The Tomorrow Code

With some few exceptions, most of my reading list comes from either John Scalzi's Whatever or SF Signal. This book comes from the latter.

The premise is simple - two teens in New Zealand think of a way to get messages from the future and then start finding them. Of course, the paradox is that their future selves are the ones sending the messages. The idea behind this seems sound enough to answer Scalzi's two question test - why did they find it first? Because no one else was looking for it; how did they do it? By analyzing the data in a different way.

The story is a little heavy-handed in its message - people do bad things to the environment, but that is not anything new. I did like that our heroes couldn't necessarily figure out everything their future selves were saying and that they didn't always succeed. The story was both pessimistic and yet optimistic in the execution.

This was a good science fiction novel, but not as great as some of the other YA literature being put out there. I would give it to a young teen to read, but not an older or more sophisticated reader.