Brother Jonathan

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

This well-developed piece of science fiction offers junior- and
senior-high readers a disturbing vision of a late 21st-century earth
where nation-states have been replaced by aggressively competitive
global corporations.

Five teens with severe physical disabilities have been brought to
California’s Center for Advanced Prosthesis where they are to have a
recently invented, but untested, almond-sized computer transplanted into
their brains by Dr. Perkin and his Intertel Corporation team. The
computer, which interfaces directly with mammalian brain tissue, is
intended to “cure” the teenagers’ afflictions, and its success
will guarantee huge profits for Intertel’s stockholders, a necessary
situation if Intertel is to avoid a hostile takeover bid by Flanders
Corp. As the corporate war escalates, the teens, dead or alive, become
the sought-after pawns. Central to the book is the question of who will
control the world’s computer networks, and to what end.

Kilian blends Jules Verne’s “gadgets” orientation with H.G.
Wells’s concerns about the social effects of scientific advances.
Adding a human dimension to the novel’s cold, profit-oriented
corporate setting is the developing relationship between teens Jonathan
Trumbull and Gretchen Hoffman. Highly recommended.