But things abruptly take a turn during the annual school talent show, during which Kyle is briefly hypnotised. Kyles story is at first mundane, focused on those unmemorable but omnipresent issues concerning most teenaged boys: family woes, tension over a girl, academic responsibilities. The novel briefly chronicles a few months in the life of Kyle Straker, a young boy whose presence is now purely historical. Its a nod to all of the above, and draws on the by now familiar narrative format of the diary, seen in works such as Flowers for Algernon, 1984, and Zamyatins Wealbeit in this case the diary is in audio cassette format. Its a trope that appears throughout both the classics and contemporary fiction, with famous works such as Frankenstein examining the forces of science and the relentless push for knowledge those such as The Day of the Triffids, with a milieu arising from humanitys arrogance and yet turning full circle with a desire to conquer and better themselves once more and even in eerie allegorical invasion works such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers.īut in 0.4 Mike Lancaster gives us something else again.
Its a fascinating idea, and savvy readers would know that the toying with humanitys role and place as a species, as well as the inevitably destructive results of our progress-oriented hubris, has long been examined in speculative fiction. In More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon gave us a world in which humans progress towards a gestalt 'consciousness, where individuals blend together to become more than the sum of their parts.
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