerful story

In this world that’s right around the corner, Elon Musk has gotten space travel off the ground. Self driving cars are a thing. And people who can predict the memetic evolution of culture have a new kind of job: em-tracking.
In this world, we can grow all animal products from vats, from meat to leather. There is no need to kill animals. But some people still crave the experience of hunting.
And some of those people are now turning up dead.
With the expanded empathy of an em-tracker, Lion Zorn literally throws up at the sight of hunting trophies and sees animals as just as empathetic as humans. He’s watching the world change towards a brighter, more inclusive future. But not fast enough. And he’s wondering if he’s tracking a murderer, or something else.
This is an uncomfortably believable world: just strange enough to be jarring, just familiar enough to be disturbing.
The characters in this story have the reserve of those who’ve seen it all, and the strength of personality that keeps you reading. The main characters are eloquent, and the side characters are engagingly quirky and very, very chuckle-inducing.
Though the story revolves around Lion, he has supports and connections in all sorts of places: old rockers with pockets full of drugs. Extinction Rebellion types. Idealistic business men. Counter culture creatives. And the strange cross section of society in this story keeps everything interesting. The author walks the line between adding color and creating solid characterization just right. In the end, you see the world through the eyes of these people. And your mind is opened.

Lion himself explores the labyrinthine question of what it means to be human, and what it means to be valuable. He tells an unflinching story of the difficulties experienced by those who are neuroatypical in our world. As an Em-Tracker, Lion suffers from the cruelties of the world. He gets overstimulated easily. He and other children like him do struggle. But he also shows us the beautiful truth: humanity has to evolve if it is to survive. The first steps toward expanded empathy are ones we need to take.
The performance is also top-notch, with wonderful work drawing you deeper into the story.
This starkly compassionate, strangely lyrical story is a modern treasure. Humanity evolves for the better, and this book may help you feel a bit more evolved yourself.

Clever cyberpunk concepts -

In general, I enjoyed this book. It explored clever future-culture concepts. And I love how it touched on the pointless horror of animal cruelty (including hunting) without being unnecessarily graphic. However, the hipster voice in which the story was written was far too forced, bordering on embarrassing. Since the narrator was supposedly a trend-finder, the fact that he came across as a poseur unfortunately tainted the overall effect for me.

Reporting from the front end of our spiral up!

The present never sounded so much like a beautiful future! This book captures the thrill of being on the cutting edge of neuroscience literature! I couldn’t stop listening to this one once I started it! Fast pace trailer.

I read both of Steven‘s previous books, so I was totally not expecting this one at all! We’ve got an entirely new flavor here. Turns out this guy was definitely made for writing novels!

I literally had to pause halfway through the second chapter and go by myself some tobacco and Indica!!

I’m only sad it ended so fast!

Abgefahren

Eigenartig, aber sehr gut. Dem Sifi-Outsider, wie ich es bin, aber dennoch zu empfehlen. Eine spannende wie unglaubliche Zukunft, auf die man sich freuen kann!

Awfull

What an awfully book. don't waste your money! It was very disjointed, probably ment to be a streaming thought work, if not it came out like that.

1 personnes sur 5 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

Reads like a Gibson knock off

This story rips elements from William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy. The voice work is excellent but being very familiar with Gibson's style and books the over all story was ruined as my mind kept making direct connections between near identical content.
Forced pattern recognition does not a good story

0 personnes sur 2 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente