Book Notices | The Passengers by John Marrs

John Marrs, The Passengers

Amazon   John Marrs' The Passengers takes place in the same universe as his earlier novel The One (my review)—a not too distant future in which cool scientific advances tend to have unpleasant unintended consequences. In The Passengers, self-driving cars are an everyday thing, and the government hasn't been as up-front as one would hope about how the vehicles are programmed to deal with accidents. Enter a bunch of disgruntled hackers, and live broadcast a handful of passengers who are trapped in their cars, and you've got a nightmare scenario that's not too hard to imagine happening in real life, at least in some form. The premise of the book is intriguing, but it didn't hold my interest for all 350-odd pages. The last 20% of the book—the what happened afterwards part—dragged a bit. I also didn't care very much about the passengers: their bios come thick and fast at the beginning, and it's not easy to keep them straight.