The Eye of Minds
Hello, all. Welcome back.
Today we have another YA book, The Eye of Minds, courtesy of the English language books at Book-Off. This Sci-Fi adventure is by James Dashner, the same author who gave us the Maze Runner series.
The only other book I've read by James Dashner was The Maze Runner itself, back when it was first released. I liked it well enough, and I know I reread it once or twice. However, I never felt compelled to read its sequels. The post-apocalyptic surval elements just didn't interest me as much as the mysteries of the maze. Couple that with the fact that I was losing interest in YA in general by that point, only finishing out series that I was already invested in, and I had no idea that The Eye of Minds or its series, The Morality Doctrine, even existed until I stumbled across it at the store.
Much like with Caraval, I went back and forth about this book. There are elements that are strong or, at the very least, are not out of the ordinary for the genre. For the things that I didn’t like, such as the quippy humor and the repetition of information, that I tried to chalk up to the target demographic. However, whereas Caraval’s simplistic or less mature elements felt like a natural extension of the teenaged narrator, these same elements felt forced in The Eye of Minds. It veered between talking down to the audience and, “How do you do, fellow kids?”
STATS
Title: The Eye of Minds
Series: The Mortality Doctrine (Book 1)
Author(s): James Dashner
Genre: Young Adult Science Fictioin
First Printing: October 2013
Publisher: Doubleday
SPOILERS
Mild spoilers for The Eye of Minds will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
PREMISE
From the back cover of the paperback, we get the following.
Welcome to the VirtNet.
For Michael and the other gamers, the VirtNet can make their wildest fantasies become real. And the more hacking skills they have, the more fun. Who wants to play by the rules anyway?
But some rules were made for a reason. One gamer has been taking people hostage inside the VirtNet - with horrific consequences.
The government needs Michael to track down the rogue gamer, but the risk is enormous and the line between the game and reality could be blurred forever …
To catch a hacker, you need a hacker.
Reaction
This premise is really off-base.
The plot for this book does indeed follow Michael as he is recruited by the government to hunt down a hacker named Kaine. However, while the premise implies that this is some sort of tense, high-stakes mystery or manhunt, the story is really just Michael and his friends (hereafter collectively referred to as “Mike’s team”) being sent from location to location by other characters. The book frames this as a hunt for clues, but it’s really just them going to a place, getting instructions on how to proceed, and then going to the next place. It’s so linear and predictable that the back half of the book follows a quest chain that is literally called “the Path”.
The details are also off. Yes, Mike’s team are hackers, but they use it for petty things, like giving themselves credit to buy snacks, or do give themselves tools to help them in the plot. At no point does it feel like these characters are some sort of digital anarchists who find their fun in breaking the rules. The bit about kidnapping is mentioned, but it is a footnote. The actual focus is on Kaine developing programs that can kill people in the virtual world and leave them braindead in the real world. As for reality being blurred, this never comes up at all. There is the aforementioned risk of physical death as a consequence of virtual death, but none of the characters ever seem confused as to which reality is which.
The bit about needing a hacker to catch a hacker is the most misleading. This story has nothing to do with hacking, outside of using it as a soft magic system (more on that in a second). The Path was so easy to find and complete that Kaine could reasonably have been tracked down by any group of bored preteens with zero skills and time to kill.
Write What You Know
Programming / Hacking
I am not an expert in programming. My entire experience with working with code amounts to writing a text-based game on a TI-83 calculator (something that was a fad in my middle school days) and writing VBA scripts for Microsoft Excel. I was only able to fabricate this website because Squarepsace gave me so many templates and tools to work with.
I can still tell that I know more about programming than Dashner did when he wrote this book.
This is a book set in virtual reality. The premise is driven by the fact that the main characters and his friends are hackers, as well as being avid gamers. They routinely analyze the code of the world around then and use their programming skills to give themselves abilities and tools to overcome problems. You don't need to be an expert in programming to write this kind of story. However, if one is not an expert in programming, then leaning upon your characters’ hacking skills to solve problems is not a great idea.
Dasher wrote the hacking in this book as a soft magic system that gets the characters out of any and all problems. They are able to casually steal personal information, falsify funds, and work themselves with whatever tools they need to waltz through any and all dangerous situations … until Dashner needs them not to do that. In those situations, we don’t get clear rules to explain why hacking can’t resolve everything. Michael and his friends just babble to themselves about how the code around them is programmed too well for them to do the thing that was instantly end the scene in their favor.
The hacking in the Arrowverse was more realistic and consistent than this. At least there, we got technobabble that would convince a layman that the writers know what they’re talking about. Here, it reads as though Dashner is dazzled by the mere notion of hacking and thinks everyone else will be, too.
Gaming
This was is more of a nitpick than an issue, yet I think it’s worth noting all the same. Again, I am not what one would consider a gamer, yet even I can tell I know more than Dashner did when he wrote this book.
Whenever Michael and his friends using hacking to access tools and other gimmicks that will allow them to advance the plot, the things they hack are not things that actual gamers would hack. I think the most glaring example of this is near the halfway mark. While in a gritty game of trench warfare, Michael hacks the knife he’s using to give it the ability to fire magical bolts of force - but he doesn’t hack himself an aimbot to ensure that he always hits his target, or a trigger bot to ensure that the knife fires automatically the moment he lines up the target on its own, or any sort of reflexes for his avatar that will allow him to automatically dodge attacks. And that’s just the stuff that subtle cheaters use. Given the circumstances, Michaels team have every reason to not care about playing fair and to use more blatant cheats. If they are such god-tier hackers who can tag programs onto users (which is established as a thing one can do in this setting), why not apply software that allows them to ignore damage? When they are in an icy game world, they hack warm hats and gloves for themselves (which are not part of the default equipment, so the cheat would be obvious to any other player you looks at them) - why not hack in something that allows them to simply ignore the effects of the cold?
For that matter, MIichael’s team are explicitly breaking the rules of the game in question because they are underage. Why do none of these other players report them to the site admins, especially when it becomes apparent that these children have hacked in weapons that don’t belong within that game?
The long and short of it is, I’m not convinced Dashner had handled any game made in the 21st Century before writing this book. He overlooks obvious solutions that actual gamers willing to hack the system would use. The closest he comes are a few times when Michael and friends give themselves enhanced jumping abilities and muffle the sounds of their footsteps, but because of the aforementioned soft magic issue, these come across less like gamers making strategic decisions and more like Dashner thinking a magical power would be cool in a given scene.
Takeaway
I am not by any means saying that an author should never try to reach outside of his or her comfort zone. Not reaching outside of one’s comfort zone is how broken settings like that of The Empyrean come to be. However, when reaches outside of one’s comfort zone, the result should at least be convincing enough to fool the laymen in the audience, especially if the subject matter in question is going to drive the story.
I think an interesting point of comparison here is Sword Art Online. Among the many things that series gets criticized for is that Reki Kawahara has no idea how to design a good video game. The mechanics of the virtual worlds in his setting are always fundamentally broken in some way that would either destroy the game’s meta or else make the game generally unplayable. However, the mechanics of the games aren’t actually that important to the overall working of the story. The only time that it matters that Kirito is a gamer specifically, rather than just being the posterboy of isekai-brand Gary Stus, is when Kawahara tries to use the premise of his setting to explore themes. It’s a shallow exploration, yet because it is shallow, I am at least convinced that Kawahara has a shred of understanding as to what he’s talking about. He’s sticking to basic ideas that don’t require a lot of worldbuilding to support.
The problem for The Eye of Minds is that we are promised a story where skill in programing and video games will matter. The fact that Dashner handles these ideas so poorly detracts from the experience we were promised. We can see the hand of the author moving the story along any time these pivotal elements are supposed to be in focus.
RATING: 4/10
This is a bad book written around its ending twist. It’s a good twist in concept, and it mostly works in execution. However, a good twist alone is not enough if the rest of the book is haphazard at best.
The prose talks down to the audience. The world is barely explored, and what does get explored is contradictory. The characters are cardboard cutouts. The plot is devoid of meaningful stakes or tension, no matter how hard it insists that these things are present.
The only reason I think this book so worth reading is that twist at the end. I will give the twist due credit down the line. It’s just that, for as good as the twist is, it simply isn’t enough on its own to justify the hours needed to read this book.
PROSE / TONE
This book does not respect the intelligence of the YA demographic.
I first noticed this in how often information was restated. Character motivations and plot details are repeated multiple times - so often, in fact, that there are a few points where motivation will be established at the end of one chapter or scene and then reiterated at the start of the next one. Unlike with Scarlett dithering over her situation in Caraval, this doesn’t read like an extension of Michael’s character (Michael being the POV for the entire book). It reads as though Dashner has so little faith in the audience’s ability to retain information that he needs to beat us over the head with every important detail.
Then there is the humor. This book bursts at the seams with quips, both in dialogue and narration. This is easier to justify as a character trait, plus I can see how this style of humor would appeal to a younger demographic, yet Dashner abuses it. There are scenes that we are supposed to take seriously that get undermined by referential comments or lampshading. I can’t tell if Dashner was trying way too hard to connect with the younger end of the YA demographic or if he had no faith in his characters to be likeable without the humor.
Also, this book is formatted in a very strange way. Every chapter is broken down into numbered sections. It’s not justified by a framing device; the majority of the time, these aren’t scene breaks; they aren’t POV shifts. The text is just chopped up into sections that many be as short as a single page. Did Dashner have so little faith in his audience’s attention spans that he has to give us milestones so we could take a break every minute or so? Do these sections actually mark the number of pages he wrote on any given night in the writing process? Your guess here is as good as mine. All I can say is that it disrupts immersion, constantly reminding me that I’m reading a book rather than experiencing the events of the story, and makes things so choppy that the narrative can’t build any momentum.
WORLDBUILDING
The worldbuilding of this book is very, very thin. This makes sense in some areas. We don’t need an understanding of the software of the VirtNet, nor do we need a detailed explanation of how VirtNet Security (the government agency that recruits Michael) operates. However, the lack of detail overall does undermine the narrative.
We are told that this future (which seems set sometime in the 22nd Century, given that a war in Greenland in 2022 is referenced as a conflict from the previous century) is bland, grey, and polluted. We are also told that everyone spends most of their time in VirtNet, only emerging for school or jobs. This begs the question, though: why are people coming out at all? Why aren’t they going to school or working jobs (at least, those that can be done digitally) via the VirtNet? It’s not like they need to exit to fulfill bodily functions - the NerveBox (or “Coffin”), which facilitates the connection to the VirtNet, takes care of all physical needs, to the point that a person can live in the VirtNet for years at a time.
On the flip side of things, we are shown nothing to indicate that VirtNet is anything but a recreational platform. The outside world, while polluted, is not inhospitable to life, as Michael does not need any form of protective gear (not even a mask for filtering the air. On top of that, the process of getting into and out of the Coffin is described as being unpleasant. Are we really supposed to believe that the entire population is so addicted to what is, at most, an online games hub that they’d abandon all other forms of recreation or lifestyle, subjecting themselves to the Coffin on a daily basis just to get their fix? It’s not even like this is the only form of digital entertainment. Michael has this chair that he uses instead of the Coffin when he wants to just scroll for news or access a chatroom. People don’t need the VirtNet, so why is absolutely everyone immersed in it?
My point here is that we have very sparse details about the world, and those details actively clash with each other. This shouldn’t detrimentally impact the narrative - after all, the focus is on a manhunt, not an existential crisis that could destroy all of civilization - but Dashner chose to present these things to explain why Michael is such a devoted gamer. If these things don’t make sense, his character doesn’t make sense. What's more, near the end of the book, Dashner tried to set up an existential threat to humanity, and part of the reason it falls flat is that we have no understanding of why humanity can't simply log off the VirtNet and do other things with their free time.
Perhaps the reason this bothers me so much is that there are multiple examples of this same type of setting out there, and most of them explain the protagonist’s immersion in the game world far more effectively.
In Epic (the first book of the Avatar Chronicles), the inhabitants of the colony planet where the story takes place spend all of their free time playing in a virtual reality MMORPG because said game is the foundation of their dystopian society. Their game serves as their main communications network, the real-world economy uses the currency generated in the game (so, by extension, the game serves as their banking system), and the government is controlled by an oligarchy of powerful gamers. We are told that the game was only intended to provide mental stimulation to hibernating passengers on a sleeper ship during the voyage to the planet, and it’s implied that the game became a cancerous growth upon society because people didn’t stop playing it when it was no longer necessary.
In Saga (the second book of the Avatar Chronicles), players develop a physical addiction to the game. The AI who runs the game needs human to build machines for her so that she can interact with the physical world, so she programmed the game to trigger neurotransmitters and enslave players to her via this addiction.
In Sword Art Online, full-dive VR games are a niche market. The players of the original game were lured into a trap by a sociopathic genius who wanted his virtual creation to be embraced as a real world with real stakes. The only people who use the technology for anything but games are shadowy companies doing research into human brains, government agencies trying to produce sapient AIs, and medical firms exploring means to help people in hospice care.
In Accel World (the sequel series to Sword Art Online), VR technology has advanced to the point that everyone has cybernetic implants for seamless integration into the network. Even so, most people primarily use it for augmented reality functions - schools are still in-person, for example, with students using their implants the way that students in American or Japanese schools today use tablets. VR games are still a niche recreational activity.
I have not read Ready Player One or seen the film, yet from what I have heard from reviewers, the virtual reality of that setting is indeed used for education and commerce, and the real world is so overcrowded and impoverished that people are eager to escape into the virtual world. Most people probably wouldn’t leave the game at all, were it not for the fact that they need to take care of their physical bodies.
In The Reality Bug (Book 4 of the Pendragon series), the people of Veelox choose to embrace virtual reality because said virtual reality provides them with perfect fantasies (and they have systems in place to sustain their physical bodies while they use said VR). The conflict of that book is driven by an effort to convince people to reject the lie of VR and return to the real world. Veelox itself is in decent shape. The only danger to society is that the infrastructure will break down if people don’t start maintaining it soon (which, as we learn in Book 7, does end up happening in the end).
I’m not saying that Dashner had to take any of these routes. If Michael is simply invested in the world because he’s personally attached to it, that would have been fine. It’s the conflict of the information that he does provide that bothers me, along with how he tries to establish sequel bait on that shaky foundation.
There are two additional elements that I could mention here, but I want to hold off on them until we discuss Plot, since they mainly serve utilitarian roles for the narrative.
CHARACTERS
I wish I had something to analyze with these characters, but frankly, this is one of the most bland casts I’ve ever read.
Michael is a nearly blank slate whose only character trait is quipping.
Of the two members of his team (neither of whom is worth the effort to look up their names), one is Michael with more sexual humor, while the other is Michael but female.
The government agents are archetypes of overreaching yet incompetent government agents.
There’s a character named Gunner Skale who’s repeatedly referenced as this legendary gamer who disappeared years ago. The reveal of what happened to him is rather anticlimactic, given all the buildup.
Kaine is a psychotic, evil presence in the background who becomes a man with a poorly defined cause in the end.
There’s nothing deeper to any of these characters than the role they serve on the story. That would have been fine if it was confined to the government agents and Kaine. It makes for very boring reading when it applies to the POV character and the characters he talks to the most.
One issue I will highlight is how poorly Dashner sets up Michael’s team as gamers and hackers. The book opens with Michael getting a quest to stop a digital suicide (which escalates into a real suicide). This is presented as procedurally generated busywork, the kind of quest the system might assign to a player who isn’t skilled or powerful enough for something more rewarding. Michael doesn’t showcase any of his supposed hacking skills, either. It isn’t until after Michael is recruited that the hacking magic system kicks in and he begins to flex his gamer knowledge (such that it is). The whole government recruitment therefore feels unearned, explained by the need to jump-start the narrative rather than being a natural extension of that narrative.
I think that Sword Art Online is once again a fitting point of comparison here. In the Fatal Bullet story arc, there are clear reasons why the government has chosen to recruit a 17-year-old for their investigation of Death Gun. Those reasons is based upon elements that were either previously established or that could be reasonably extrapolated from the previously established elements.
The government is not, at that point, hunting Death Gun down. They just want to confirm whether his claim of possessing a weapon that can kill people in the real world by shooting them in virtual reality is legitimate. They don’t need a hacker, a detective, or a soldier; they need a volunteer to hook up to a bunch of medical monitoring equipment, log into the game where Death Gun prowls, goad Death Gun into opening fire with this supposed ultimate weapon, and then monitor the physiological effects. In short, they just need live bait.
Death Gun is targeting high-profile players. The government’s best bait is someone who is a good enough gamer in his game to get Death Gun’s attention. However, because of how hard it is to get user data from the company, the mere act of identifying an existing high-profile player is a non-starter; recruitment would be impossible. They need an outsider who is skilled in VR games. Kirito has nearly three years of experience operating in virtual reality (two of which the audience saw in the first story arc and one of which was implied by the end of the second story arc). The government is fully aware of this experience level and his real identity because he was one of the thousands of victims from the first story arc.
The government has past contact with Kirito. As exposited at the start of the scene where they recruit Kirito, the agent who recruits him also communicated with him during the government’s investigation into RECT Progress in the aftermath of the second story arc. In other words, not only is Kirito qualified, but they can reach out to him via a familiar face.
As a cherry on top, the government in this story is smart enough to know how to push Kirito’s buttons without resorting to extortion (which is what the government does in The Eye of Minds). The agent they send tempts Kirito with the mystery of Death Gun and, when that fails to win Kirito over, resorts to offering him a fat paycheck. Audience members who saw the second story arc know that Kirito has trouble resisting the power of material things (given his anxiety about dumping an inventory of items that were corrupted and unusable anyway), so it’s believable that he can be bought.
Kirito may be a far blander character than Michael, but at least the Fatal Bullet story properly establishes his skills and why he is the one being pulled into the events of the narrative, rather than just expecting us to go with it.
PLOT
The plot of this book is incredibly bland. Both the inciting incident - Michael first hearing about Kaine while trying to stop a girl from committing suicide - and his recruitment by the government are engaging enough as hooks, but the momentum imparted by these elements quickly fades. Michael’s team just wanders from location to location. They show up in a place, either get directions or find an exit, and move on to the next location. Most obstacles are overcome easily and without consequences, with the exceptions being the moments when Dashner wants to inject some drama into the story and convince us that there are stakes. Very early on, it becomes clear that Michael’s team has incredibly thick plot armor. When bad things actually do happen to them, all it elicited from me was an eye roll, as the hand of the author was very obvious.
Credit Where It’s Due
While I don’t think that Michael’s recruitment by the government works from a character perspective, I do at least find it logical in terms of plot progression. He was present for a suicide linked to Kaine, so its not impossible that he would pop up on the radar of an agency tasked with policing VirtNet and hunting Kaine down. The government agents also directly tell Michael that he and his team aren’t the only ones looking for Kaine. While this isn’t a fix for skills not being demonstrated, it does at least indicate that manpower is more important that skill for this job. (The twist at the end of the book also lends additional context as to why Michael specifically would be someone they trust with this task.)
I also do think that Dashner handles the question of life-or-death stakes within a virtual reality world fairly well. In this setting, dying in the virtual world does not actually kill you, because everyone has a digital buffer that prevents virtual harm from translating into physical or psychological distress (referred to as a “Core” within the story). Someone ripping out their own Core (as was done in the suicide in the opening chapter) is a big deal both for the difficulty of the task and the fact someone would actually be desperate enough to do that. Later, the introduction of KillSims, programs designed by Kaine that can leave human beings braindead despite their cores, is treated as a huge deal. When Michael’s team gets onto the Path, the stakes are not (initially) death; rather, the Path is coded to automatically lock out anyone who doesn’t successfully complete it on the first try. “Death” from that point onward just means that Michael’s team will be unable to complete their mission and find Kaine. So, while this book suffers from a severe lack of meaningful tension and believable stakes (as we’ll cover next), I do think Dashner was successful in balancing out the issues introduced by this story occurring in a virtual world rather than the real one.
Action / Puzzles
The action scenes in this book are every bit as bad as A Master of Djinn. I think a strong argument could be made that they do even more damage to the narrative, though. The action in A Master of Djinn might have bene pointless spectacle, but it wasn’t what drove the story; the police procedural bore that burden. Here, engaging with obstacles during the hunt for Kaine is the core of the narrative, and thus, the action does drive the story. The lack of stakes and tension becomes less of an amateur mistake and more a leaden weight that drags the whole story down.
The issues with how Dashner handled the programming and gamer elements really causes problems here. It is never clear how much of a challenge actually exists in any given action sequence. Every time Michael’s team hacks some solution, I felt compelled to ask either, “Why didn’t you do more than that?” or, “Why didn’t you use that extremely effective hack in any previous scene?” In all the situations where hacking isn’t a solution, it’s nonsensical that Michael and his team survive, let alone make progress. Being a “gamer” does not explain how players in virtual reality are able to rather easily fight off KillSims in hand-to-hand, despite the fact that KillSims are explicitly designed to kill gamers. It does not explain how they are able to hold their own against other “gamers” in a game where Michael’s team are novices and the other gamers are experienced. It certainly doesn’t explain either of the following two situations:
There’s a scene where a woman holds Michael’s team at gunpoint to stop them from accessing a game they are too young to enter. Despite the fact that she explicitly says that her paycheck is on the line if they get past her, despite knowing she can gun them down without them actually dying, this woman allows Michael to slowly walk across the several feet between them and knock the guns out of her hands.
There’s a scene where a trained government agent sent to raid a digital fortress sees a KillSim in the distance and chooses to drop her weapon and run away, at which point Michael picks up said weapon and proceeds to slaughter the KillSim and its companions at range, thereby begging the question of why the agent didn’t open fire from that original position.
And then there are the puzzle elements. If you had criticisms of how the maze in The Maze Runner was solved, I guarantee you will hate the challenges in this book. The entrance to the Path is locked by a very dumb riddle. I will fully admit that I got it wrong, but given that I have always been terrible had riddles, I am not a good metric for this sort of thing. When the answer was explained; I facepalmed, because it’s the sort of riddle with multiple correct answers, so Michael’s team getting it right on the first time feels more contrived than earned. There’s an endless hallway that is solved by kicking a hole in a wall. There is a cryptic message about kneeling before one’s ancestors that is resolved by finding a portal in the very obvious chapel to ancestral beings. All together, the puzzles feel like they were written to seem smart rather than creating a situation that could only be overcome through logic.
By the back half of this book, I was checked out. Michael’s success was guaranteed by sheer virtue of how effortlessly he cleared obstacles. The various set pieces he encountered from that point to the climax were just noise.
The Tangent Twist (Heavy Spoilers)
In the scene where Michael’s team finds Gunner Skale, we get the big reveal of who Kaine really is. We learn the source of his overwhelming abilities as a programmer. We realize that he poses a threat to not only the VirtNet but the entire world.
You see, the truth about Kaine is …
Drumroll, please.
BA-BUM BA-BUM BA-BUM BA-BUM.
Kaine is … a Tangent!
I know, I know. I was shocked, too. Truly, Dashner has flipped the proverbial table under this whole story.
What do you mean, “What is a Tangent?” What do you mean, “So, what?” Weren’t you paying attention when I explained the existential threat that Tangents pose to this setting?
No?
Of course not, because I didn’t provide you with that information … and neither does Dasher.
A Weak Reveal
About a third of the way into the book, Michael’s team learns that Kaine is emotionally invested in the well-being of certain Tangents. This being the first mention of Tangents in the book. We are then given very blunt exposition about them.
Basically, Tangents are advanced NPCs that believe that the VirtNet is the real world. Much like smart AIs in HALO, Tangents suffer from a form of Rampancy (which they call Decay, though I will continue to refer to it as Rampancy). Tangents eventually begin to notice holes in their backstories and suffer a psychotic break as they grapple with the artificiality of their own existence.
After that exposition dump, Tangents only appear as tertiary characters who pose no obstacle to Michael’s team. One guards access to the aforementioned adults-only game. If Michael’s team didn't say, “I think she's a Tangent,” there would be no indication that she was one; she is also so easily overpowered that it undermines the idea that Tangents are any more dangerous than human adversaries. Every other potential Tangent that appears after her merely spouts dialogue at Michael’s team.
As a result, the reveal that Kaine is a Tangent actually weakens the narrative. No longer is he some hacker with unfathomably vast power. He’s just an NPC who’s probably operating within a limited set of parameters.
The Mortality Doctrine
In the climax, Dasher tries to double down on the idea that Kaine is this immense threat, and in doing so, only compounds the problems of the Tangent reveal.
The Morality Doctrine for which this book series is named is Kaine’s effort to combat the Tangents’ Rampancy issues. He wants to upload Tangents into human bodies. All his nefarious activities, including the KillSims, were about creating human hosts who would be blank slates for downloading a Tangent from VirtNet into the real world. Michael’s reaction to this reveal makes it clear what Dashner was going for here: an AI uprising story, with the Tangents rising from within VirtNet to wipe out humanity.
Here’s where the lack of attention given to Tangents becomes a problem. We have no real understanding of how much agency Tangents posses. We have no real grasp of whether they would even want to transfer their digital selves into human bodies rather than pursuing the existing cure for Rampancy (which was established in the very same info-dump where Tangents were introduced). We have no real reason to believe that Tangents are particularly threatening even in their digital state, let alone whether they’d continue to pose a threat in human bodies. Framing the Mortality Doctrine as an existential threat is therefore a bit like trying to equate the Emu War with World War II. It might cause this setting a lot of headaches in the short-term, but it seems like society will carry on and forget the whole affair even after the nefarious invaders claim their personal victory.
Let’s consider another story that did a similar idea much better: HALO 5. For all of the problems with the writing of that game, one element that is not a issue is the believability of the Created as a threat, especially if one had been exposed to the past games.
Cortana had firmly cemented the intelligence of smart AIs through multiple practical examples. A faction of smart AIs was therefore a daunting threat, even if they weren’t individually as powerful as her.
The danger posed by Forerunner technology was integral to the fabric of the series. The Guardians specifically might have been new to HALO 5, but they were merely a new reflection of the force we understood. Cortana also made use of the Promethians for her footsoldiers, and anyone who played HALO 4 would be familiar with them as an antagonistic force.
The horrors of Rampancy and the psychological toll it takes on a smart AI was demonstrated vividly through Cortana’s deterioration in HALO 4, in addition to being lore that ran all the way back to The Fall of Reach. This makes it easy to accept that smart AIs would be so desperate for a cure that they would swear loyalty to Cortana. This is especially true because, by the mere virtue of still being alive, Cortana has demonstrated that the cure is real, rather than just being a promise with uncertain hope of success.
Within HALO 5 itself, we were exposed to two smart AI characters who provided a window into how the AIs feel about Cortana. Governor Sloan was a Rampant AI who joined Cortana as an alternative to death. As for Roland, while he remained staunchly allied with the humans and helped the USNC Infinity escape Cortana’s clutches, he also didn’t hold back his feelings. He made it very clear how disgusted he was with the humans for assuming Cortana was the enemy when all they had to go on (at least, in his mind) was the fact that she wasn’t dead from Rampancy.
Therefore, when Cortana announced her intention to seize the Mantle of Responsibility and called on smart AIs to swear fealty to her, we had a firm grasp of the existential threat the galaxy was facing.
The End Twist (Heavy Spoilers)
The big twist at the very end of this book almost redeemed it.
In the final chapter, Michael wakes from the VirtNet after his encounter with Kaine - and discovers that everything is wrong. The apartment he’s in isn’t the one he’d been in when he entered the Coffin to hunt Kaine. When he looks in the mirror, he finds a stranger staring back at him
Unbeknownst to himself, Michael was a Tangent the whole time. The manhunt for Kaine was orchestrated by Kaine himself to identify the best candidates for the Mortality Doctrine. All the times that Michael thought he was returning to the real world were actually him descending into one of the simulated worlds of the VirtNet. The government knew this the whole time; the reason they recruited Michael specifically was because they knew he was a Tangent who Kaine was interested in, and thus, they were confident he’d be able to expose Kaine’s location to them if he walked into Kaine’s arms with a tracer program on him.
This was a twist I saw coming from about halfway through the book. This wasn’t because it’s a bad twist that was telegraphed. Rather, it’s a twist that Dashner made the effort to lay a foundation for.
Around the halfway mark, Michael realizes that he can’t remember the last time he’d actually seen his parents. He had memories of them, but not memories of the last time they’d been home from the international business trips.
Kaine has had plenty of opportunity to eradicate Michael, taunting him directly and tormenting him with visions, and yet made no effort to simply snuff Michal and his friends out.
In the scene where the government recruits Michael, they terminate the meeting because they detected Kaine approaching and were visibly afraid of him, something that didn’t make much sense in the real world yet is given new life with the added context of the meeting occurring in a game world.
This twist could have made this book worth reading, but no twist can single-handedly carry an entire narrative. Michael being a Tangent is therefore a strong moment in a very weak text.
Also … the execution leaves much to be desired. There are three elements within the reveal itself that create plot holes.
As part of his Rampancy, Michael was suffering headaches and seizures. This was previously explained by brain damage he suffered during the KillSim fight I mentioned earlier. The twist wants us to believe that this was actually Rampancy the whole time, which begs the question of why the problem didn’t start any early than the KillSim’s attack. Also, why would the KillSim attack him in the first place if he’s a tangent? Why can’t it register that he doesn't have a human body that can be seized for Kaine’s purposes?
Before Michael can finish processing the revelation that he has been downloaded into a stranger’s body, a government agent arrives at his front door to debrief him. How did the agent know precisely which human body he’d be uploaded into?
You may recall that I mentioned death isn’t truly part of the stakes for most of the book. However, one of the last barriers to reaching Kaine is that Michael has his Core torn out, guaranteeing real death if he continues onward and dies, and is then offered a chance to leave the Path without dying. If Michael is a Tangent, how does he have a Core to tear out? If he does not have a physical brain to protect, he does not need a Core.
Sequel Setup
The Morality Doctrine has three books in total, with The Eye of Minds being followed by The Rule of Thoughts and finally The Game of Lives. I think it makes a certain amount of sense. The first book was all building up to reveal what Kaine’s plan was, and now the sequels can engage with the fallout. The problem is that this book seems to be entirely geared towards setting up those sequels, rather than being a satisfying story in its own right.
I actually thought this was a standalone book when I bought it. The fact that it was the start of a trilogy was not emphasized on the cover. However, as the plot ground on, I realized that it had to be setting up a sequel, for the simple reason that this book was boring.
All of the obstacles, every exchange of banter between non-characters, and the constant repetition of information feel like they exist to pad the length. Nothing meaningful happens until the climax. The result is a book that’s a slog for most of its length and then ends in a rush. It almost feels like Dashner originally conceived this series with the twists being established information at the start and then, for whatever reason, decided to write this book to feed the audience the information in the most dramatic way possible. It would be like if John Favreau had made the first Iron Man film into a drama about the development of arc reactor technology, ended said film on Stark being captured by terrorists and making his mini-reactor, and then left all the actual Iron Man stuff until the sequel.
I’m not saying that this book needed to be crushed down into exposition at the start of The Rule of Thoughts. What I am saying, though, if that if an author wants to take the time to explore exposition as big twists, then there needs to be a story that makes that exploration worthwhile.
CONCLUSION
The Eye of Minds is a disappointing book not because it is fundamentally broken but because it is poorly executed. As pointed out with all the comparisons, the ideas here have worked in other media. It’s just that the details really do make a difference. Unfortunately for this book, the differences from other works are not good ones.
I honestly don’t think Dashner would have needed to change much to make this book a worthwhile read. If he dialed back the hollow action and replaced with proper character development and a more thorough exploration of the setting, particularly in regards to the Tangents, I think the twists of the book could have landed as intended. There would be something meaningful to draw readers into The Rule of Thoughts.
Maybe people who really like this type of setting would feel compelled to go on regardless. As it is, this is the point where I log out of the Mortality Doctrine.
THE NEW YEAR
2025 is almost upon us, and I’m excited to share what’s ahead.
Obviously, the Goblet of Fire analysis is ongoing, including a post next week. That series will conclude on March 21st. The week after, on March 28th, the review series for Onyx Storm will begin. Judging by the posts that most people seem to be interested in, it looks like we’ll be doing another book club-style review for it. This will release biweekly, just like the Goblet of Fire analysis.
For the intermediate weeks, though, we have some interesting things on the docket.
On January 3rd, we’ll open the New Year with an interlude discussing the current Romantasy trend in Fantasy literature. This is a trend that is causing problems for writers and readers alike, and I don’t think it’s based on supply or demand. I will be detailing my reasons for this and proposing a potential solution to it.
Then, on January 17th, we’ll have the first entry for Missed the Mark in over two years. We’ll be delving into the MCU Captain Marvel film discussing how it botched the delivery of its themes as well as how adjusting the application of superpowers in that movie could have redeemed it.
After that, January 31st will kick off a new If They Planned It All Ahead series: the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy rewrite treatment that I promised years ago. This will be a project of at least 11 parts. To break it up, I’ll be covering the books of Dragonlance’s War of Souls series in between the rewrites of each film.
It’s going to be a busy year, and I hope you’ll all join me for it. Merry Christmas to all, and a Happy New Year.
