Cyber Seed (quadrilogy) by Craig Falconer
ISBN: 9781482704396, 9781508599838, 9781522948063, 9781541201897
Amazon ID: B07ZKR5XG5
It's a quadrilogy:
- The oh-so-inventively-named Sycamore 2
- The slightly-more inventively-named Sycamore X
- The less-again inventively-named Sycamore XL
Leaving aside for a moment (or indeed for the entire series of books, since the presumed science and/or engineering behind this is never even discussed) the fact that we're dealing with devices which can transmit and receive high-resolution images wirelessly (and not just to/from a local network access point, this is outdoor cellular GSM capability) with no possible source of power (they're contact lenses which just sit in your eyes, and can be inserted / removed at least as trivially as standard contact lenses), the premise of the story is that some geek has come up with a way to implant a tiny chip (small enought to be injectable by syringe) into your hand, which then acts as a touchpad using the surface of your skin - again without any source of power, and also communicating wirelessly to the cellular GSM network.
Provided you can suspend this much technical disbelief (and if you were happy with The Circle, you'll be happy with this), the story is not bad. The characters develop pretty slowly, and there are no time warps in the storyline to cope with, so it's not a difficult story to get into (more like Colony Mars or The Martian than Impossible Times, which is an excellent, although rather convoluted, story, or (don't follow this link, you'll hate me for it) Cloud Atlas, which is just plain incomprehensible), and the books are nicely different from each other - it's not just as case of "oh, here's more of the story you've already been reading"; the second book takes off in (literally) a completely different direction from the first, and although it follows on well, it gives you a whole new situation to think about and get involved in.
All in all the first two books tell quite a good story.
The third and fourth books in the quadrilogy are distinctly different.
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