The Tomorrow Code

by Brian Falkner

Grade: 2 stars
Story: Tane (the creative one) and Rebecca (the smart one) come up with this idea about sending messages back in time, and before you know it, they're on a mad adventure to save the entire human race

Thoughts: Ok, so I had this awesome post written out (if I do say so myself), and then a I did a stupid thing and lost it all. So here's my attempt to recreate it.

I actually started reading this one quite a while ago and couldn't finish. I think it was just general busyness and not the book itself, because it starts out quite awesomely. It's full of cool (although highly improbably and probably wrong) science, a new and unusual form of time travel, and lots of binary code.

However, about 2/3s or 3/4s of the way through, it begins to get all Environmental. Note the capital. In other words, there's not just the idea that humanity should stop wrecking the planet, which I agree with, but the idea that humanity is a pathogen and should be destroyed because it's wrecking the planet. This I do not agree with at all. I mean, this is 7 BILLION PEOPLE'S LIVES we're talking about. Now I know this was partly just Rebecca's opinion, which is fine, but the book seemed to show some sympathy with the idea as well. Which is not fine. At least, it's highly annoying to myself.
Also, killing chimps is not murder. It's not good, but it's not murder.

Finally, I know this shouldn't matter, but the phrase "Deus ex Machina" is LATIN. It's NOT GREEK. (See page 286.) Perhaps part of the reason why it annoys me so much is that there's a fair amount of explaining in this book (now that I think of it, probably too much for my taste). Mostly Rebecca explaining lots of science, but also lots of explanations about Maori traditions, and a bunch of other stuff as well. So if he got that wrong, what other among those many explanations might he have got wrong? Again, it probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does. But I don't like factual errors. They bug me.

So we'll see how the rest of my reading of Brian Falkner goes. I really loved Brain Jack, but mostly it was because there was lots of computery stuff. I had been thinking of making a Top Ten (Or So) list of Kiwi authors, and adding him to the list. But I think I'll wait a while now.


P.S. Ok, so now that I've re-written it out again, I'm afraid it's definitely not as good as the original post. I HATE THAT. And it always seems to happen when I'm particularly fond of the original post. But really, it was my own fault. Ah well.