And then there were the people who experienced Lock In

A virus. A broken system. A new kind of human. Sounds familiar?

In his 2014 near-future dystopian story, Scalzi depicts a world in the midst of a pandemic crisis. Just like a prophecy.

Okay, this is not a review; it’s just a collection of scattered notes. You know… Impressions like sparks that lit up in my head while reading. When I first picked up Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, I thought it was nonfiction. The tone. The structure. The creeping dread… It felt like a documentary, like something pulled from the archives of the Spanish flu. But no, it’s science fiction. Or rather, science fiction that has already happened.

A global virus.

Mass disruption.

Political chaos.

Corporate opportunism.

The book unfolds like an oral history. There’s no main character or classic plot arc. Instead, there’s just a chorus of voices (doctors, engineers, journalists, bureaucrats, and the Hadens themselves) puzzle together what happened. A virus tears through the world. Most people recover, but a small percentage end up “locked in”: fully conscious, fully paralyzed. They are trapped in their own bodies. No way to move. No way to speak. No way out.

Government missteps.

Tech giants circling.

Insurance companies ghosting.

But here’s the twist: Unlocked isn’t just about the collapse; it’s also about what comes next. People don’t wait to be rescued, they build new ways to move, to speak. To live.

Neural interfaces.

Robotic bodies.

A new kind of existence.

A different way of being human.
Is this science fiction?

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Thanks for being here, guys,

Michael.