WWW:Wake (Robert Sawyer)

This science fiction story of a blind teen given her sight through technology won the Hugo award, but I was disappointed. I couldn't get past the ludicrous scientific handwaving to appreciate the rest of the story. Caitlin (an annoyingly brilliant, cheerful, perfect teen) has a rare (and fictional) problem with the wiring of her retinas that scrambles the signals sent to the optical portions of the brain, so they give her an implant that intercepts the signals, fixes the coding, and sends them on. Immediately, her brain can process these corrected signals, and now she can see! This is, of course, incorrect on many levels. There is no fixed kind of coding that the brain expects that the retina has to get right - they wire up together and figure each other out, within certain genetically determined parameters. Even if we grant that, an occipital lobe that has never received useful data from the eyes will simply never develop the ability to process signals, and won't be able to handle them if they are later delivered. The author gets around this by saying that she has used the Internet practically since birth, co-opting her occipital lobes for "visualizing" her way around, and this meant is it well organized, so the visual signals will work. Sorry, but this means it is less able to handle signals from the eyes, now that it's been organized for some other purpose. And all of this is aside from the real point of the story, which is that a self-aware entity has developed out there in cyberspace, not knowing what it is or what existence is like, and it somehow gets plugged into Caitlin's optical feed so the two of them can become aware of each other.... I couldn't buy any of it. Sorry.