Brain Jack follows the story of Sam Wilson, an 18 year old high school senior who is also a world class hacker.  The story is set in near future New York City, where online gaming has become as addictive as street drugs, and computer mouses and keyboards are obsolete, replaced by “neuro” headsets that connect your brain directly to computers.  But if your head becomes a computer, then who says brains cannot be hacked?

The story begins when Sam carries out a cyber attack on a tech company in an effort to get a free “neuro” headset.  When things go awry, Sam infects their systems with viruses, and unwittingly takes down the internet in the United States for 3 days.  Unfortunately for Sam, he doesn’t get away with the attack without being noticed. Without giving too much away, Sam is noticed by an elite cyber technology group run by the government, and has to defend the U.S. against an enemy created by citizens’ increasing dependency on technology.  

The setting of near future New York City is completely believable.  Falkner includes relatively insignificant details about the setting in order to distinguish it from current day NYC.  This is shown by a scene with a place called “Gamer Alley”. Gamer alley is a place with games so addictive that they have been declared illegal.  Falkner uses multiple parallels between being addicted to these games, and being addicted to drugs in today’s world. Sam has a brief encounter with a woman whose hands twitching shows that she is a “Gamer” or game addict.  The way Falkner so nonchalantly talks about gaming in this book would be best described as a part of the Uncanny Valley that, gaming in this world is so similar, yet dissimilar to gaming in our world. It isn’t much of a stretch that the world Falkner describes could happen in our world.  Personally, I find this terrifying.

The characters in this book are extremely believable at some points, but tend to follow well known cliches extremely obviously.  Obviously, in a dystopian book there will be some disconnect with how people in real life act compared to their literary counterparts, however it feels like a cop out for some parts of the book.  Perhaps Falkner was suffering from writer's block, and needed something for the continuation of the story. Regardless, in a heavily saturated topic/genre, Falkner makes an satisfactory effort to distinguish his book from the other 100 just like it.

Closer to the end, the book takes a huge turn that Falkner just kind of dumps on the reader.  While looking back I can see he was making attempts to foreshadow the turn, but he didn’t do a really great job at giving clues.  You can see where he wanted the story to go, but the way he wrote the book didn’t do a great job at expressing it. Just as a lesson, you cannot start foreshadowing a massive plot turn the page before it comes out.

The larger theme of the story would be about cybersecurity, and how important it is to keep your data safe.  This is exemplified by the prologue, which is an attempt to sound like an edgy hacker that could steal your data “If he wanted to”.  I actually took some issue with this, because the prologue doesn’t compare at all to the main character Sam. You cannot make Sam a scary and anonymous hacker, then have him be a victim/protagonist in the same book.  I understand that the prologue is meant to be a hook for the reader, but it comes off as tacky when you read the rest of the book. Switching between hacker cliches might be an easy way to further the plot, but it’s also annoying and overdone

In conclusion, the book is actually not as bad of a book as I thought it would be from the title.  In all seriousness, what kind of a name is “Brain Jack”? Personally, it just sounds off to me. He didn’t even make the main character’s name Jack, which would have been awesome.

As someone who reads a lot of science fiction, this book does fall into a lot of annoying cliches, but makes an effort to distinguish itself.  Whether it succeeds or not in this is up to you, the reader.