The Affinities

Written by Robert Charles Wilson

Narrated by Scott Brick

In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies--genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the twenty-two Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't just people who are likely to like you. They're also the people with whom you can best cooperate in all areas of life--creative, interpersonal, even financial.

At loose ends both professional and personal, young Adam Fisk takes the suite of tests to see if he qualifies for any of the Affinities, and finds that he's a match for one of the largest, the one called Tau. It's utopian—at first. Problems in all areas of his life begin to simply sort themselves out, as he becomes part of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another—to helping him.

But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war--with one another.
What happens next will change Adam, and his world, forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781427262592

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson was born in California and lives in Toronto. His novel Spin won science fiction’s Hugo Award in 2006. Earlier, he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel A Hidden Place; Canada’s Aurora Award for Darwinia; and the John W. Campbell Award for The Chronoliths.

Reviews for The Affinities

[Joshua Benfield · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. It was my first book by him that I've read, and I hope his other books are equally good or better. My favorite part was watching the Affinities (and the main character) evolve as the years pass. The ending was unfortunately my least favorite part but was also not bad either. It just seemed like it could've just used another chapter to really wrap things up, but I guess the author wanted to leave it up to the imagination or leave the world more open ended for another book set in that universe.

[socprof9740 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is the second disappointment for this long-time RCW's fan (after Burning Paradise). Up to the very end, we are supposed to root for the "good guys" in this story, the Tau affinity (a new form of in-grouping, based on some kind neuro-measurements) even though they are as exclusive and discriminatory, us-first and screw everyone else, as the other affinities, except they are the "chosen one" by the scientist who created the affinities and their underlying concepts.
In the end, the entire concept of affinities falls apart thanks to governmental intervention because, otherwise, these very libertarian groupings were ready to claim self-governance, which would lead to various forms of segregation and exclusion. Are we supposed to find that appealing?
And the creation of in-groups also involves the creation of corresponding out-groups, so, we get a very predictable affinity conflict between the libertarian, multi-centered Taus, and the authoritarian Hets (the villains of that story, the ones who use violence, even though the Taus do distasteful things, including spying on people).
Interestingly enough, the ending completely evaporates that structure, but only to open up to a different type of grouping that is supposed to be better.
I think this book is an inadvertent cautionary tale on grouping-by-algorithm.

[conalo-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The was both an interesting and fun read. I really liked the main concept as told in the story with humans falling into set groups of people after genetic testing that you are predisposed to get along with. Interesting characters and a plot that kept me reading consistently. The only thing I really wasn't sure about is the ending which (at least for me) kind of just petered out. If I had to guess, the author left enough open topics that a sequel is probably pegged for sometime in the not to distant future.

4 stars for a fun read that I enjoyed quite a bit. Recommended for fans of near future sci-fi stories.

[bobholt-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While I was initially not excited about the concept of a sci-fi novel based on social networking, I gave Wilson the benefit of the doubt (based on Spin), and was pleasantly surprised.

Wilson is able to take a modern concept and extrapolate possibilities for very near-future advances. He is then able to give it some elements of a thriller, and ends up with a very fun novel akin to the best works of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.

[adamwolf_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am biased against books where there are multiple jumps through time--i.e. a 4 year skip here, a 5 year skip here.

That being said, I really liked this book. Full of good ideas, and some scary ones.

[alanpoulter_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rather disappointing, the central idea is weak.

[ohernaes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Near future science fiction. New methods enable mapping people into "affinities"-collections of like minds maximizing the potential for cooperation. These groups of course become rivals. Recommended.

[gwendydd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My opinion of this book is the same as my opinion of Robert Charles Wilson's other books: he has some really great ideas, he writes some very believable characters, his writing is very engaging, but he never quite brings those great ideas to full fruition, and in the end I found this disappointing.The interesting idea is this: what if neurologists found a way to map people's brains, so that they could put people into social groups where they will automatically fit in and thrive? The implication is that by finding people who are neurologically wired to work well together, you could create the next phase of human evolution: a type of inter-human cooperation that makes it possible for humans to go far beyond what humans have ever done before.This is a fascinating premise, and for a while, the book follows up on it promisingly. Naturally a corporation owns the technology to do this, so some of the book's conflict revolves around the corporation's attempts to keep control of the technology. The story also really demonstrates what happens when a large group of people inherently trust each other and watch out for each other, to the exclusion of others - a new kind of class society is born. Unfortunately, the book never explores the idea of the next level of human evolution. The Affinities ultimately amount to no more than Good Old Boy networks. You need a lawyer? Oh, there's a guy in the Affinity who can do that. You need a helicopter tonight? Well, we can make some calls to make that happen. There is never any exploration of what humanity looks like with improved cooperation, or what they can accomplish.Some of the reason that the book never explores the premise's full potential is that it focuses too much on the family squabbles of the main character. This is both a strength and a weakness of the book. It is a strength, because the plot is very much driven by what is happening to the main character, and Wilson is very good at writing believable and interesting people (although in this case, all of the characters except the main character are pretty one-dimensional). This is a weakness because the book is too focused on small details, and leaves out a lot of the big picture.All in all, I found the book enjoyable to read (I listened to the audiobook, which is well-read), but ultimately unsatisfying.

[jsburbidge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This felt very typical of the author -- strengths from following people's lives at the everyday level, which is a constant through big-concept and smaller-concept books of his.The book posits a jump forward and a systematizing of the study of the psychology of social interactions, from a ground-level view: the narrator becomes a member of an Affinity, and the early history around the affinity model is told through his eyes. It has windows onto two main periods: the beginning, when the Affinites are new, fairly unknown, and the narrator is just joining, and a secondary point where they are not only generating pushback from society at large but are in conflict with one another. There's a twist at the end -- the book isn't going where you (probably) think it's going.This is nicely written -- good prose, engaging characters, interesting themes -- but it's not as big or shiny as, say Axis or even Darwinia. Solid, enjoyable, but not at his best.

[stefferoo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My thoughts on The Affinities in a nutshell: Loved loved loved the idea, but not so keen on the execution. Social science fiction is an enjoyable subgenre for me, but when the socio-political part of that equation gets lost in the narrative, I confess having trouble getting into the story. Nevertheless, there are a lot of interesting themes in here, many of which can be gleaned from the general description of the novel itself.The book begins with an introduction to our narrator, Adam Fisk. At loose ends with his life and career, one day he decides to sign up for Affinity testing, the newfangled social phenomenon that has been sweeping over the continent by storm. That decision will change his life forever. Adam’s results ends up qualifying him for entrance into the Tau Affinity, one of twenty-two exclusive social groups whose membership is determined by a complex battery of personality tests. Tau becomes Adam’s new family. His fellow members don’t need to know him to understand him or to be his friend; they’re all Tau too. It’s “Tau telepathy”, everybody just gets everybody else. Yet as the years go by and Affinities become more entrenched in our societies, new problems start to manifest. The people in the twenty-two Affinities are happy with their new friends and new lives, but what of the people who don’t want to join an Affinity or whose tests don’t qualify them for any of them? And because members within an Affinity are so adept at working with each other, it is inevitable that the bigger and more influential Affinities begin to accumulate real political and financial power – Affinities like Tau and Het, whose differences eventually lead them to war against each other.It’s all very fascinating, and indeed, I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so of the book immensely. Alas, around the halfway mark is when things started unraveling. While I liked the concept of Affinities, what we don’t get near enough of is the science or technology behind it. I felt like I was expected to just roll with the punches, ignore the implausibilities and just move on, so to speak. Which would have been fine with me if the story was more satisfying on the social commentary front. But it wasn’t either, not particularly. With regards to the book’s topics, it felt like the author was biting off more than he could chew, resulting in limited implementation of the main idea when its potential in fact demands so much more. While reading The Affinities, I frequently caught the sense of the story crying out begging to be a lot bigger, but it nonetheless fails to break out of the superficial plot that confines it.Granted, writing stories that explore human behavior is always tricky. What Wilson endeavored to do here is admirable, but in the end I think the concept he put forward was treated too simplistically. Perhaps this is because we only focus on a single affinity, Tau, and didn’t get to see much of what happens within the others. I felt less the “affinity-sympathy” between members of Tau, and instead more the differences between the people associated with Affinities versus those who were not. The first group unfortunately came across as insouciant and promiscuous pot-smoking shallow snobs, while the other group was portrayed as stuffy, bigoted, corporate-machine-loving ignorant right-wingers (most notably illustrated by Adam’s family). I don’t think this was the point of the novel, but that was a strong impression it gave off. Our main protagonist is neither of these two extremes but ends up being a rather passive entity caught in the middle, which in some ways makes his character even more irksome.Perhaps what excited me most about this novel was its setting. Toronto is my hometown and I loved that Robert Charles Wilson (who resides there) did it plenty of justice by illustrating what a vibrant city it is, made up of diverse neighborhoods filled with diverse people. It is also Canada’s largest city and economic powerhouse. Arguably, its qualities make it the perfect milieu for stories like The Affinities to take place, because it has all the necessary ingredients for them.In the end, I don’t want to sound overly critical or make you think that I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did. There is a very interesting story here; when I wasn’t frustrated by it, I actually really liked it, especially when the plot picked up again in Part Three as Tau wages war with their rival, Het Affinity. It becomes a more direct and intimate story at that point, bringing suspense and even a few thrills into the picture. Unfortunately though, whatever comment this book hoped to make about society was lost in the tousle. Still, there are many things this book does right, and it’s worth reading.

[jjbooklvr · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is one of those books I wanted to enjoy more than I did. It started out interesting, got a little slow in the middle and then raced to the end. I really didn't like the ending. Enough that I will have a hard time recommending this book to anyone. Or even know who the book is targeted towards.