For civilization, devastation is a disease. For not only does it destroy buildings, disrupt basic services, and overturn the rule of law, it infects the humans exposed to its necrotic caress with a persistent sense of nihilism. It entices them to believe that society, as it was, is gone and that only fools would waste time re-establishing it. It convinces them that the only worthwhile virtue of their new existence, amongst the smoldering rubble of what was, is to survive and to do for oneself at the expense of everyone else in the name of that survival. But herein lies devastation's true perniciousness. For if everyone adopts this selfish attitude, then nothing is ever repaired, rebuilt, reborn. The world, staffed by survivors, is allowed to decay until even the memory of civilization is gone. This is the attitude that pervades the first three volumes of Jeff Somers' series and its one he wields to great and depressing effect.
It's the 21st century and life as we know it is gone. Nation states, and the individual freedoms they granted to their citizens, have been swept away by the System, an apolitical surveillance state that has, in the name of uniting the world, deployed bombs and droids, wars and assassins, as a means of establishing a new, peaceful order. For a time, widespread resistance to this new, globalist regime burned bright, but eventually even these organized pockets of rebellion were ground out beneath the ruthless bootheels of the System cops and their masters, men and women who would rather rule over rubble than not rule at all.
Through this dystopian world simmering with resentments slouches Avery Cates, a 27-year-old mercenary who barely remembers the world before unification. The totality of his adult life has been lived beneath the merciless eye of the system and their enforcers who roam the ruined streets of his native New York with a kind of brutal and uncaring vigilance. Cates' only means of survival in this world of solitude and disenfranchisement is to hire his gun out to those who can pay for murder. But though his skills have kept him alive for longer than most of his compatriots, his luck appears to have run out. For Cates has been tricked into killing a system Cop, a crime that generally results in long spasms of torture, at the hands of these new brothers in blue, prior to a painful death. His only escape from this particularly grim fate is to allow himself to become a tool for the director of the system Cops' Internal Affairs division, an exploitative relationship that will send Cates on a long, destructive spiral into the very bowels of his dirty, corrupted world.
A dark and difficult experience, The Avery Cates Series is a coarse and clumsy take on dystopian science fiction. Mr. Somers draws on 20th-century history to essentially recreate, in the 21st century, life imagined by the Third Reich, corporate fascism in which people were only allowed to act with the permission of the all-powerful, all-seeing state. This framework is then married to a series of explosive challenges for Cates to overcome at the expense of everyone around him. This union of historical influences and Hollywood blockbusterism initially stirs powerful emotions, particularly for those readers even passingly familiar with Nazism. Unfortunately, this is where the author's creativity ends. For all else is merely a stress test to see how far Cates can be pushed before he cracks and relinquishes what's left of his humanity.
Perhaps the most unpleasant part of Mr. Somers' work here, though, is his reliance on foul language. Any good story deploys its fair share of epithets which, when properly and sparingly used, have an unrivaled impact upon the reader. But the author completely rejects this philosophy, instead, peppering his work with every permutation of what George Carlin called the seven dirty words. Yes, to some degree, this harsh and violent language helps convey both the brutality and the hopelessness of Cates' world, but he accomplishes this at the expense of the reader's attention and respect, both of which are eroded by his reliance on such a flippant means by which to communicate personal and societal desolation.
There are virtues here. The Avery Cates Series challenges notions of what it means to be human. It adopts and darkly distorts proposed technologies such as digitized consciousness, mechanized exoskeletons and the artificial hivemind to create an affectingly grim view of a possible future. Imagining and spinning out such scenarios is not a simple achievement. And yet, this is at far as it goes. Mr. Somers does not grasp these tools and fashion something with which to advance the conversation. He has, instead, adopted the themes and the rhythms laid down by the masters before him and, sadly, re-constituted them with only marginal success.
For those looking to be entertained by a swift, atavistic plunge into a grim, pugilistic world, there is material here worth exploring. But for anyone seeking to find enlightenment amongst the ashes, such embers are few and far between. (2/5 Stars)
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