Lexicon by Max Barry

Great sci-fi has often traded on the genre’s potential for making abstract ideas real: Philip K Dick made the question of ‘what makes us human?’ tangible by creating a world of artificial intelligence, Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse played on the idea of identity with its memory erasing/replacing technology, while cinema explored the very nature of reality in films such as The Matrix and Inception.

Max Barry’s Lexicon has the same aims, but for neurolinguistics: the science of language. In Lexicon, neurolinguistics has been refined to the point where it can be used to essentially hack the brain: using the right combination of words to slip through the mind’s defences and manipulate it from within. A group known as ‘Poets’ are the masters of this art and run an elite academy, honing students into highly disciplined and dangerous wordsmiths. Lexicon aims to mix linguistic theory with an action-thriller plotline but the two never entirely congeal, resulting in something like a TED talk interspersed with car chases. The premise is interesting but never really gets developed beyond the cover’s ‘words are weapons’ tagline and, while it’s often funny and compellingly fast-paced, it’s all just a little too slight to ever become really engaging. [Ross McIndoe]