The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
It's told in interconnecting stories narrated by different characters in different times. I got a bit lost trying to figure out who was talking and how they were connected to the person in the previous chapter, so I made a sort of character map to help keep them all straight. It wasn't pretty with criss-crossing lines and arrows showing who each one was to the other, but it helped me see the overall picture so I could concentrate on the story.
The setting is the near future, when a new development in software enables people to upload their consciousness to an online server, then download it onto a piece of personal hardware called a cube. You could use it to regain lost memories, to re-live your best - or worst - days. Everything you've ever done, said, or thought, the good and the bad, all readily available.
With further development came the opportunity to upload the contents of your cube to a collective consciousness that everyone would have access to. As ominous as that sounds there were some benefits in areas like law enforcement and medicine. No one was required to join the collective, but if you didn't you wouldn't have access to those of others. People in favour of this data sharing were called counters, those opposed, eluders.
The stories, some narrated in the first person, some in the third person, one in the second person "you", and one that's simply a list of text messages, examine how the technology affected different people at different times. It looks at connection and what we give up when we trade privacy for information.
The software program - called Own Your Own Conscious - provides the basis for the story, but the book is much more about the people who designed and used it than it is about the tech itself, and that's what makes this such a compelling story. These characters came to life in a way that made me forget they're words on a page and that none of this really happened.
Once I figured out who was who and where it was going, I loved it.
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