A thrilling demolition of tropes and expectations in The Demon Cycle

From The Week of December 30th, 2013

There are many ways to measure a man. We can judge him on how he treats his fellows, on how he acts when there's no one around to watch him, even on how he represents himself to those who know no better. But these observations can only tell us so much, and mostly about the public and private faces of someone shaped by a million different experiences and interactions. Hence, it's popular to suggest putting him to the most extreme test, of stripping away every advantage to see what he is like when the crucible is upon him. But even cowards can find courage when there's nothing left to lose. No, the best way to measure a man is to give him the world, to grant him godlike powers to change the destinies of himself and everyone he knows. Only then, when there are no societal checks left to confine him, can you truly know him. And this truth is vividly rendered in Peter V. Brett's fascinating and often exhilarating series.

In a devastated world, ground to dust by an unstoppable threat, life is as difficult as it is short. Civilization has been reduced to isolated hollows, semi-autonomous hamlets notionally under the control of various neighboring duchies. But while these regional authorities provide a threadbare framework of centralized control, this is, at best, lip service to a humanity traumatized into servitude by immortal demons which, every night, rise up from the earth's core, yearning for destruction and sustenance. Manifesting from stone and wood, from wind and fire, these seemingly unvanquishable foes reek havoc upon society, preventing it from advancing upon the medieval creeds and conditions that define it.

However, despite the insurmountable obstacles these demons represent, not all hope is lost. For these creatures are susceptible to sunlight, which dispatches them back to the hell they came from, and to the Wards, a hieroglyphic language that, when properly composed, has the power to not only repel the demons with magic, but to harm them as well. Only, the secrets of this language have been long lost, forcing the surviving humans to huddle in their houses, behind the few wards they remember, and pray for a dawn that never comes swiftly enough.

This gruesome stalemate, however, is shattered some 300 years after the rising of the demons when an ancient city is re-discovered by a wandering youth, searching, earnestly and hopelessly, for answers to the demon threat. At great peril, the young man liberates not only warded weapons from this sacred place, but also knowledge of long-lost wards that may well allow humanity to hold its own against the demons. However, this city is not of his heritage and the fight that ensues, over possession of its relics, and the mantle of its stewardship, may well shatter humanity forever and see a permanent night ascend from the Core to claim the world.

A thrilling ride through a broken world yearning for any sign of hope, the first three volumes of the Demon Cycle is, on balance, excellent fantasy fiction. Drawing on the venerable traditions of the epics that have shaped the genre, Mr. Brett begins with a premise that that has underpinned thousands of tales like it, the young man rising out of obscurity to defeat the indefatigable dark power. And yet, instead of relying upon the tropes typical of such tales, he exploits them, establishing the reader's expectations only to shatter them with creative developments of character and plot that charge what should be a stale adventure with energy and vigor. This is no mean feat; it is far easier to travel the well-worn path than it is to strike out on one's own. Thus, Mr. Brett should be celebrated for the exhilarating surprises his subversiveness generates.

While The Demon Cycle, thus far, has a cast of engaging, if overexposed characters, and a familiar world so reminiscent of more epics than I can name, it is pleasingly original in its willingness to draw in the symbols and the tropes of different genres to forge something new. Elements of horror, romance and dystopianism are all present here, lending the work the doom of a post-apocalyptic novel. And yet, these various threads are united by the work's protagonists, all of whom stubbornly put a shoulder into the plot until it is flying along, the work of potent, if opposing, wills. What's more, the author has drawn on the tropes of the video-game world to provide an even more familiar structure to the plot which sees heroes and villains alike methodically ascending from powerless obscurity to triumph and wonder.

The Demon Cycle ought to be a Frankenstein, a monster built from the stolen parts of unconnected creatures and, certainly, it has its bad moments. The genre-bending sees Mr. Brett discordantly inject episodes of extreme violence and physical and sexual abuse into a tale that, at times, feels as emotionally harmless as the Lord of The Rings. What's more, it's borrowing of things familiar to us leads it down a road to cultural insensitivity. For Mr. Brett has uncritically appropriated swaths of Bedouin and Arabic society to stand in for his world's desert people, exposing his readers to a thoroughly westernized view of cultures more complex than he often gives them credit for. These are flaws that drag on the three published novels, burdening them with unnecessary baggage. And yet, given that the series' strength is its capacity to subvert, perhaps these too are simply expectations being set up to be knocked down. We can hope.

This is a superb and unexpected delight that resists being set down. An adventure of the most darkly engaging kind... (4/5 Stars)

A dense but disappointing conclusion to the Spin Series in Ghost Spin

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

For centuries, philosophers and thinkers have attempted to arrive at a coherent, all-encompassing answer to the question of what it means to be human. Their avenues of thought, though legion, have focused on the spiritual, the dutiful, the attitudinal, even the cognitive. And in this, they have missed the most critical path, the technological. After all, the question takes on a whole new universe of significance when we consider that, soon, humans won't even be exclusively flesh and blood, that they will extend their lives by using artificially grown replacement organs, that they will adapt themselves to life under Earth's oceans and in the skies of other worlds. We are on the brink of revolutions in cybernetic enhancement, genetic engineering and quantum computing that will eventually collapse the nation state and end capitalism as we know it. Defining humanity will become meaningless because to define it will be to define life in all its intelligent forms. This Chris Moriarty explores in the concluding work to her Spin Trilogy.

It is the 25th century and humanity, under the semi-authoritarian aegis of the United Nations, has taken to the stars. Utilizing the half-understood technologies made possible by breakthroughs in the quantum universe, artificial intelligences have been created to operate infrastructure and spacecraft, biomechanical wirejobs have been fused into the human brain and nervous system to create cognitive and physical enhancements, and exotic matter has been mined and deployed to create faster-than-light relays through which humans can explore the galaxy. This ought to be a utopia, a world beyond strife and discord. And yet, political corruption, wage slavery and widespread distrust of humans for the intelligent machines upon which they rely has forged a fractured civilization, one in which deep disparities in income equality and opportunity have lead to an unimaginable gap in the standard of living between elites on earth and colonials elsewhere.

Into this toxic stew of exploitation floats Catherine Li. A veteran of the UN's military arm, she has paid her dues and, thanks to Cohen, the oldest AI in human space, she has forged some kind of life. Sure, there is still the question of her past war-crimes, for which some would hang her, but her enduring relationship with Cohen keeps her largely safe from their manipulations. Until, one day, she learns that Cohen is gone, the victim of someone else's murderous intentions or his own suicidal instincts it's hard to say. But armed with a spun-off remnant of his personality, she intends to get to the bottom of why she's lost the only man she's ever loved. In doing so, she will come to understand the universe, and humanity's future in it, IN WAYS both frightening and fearsome.

A long, meandering conclusion to Ms. Moriarty's engaging, thoughtful, and confronting trilogy, Ghost Spin is equal parts success and failure. Taking up the structure of whodoneit crime fiction that worked so well in the trilogy's excellent first volume, it is essentially a 400-page rumination on the spectacular possibilities and perilous pitfalls of technologies sure to be churned out by the quantum revolution. Atop this, Ms. Moriarty has welded a plot framework that unites an updated version of the sea-pirate story with a mysterious murder-suicide that is entertaining without managing to be engrossing. For the plot here feels secondary, little more than a delivery system for the payload that is the author's philosophical ruminations on humanity's habits and foibles.

Catherine Li, the trilogy's protagonist, has always been a deliberate cipher. Having had her memories scrubbed as a consequence of the technological constraints of her job as a soldier for the UN, she is a benumbed and largely empty vessel animated by instinct and desire. These were deliberate choices on Ms. Moriarty's part and they worked when Li had a mission to complete and a status quo to overturn. Here, though, Li, once a badass of the first order, has been reduced to a woman desperate to find the only man who she invited inside her head, to fill up those empty spaces left blank by her past. And though the author couches this eager search in posthuman terms -- the man as artificial intelligence and Li herself as a copy of a copy --, this does not obfuscate the basic framework of a very old, very tired story.

But while Ms. Moriarty may have overexposed her characters and their deeds, few authors of popular fiction can speak with such eloquence about the nature of existence. In Spin State, she revealed a remarkable talent for terrifying technologies that ate away at what humans hold most dear, identity. Here, she takes up this most sacred virtue and smashes it upon the altar of science. The fragments that result are the fragments of her tales and in this she is, at least for this writer, a must-buy. But the Spin Universe has reached its end, at least with these characters. New ground must be sought out and mined for value.

Problematic, but no less thoughtful or imaginative for that... (3/5 Stars)

An entertaining, informative look at TV's new golden age in Difficult Men

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

Though art has always been, to some degree, shaped by patronage, money that flowed from rich donors interested in vanity and beauty, it has never been more captured and regulated by financial interests. For only they have had the means by which to distribute art globally through the mediums of television and film, concerts and art shows. Though many of them would have initially promised otherwise, this has naturally lead to such investors gaining a significant say over what kind of art is made. After all, if the primary means for the artist to make money is to put their art before the eyeballs of millions, and if it is all-but-impossible for them to own the means of this distribution, then the artist has no power and is forced to yield to the investor. But now, slowly, painfully, this model, so dependent on the whims of the rich and the entitled, is changing, allowing in a new era of style and expression that is mesmerizing audiences with stories no one has been able to tell. This transformation, and its results, Brett Martin explores in this excellent, cultural investigation.

For the first fifty years of television's existence, the consumer was all-but irrelevant. From his perspective, he would sit down in his living room and watch a narrow selection of programs broadcast to him by powerful, unknowable network s whose executives he'd never meet, and whose programming motives he'd never understand. For to those same executives, he was just a poorly understood data point lumped in with millions of other data points to create the audience, a captive collective they could present to advertisers as millions of people just waiting to buy their products. This was television, entertainment sponsored and shaped by a single stream of revenue (ads) which not only determined the kind of programs that these networks would air, but governed the morals and the attitudes the programs would represent.

Over the last 20 years, with the rise of Cable, this old, decaying model has begun to collapse, replaced by a new and vigorous view of television programming that has electrified audiences. Though ads are still present in the economic calculus used to create new TV, they are just a part. New sources of funding, from DVD box-sets to Carriage Fees, have liberated cable channels from the tyranny of advertisers, looking to hawk their products to primed audiences, and allowed them to create shows that sound out the dark depths of the human soul while reflecting the modern world in a manner that is, at times, so realistic it borders on the ideological. From The Sopranos to Louie, from The Wire to Veep, this new golden age of television has asked questions no one has been able to ask, not in this here-to-for constricted medium. And in doing so, they have left an indelible mark on the culture that will not be forgotten.

From HBO to FX, from from executives to creators, Difficult Men is a vivid exploration of the transformative programming broadcast in the Cable age. Throughout these 300 pages, packed with gossip and biography, history and new technology, Mr. Martin introduces us to the complicated artists frustrated by television's narrowness, the ambitious executives who sought to use Cable as a means of freeing them, and the unforgettable works of dramatic art born by this revolution. Dividing his chronicle into three, roughly five-year blocks of time, the author begins with HBO's early, powerfully disruptive successes (The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood) and concludes with those who've taken up the torch HBO lit and then fumbled: Fx with The Shield, Rescue Me and Justified; AMC with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And in this, he has touched on virtually every significant TV product that has delighted and disturbed the culture over the last 20 years.

Though the work succeeds in providing the necessary background to understand why TV has changed so much since the early 1990s, Difficult Men is at its best when illuminating the powerful, conflicted personalities that have driven these cultural touchstones. Writing with a mixture of reverence and amusement, Mr. Martin examines the politics, the dispositions and the working habits of chase and Milch, Ball and Weiner, all as a means of connecting their issues and their passions to the iconic characters they've created. In this, we come to an understanding of Tony soprano and Don Draper, the Fishers and the Whites, that borders on the profound. For these were not simply pieces of fiction conjured into existence by men newly freed to tell stories. They are outgrowths of drive and obsession, anger and confusion, that we all experience but that has been more deeply concentrated in these Showrunners.

While Difficult Men's stumbles are few, there are disappointments here. Mr. Martin spends virtually no time discussing the archetype of the anti-hero alpha male represented by these shows and the way in which the culture will eventually grow tired of him. He makes it clear that this particularly American view of the modern man can be directly traced back to the men who created them, and so we can infer that the preponderance of male artists in the world of television is responsible for this. But he fails to grapple with the central question here. When, two years from now, audiences are sick of seeing yet another version of the same, conflicted white man in his 40s, and turn away from such programs, will Television decide that the Cable revolution was unsustainable, or will it realize that it needs to seek out newer, more diverse talent? Moreover, Mr. Martin gives almost no time here to the role Showtime played in this revolution. Dexter is winked at, but Homeland, Nurse Jackie, The L Word and Weeds are all neglected, likely for not fitting into the alpha-male narrative.

Notwithstanding its occasional omissions, this is an excellent and deeply entertaining look at products and people that have shaped our culture since the late 1990s. A must-read for anyone who has watched even a few of these shows... (4/5 Stars)

A long, filthy descent into nihilism in The Avery Cates Series

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

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)

A dark journey through L.A.'s underground in Drive

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Until science solves for the mysteries of the mind, the age-old debate of nature versus nurture will continue to percolate, propelled onward by the desire to understand unfathomable humanity. Why do some of us become saints and others sociopaths? Why do some of us have indomitable tempers while others possess uninterruptable serenity? Why do some of us drive ourselves to the heights of fame and fortune while others never make it out of our neighborhoods? Questions and accusations, theories and excuses, abound, some of them helpful, others generated from bias. Until we have a roadmap to human nature, we're left with only our intuitions and our suppositions, a circumstantial uncertainty played to eerie effect in James Sallis' brief but bloody piece of crime fiction.

A son of the American Southwest, birthed from a home of deep dysfunction, the Driver moves through life as if it were a movie. He remembers meals and jobs, girls and cars, but the rest is sloughed off as vestigial to his Polaroid life. Lacking even a name, he is a quiet ghost in the City of Angels, performing car stunts for Hollywood by day and acting as the wheelman for criminals by night, a dual life that seems to suit him quite well, that is, until two transplanted connected gangsters from old New York decide to tear up the rulebook to their underworld game, stalking him for ill-gotten gains Driver would have happily returned if they had the courtesy to ask nicely. That they don't is, for Driver, causes belli and the fallout promises to be spectacular.

Barely a hundred pages, Drive is nearly a perfect piece of dark, summer reading. Emerging from the swift, flashy tradition of crime fiction popularized by Elmore Leonard et al, Mr. Sallis has constructed a series of dramatic, even moving vignettes that act upon the narrative like flashbulbs, momentarily shedding light on fragments of time in the life of a man (Driver) who has only a foothold in our world, the rest of his nature lost to some netherspace of deeds and apparitions. Consequently, Driver, the only character who claims more than perhaps ten percent of the tale, is a person barely glimpsed, his motives hidden behind a creepily affectless facade that Mr. Sallis has miraculously imbued with magnetism, not repulsiveness.

Reducing his cast to but one serious player is, for the author, a toss of the dice, a roll made in the confident hope that Driver will captivate readers. And he does. For he is not a simple monster who demands that we accept his nihilism-as-parable for 21st-century America. Rather, he is a deeply damaged person who has come to imprint upon the world certain codes of conduct that are, for him, inviolate. This is not some ancient skein of honor upon thieves co-opted from the Mediterranean. It is the means of his survival in a world that, without his rules, is completely inexplicable. In this, is just like everyone else he shares the world with. The difference rises only when we contemplate the particular codes which, for a man who does not seem to feel pain, much less emotion of any kind, are quite apart from the ones we would know. This is why he is a creature of fascination. He is a puzzle, not an animal.

There are other pleasures here, certainly. Mr. Sallis' Los Angeles operates in that entertaining pretend space of urban cities devoid of law-enforcement, a world fully endorsed by Hollywood that suggests that civilization is merely a series of encounters and exchanges moderated by the threat of violence and the possession of power. This may be absurd, but it is also profoundly appealing, offering up a glimpse of an unrestrained life that our savage sides long to experience. It is the forbidden sandbox of no holds barred that we all left behind AS toddlers learning that we had to accept society's chains in exchange for life. This adrenaline hit never gets old.

A rewarding read... (4/5 Stars)

The Petrovitch Trilogy booms and sizzles like a Hollywood blockbuster

From The Week of April 15, 2013

Beforelong, any discussion of what constitutes a good life inevitably turns to the fundamental question of what we, as individuals, owe to the world into which we are born. We cannot choose the society that birthed us. Nor can we necessarily choose to emigrate to the society that best suits us. And so, given that we lack a full measure of agency in this area, one would expect our answer to be that we owe our world nothing, that one can only feel an obligation to something that they have freely chosen to belong to. Despite this, many of us choose to give back not only our time and money, but, in some cases, our very lives. Such a selfless act of devotion to a society can only mean that, to some of us, society is everything. This most enduring debate underpins Simon Morden's explosive, apocalyptic trilogy.

It is the third decade of the 21st century and the world has been convulsed by terrorism. An event known simply as the Armageddon, a series of nuclear suicide bombings perpetrated by zealots, destroyed much of the new century's promise, reducing many of the world's countries to radioactive wastelands and triggering a refugee crisis throughout what remained. The United States and the European Union appear to be the two remaining powers of significance. However, the former is too beset by its own religious fundamentalism and the latter is too convulsed by seeming indifference to set about restoring order to a planet in political, environmental and economic shambles.

Amidst this ruin endures Samuel Petrovitch. A refugee from radioactive Saint Petersburg, he has come to post-Armageddon London, now known as the Metrozone, to attend school at the Imperial College of London where he has distinguished himself as a brilliant thinker in the field of experimental physics. Cynical beyond his youthful years, he has been deeply scarred by a hellish adolescence that has left him with not only a faulty heart, but a heavily burdened conscience that, despite his every effort, he cannot quash. He wishes only to be left alone, to create something glorious out of the rubble, but fate has conspired to place him at the center of great events over which he has only minimal control, events that have the power to transform the world beyond something even Petrovitch's powerful mind would recognize.

Ambitiously grappling with any number of vital social issues, The Samuel Petrovitch Trilogy is a gripping thrillride through a post-nuclear Hell. Mr. Morden imagines a profoundly scarred world that has finally paid a high price for nuclear proliferation. He's then seeded this world with a fascinating array of characters, all of whom have suffered through not only Armageddon, but the socioeconomic fallout that has virtually ended the notion of local government, transferring the bulk of political power, at least in the Metrozone, into the hands of gangland figures and crime lords who possess the lethal combination of ruthlessness and manpower to make some kind of order from the chaos. We are made witness to the birth of religions, of social classes, even of new traditions, that would have been unimaginable even 20 years earlier.

Though Mr. Morden's trilogy is squarely aimed at readers seeking plots and prose drenched in adrenaline, his work here is elevated by a series of ethical questions that will transfix more thoughtful readers. The author deploys Petrovitch as a cipher for the technologies of tomorrow, a means through which his readers can interpret both the promise and the terror of what's to come. What are the potential costs to human society of widespread computer automation of infrastructure and transportation? What are the spiritual implications of creating artificial intelligences which exhibit every indication of sentience and conscience? What should we be willing to sacrifice, in the form of order, to open our borders to refugees from dying nations? These are merely a few of the numerous 21st-century debates that, yet to be widely argued, will undoubtedly define the decades to come. Mr. Morden executes them with skill and style.

For all its thematic virtues, however, let there be no doubt that this series has its numerous troubles. The Samuel Petrovitch Trilogy is the literary equivalent to a Hollywood summer blockbuster, an explosive spectacle that, in the silence between cacophonies, seeks to say something profound. To Mr. Morden's credit, he pulls off this magic trick far more fluidly than do his siblings in cinema, but this does not alter the reality that these three works are bloated with post-apocalyptic action sequences that are both repetitive and overblown. Moreover, when it comes to metaphor, Mr. Morden has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Petrovitch's malformed heart is meant to represent the profound selfishness that is the face he puts to the world. His search for a healthy alternative is meant to parallel his search for goodness, both internal and external. And yet, it's clear that Petrovitch already possesses a conscience and a spiritual heart, compelling Mr. Morden to pivot this metaphor to one of man becoming machine that never escapes the hopelessly theatrical.

However much this trilogy is like a fine rock band that plays too loudly just because it can, its merits ultimately overcome its flaws. This is not just a nihilistic journey through a crumbling world. This is a vision of a utopia being born out of the ashes of human error and ignorance. Executing this vision requires not just talent, but a desire to say something meaningful. That is a virtue we can all celebrate. (3/5 Stars)

Blood, cruelty and a dark future of exploitation in The Bel Dame Apocrypha

From The Week of March 18, 2013

Though it seems, at present, the only effective means of solving international disputes, war exacts a terrible price from its practitioners. Its bombs and bullets, missiles and machine guns, may well be blessings that resolve disagreements through conquest, but with every death, with every cratered building, hatred is inflamed in the hearts of the victims and their families, a hatred that, when properly nourished, prolongs war and ensures that neither side can extract themselves from its embrace without scars that run soul deep. Thus, war's price is more war, war that does not end. For even if the battlefields are cleared and the enemy is in chains, revenge lingers in the minds of the vanquished, making the prospect of peace nothing more than an idealist's fantasy. This Ms. Hurley makes exquisitely and tragically clear in a trilogy that is as difficult as it is engaging.

On a distant world far in humanity's future, civilization has descended into nightmare. After centuries-old attempts to terraform the planet only partially succeeded, the technologists and gene masters who sought to turn this arid planet into a paradise withdrew, leaving their descendents to flounder in the desert sands of a world baked by two vicious suns. Cities on Umayma are isolated havens protected from the worst of the planet's depravities by programmable organic filters which sheathe these ports of civilization, keeping out the grotesquely mutated monstrosities that slither and snake across the rest of its blasted surface. But even though these filters protect the humans from Umayma's natural dangers, they cannot protect them from themselves.

Since the withdrawal of the colony's founders, Umayma's inhabitants have devolved into religious and territorial warfare that has virtually halted technological and societal progress. Umayma's various nation states, each of which zealously practice a form of Islam, have fallen back on the barbarism of biological weaponry to enforce their particular beliefs. This chaos has not only sewn blood feuds into the very fabric of Umaymian life, effectively ensuring conflict for generations to come, it has distorted their faiths and their societies in ways that would be unimaginable to their ancestors. Not only have the traditional gender roles been distorted, but political power has accreted into the hands of the few, while doctrine has cruelly stagnated, offering no solace to those mutated humans who are more creations of Umayma than they are of god.

Through this hellish environment moves Nyxnissa so Dasheem, a rugged, resilient bountyhunter haunted by her past. After a stint on the front lines of her nation's most recent hot war, she was welcomed into the service of the Bel Dames, a government-sanctioned death squad tasked with removing inconvenient and undesirable elements from her country's landscape. The harsh and ruthless Nyx proves herself quite adept at being a Bel Dame, taking pride in her grizzly work, that is, until she is betrayed by her superiors and cashiered from the Bel Dames, abandoned, without friends or income, onto the rough streets of her hometown. Nyx slowly rebuilds her life, hiring on a team of assassins to help her execute the jobs that come her way. Unfortunately for Nyx, no job of significance can take her far enough from the halls of power that she won't be drawn back in to the world of vicious politics and planetary conquest that dismissed her so thoughtlessly. Nyx survived having her title revoked, but can she continue to win and live in a world that seems set upon her death? Only the gods, who have so clearly forsaken Umayma, can say.

As violent as it is bizarre, The Bel Dame Apocrypha is fascinating fiction. A harsh mashup of the science fiction and urban fantasy genres, it is a ruthless and jagged portrayal of lives lived at the very limits of physical and spiritual endurance, on a world too reminiscent of Hell to be coincidental. Sparing neither favorites nor fools, Ms. Hurley is equally savage with her wicked pen, heaping depravities and betrayals upon her beleaguered characters, demanding only that they survive, that they continue, no matter how slowly or painfully, towards their bloody destinies. This cruelty is, at times, wearing, but not since Martin has it been so successfully executed.

Though The Bel Dame Apocrypha reads, superficially, as little more than an exercise in torment, there is something revolutionary here. For Ms. Hurley has used the demands of war as an excuse to completely invert the traditional roles of men and women. In nasheen, the country that doubles as the trilogy's primary setting, the conflict has lasted so long that men are a scarcity, their numbers hurled for so long into distant battlefields that society has re-shaped itself around women who talk and act like men. In fact, were they given male names, their actions and attitudes would be completely indistinguishable from men. Ms. Hurley's is far from the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women. However, it might well be the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women who fill the roles and dispositions commonly held by men. Which begs a fascinating question.

Are the various attitudes and postures adopted by the genders inherent to those genders, or are they, as Ms. Hurley imagines, inherent only to the roles society requires them to fill? In other words, Are female politicians, warriors, assassins and merchants just as likely to be selfish and corrupt as their male counterparts, or do their natural dispositions shield them from the worst excesses of power's abuse? Arguments for both sides are plentiful, but there can be no doubt that Ms. Hurley has clearly and convincingly stated her case, that only circumstance distinguishes the genders from one another, that we only view women more favorably because we've narrowed their opportunities to be corrupted by power. A provocative view that makes for engrossing reading...

There are flaws here. The Bel Dame Apocrypha is ceaselessly violent. There are few chapters not marred by death and dismemberment. Moreover, Ms. Hurley makes virtually no attempt to gently embed the reader in her world. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to be obscure, to gleefully watch as the reader attempts to orient himself in an utterly foreign environment. This will frustrate some, but for those who stay with her trilogy, this bold strategy pays off wen the rhythms and the schemes of Umayma become all-too-painfully familiar. What's more, the trilogy could have benefited from some additional characters, individuals who would have done a better job fleshing out Ms. Hurley's world. As it is, the perspective rarely strays beyond Nyx and her team which can be, at times, tiresome.

In lesser hands, The Bel Dame Apocrypha might well have been little more than an excuse for savagery. But Ms. Hurley has imagined a world as rich and different as it is dark and cruel. From its organic technology to its paternalistic women, it churns out surprises and profundities with equal measure. This is in no way fare for the weak of heart or stomach, but for those looking for an adrenaline-fuelled ride through an outer circle of Hell, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

Exogene: The Subterrene War 2 by T. C. McCarthy

From The Week of November 5, 2012

The malleability of the mind is an essential aspect of human evolution. It allows for us to be individuals, to learn, to prioritize, and to specialize in the disciplines and pursuits that we care most about. But for all its virtues, this same malleability that catalyzes so much personal growth also leaves us wide open to the manipulations of others. Known euphemistically as brainwashing, this systematic conditioning is the cruellest weapon in the toolbox of dictators and cult leaders, generals and gurus, allowing them to commandeer our freewill in the name of a righteous cause, their righteous cause. It permits them to mercilessly hollow-out their followers, filling in that emptiness with codes and commands that will ensure fealty. Rarely has its consequences been so vividly demonstrated than in this, the second instalment in Mr. McCarthy's war-torn depiction of the future.

It is the 22nd century and Earth has been sucked dry. Exhausted by hundreds of years of accelerated extraction, its resources have been pulled from the ground to shape cars and cities, weapons and civilizations that were never efficiently recycled. They didn't have to be. There was always more mines to dig, more ore to find, more materials from which to craft. But now that this extractive free ride is at an end, the world's many powerful nations, believing that they have no other choice, are forced to go to war with those few invaluable pockets that remain, turning the surface radioactive in order to preserve the treasures that lie beneath.

In the pursuit of this endless war, the various factions have turned to genetic engineering to augment their war machines. Human casualties are politically unpopular, not to mention costly. If these priceless units can be armored with battalions of tank-grown soldiers, who can be ordered to fill out the front lines of combat, the human cost can be reduced without the unwanted necessity of halting operations. In the United States, males were the first to be grown, but their aggression proved uncontrollable, compelling military geneticists to turn to more pliant females into which they poured a toxic blend of theology and patriotism to create the perfectly obedient and yet perfectly deadly supersoldier. From the wintery front lines of Russia to the warm freedom of Thailand, this is their story.

Exogene is a march through Hell. Swapping out Germline's established characters for a new roster of American genetics, it is a relentlessly savage demonstration of the death cult, that most destructive skein of brainwashing. Through the eyes of Katherine, a combat veteran approaching the end of her young shelf-life, and Megan, her lover and unit leader, we come to understand the terrifying and degrading plight of cannon-fodder, watching all semblance of morality and human decency give way to political and military necessity. Indoctrinated into a life they never chose, the Gees are living beings reduced to serving a single, nihilistic purpose, to kill in the name of a god invented to control them.

This is the work's primary virtue. For in holding up this albeit extreme example of slave labor, Mr. McCarthy reminds us of our species' dubious history when it comes to expediency. Be they the soldiers hurled into war or the subhumans forced to toil in factories and plantations, generations of humanity have found ways of excusing away their immorality. Why? Because they stood to profit from it. They stood to reap rewards that were too desirable to turn down, even if they came at the cost of that most universal right of any living creature, personal freedom. It's a lesson worth teaching. For we stand now at the threshold of unimaginable science ranging from artificial intelligence to genetically modified humans, advances which will allow us to once again selfishly capitalize on the work of creatures it's convenient to not consider human.

It was a bold decision to switch away from the war-correspondent ethos of Germline to the themes detailed above. It ensures that Mr. McCarthy's series stays fresh and confrontational. And yet, for all of Exogene's value, there is a relentlessness about the violence and the depravity here that numbs the spirit. This may well have been Mr. McCarthy's aim; for anyone would be numbed if forced to suffer the degradations herein. And yet, the novel's power lies in the extent to which it is a gauntleted punch to the face, in which case numbness is not a benefit. I felt myself wanting a reprieve, a moment to catch my breath, to rest, but none was forthcoming.

As raw as it is demonstrative... Potent science fiction... (4/5 Stars)

The Moreau Series by S. Andrew Swann

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Playing god is a tricky game. For as much as we have summoned the technical and cognitive powers to master various scientific disciplines, we are in no way divine. We lack that wealth of wisdom and understanding, of patience and vision, possessed by such theoretical beings. And yet, our expertise in the sciences has given us the keys to unlock the doors to the properties of the life around us, to alter the very genes upon which these organisms live and grow. Are these not the powers of god? And if so, do we not owe it to the life that we create that we take on the responsibilities of parenthood, of stewardship? These are vital questions we will all be forced to confront in the decades ahead, decades defined by genetic engineering and depleted resources. They are questions Mr. Swann confronts in his fascinating if overly bombastic series.

By the middle of the 21st century, war will have utterly reconfigured the world we know. From japan to India, Asia, including the Middle East, will be a wasteland, the devastated gestalt of several disconnected conflicts now known simply as the Pan-Asian War. Refugees from that consequential conflict have found their way to Europe and North America, further fraying the already decaying social safety nets present in those marginally healthier regions of the globe. Worse than the refugees, though, are the Moreau, genetically engineered soldiers from the Pan-Asian War which have flooded into the still-standing cities of the west.

The result of experiments designed to bestow upon the human form the many gifts of the animal kingdom, the Moreau are halfmen, humans crossed with strains of feline, rodent, ursine and canine. Blessed with speed and skill, claw and tooth, these fearsome creatures, made for war, have bred with one another, producing offspring who, while possessed of genes engineered for combat, have never experienced the depravities of the battlefield. No, these second generation Moreau know only the ghettos of the west into which they were born. These so-called Moritowns are 21st century slums, places of death and disease which have been scarred by neglect and exploitation. For other than the purposes of relieving their fetishistic urges, the humans who created the Moreau want nothing to do with them now that the wars are over. After all, the Moreau are walking, talking reminders of the abandonment of their own morality and forsaken responsibilities.

Into this tangled web of corrupt geopolitics and twisted science are dropped a loosely connected group of three genetic experiments, each of whom have found some kind of home in this challenging environment. Nohar Rajasthan is the son of a martyred deserter from the Pan-Asian War. A tiger strain, he rolls his talent for finding people into a career as a private investigator which lands him in the heart of a strange and explosive conspiracy. While clawing his way to the truth, he befriends angel Lopez, a young, Peruvian rabbit breed left for dead in the slums of Cleveland where Nohar was born, and encounters Evi Isham, an government asset formerly of Israeli intelligence engineered to be the perfect human soldier. Together and separately, they pry apart bits of a massive, multi-pronged coverup, the exposure of which is bound to completely transform human civilization.

Though infected by its own strain of over-the-top blockbusterism, The Moreau Series successfully imagines a near-future world contorted by human arrogance and selfishness. Mr. Swann, who went on to pen an excellent trilogy that build on this dystopian foundation, allows Nohar, Evi and angel to each feature in their own volume of this chronicle, a decision which permits us to become intimately familiar with the quirks and needs of the various forms of Moreau. Mr. Swann may not have the most creative prose, but what he lacks here in the way of polish he more than makes up for in inventiveness. For he's constructed a plausible, if grim, world, welded atop this morass of crippled ethics and broken dreams a vicious conspiracy, and wrapped this lethal package in layers of Hollywood thunder and 1940s-style whodoneits which hold together passably well. It's a conglomeration of styles and influences which neatly mirror Mr. Swann's Moreau who are themselves a hodgepodge of various genetic sources.

To whatever extent The Moreau Series is flawed in execution, it more than amply earns the benefit of the doubt by asking thoughtful questions that will inevitably make themselves the centerpiece of mainstream discourse in the years ahead. The Moreau are sentient weapons. They are things created by humanity to serve a single, destructive purpose. When that purpose is completed, they are abandoned, unwanted, subjects of an ugly chapter in history that humanity is ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone admit to. This is, of course, the natural result of innovation without wisdom, of creation without understanding. For all of the issues the Moreau face would have been perfectly obvious to their creators if they paused for a moment's thought. But no, driven by the necessities of war, and unhindered by conscience, they blazed forth and created a new race of beings that quickly discover their gods are profoundly flawed. We should all hope that, when our future selves inevitably grapple with precisely these dilemmas, they are not so shortsighted.

As engaging as it is hampered... The Moreau Series is not Mr. Swann's finest work, but there is much here to keep fans of ethics, science and combat well-entertained. (3/5 Stars)

The Expanse: Books 1 and 2 by James S.A. Corey

From The Week of September 24, 2012 While many, in our civilization, have rightfully blamed religion for much of the chaos and war that have tormented the last 2,000 years of human history, science is equally capable of enshrouding the world in death and darkness. For science without morality is not a tool by which progress is made through rationality; it is nothing more than a systemic means by which the few exploit the many in the name of the greater good. Good science, then, must adhere to the same standard that drives good religion, a positive, ethical framework that always places the rights of the individual above the welfare of the masses, knowing that, to do so, guarantees the rights of everyone. This is a difficult lesson, one that requires us all to overlook our biases to glimpse a deeper, more universal truth about human behavior. It is a lesson devastatingly taught in these first two volumes of a fascinating and disturbing trilogy.

Centuries from now, humanity will not have solved all of the problems that plague it today. There will not be medical cure-alls that dispel all diseases; there will not be wonderful technologies that obviate the need for extractive economies; there will not be political structures that promote good works while discouraging corruption. Instead, there will exist a species much like our own. Oh, humans will have invented interplanetary engines that will allow them to settle on the planets and moons of our solar system. They will even have made discoveries in genetic engineering that will allow them to grow useful crops on these inhospitable rocks, allowing humans to live and breathe in any of a dozen habitats beyond the orbit of Earth. But the underlying inequities will remain. The shortsighted sins that have hobbled our species for the whole of recorded history will still be with us, only now the greedy and the lustful, the powerful and the ambitious, will be armed with weapons and engines capable of destroying entire civilizations.

In Leviathan Wakes, the series' opening salvo, we meet two very different individuals trying to live in this dangerous, complicated universe. James Holden is the executive officer of the Canterbury, a spaceship designed to retrieve water, in the form of ice, from the solar system's less hospitable zones and deliver it to human habitats where it can be bought and consumed by the some 40-billion humans who now live and flourish in the glow of our star. An idealist, formerly of the UNN, the naval arm of the United Nations armed services, Holden endeavors always to act in the best interests of his crew and of humanity. And if that means he must trumpet dangerous truths from the deck of his ship to the rest of the solar system then that is how it must be. Consequences be damned... For truth must always triumph over secrecy. There is no other way for justice to prevail over corruption.

Joe Miller is Holden's polar opposite. A middle-aged detective thoroughly captured by the harsh demands of policework, he has been beaten down by thirty years of investigations and arrests that never seem to make a dent in the crime he's been contracted to control. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, vice will continue to flourish in a society plagued by inequities and broken dreams. His life takes a decidedly sharp turn, however, when he is asked to retrieve a wayward rich girl from the slums of the asteroid belt and forceably return her to the wealth and privilege of her Martian parents. For in accepting this contract, he stumbles upon a terrible secret. Someone is playing with genetics in a way so foul that it disgusts even the hard-hearted Miller who, through circumstance and good fortune, teams up with a grieving and infuriated Holden to get at the heart of a most grotesque mystery. Someone has unleashed a terrifying virus upon humanity. But why? And to what end? In Caliban's War, the series' second instalment, ambition has once again endangered the human race. The protomolecule, that most alien and incomprehensible virus that ignited so much death and chaos in Leviathan Wakes, has resurfaced in two vastly different ways. The most obvious strand is currently feverishly reconfiguring Venus, transforming it from a Hellish hothouse into a planet of unimaginable design and destiny. The subtler strain is at work in a secret laboratory on Ganymede, a populated moon of Jupiter, where the theft of some immuno-compromised children has gone entirely unnoticed thanks to a quick but brutal shooting war between troops loyal to Mars and Earth. When the dust has settled and Ganymede lays in ruins, sixteen missing children is hardly a priority except for one man, the desperate father of one f the girls who'll do anything to get her back. Holden and his crew, made frantic by the protomolecule's re emergence, adopt the father's mission in hopes of it leading them to the powers who insist on risking humanity's very existence.

Dominated by blood and war, zombies and viruses, The Expanse is exquisite, cinematic science fiction. James Corey, the pen name for a collaborative effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, has assembled from numerous inspirations two powerful, winningly original novels that are as painfully realistic as they are unflinchingly gory. Many influences are made manifest here, from the horror of Dean Koontz to the institutional corruption of Richard Morgan, to the space-combat realism of C. J. Cherryh, to the biological realism of Paul McAuley. But The Expanse is neither a re-imagination of, nor dependent upon, these influences. On the contrary, it rises well above the fray, rejecting the derivative destinies of most works of its kind to chart its own ambitious and exhilarating course.

There is plenty here for everyone: political corruption, institutional mismanagement, zombie horrors and creepy alien technology. There are wars and firefights, terraforming and genetic engineering, but in the end the series' genius lies in its characters who were as carefully laid out as they are stunningly realized. Holden's idealism set against Miller's cynicism is the most obvious and successful polarization, but Abraham and Franck have taken just as much care with their world's secondary characters, animating them with a power that can be both delightful and terrifying. There is an exquisite exactitude here, a vanishingly rare attention to character detail that makes every single one of the actors in this drama come to life to a degree that puts to shame the efforts of lesser lights.

There is no question in my mind that The Expanse is the kind of science fiction that could be successfully brought to the silver screen, causing a new generation of TV-viewers to fall in love with the genre. For like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse puts the fiction before the science. It cares more about its characters and the ethical dilemmas they are confronted with than it does about the science which, nonetheless, is successfully welded atop this foundation of character. It is a futuristic war shaped by a Wikileaks-style debate over the control of information and the ambition of institutions to do as they please. In this, it cannot but be relatable to our masses.

Winning work. Occasionally a bit too preoccupied with gore, but in every other respect extraordinary. (5/5 Stars)

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

From The Week of July 02, 2012

What criteria must we meet in order to be considered human? Must we be creatures of flesh and blood, bone and organ, intelligence and wit? Must we adhere to the path laid down for us by evolution, or can we still be considered part of the species if we use science to accelerate our genetic development? For us, such questions remain in the realm of the arbitrary, providing more nourishment to philosophers than to the people. And yet we may soon reach the point at which science has sufficiently advanced to eliminate death and disease, hunger and heartbreak. Will it still be trivial when we intersect with this future and are forced to weigh how much of what makes us human we are willing to sacrifice in order to attain our place among the stars? What will come of us when our society is overtaken by these technologies? Will there be any going back? Mr. Rajaniemi ruminates in his challenging and exciting novel.

The third millennium is halfway over and humanity is utterly unrecognizable as the species that so long ago feared for its survival on the plains of Africa. Having undergone a quantum revolution that has opened the door to unimaginable technologies, humans have digitized their minds, uploading their souls to unspeakably powerful systems as a means of achieving both enlightenment and immortality. When they have need of flesh and blood, they have merely to create a body from various forms of intelligent matter, swelling themselves with awesome augmentations that span the spectrum from the incredible to the exotic. But though this expansion of known science has pushed humanity through the resource bottleneck that for so long hampered the species, it has not eliminated the need for power which continues to fuel the tides of war.

Fought out between individualists and collectivists, between posthumans who wanted to maintain the sanctity of their own minds and posthumans who continue to seek a single, organized metaconsciousness that will collaborate in the exploration and the conquest of the known galaxy, the protocol War devastated the solar system and, worse, failed to yield up a clear victor in this battle of technologies and ideologies. The result, then, is a glacial peace that could turn into a hot war at any moment if the soboronost have their way. For driven by their mission to curate every human mind in the solar system, these collectivists will stop at nothing to wipe out the last measure of individualist resistance which has coalesced on Mars in glorious, floating cities that are constantly on the move, avoiding Soboronost threats.

Into this toxic stew is dropped Jean le Flambeur, a legendary thief who, unexpectedly, is liberated from his long stay in a horrific virtual reality prison in which he's forced to play the same treacherous game on an infinite, punitive loop. Sprung by an agent of one of the seven Soboronost Founders who requires Flambeur's unique skillset to steal something of vital importance to her, he must first retrieve memories he's hidden even from himself before he can be of any use to the vicious and manipulative Founder. Minded by Mieli, the Founder's winged agent and a warrior with individualist sympathies, Flambeur returns to the scene of one of his many crimes, the free cities on Mars where reassembling his past will mean reintroducing himself to the people he harmed and abandoned 20 years ago. Will Flambeur betray them once more, or will revenge prompt them to turn the tables on their old friend and give him some of his own treacherous medicine?

The Quantum Thief is exceptional science fiction. Harnessing the cynicism and the wit of Iain Banks and the hard science of Alastair Reynolds, Mr. Rajaniemi has established, with but one book, a place for himself among the greats of the genre. For in all of its imaginative force, this first entry in a proposed trilogy is as fantastically plotted as it is concisely told. From the philosophy of humanism to the quantum technologies of the far future, the author hardly even needs a plot, so vivid is his world of demons and power plays, angels and dominance.

Mr. Rajaniemi's tale is energized by two sizeable gambles, both of which pay off in spectacular fashion. Firstly, he bets on the intelligence of his readers to suss out for themselves the intricacies of tech and plot that underpin the novel. In this, he follows in the hallowed footsteps of giants like William Gibson who refused to break character to explain even the most trivial elements of their glittering mindspaces, requiring the reader to mentally and emotionally engage on a level far more profound than the relatively shallow playgrounds in which most fiction cavorts. Secondly, at no time does he allow us to rest from an assault of ideas and concepts that are hurled at at us with ballistic force. Mr. Rajaniemi not only demands that his readers come to grips with the death of humanity as a biological species, he envisions a future Internet based on publicly accessible memories that, should it come into being, will forever transform communication and socialization far past the point of recognition. Under other circumstances, this intellectual denseness might be bothersome, but in the author's skillful hands such revelations merely add to the complexity of the world, opening up new vistas to be considered and pulled apart.

There is, unquestionably, a steep learning curve for The Quantum Thief. But while the reader is adjusting to a world of exotic matter and stolen minds, MMORPG guilds and terrifying war machines, he's being subjected to a steady supply of wit and charm that pull him down into the story until, slowly, inevitably, it clicks into place. A truly remarkable first effort and, even without the science and the factional fighting, a memorable mystery. One of my favorite reads this year... (5/5 Stars)

The City of a Hundred Rows Trilogy by Ian Whates

From The Week of June 03, 2012

Despite our best efforts, despite our planning, our yearning, and our needing, our lives are often beyond our control. For while we make our own decisions, from the trivial to the consequential, from when to cross the street to what career path to pursue, we have no control over the millions of other variables that impact on our choices: the car that unlawfully belts us, or the economic circumstances that render obsolete the jobs our education promised us. Control is an illusion, a construct of ego that helps us to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we hold destiny's reins, not the other way around. Mr. Whates harnesses this fallacy and uses it to hammer home our helplessness before grand events. The product that results from this abject lesson, while limited in vision, is quietly entertaining.

Thaiburley is a city of hopes and sorrows, magic and crime. The centuries-old vision of powers time has faded unto legend, Thaiburley has endured war and chaos, riot and despair, fire and nightmare to become a crowded home for humans and aliens who live, side-by-side, in a place like no other. For Thaiburley is a city of 100 stratified rows that reach for all of the promise of the heavens.

Though not initially designed to sort out the haves from the have-nots, these 100 stories (rows) have, over the years, sorted themselves into cliques, each row making a particular contribution to the Thaiburley whole. But while such specialization has its advantages, serving to leave no doubt in anyone's mind where citizens can find what they require, this form of stratification is wide open to abuse. For it is a simple matter to slowly but continuously compel the less fortunate onto lower and lower rows, into the forgotten and neglected depths of the city and far from the law and order of the Heights, where government resides, where law-enforcement patrols the streets, where the sun is yet visible.

In City of Dreams and Nightmares, the series' first instalment, we encounter the vivid consequences of this neglect in the form of Tom, a young street-nick whose short and difficult life has been marred by gangs, violence and darkness. Born to the lowest rows of Thaiburley, he is raised by the streets, welcomed into their thieving arms, and put to their purposes. He, like his brothers in the blue Claw gang, grift, steal and work to protect their turf against the other street-nick gangs that seek to take it from them.

The familiar rhythm's of Tom's dystopic life are shattered, however, when he is charged with making a long and daring climb to the heights of Thaiburley's fabled rows. Skilled in hiding and evasion, he is helped past the rival gangs until he is away and free to climb all the way to the top. But just as Tom is adjusting to the marvels of the lawful world around him, so rich with color, freedom and wealth, the likes of which he's never seen, his reverie and his mission are shattered when he chances to witness an early-morning murder. Brimming with jealousy and privilege, one of Thaiburley's senior officials has stabbed his student to death. Quickly, the murder is blamed on Tom, igniting a city-wide search for the street-nick which not only forces Tom into uncertain alliances, it compels him to flee into the strangest and darkest corners of the city in search of safety and salvation.

In City of Hope and Despair, the series' second volume, Thaiburley has settled into the calm eye of the storm that promises to shake its ancient walls. For though the immediate danger, for Tom and the city, has past, a deeper game is still underway, one that dredges up old nightmares. For while Tom is dispatched to an icy, northern citadel in hopes of fully realizing his talents, Katrina, the young, embittered independent operator who recently helped Tom avoid the wrath of the city's authorities, is forced to confront her grim past when her mother's killer re-emerges to stalk the sin-stained streets of Thaiburley's lowest rows.

How foul is a thing that prays on the unfortunate? Who devours what little hope they have? A thing that requires their sustenance to live, a thing that understands full well that the best victims are ones no one cares about. And so, while a strange and deadly flu sweeps through Thaiburley's most powerful assemblies, preoccupying the authorities, Kat draws upon old allies and friends to combat a nightmare that haunts her dreams with the ruination of her childhood.

In City of Light and Shadow, the most recent entry in the series, the war for control of Thaiburley finally comes to a climactic head when the animating force behind the chaos at its core is identified and engaged in combat by a steadier, wiser Tom. While the city's wisest minds continue to be felled by a mysterious and devastating illness, all of the remaining resources of the Prime Master's administration must be gathered and hurled at this threat lest the source of the city's power lose control of its agents and darken the city forever in powers beyond anyone's command.

Though it suffers at times from a lack of focus and imagination, The City of A Hundred Rows is solid fiction that, in delivering on many of the fantasy genre's legendary tropes, breezily entertains. Mr. Whates will never win any awards for his elementary prose, but he compensates for this lyrical shortcoming with a roster of familiar, charming characters and a story which, though unoriginal, serves the reader with a sizeable helping of satisfaction and amusement. Moreover, the extent to which he grounds his magic in some kind of logic provides the story some welcome framework for what is, ultimately, a mashup of the best elements of fantasy and science fiction.

While Mr. Whates' primary purpose here is entertainment, his tale is not without social commentary. The City of A Hundred Rows is best imagined as a series that the immature lovechild of Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien might have produced. Stratified Thaiburley strongly evokes images of Victorian-age megacities like London and New York which beseeched visitors and inhabitants to buy into the pretty fiction of their opulence and ostentation while ignoring the grim reality of the impossibly difficult lives endured by their forgotten underclasses. Law and justice exist only for those who matter, those who are visible, those who live in sunlight. The wretches, most in need of support, guidance and protection are beneath the notice of all but a rare, fairminded few.

Unfortunately, this attempt to speak to a broader theme is also the source of many of the work's flaws. For Mr. Whates in no way explains how a dystopian city could continue its descent into degradation despite having a benevolent and all-powerful ruler with legendary warriors at his disposal. The author clearly wished to burden Tom and Katrina, his two protagonists, with miserable backgrounds while also using the corruption and the moral decay within the city as a wellspring of enemies for his heroes to battle. But in choosing to cast Thaiburley's Prime Master as a force for good,and to grant him extraordinary powers, he leaves the reader wondering why the city's leader doesn't simply fix the problems endemic to this place when he's clearly capable of doing so. The conceit, then, that these are challenges only Tom and Katrina must face, as a means of serving the story and accelerating their maturation, is tragically obvious.

No doubt fans of heroes and quests will find the journey depicted in The City of A Hundred Rows enjoyable. Much of its plot reprises much of fantasy's most hallowed tomes. And yet there are too many disharmonious notes here to allow the reader to forget that he is in the hands of an apprentice playing a master's tune: too many characters introduced and forgotten, too many plot threads woven and then neglected, too many moments of deus ex machina for the victories to feel earned.

Compelling for its heroism in the face of corruption and the extent to which it mixes and matches science fiction and fantasy, but in every other respect derivative... (2/5 Stars)

The Darkness That Comes Before: The Prince Of Nothing 01 by R. Scott Bakker

From The week of April 23, 2012

Though the countless generations of humanity that have lived across the centuries have little of custom or culture in common, they do each share one disturbing characteristic. Each generation produces, at one point or another, a few tortured souls who believe that the apocalypse is nigh, that the world they know so well is ending, and that only they are capable of warning the poor, ignorant masses of their collective fate. We may, at some point, discover the source of the strange, existential impulse that empowers this eschatology, but such knowledge is almost secondary to a deeper truth, that, on some profound level, we must simultaneously want and fear the end of the world and whatever that may herald for ourselves and those we love. We must want, in short, to live in interesting times, to play our parts in an epic drama that dwarfs all else that has come before.

In all this desire, though, in all this fervor for the end times, do the doomsdayers truly comprehend what they are anticipating? Can they grasp the bloodshed, the chaos, and the darkness that would arise from an actual apocalypse? And if so, would they rue what they were so eager to declare? This apocalyptic novel from Mr. Bakker leaves little doubt that heralds of end times are but children playing with shadows, that true darkness is far more profound and fearsome than any of us can imagine.

On a world riven by magic and faith, destiny and prophecy, sorcerers, priests and emperors vie for control of Eaerwa, a diverse continent home to both urban cities and rural steps, self-indulgent nobles and war-hardened tribesmen. Of course, Eaerwa wasn't always so ripe for power-plays. Not 2,000 years earlier, it was all-but-depopulated by the First Apocalypse, a continental conflict that turned both the people and their culture to ashes. But the passing of two millennia has not only restored imperial government and mercantile trade to the land, it has allowed the lessons of the past to slip into shadow, forgotten by competing forces whose yearning for power and dominance compel them to violent action.

The result is the Holy War, a conflict that pits two deeply divergent sects of the same faith against one another in hopes of reclaiming a city holy to both sides. But though this conflict is bound to claim the lives of countless souls, selling their families and the continent at large into economic and social chaos, it is almost secondary to deeper forces at play, forces that are awakening after centuries of being thought banished or dead. And for all of the terrors war can summon, they are as nothing to the nightmares this new darkness heralds. A second apocalypse is imminent, ready to return this still wounded world to rubble.

The first instalment of an ambitious trilogy, The Darkness That Comes Before is a fascinating piece of fantasy fiction that arguably has more in common with epic poems and Greek tragedies than it does with its genre's customary fare. Rife with philosophy and violence, it is both sacred and profane, as drenched in the fanaticism of zealots as it is the opportunism of tyrants attempting to capitalize on such faith. In this, it is an deeply political novel that boldly sets out to suck the reader down into a world as intensely drawn as it is utterly foreign, a world of godlike magicians and beleaguered whores, spoiled emperors and holy prophets. These opposing and competing forces occupy the heart of this blood-soaked work, fighting for dominance over a sprawling and, at times, bewildering tale.

But as much as Mr. Bakker succeeds in injecting his fiction with the philosophy of high literature, as much as he manages to bring Eaerwa to light in all its complex depravity, The Darkness That Comes Before is nonetheless a decidedly unlikeable novel. Its characters are all-but-universally hateful. Yes, there are moments when Mr. Bakker's protagonists manage to elevate themselves from the mire, but even these moments are characterized by despair, confusion, and an overriding sense of doom. There is not a spark of joy to be found anywhere within these 700 unpleasant pages.

Mr. Bakker should be commended for his achievements here. It is a rare talent who can conceive of such a rich world and animate it with such violent flair. But his characters are mere two-dimensional puppets, pieces to be moved on the cosmic chessboard. The author never allows his readers to empathize with them, let alone love or admire them. All such emotion is lost in the everpresent sense of gloom and repulsiveness that clings to each of his actors who are, for all their sweat and toil, uncompelling.

For me, the journey ends here. For what Mr. Bakker forgot, in the creation of his nuanced world, was to imprint upon his story something like a reason for the reader to keep turning the page. For all its art, distasteful and disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

The Virex Trilogy by Eric Brown

From The Week of April 16, 2012

What does it mean to be human? Our bones have been measured, our hearts weighed, our blood analyzed. Our very cells have been dissected, their secrets laid bare under the powerful inquisition of the microscope. But can these metrics of flesh and muscle, reflex and strength, define human? Perhaps our minds are the better arbiter of who we are, oceanic consciousnesses made possible by the gestalt of a trillion neural connections woven into the fabric of our brains. Until science has banished the mysteries of the human mind, the question remains one for philosophers to reason through, their intellectual progress forever hindered by their imperfect understanding of a beautiful system. However, someday soon, neurology will solve for the unknown and we will know what it means to be human and whether or not it is defined by the elusive soul. What will that world look like? Will it be better or worse for the knowing? Mr. Brown muses in his sweeping trilogy.

The year is 2040 and New York has become new India. Widespread environmental collapse has devastated large swaths of inhabited land and left the Big Apple stewing in a mixture of extreme temperatures and monsoon rain which perpetually pound at a treeless, hyper-urban landscape. Refugees from Asia and the American South, fleeing now uninhabitable climbs, have flooded the city, swelling it beyond the capacity of its public services. The police labor to maintain some semblance of law and order, but justice is more often found at the point of a gun in this torrential world in which technology is as ubiquitous as concrete.

As a consequence of the influx of refugees, the city has deputized private investigators into its police force. Though these hybrid cops are permitted to keep their own offices, take their own cases and charge whatever fees the market will bear, they are peace officers, men and women who will, in an ideal world, help to strengthen the palsied arm of the law in feverish New York. Their effectiveness, however, is minimized by a world in which technology is evolving at far too rapid a rate for the law to comprehend, much less grapple with.

In New York Nights, the trilogy's curtain-raiser, we meet One such quasi detective. Hal Halliday is a smart but self-destructive investigator in his 30s who, despite the passage of many years, remains burdened by a traumatic childhood. A refugee of the NYPD, Hal was welcomed into private practice by Barney Kluger, an older, wiser man with tragedies of his own. Together, the partners and friends are submerged into the world of virtual reality (VR), when they are hired to find a missing woman. A trendy technology taking New York by storm, VR is reshaping human interaction. Bars all over the city are buying and renting out Jellytanks, immersive tubs in which humans can lose themselves, their minds transported to a million programmable vistas.

Fearful of VR's social consequences, Virex, an insurgent organization intent upon bringing down the big corporations promoting VR technology, attempt to warn the public about the emotional and physical costs of overusing the emerging technology. But their warnings are largely ignored until a rogue intelligence escapes its VR makers and flees into the Internet where its schemes to be alive and free entangle and devastate a community of alternative Women, several of whom turn up murdered. Hal must reach into his past and the sister he's all-but written off to find a way to stop the emergent AI.

In New York Blues, the trilogy's second instalment, a few dark months have past. Lonely and caseless, Hal has turned to a street kid for companionship. A refugee from the Atlanta Meltdown, Casey is a homeless girl looking for a chance to escape her origins. And so, when Hal offers her a place to stay, she quickly blossoms, becoming not only his connection to the outside world but a key cog in the biggest case of his life. For the Vanessa Artoise, movie star extraordinaire, has just darkened his door with her legendary beauty and she's willing to pay Hal anything to find her missing sister.

Seconds after accepting the case, an attempt is made on Vanessa's life, an effort that galvanizes Hal into action. Sniffing out the sister's trail, however, leads him into the dark and twisted heart of VR where powerful men troll for impressionable girls, exploiting them for the fulfilment of their fantasies and their obsessions. To find Vanessa's sister, Hal will have to confront the very creators of these virtual paradises on their own turf, a disadvantage that will not only endanger him but the few people in this world he cares for.

In New York Dreams, the trilogy culminates with the full realization of VR's potential. Where once it was only safe for humans to spend hours in the Jellytanks before having to exit from perfect hallucinations, now they can spend days in Vr, exploring ever-more-elaborate environments which can be tailored to suit the every whim of the user. How can the real world, with all its flaws and foibles, its pains and disappointments, possibly compete? Virex, which has been warning humanity about this grim future for years now, ought to be poised to best exploit this breakthrough. But the insurgency, once so noisy, has been betrayed. Key operatives at the heart of the conspiracy have been secretly replaced by the enemy.

Rendered toothless, the organization is in no position to halt the conspiracy which claims the lives of several men and women, one of which was once dear to Hal. The investigator might never have known about the deaths were it not for Casey who helps to extract him from his own VR dreams long enough to put him on the conspiracy's cold trail. Will he discover the plans of the mysterious Methuselah Project before it's too late, or will his body, weakened by his addiction to VR, fail him and leave him, like everyone else, helpless before the dawn of a new world?

Though The Virex Trilogy lacks the brilliance of plot and prose necessary for lasting acclaim, its entertaining plots and thoughtful ruminations elevate it above the fray. Mr. Brown's characters are refreshingly human, flawed specimens who lack not only physical beauty but social graces. Instead, they stagger through life, blundering from moment-to-moment, never prepared for what's to come. This faintly autistic take on human nature is both engaging and appropriate for the author's somewhat alarmist future.

There are problems here. For a series named The Virex Trilogy, there's remarkably little Virex about it. The organization, which at times appears to be on the brink of full-blown terrorism, yields its time to the cast of characters who orbit Hal's world. Not until the final novel is Virex explored at any depth and even then it is only elaborated on in the service of the plot. This, along with characters who inexplicably float in and out of the story, leaves far-too-bare the mechanics of plot. Polishing up his tapestry in order to hide the threadbare bits is not Mr. Brown's strong suit.

That said, there's much here to admire. Virtual reality has been explored before, but Mr. Brown takes up this trope not only in the service of his story, but in the interests of exploring its many and varied consequences. In this, he manages to make some thoughtful points about the underpinnings of human interaction and human experience. And so, while the tales told here are otherwise inescapably mundane in their construction, the social critiques woven into them lend life and color to both the world and its inhabitants.

Solidly entertaining... Mr. Brown won't hit many home runs, but he'll rarely strike out either. Instead, he can be consistently relied upon for a good double. There are far, far worse fates. (3/5 Stars)

The Etched City by K. J. Bishop

From The Week of March 05, 2012

Human nature demands that we apply narratives to both our lives and our history. It is, after all, how we think, a quirk of the brain's memory-storage system that compels us to turn everything we are and everything we were into a chronicle. But these narratives, embellished over time, are deceptive. They are assemblages of events which, individually, had no meaning, or pattern. They were simply events, things that happened in spacetime that do not have to be governed by the laws of cause and effect. It is merely hindsight that prompts us to gather up these disparate threads and weave them into a meaningful tapestry, a portrait that applies some kind of order to the randomness of life. Though Ms. Bishop's dreamy, Gothic adventure is animated by the nightmarish, the grotesque and the painfully realistic, it is this absence of gilded history, this jagged dislocation, that underpins the piece.

In a world of deserts and snow, of sun and ice, the Copper Country is some of the deadliest territory imaginable. Riven by war and treachery, these dusty plains are antithetical to a long and fruitful existence. Yes, bounty hunters and brigands can find much coin here, but what happens when that life grows too hard, when ones luck has run as dry as the earth? Then one has but two options, death or a new beginning, elsewhere, in a place of meager hopes and fantastic dreams.

Raule and Gwynn, once friends and mercenaries, have chosen survival over an anonymous death in the baking sands. Teaming up on the road, the female doctor and the male gunslinger ride for Ashamoil, a sodden city on the edge of the tropics which, far from being a respite from the lives they've known, seems to harbor magic and nightmares all its own. Having fended off their vengeful pursuers -- ex-colleagues from the old country --, Raule sets out her shingle in a hospital run by nuns, trying in some small way to turn away from her past. Gwynn, however, is unrepentant, signing on with a powerful crew of cutthroats who more or less operate autonomously within this humid outpost of civilization. As Raule buries herself in healing work and Gwynn lives the life of a mercenary soldier -- killing, drinking, whoring --, their orbits drift apart, but when war comes to town, setting off a chain reaction of increasingly violent incidents, their worlds will once again overlap, much to their pains and their cost.

The Etched City is without doubt one of the strangest pieces of genre fiction to have recently floated to the cultural consciousness. Ms. Bishop has a poet's skill with words and a dreamer's talent for imagery, virtues which, together, invest her work here with a Gothic majesty. The setting is strongly reminiscent of the 19th century Wild West with Ashamoil taking up the mantle of the lively but amoral border town nestled on the edge of the untamed frontier. Pre-electric, knightly chivalry has nonetheless given way to the advent of guns which have turned every man, armed with a grudge and grandiose aspirations, into a deadly weapon capable of instantaneous and irreversible violence. In this, the world is similar in feel to Steampunk's Victorian revival.

What's striking about Ms. Bishop's work, however, is not the lengths to which it revels in the visually grotesque, the mystically bewildering, or even the understandably nihilistic. It is the grace with which the author interweaves discussions of morality, godliness and reality into what is otherwise episodic escapism. Though the work is difficult at times to swallow, and a challenge at other times to enjoy, it leaves no doubt that it was the product of a talented mind. It is as if Hemingway, or Joyce, or Dickens, or any of the greats had decided to descend from high art to put to paper the fancies of their powerful imaginations. And so even though it is occasionally repellent, The Etched City is, like the magnificent snakes with which it is so fond, always hypnotizing. I must seek out some of the author's short fiction to see if it too bears this compelling amalgam.

Mesmerizingly gruesome. (4/5 Stars)