Book Review: The Technologists

The Technologists is a Fun little thriller/whodunit based in late 19th century Boston. Call it 'Historical fiction with a pinch of steampunk'. The first graduating class of the newly-founded MIT are forced to band together to get to the bottom of a series of technology-based disasters that befall the  city.

The book started out a bit weak, with the period-centric language feeling forced, and some of the character motivations feeling excessively contrived (e.g. in several places in the book, anti-technology folk stop their violence/rioting/etc to pontificate on the evils of science and technology). The science used to create the disasters is contrived and implausible, but this is as forgivable as that used in your average Bond flick.

The book really comes together in later chapters though. A good thriller like this, upon revealing who's behind the wrong-doing, should have you exclaiming "I should have known it was him! The signs were there all along!". The author accomplishes this several times over, only then to pull the reader back to realize that the given character wasn't the culprit after all. The author did a good job doing this, making the last few chapters worth the few groans induced during the earlier parts of the book.

The Technologists: A Novel