I heard about the sci-fi novel Exadelic from this TechCrunch book review. Going through the first dozen chapters, I wasn’t sure there was much more to add than what the reviewer identified right in the title of the book: it’s Ready Player One, Silicon Valley edition, where the divisive insider references can be either invigorating or alienating, and the bland protagonist either a stand-in for the reader or…well, just bland.
Exadelic cribs from more than just one piece of pop culture. The writing style is Dan Brown-esque—in how it prefers short, action-packed chapters with cliffhangers dangling at the end of every one—and in the early pages flirts with uninspired descriptions and dialog also attributed to the author. The plot is reminiscent of the original Matrix, asking questions about the nature of the universe and the age-old question of whether we’re living in a simulation. To its credit, the book mostly takes inspiration from its predecessors, and by the midpoint of the story diverges from well-trod sci-fi tropes to craft its creative path.
The Silicon Valley setting is a personally familiar one. The plot starts in the Bay Area in the 2020s, around the time when AI is starting to garner breakthroughs. For…reasons, the story then makes a jump back in time to the early 2000s, which coincidentally was another personally relatable time period, those teenage years when I moved to Berkeley for college1. The author sprinkles in casual locations around the Bay, to ground the adventure in the real world; instead of touristy locales, though, he makes use of nondescript cafés and familiar bus routes, stuff that only the locals would appreciate.
One downside of using the present day for fiction is that it locks in the time period; for one like Exadelic which is so reliant on technology and software, it runs the risk of aging poorly in years to come. Granted, this is not uncommon in sci-fi: some of the classic stories from the middle of the 20th century, or even earlier, imagine future technologies as extrapolations of what existed at the time, unable to conceive of the step functions in tech of our actual history. It’s like the Star Trek communicator from the original series—a bulky voice box thought to be the culmination of 300 years of technological progress, while in a mere 50 years, we’re selling working replicas of the device where most of the material is the plastic mold to recreate the shape and the electronics take up 1% of the physical space.
All that said, the story ends up being a fun romp that makes enough jumps—in time, space, and levels of technology—that spur the imagination. The familiar aspects of location, and the programming references2, make Exadelic feel like a book that I could someday write—when I retire from the tech industry and embark on the lucrative career path of an aspiring novelist.
