Spotted this on sale and decided I had to have a read. I work in computers and engineering so I tend to be a sucker for this kind of thing.

Part way through the book the author makes the comment that he does what he does half for science and half for ego and I would strongly agree that there is a lot of ego tied up in this book. You certainly can't fault Warwick's commitment since he certainly put his body on the line in pursuit of his dreams. I can't help but think that some of his claims are somewhat inflated, though in so far he is completely infatuated with being a cyborg. He describes the neural signals he received from his wife Irena as being "sexy". However since what was happening was that signals from her nervous system were being interpreted by computer which then created a certain waveform which was injected into his nervous system it is difficult for me to see how the signal could be any sexier than when his assistant pushed a button on the computer and generated the same waveform. Nevertheless, Warwick is obviously passionate about his subject and is certainly visionary. I remain unconvinced that cyborgs have any huge advantage over tool wielding humans but perhaps at heart I am a stick in the mud luddite.

Picked up from the Trattorie OCZ. I can't actually remember if I've read this book before, or just read *about* it in another of Warwick's books, but I'm reasonably certain the latter is the case. If I start reading it and it suddenly seems weirdly familiar, then I'll know I'm wrong ;-)

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I hadn't read it. The one I'd read was QI: the Quest for Intelligence, in which he mentions the cyborg experiments described more fully in this book. Interestingly, looking at my journal entry for that book, I said pretty much the same things that I want to say about this book:

The author's basic thesis ... is soundly argued, but too much of his supporting evidence was either over-argued, so that I felt like he was just going over the same ground again, or was lacking in detail, so that it felt like he was making leaps of logic without explaining how he got there.

He does have a tendency to say the same things over and over again, and to leap to wild conclusions from what seems flimsy evidence (or at least to give the impression that he's doing that, because he doesn't mention the intervening steps of his deduction). The concluding chapter ("not to be read before 1 January 2050", which instruction of course I ignored, because I don't want to wait that long before I can release the book!) is a case in point - his extrapolations of what life will be like in fifty years seem pretty random, and some of them seem highly unlikely (like that we will have forgotten how to use normal speech!).

However, despite the poor writing (I was amazed to see that in the introduction he thanks his editors for "turning my vague meanderings into what I hope is a readable bestseller" - if this is the edited version, I'd hate to read the orginal!!!), the research itself was fascinating, and raises some really interesting questions. It will be interesting to see where the Reading team go next with their research.

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Ignored this book, on the table at Browsers, cos I assumed this was some sort of vyborg fiction story. Then I realised that, not only is it real, I've actually seen this guy on TV. I'm very interested in how far he has gone and what possessed him to do the things he has.