Person + Computer + Blue Screen of Death = Drugs (say whaaaat?)

Bluescreen by Dan Wells
Series: Mirador #1
Published by: Balzer & Bray on February 16, 2016
Genre: Crime, Dystopian, Science Fiction
Pages: 352
Source: Edelweiss
Book Details
Rating: ★★★★

Los Angeles in 2050 is a city of open doors, as long as you have the right connections. That connection is a djinni—a smart device implanted right in a person’s head. In a world where virtually everyone is online twenty-four hours a day, this connection is like oxygen—and a world like that presents plenty of opportunities for someone who knows how to manipulate it.

Marisa Carneseca is one of those people. She might spend her days in Mirador, the small, vibrant LA neighborhood where her family owns a restaurant, but she lives on the net—going to school, playing games, hanging out, or doing things of more questionable legality with her friends Sahara and Anja. And it’s Anja who first gets her hands on Bluescreen—a virtual drug that plugs right into a person’s djinni and delivers a massive, non-chemical, completely safe high. But in this city, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and Mari and her friends soon find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy that is much bigger than they ever suspected.

Dan Wells, author of the New York Times bestselling Partials Sequence, returns with a stunning new vision of the near future—a breathless cyber-thriller where privacy is the world’s most rare resource and nothing, not even the thoughts in our heads, is safe.

Bluescreen was such an AWESOME and original idea.

I’m a computer nerd so to read about computers in peoples BRAINS and such a unique “computer drug” idea… loved it!! For the first half of the book I literally just could not get over the idea of “Bluescreen” and how awesome it was. I’d just get lost in my brain even thinking about it.

Imagine…

You know how a computer might get the “blue screen of death”? You’re using it like normal, then all of a sudden… BAM! It shuts down. Stops working. Blue screen of death.

Okay well if you take a computer, put it in a person, then bluescreen that computer inside the person’s head? What happens?

DRUUUGSSS!

I hate drugs. Hate hate hate. But this idea? It was so fascinating to me! The idea was:

• You overload the computer’s CPU.
• The person’s brain computer is trying to do SO MUCH AT ONCE that it can’t keep up.
• So, it crashes.
• The person gets a high from that sudden overload -> point zero. From EVERYTHING to NOTHING.

“It bluescreens you. An overwhelming sensory rush, an unbelievable high, and then boom. Crash to desktop.”

I’d never do drugs, but I couldn’t get over how freakin’ interesting this whole idea was.

Plus, there was a super cool gaming aspect in Bluescreen. I’m a bit of a gamer myself so that totally clicked with me. It was like total virtual reality since you play the game on the computer that’s in your head. Rad.

This young adult book actually felt REAL!

I really appreciated how Bluescreen felt more “grown up” than other young adult books. There was fowl language, love interests, clubbing, drugs… It felt like REAL young adult, as opposed to the “censored” young adult we often see (where we pretend young adults don’t swear, do drugs, or have sex). I liked how it felt RAW and REAL.

“When we get back I’m going to feed that blowhole his own testicles in a sandwich.”

Super awesome… but a bit of fizzle at the end.

The only reason I’m giving this 4 stars instead of 5 is because I felt it fizzle a little at the end. Don’t get me wrong, it was super action packed, but I think MY EXCITEMENT for it fizzled. Maybe there was almost too much going on and I hard a hard time keeping up the pace with all the names, plans, and pieces of tech? I don’t know, but SOMETHING caused me to tune things out a little. Maybe it was just a “me” problem rather than a “book” problem.

But otherwise, it was a fantastic read—perfect for tech nerds like myself.

The Verdict