Who gets to decided whether you can put such a technology in your brain? Who gets to decide whether scientists can make advances in such technologies? What happens when the War on Drugs and the War on Terror smash into a promising technology that looks like a drug, that’s used as a drug, and that’s similar to other technologies abused by criminals and terrorists? That tension – and the very cool science – drove the book from San Francisco to the back streets of Bangkok Shanghai and Washington DC to Buddhist monasteries in the mountains of Thailand and more.Ĭrux personalized that idea to one of consequences and responsibility. The big idea at the heart of Nexus was a question of freedom and control. That technology brought awesome potential to increase human communication and human innovation – or to be used for mind control, assassination, or political subversion.

Nexus introduced a technology – packaged as a drug – that could link human brains, with their s enses, thoughts, and emotions, across short distances or eventually across the net. The science at the heart of the books has been consistent. Near-Singularity meets Occupy and the Arab Spring.Īpex is the third and final of my Nexus novels, concluding the trilogy started with Nexus and Crux. Apex, the final book in Naam’s Nexus trilogy, is out now, and Naam is here to explain how it interacts with his previous novels - and where it takes us from there. Very quickly, Ramez Naam has become a name to be reckoned with in science fiction, with a series of near-future novels that question reality - or what we use to perceive it, and how that can be manipulated.

Nexus crux apex