Nothing is simply black or white it’s all a murky dull gray.”īut because of an accident in which fragments of an iPhone become embedded in Tom’s skull (to be precise, a 32 gigabyte iPhone 3GS, traveling at a speed of 77 miles per hour), the power of moral arbiter is suddenly forced upon him, the chance or the obligation to decide whom to punish as his fluorescent alter ego, iBoy. “There aren’t things that are definitely right or definitely wrong. Tom does, however, feel far more ambivalent than this “iBrain” does about the crimes of his peers. The “iBrain” in this case is distinct from the boy, the 16-year-old protagonist Tom Harvey, an average teenager “with no major problems, no secrets, no terrors, no vices, no nightmares, no special talents,” as he sees it. It doesn’t care if they’re poor or uneducated or bored or addicted or troubled or lonely or if they simply don’t know any better.” Kevin Brooks’s “iBoy,” his latest gritty sci-fi thriller (“Black Rabbit Summer,” “The Road of the Dead”), is a vengeance tale that even offers a philosophical take on the criminal actions of these young offenders, a prescient view currently shared by many British politicians: “The application in my iBrain doesn’t care why they do it. The setting for “iBoy,” in the projects and high-rises of South London, as well as its violence, meted out by marauding pubescent gangs, cannot help cutting close to the bone after this past summer’s riots in England.
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