an entertaining, if overly explosive, near, nanotech future in Nexus

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Although progress has been a constant throughout human history, successive generations building on the discoveries of those who came before, it has often come so slowly, so gradually, that humans have rarely had to confront the notion that progress might change their entire world. Certainly, there have been inventions that instilled such fears, particularly those produced by societies beginning to industrialize, but even these advancements only affected certain walks of life. Only in the last 50 years has technological progress reached a sufficiently high velocity to challenge our deeply instilled sense of stability, of sameness. And the result? Nearly universal anxiety about where our civilization is headed, whether or not we are enslaving ourselves to the utility of technology, and the degree to which we are raising children zombified by being forever plugged in. We want the world to be predictable. We want to be what we know. It's precisely this hunger that Mr. Naam exploits so well in these first two volumes of an engaging future of the synthesis of man and machine.

The year is 2040 and, quietly, humanity is on the brink of a revolution as consequential as it is irreversible. Nexus, a drug based on neurological nanotechnology, allows for the voluntary linking of human minds. Not only can experiences and emotions be shared, but thoughts can be exchanged effortlessly, individuals entwined until they can become united far more than they were apart. Moreover, Nexus allows humans trained in its use to hack their own brains, unlocking doors to potential previously only dreamed of. Homeostasis can be monitored and tweaked. Bodies of knowledge, of skill, can be compiled into apps that Nexus users can run, empowering them with instant abilities. Even memories can be blocked, manipulated and selectively forgotten. The brain has not be cracked. It has been reduced to a coding platform that is the playground of geeks everywhere.

But this is also precisely why Nexus is banned throughout the West. The potential for Nexus to create transhumans, to create species distinct from baseline humanity, terrifies western governments. Coming on the heels of any number of disastrous encounters with cloning and mind-control, it is seen as an existential threat to an entire way of life. Which is why it must be controlled at any cost. In America, this responsibility falls to the ERD, the emerging Risks Directorate, a branch of Homeland Security which arms its agents with the newest bio-enhancements and unleashes them upon the producers and peddlers of Nexus. Arrests are made, careers threatened, lives ruined, but for one promising scientist, kaden Lane, their threats are provoking, not quelling. For they have evoked in him a desire for revenge and freedom that might just accelerate humanity's date with destiny, permanently upending the world order.

An entertaining if formulaic jaunt through an exciting, potential future, the first two volumes of the Nexus series are worthwhile science fiction. Ramez Naam establishes an engaging world of bright parties, experimental drugs and unshackled ambition that feels pleasingly and authentically global. Nexus may have been dreamed up in Silicon Valley, but it's adopted, played with and accelerated to its potential in an increasingly powerful Asia which has had little, if any, history with, much less time for, the tricky balance of state power versus individual freedom. It is a playground of experimentation that proves deeply fertile for nexus, a playground that the West, through means both covert and otherwise, tries to manipulate and pollute. In this way, Nexus becomes a future analogy for today's oil politics, with the US acting as it sees fit, with little to no care for the consequences, let alone for international law.

At the series' heart lies a fascinating question. Should knowledge, that could potentially be put to ill use, but that also has immense utility for those who will not abuse it, be regulated by governments? Nexus will change the world. It will break down the traditional notion of the individual and create a new kind of permanently connected person, one incubated in the ideas and philosophies of we rather than I. But however revelatory, howevermuch it may expand the horizons of the human experience, this is potentially powerful for certain abusive personalities who could use this technology to enslave their followers, or their dependents. But should such potentialities be a death knell for any technology? By positioning his heroes as non-conformists, and by giving near omnipresent surveillance technologies into the hands of his government villains, Mr. Naam convincingly argues that knowledge should be free and that we ought to trust in the goodness of people to ensure that it is not put to wicked ends.

Superficially, however, Nexus and Crux are techno thrillers. The author may ask interesting, philosophical questions about the nature and responsibilities of knowledge, but these queries are far-too-often sandwiched by adrenalized action scenes aimed straight at Hollywood. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it does cause the characterizations here to suffer. Mr. Naam never manages to create anything close to a functioning, rational actor. His characters are puppets being jerked around to his masterful end. Often, the action and the technologies hide these flaws, but they inevitably re-surface to remind the reader that the author cares far more about saturating his pages with set pieces of total mayhem than he is in developing real people we can relate to.

This is a fascinating journey, one that won't soon be forgotten. Mr. Naam is right to point out that, with the advent of certain technologies, our world could radically change in months, maybe even weeks. But one doubts that such change, however exciting and chaotic, would be quite so bloody, or labyrinthine. (3/5 Stars)

A tragicomic romp through a vivid world in the sublime Sharps

From The Week of February 24, 2014

For all but a powerful few, we are pawns in another's game, our lives subject to forces we'll never comprehend. The potent influences of politicians and CEOs, diplomats and warlords, may not seep to the surface of our daily existences, but they are there, nudging us in directions of another's choosing. Part of this shaping is indirect, the ripple effects created by the wakes of society's prime movers, but a significant component is conscious, the tangible result of men and women who believe they are in the right and who are not afraid of acting on that belief. But what if those beliefs are wrong? What if those plans are too cruel to be tolerated? When do we, as the pawns in their games, decide to take ourselves from the board and make our own choices? K. J. Parker poses these very questions in her fascinating, political adventure. The dark energy generated from their answers is enough to make this one of 2012's finest reads.

In a world of merchant banks and triumphant generals, of powerful priests and corrupted nobles, Permia and the Republic of Scheria endure an uneasy peace. The two countries have little in common. Their skills, their gods, even their politics are completely different, leaving little room for common ground. No surprise, then, that the two bickering nations have recently concluded a decades-long war that destroyed the economies of both countries and was only ended thanks to the brilliance, and the brutality, of Scheria's legendary general, Herec Carnufex, infamously known as the Irrigator. However much they may hate one another, though, they do share a love of fencing, a sport which is of fanatical importance in both lands and can perhaps serve as a bridge by which to heal old wounds.

That appears to be the idea behind a mutually agreed-upon tour in which Scheria's finest fencers will be escorted through passionate Permia and set against its greatest swordsmen, in an ostensibly symbolic display of skill and glory. But when Scheria's prime movers select a band of misfits to represent them, more than a few eyebrows are raised in influential circles. A woman? An accidental murderer? A veteran of the Permian war haunted by his service? The Irrigator's second son who seems far more interested in books than blades? This is hardly a team to be feared. So why have they been sent into an unfamiliar land, with foreign customs and unstable politics? Why do they all get the sense that they are taking part in a game none of them understand? As Permia erupts in revolt, they will have to find answers quickly or else full-on war may resume. And this time, there may not be anything left to salvage when the guns have ceased their firing.

Delightful and dour, Sharps is a sublime work of fantasy fiction from an author whose relative obscurity is entirely undeserved. Ms. Bishop does a masterful job of layering her plots with interconnected schemes that slowly, tragicomically unwind through the narrative, ensnaring her characters in webs of lies and powerplays that rarely end well. This sophistication, in both its understanding of the selfishness of human nature and of the corrosiveness of politics, provides the fertile ground from which her complex characters grow.

This is hardly the first time that misfits have been asked to, in some sense, save the world, but rarely has it been done with such class and verve. It is an easy thing to assemble a cast of clowns and watch them bumble their way towards an inevitable conclusion. It is entirely another matter to animate a company of selfish smart-asses, secretive heroes and foolish businessmen, who not only attract the reader's interest and fondness, but who also succeed in elevating themselves from their darkly humorous circumstances to be rounded, plausible individuals, endowed with the tragic desire to do right, to fulfil their own kind of justice. A misstep of any significance on Ms. Bishop's part and Sharps would have slid into the ditch of farcical absurdity, a world in which the outcome loses all mass. That she has avoided as much here is a credit to her skill.

No review of Sharps specifically, and Ms. Bishop's work generally, would be complete without commenting on the mountains of research and experience from which these tales benefit. The author has a complex understanding of banking and trade that surely flows from an inquisitive mind open to the training and the knowledge of numerous disciplines. But these economic principles are mere icing on the cake that is her familiarity with fencing without which the novel would be a pale shadow. The author speaks fluently of not just the moves but the mentality of the fencer, of the fears and moments of explosive action that characterize it. This expertise deeply enriches the work.

Sharps' only flaw is that it is not the beginning of a series, a greater whole for the eager to devour. We must content ourselves with this unmystical gem that, for all its dirty politics, shines like the sun. (5/5 Stars)

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 sprawling and successful SciFi epic in Hamilton's The Void Trilogy

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

From our actions to our futures, the right to choose is one of humanity's most coveted freedoms, one that countless souls have died to ensure and to preserve. This is as undeniable as it is peculiar. After all, humans, down through the bloody centuries of their history, have spent far more time bound by coercive bondage, political, economic, social, than they have spent free to act as they see fit. Kings and chieftains, sea captains and factory owners, popes and martyrs... They have all used their power and their authority to claim our fealty. And yet, perhaps this is the very reason why the freedom to choose is so prized. For when it is so rare to be afforded with the opportunity to choose one's destiny, regardless of the consequences, then it is savored like the finest wine. But what if we were all afforded this uncoerced right? What if we could act as we pleased no matter the costs to the others around us? Would it still seem wise to hail such a right? Peter F. Hamilton speculates in his engrossing epic.

It is the middle of the fourth millennia and humanity wants for nothing. In the 1,500 years since the creation of the first computer, we have traveled to other stars, encountered alien races both friendly and formidable, and discovered wondrous technologies that have, for most, banished the very notion of suffering. Powerful artificial intelligences ensure a safe and lawful Commonwealth of worlds, most of which have access to science and immortality, art and faith. After all, there is room for any sort of life in a civilization that has done away with the scarcity imposed by finite resources and limited power. In a universe where matter and energy are equally malleable, there is little one needs be denied.

And yet, encroaching upon this utopia is the strangest of threats. The void has persisted for nearly a million years, an incomprehensible region of distorted space within the galaxy in which the physical laws as we know them seem not to apply, in which the power of the mind appears to be superior to that of the physics of spacetime. This might be nothing more than an object of curiosity were it not for the fact that the Void occasionally undergoes expansion fazes, moments of explosive violence that consume the stars and planets in its path. Despite the best efforts of the galaxy's most powerful minds and weapons, the Void has proven to be impervious and indestructible which is why entire star systems have had to be evacuated ahead of its expansion in order not to condemn the lives of countless souls to its voraciousness.

Though the Void's purpose is unknown, many factions within human civilization believe they hold the answers. The most popular of these is the Living Dream, a vaguely Christian organization that believes the Void is a kind of heaven into which they can pass. But those who've studied the Void argue that passing into it helps to trigger its expansion fazes which is why they attempt to halt the pilgrimages to the Void. And yet, these imposts only seem to encourage the dreamers to try harder to achieve their aims, no matter the cost to the universe the Void is threatening to devour.

A series as inventive as it is expansive, The Void Trilogy is epic science fiction, a 700,000-word odyssey through worlds of science and death, politics and faith, yearning and fanaticism. Mr. Hamilton, who is no stranger to thinking big with his fiction, has built here on an existing universe, introducing into it an existential threat that his protagonists fear and his antagonists hunger for. Their clashes prove to be as memorable as they are violent, leaving no doubt that humanity's thirst for destruction, its willingness to use force, has not been softened by immortality.

In its technology and its politics, The Void Trilogy is deeply reminiscent of Iain Banks' famous Culture Series, a collection of works that tried to conceptualize a utopian future for humanity unburdened by the chains of scarcity, one in which everyone would be free to pursue their interests thanks to the willingness of machines and artificial intelligences to do the unglamorous labors that underpin civilization. Certainly, some of the ideas deployed here, are fanciful unto hilarity -- weapons capable of destroying planets and stars are, at times, unleashed almost gleefully --, but Mr. Hamilton manages to largely confine his flamboyant excesses, leaving the reader with an exploration of life utterly transformed from the paradigms with which we are so familiar. To step outside those prejudices, those realities, is a significant achievement in its own right. To then manifest such a utopian civilization in which we are all free to act as we choose, be who we choose, is a feat in truth.

It is a most difficult task to maintain the reader's interest over nearly 2,000 pages and for that we have Mr. Hamilton's host of characters to thank. From the silly to the serious, from the sociopathic to the egomaniacal, we are introduced to detectives and popes, martyrs and commoners, zealots and knowledge seekers, all of whom come together to form a vivid tapestry of conflict and power. And yet, these fine actors are also the epic's most troublesome element. For though most of our prime players have existed for more than a millennia, some even back to the early 21st century, none show any sign of the immense weariness that would naturally eventuate from living so many countless years. Mr. Hamilton makes virtually no attempt to lay out the social conventions that would have to arise to grapple with such unfathomable lifespans: multiple lives, multiple partners, multiple careers. In fact, one of his main characters has been a detective for more than a thousand years. Far from admirable, this seems almost perverse. This, along with a certain plasticness of minds and deeds, troubles the work.

And yet, these flaws do not ruin the epic. For like in life, it is easy to imagine darkness and degradation, to dream up the dystopias that some secret part inside all of us hungers for. It is much more difficult to create, to conceive of a world that is wholly new, and then to animate that world with vibrancy and vitality. The Void Trilogy may be far more interested in exploding stars and weaponized black holes than it is in the sociology and psychology, but it still checks all the boxes of good SciFi while being a rollicking good time. (4/5 Stars)

Abraham's The Tyrant's Law fails to bring the heat

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

Belief, no matter its form, is a powerful thing. It nourishes us when we are alone, it motivates us when we have no drive, and it sustains us when all hope is gone. It is the kindling that keeps lit the flame of life which burns in defiance of a hostile universe. And yet, belief has its drawbacks. For while it can push us to be more than we are, belief is not inherently wise. It offers strength, not guidance; will, not insight, a truth that helps to explain why the most ardent believers have often, in the history of our species, also doubled as our most violent and destructive members. Both sides of this coin of faith, the good and the pernicious, play substantial roles in the third entry of Daniel Abraham's engaging Dagger And The Coin series.

The day that no one thought would ever come has arrived and the empire of antea, forged in the ashes of a war now more myth than reality, has fallen. Its ruling sons, once so powerful and pompous, have either been swept into early graves, or corrupted by the priests of a newly ascendent faith that only a meager few understand well enough to fear. For this religious order has the sanction of antea's Lord Regent, Jeter, a man of middling talent who has been plucked from obscurity to be the most powerful man in the known worlds. And given that they have placed at his disposal their singular talents, of sniffing out lies and convincing the weak-minded of their own twisted truths, he is not likely to relinquish his dependence upon them anytime soon.

Cognizant of the crimes of these mysterious priests, a small group of scattered dissidents, who are barely aware of each other's existences, agitate against them. Some choose to do so from within the empire, in hopes of undermining their power. Others, meanwhile, seek out answers in the form of relics and riddles that might well shed more light on how to defeat them. At times, their individual missions appear hopeless. And yet, answers live on in the history of the world, answers that might open a window to a future none of them can imagine.

Lacking the tightness and the drama of The Dagger and The Coin's first two splendid entries, The Tyrant's Law is, nonetheless, an entertaining bridge to what is to come. Mr. Abraham has created a host of characters, from the loyal to the traitorous, from the humorous to the mad, that are as well-drawn as they are tragic, overmatched souls who must somehow find a way to persist in the face of horrors that would make gods take note. They are the work's virtue, establishing an emotional tether between reader and work that won't easily be broken.

Mr. Abraham occupies a fascinating place within the genre of fantasy fiction. For while he is understandably counted among the first ranks of the wave of gritty scribes who have helped boldly navigate Fantasy into new and exciting waters, he does not exhibit the same cynicism as his fellows. The labors encapsulated here are as overwhelmingly atlasian as they are in works by Abercrombie, Morgan, Martin and so on, but they harbor a certain measure of good humor and even hope in lieu of world weariness, a promise of warmth that may not lead to softness but that is nonetheless present throughout. That seductive suggestion, that hint of something more, is here in spades.

And yet, though Mr. Abraham brings his able pen and his cast of engrossing misfits to bear here, the necessities of the plot fail him and us. The Tyrant's Law is almost entirely consumed by the moving about of chess pieces which may well pay off down the road, but that here leave the reader feeling as though he's slogging through mud. There is plenty of movement and machinations, even of blood and manipulations, but these seem like mere dress rehearsals for what's to come, the breath taken before the fall. Required, yes, but no more tolerable for knowing it...

The Dagger and The Coin is just the right amount of inventive and familiar, violent and thoughtful. And for this, it should be celebrated, but this will never be remembered as one of its better entries. Here's hoping for better to come. (3/5 Stars)

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is beautiful, exquisite irony

From The Week of August 19th, 2013

What is a hero? The people admire them, our cultures celebrate them and our literature elevates them to immortality. So it is safe to say that we know a hero when we see one. But if pressed to define the criteria for becoming one, we might offer up very different answers. Some of us might value the unsung heroes who toil quietly at thankless jobs that ensure our safety on a daily basis. Others, meanwhile, might emphasize self-sacrifice, believing that a hero is only a hero if we know of, and are inspired by, his or her actions.

But as difficult as it might be to define a hero, it is even harder to unknot the complex relationship between heroes and the societies that harbor them. For while society hails them, upholds them as objects of valor and achievement, it also devours them, reducing them from human beings, with flaws and tempers, to useful paragons that further society's ends. This is no way to treat anyone, let alone those for whom we have the deepest respect. This Ben Fountain captures in his outstanding novel.

For the men of Bravo Squad, they were just doing their jobs, doing what they were trained to do. But for everyone back in America, the ambush at the Al-Ansakar Canal is a defining moment of the Iraq War. Captured on film and replayed for all to see, this four-minute-long engagement, in which Bravo Squad risks their lives to rescue a convoy trapped by insurgents, is a re-affirmation of what they already know, that American soldiers are the bravest and best the world has to offer. And so, it seems only fitting that the survivors of the ambush, while being patched up, and while grieving for the men they've lost, be flown back to America for a thank-you tour, a whirlwind, whistle-stop affair that sees them shaking hands and smiling for photographs in a dozen major US cities before concluding at that most enduring of American rituals, an NFL game at Texas Stadium where they will be honored at Halftime.

For Billy Lynn, the star of the footage which caught him trying to save the life of his dying friend while continuing to kill the enemy, this is a completely disconcerting experience. A 19-year-old boy from a small, Texas oiltown, he is utterly unprepared to be the center of anyone's attention.. And now there are 70,000 people who want to congratulate him, to tell him what they think about the war, and hail him as the bravest of the brave. He must interact with the rich and the poor, the kind and the venomous, all without doing dishonor to the army that has put him here. Over these few hours, he has to be what America needs him to be, but can he be that when he doesn't even know himself? Cheerleaders and millionaires, footballers and fans and at the end of it a war he must go back to, a war that might never end...

As winningly poignant as it is sharply satirical, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is fiction at its best. Juxtaposing the small lives of the men of Bravo squad against the enormity of the spectacle of an NFL game, Mr. Fountain beautifully captures America's tortured relationship with its heroes, with its superficiality and with its founding mythology. For this is a country built on the idea of freedom, constructed to be welcoming to all those who wish to escape tyranny, that is, nonetheless, engaging in two savage and costly wars that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Rather than deal directly with such a difficult truth, however, the people wrap themselves in the sanctity of their flag, focusing on the deeds of heroic men in order to avoid looking at the price they are all paying in a place that few of them could even find on a map. Never in history have so few been asked to bear the weight of so much for so many and this cultural, economic and experiential divide could not be better represented than it is here.

Beyond its potent cultural critiques, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a wonderful and warm character piece. From its young, virginal protagonist, Lynn, to his friend, Mango, his sergeant, Dime, and the film producer, Albert, who is trying to make their story into a movie, the actors here are complicated, rich and deeply entertaining. Mr. Fountain embraces their flaws, depicting them as young men who both love and hate war, who appreciate and scorn their treatment subsequent to the ambush, and who accept and yet cannot abide the empty platitudes of the rich, entitled men who want to be seen to be doting on them. For all their warrior prowess, these are clearly vulnerable men who would benefit far more from a few days respite than the overstimulated chaos of an NFL spectacular. And this brings us to the author's most trenchant observation.

The culture does not feat heroes for their benefit. They feat them to assuage their own guilt about what the heroes have been forced to do. The culture doesn't care about these boys. If it did, they would ask them what they wanted. They would help them with their care, with their futures. Instead of this substantial and meaningful aid, the heroes get fifteen minutes of unwanted fame while being jerked around by titans of industry with whom they have nothing in common and who seek to only use their momentary celebrity to polish their own egos. It is a display of such profound self-indulgence that would descend to the level of disgusting if it weren't so painfully predictable.

Mr. Fountain has a nimble pen, a sharp eye for cultural critique and a strong sense of injustice and irony, all of which he uses to wonderful effect in one of the best reads in years. (5/5 Stars)

Dark fantasy done with militarism and style in The Thousand Names

From The Week of August 12th, 2013

As much as we celebrate the rebels and counter-culturalists, the protesters and conscientious objectors, society runs on rules. After all, at root, society is a common code of conduct to which we all agree in order to receive the benefits of civilization. If there is no conformity to these codes, then there is no universal fabric into which to weave the threads of our lives. And yet, this rule-based system throws up its fair share of problems, chiefly, that it empowers those tasked with enforcing the rules. And given that we cannot guarantee their earnestness, their steadfastness, or their honesty, we often find ourselves lead, judged and moderated by powerful narcissists who happily march us into chaos so long as it suits their ends. Such truths, along with their consequences, are demonstrated to wonderful effect in the opening volume of Django Wexler's dark, militaristic series.

In a world of empires and churches, deserts and gods, war and rebellion is in the process of harshly re-shaping the known lands. Decadent princes have been violently swept from power by the nihilistic Redeemers, a faith that has little time or patience for existing orders and their foolish rules. This upheaval has ripped the vordinai empire apart, not only laying open its once-peaceful towns to all of war's terrible crimes, but forcing its loyal soldiers to fight battles on two fronts: to restore the proper order and to control and supply their men who might no longer have a ruler to fight for.

Into this heady time come two consequential soldiers. Marcus d'Ivoire is the personification of duty, a captain who cares for his men more than he does for the letters of the land's laws. He had resigned himself to career oblivion, but then fate intervened and made him the immediate subordinate to a revolutionary Colonel who promises to change the campaign's fortunes. Winter Ihernglass, meanwhile, is everything but a conventional soldier. A woman masquerading as a man, she has, through good fortune and even better soldiering, elevated herself into the ranks of the decision makers and, with this terrible secret hanging over her head, leads them with a kind of graceless bravery. Together and separately, Marcus and Winter must assemble the pieces to this strange, religious puzzle and act upon this troubling picture before the future is lost to the darkness of demons.

Though at times overly fixated on martial maneuverings, The Thousand Names is excellent fantasy fiction. Mr. Wexler treads here on some of the same ground trailblazed to such epic effect by Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of The Fallen. However, rather than stoop to copying the fine works of other masters, he has re-organized these existing themes into an entirely new and pleasing configuration, one that successfully challenges the entrenched expectations of readers of fantasy. Given how many thousands of volumes have been published in this genre, this is no mean feat. And yet, the author succeeds in welding mysterious faiths, dangerous enemies, uncertain alliances and unexpected fates upon a familiar framework, the end result of which is bound to please most of those who take it up.

While many authors of fantasy reach for the familiar-unto-hackneyed settings and time periods of sword and sorcery, Mr. Wexler wanders off in search of newer, richer ground. The world of The Thousand Names owes much more to Western Europe's 17th century than it does to its 15th. Here, the musket has made extinct flashy knights and their obsolete charges, replacing them with military tactics more appropriate to the American Civil War than to the Battle of Agincourt. Moreover, the Vordinai empire's social policy seems to track with the tastes and the biases of Georgian and Victorian England, where inequities in class, income and opportunity were so apparent and extensive that reform was inevitable. Add to this the spicy language of Martin and Abercrombie, the Genderbending of Morgan and Kritzer, and the result is a dark work of emotive fiction.

For all its virtues, The Thousand Names suffers from two primary structural flaws. While Winter Ihernglass's story is arresting in its freshness and its informativeness, Marcus d'Ivoire is, by comparison, a lifeless lump. It is not so much that the man is a caricature of virtue, though, this does make up some of the equation. Rather, it becomes clear, early on, that he exists only to allow the reader physical and plot proximity to one of the work's primary antagonists without actually adopting the antagonist's point of view. Mr. Wexler is not the first to deploy this tactic. And yet, he does so with a clumsiness that fails to inject Marcus with any kind of vitality. Less troubling to the narrative but more bemusing to this reviewer is the preponderance of military maneuverings that consume the first half of the chronicle. Yes, the detail here demonstrates extensive research and knowledge on the part of the author, but after the first few scenarios in which the story's prime movers exhibit their bravery and skill, these set pieces lose their meaning and become more theatrical than useful.

Notwithstanding its flaws, however, this is an excellent and weighty read, one that takes some calculated chances in order to say something new in an old genre. Deeply engaging... (4/5 Stars).

Petraeus, Counterinsurgency and the new US military in The Insurgents

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

There is no activity with which humanity has more familiarity than war. From the earliest tribes to present-day superpowers, it has been practiced so ubiquitously that it has defined the destinies of virtually every culture we've ever created. And yet, for all this expertise, we are, by and large, miserable, shortsighted wielders of the discipline, profoundly trapped by our biases of the enemy, an overinflated sense of our own martial past, and a rigid adherence to structure and tradition that eschews the bold in favor of the safe. Perhaps, in times past, when men like Alexander the Great could rise out of relative obscurity to conquer half the world, these afflictions were surmountable by the all-but-divine will of a single man, but in this age of massive armies and technological warfare, there is little room remaining for individual geniuses to operate and affect both their futures and those of the nations to which they've sworn fealty. Still, some will try. And Fred Kaplan has, here, chronicled at length the most famous of these revolutionaries.

The son of a librarian and a sea captain, David Petraeus has lived a remarkable life. From 1974 until his retirement from military service in 2011, he served the US Army with distinction, holding numerous commands both domestically, in the training of special forces, and overseas, in hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But though, by all reports, he was a relentlessly driven soldier with a legendary work ethic and capacity to endure punishment, he is best known for his defining role in championing the doctrine of Counterinsurgency, or COIN, which is credited with having helped to empower the Sunni Awakening of 2007 in Iraq which changed the fortunes of that doomed war dramatically, permitting the United States military to deal a devastating blow to Al-Qaeda and their allies. Though his application of COIN in Afghanistan would be less successful, it would do little to tarnish the reputation of this new, intellectually driven form of warfare.

Technology has forever changed our world and this is no more true than for the practice of war. Terrorism has empowered non-state actors, giving them the ability to stand up to much larger nations, at least for a time. Successfully eliminating these insurgent groups would require very different tactics than those nations have traditionally used. The holder of three degrees, David Petraeus believed so deeply in this consequential shift that he devoted his career to compelling the US Army to evolve, to be smaller, trimmer and smarter. After years in the wilderness, after having his reforms blocked by generals and defense secretaries uninterested in coloring outside the lines, he and several key allies both military and civilian, successfully agitated for a new approach to 21st-century warfare, one that relied upon cultivating the trust of leaders in the warzones in question and using those contacts to uproot the enemies hiding in their midst. And though ambition, along with a scandalous affair, would eventually doom his career, his disgrace would come long after he'd left his scholarly mark upon one of the world's most rigid institutions.

The Insurgents is a thorough, well-paced, and engrossing examination of the Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the men and women who fought for it in the face of stiff resistance from well-entrenched traditionalists eager to ignore the evolution of modern warfare. Mr. Kaplan, an author and journalist, uses David Petraeus' career as a focus, a touchstone from which he can cast a wide net that captures not only COIN and its impact on the United States' most recent wars, but the shambolic manner in which the US military is run. Given how infrequently the US military has been defeated, this would appear to be an absurd claim. And yet, this organization suffers from the kind of institutional rot present in all bloated organizations, a decay that results from the self-interested motivations of powerful individuals within the organization who, because they cannot be sure of their place in a changing environment, resist such change with all their might. One need only look at the manner in which the Iraq War was justified and then prosecuted to understand the shattering, real-world consequences of such stubbornness.

As much as the US military comes off poorly here, let it not be said that Mr. Kaplan is in the bag for David Petraeus and his famous doctrine. Quite the contrary. The author is clearly sceptical of the degree to which COIN influenced the outcome of the Iraq War. And he's wise to be. For it seems almost impossible to separate COIN's impact from the abject misery of local Iraqis who, having finally had enough of being victimized by thuggish Al-Qaeda, rebelled against them and, with the eager aid of the United States, crushed their operations. Given that the whole purpose of COIN is to give breathing space for good people to organize against the destructive elements inside their own societies, it is hard to argue that COIN was not a benefit in Iraq, but its fairly evident failure to improve the situation in Afghanistan is a serious blow to its credibility. COIN's defenders will argue that Afghanistan is a uniquely atomized country, one that simply cannot be fairly governed in the modern world and, given its miserable history, that may well be true, but this in no way helps COIN's case.

The Insurgents has its sketchy moments. It seems evident that this book had all-but-come to print when the story of Petraeus' affair broke, compelling Mr. Kaplan to pen a hasty and uninformative coda to his chronicle. Moreover, the author doesn't appear to have had any access to Petraeus himself which is somewhat problematic given the heavily biographical nature of the work. However, these are minor knitpicks in what is otherwise a balanced, rational account of two bad wars, the men who prosecuted them and the ideas that bubbled up to impact them.

An excellent primer on the new face of war... (4/5 Stars)

The many faces of man and India in the long and winding Shantaram

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though we can try to broaden our experiences with travel and literature, exposing ourselves to classes and customs of which we know little or nothing, we will never know others the way we know ourselves. From the thoughts that define our darkest moments to the rhythms of our lives indelibly shaped by the cultures that nurtured us, this is what we know. Everywhere else, we are strangers, floating through societies, defined by languages and landscapes, that would require years to understand. But what if we don't even belong to the places that nurtured us? What if, even there, we are misfits, our energies and temperaments mismatched with what we know? Then escape is our only option, a commitment to life as a stranger in a strange land, the price of which is exquisitely captured in Gregory David Roberts' sprawling work of autobiographical fiction.

The product of a working-class upbringing and a life-defining stint in a harsh, Australian prison, Lindsay Ford is a stranger to himself. A bank robber of some repute, he has fled his native land, and the jail that sought to cage him, and traveled, on a fake passport, to India which, initially anyway, serves as merely a stop on his way to freedom in Europe. However, before Ford can move on, events and new friends conspire to keep him in this unknowable, tumultuous country that he is forced to embrace and understand when, in an act of karmic revenge, he is himself robbed and deprived of all but the shirt on his back.

This defining event sends Lindsay on a remarkable journey of criminality and philanthropy that begins in a Mumbai slum and concludes in the violence of war-torn Afghanistan. Between, he will learn Indian languages, Indian customs and even Indian prisons, each of which serve to deepen his understanding of not only himself, but the suffering of the world. Enlightenment, however, may just come at the cost of his soul which may well be the only thing that one cannot sell in this land of noise and opportunity.

Shantaram is a monumental work of fiction that asks far more questions than it answers. Built on the back of Mr. Roberts' remarkable life, it is a thousand-page odyssey into the India of the 1980s, a place of corruption and sorrow, kindness and justice, that is undoubtedly the star of the tale. For the author forsakes a desire to constantly entertain the reader with plot and action and devotes large swaths of the work to simply describing this nation of a billion souls scrambling to get ahead in a world that makes that an all-but-impossible achievement. Villages and slums, cities and jails, are revealed in all their structure and their limitations, exposing India, at the least the India of this novel, as a place where the failure of organized, fair civic institutions have been replaced by ad hoc operations that attempt to provide some sort of framework for the lives of the lower classes. The patchwork nature of this tapestry is both beautiful and tragic.

Though Shantaram speaks at length to issues that range from morality to corruption, suffering is its profoundest and most consistent theme. Lindsay, Mr. Robert's fictional alter ego, endures a remarkable amount of degradation, all of which eats away at his spirit. In this, he becomes our entry point into the Indians who live with the same treatment, or worse, on a daily basis and do so with, what is to the western mind, a stunning degree of fortitude. The scars of unfathomable poverty linger on them, certainly, but it's the novel's caucasian characters who seem far more burdened by their experiences here. It is they who lack the armor that comes from properly understanding a place, of having their expectations for life calibrated from the moment of their births. The Indians know how to take life's slings and arrows without having them damage their spirit. The westerners, meanwhile, have no such protection which causes them, in the face of all of India's thunder, to break down and lose their way, to become trapped by its schemes, radicalized by its violence, and numbed by its capacity to test the depths of the human spirit.

Shantaram has some revolutionary moments, perspectives and phrases that leave the reader alternately breathless and enlightened, but it does this at the expense of the plot which is picked up and set down at the convenience of its author. Fully half of the work is made up of one rumination or another on the nature of existence which, after awhile, becomes both burdensome and far too apparent. The reader begins to sense the digressions into moral philosophy, to feel them coming, to resist the urge to skip it in order to stay within the story's arc, a frustration that weighs down this truly tome-like work. Had the author made more of an effort to intertwine these spiritual musings with the story's significant episodes, one senses that the read would have been legendary.

Fascinating and enlightening... (3/5 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)

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)

The Battle of Tora Bora vividly catalogued in Kill Bin Laden

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Humanity puts great stock in symbols, images and individuals who can either inspire us to achieve our wildest dreams or remind us of the darkness that lies within us all. They can drive civilization forward on the back of all they've sacrificed to give us peace and stability, or seize us in selfish hatreds that harden our hearts and narrow our minds. But for all their historical and rhetorical power, symbols are only what we invest in them. After all, our symbols would be meaningless to someone who lived a thousand years ago, much less a thousand years from now. And yet, in the heat of moments of pain and confusion, this lesson is forgotten, neglected for the pleasures of exorcising them, a lesson taught quite well in Dalton Fury's adrenaline-fuelled memoir.

Though the September 11 Attacks sent powerful shockwaves of emotions through much of the world, they, in their audacity and their horror, also formally introduced the general public to Usama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist who had spent most of the previous 20 years funding and engineering acts of rebellion and terrorism. His crimes, even prior to 9/11, were legendary within international circles, but after this bold and heinous strike at monuments of American economic power, he became legendary, a creature of near-mythical powers who could direct devastating assaults against the world's most powerful nation, all from the relative comfort of the remote, tribal Hindu Kush.

This mountainous, central Asian region shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan had already proven, in the 1980s, to be a successful base of operations from which Afghan guerillas, supported by Arabian jihadists, attacked and disrupted the Soviet occupation of their country, eventually leading to the USSR's withdrawal from the unruly nation. Now it would perform a similar function for Usama Bin Laden who hoped to use his attacks against America to provoke his enemy into a ruinous war in the mountains he knew so well. Here, on familiar ground, he could watch America's might break against his winter stronghold and, in doing so, reveal to the world the extent of American weakness.

Instead of committing to such a war, the United States sent special operatives to Afghanistan, teams of Rangers, Deltas, SBS operatives and CIA agents armed for battle and packing the millions of dollars necessary to purchase the loyalty of local warlords who would execute the American-backed assaults against both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This campaign would culminate in the Battle of Tora Bora, a series of skirmishes that would eventually smash Al-Qaeda, sending its key men into hiding and largely ending it as an organized force.

The commander's eye view of this most consequential battle, Kill Bin Laden is an arresting narrative of a hunt that narrowly missed capturing the world's most famous terrorist. Dalton Fury, the pseudonym for the Delta commander in charge of this mission, draws from his journal of those difficult few months to paint a thorough, if nationalistic, view of the battle, its protagonists, antagonists and the circumstances that lead to them clashing in this most remote mountain range. Supplementing his account with colorful anecdotes of life as a special operative, and detailing the absolute extremity of the training these soldiers endure to join such elite companies, Fury succeeds in conveying a sense of what it's like to be a member of the world's supreme fighting force, both its rewards and its disappointments. In this, he leaves little doubt of just how far these men have deviated from the normal life and the price they pay for living so far outside this most customary box.

However much Kill Bin Laden educates us about the lives and the demands of special forces, it stumbles when attempting to carry out its primary mission, to provide an unbiased account of the Battle of Tora Bora. Fury certainly reconstructs the combat, and the chain of events that lead to it, but these details are drowned out by his incessant need to denigrate the Afghans with whom he operated. In light of the fact that these warlords and their armies required American cash as motivation to fight, it seems reasonable to conclude that Fury is right to criticize their reluctance to fully engage with a fundamentalist enemy ravaging their homeland. But his tone so often devolves into outright scorn that his contempt for these men and their ways creates a great deal of room for doubt as to whether or not he's given them a fair hearing here.

That said, one gets the sense from these pages that Fury is not a man interested in outside criticisms, that he'd no more be interested in disguising or shading truths than he would be in retreating from a battle. And so, though we may harbor some doubts as to his fairness, the author has absolutely succeeded in his attempt to communicate his own personality and the ethos of the Deltas, facts which, alone, make this a worthwhile read.

History shifts on pivotal moments like these. Had Bin laden died at Tora Bora, it seems likely that the pretext for the War in Iraq would have been too weak for it to eventuate. The history of the 21st century's first decade would have unfolded far differently in the wake of such a monumental change. To see such a moment play out is a gripping experience no matter how prejudicial the execution. (3/5 Stars)

A bloody rumination on faith and sacrifice in Abaddon's Gate

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

Concerted, collective action towards a single, unified goal is, for humans, a challenge without peer. For though most of us possess the requisite generosity to selflessly offer our aid in times of stress and confusion, we are still creatures of ego, individuals who believe that our ideas, our beliefs, our plans, represent the right way and that everyone else's ideas, beliefs and plans are inherently less for being other, for being not of us. This self-centered mentality is not without its merits. After all, often, there is a right way. And if someone who possesses the requisite strength of personality leads his fellows in the direction of the truth, then the whole benefit. But how do we know what is right? How can be we be sure? And are confidence and ego our only guides? Abaddon's Gate ruminates.

In a future solar system dominated by political rivalries, ideological disputes and commercial realities, life is difficult and dangerous. Population pressures on Earth have not only forced society to adopt radically different ideas of the family unit, they've compelled the bold and the ambitious up the gravity well and into the solar system where opportunities are as wild as the various space stations, orbital habitats and domed moonbases are liberal. Though this offworld expansion has both developed beneficial technologies and brought back useful resources to the humans who need them, it has only deepened the balkanization of humanity into several distinct and contentious groups which are as selfish as they are bellicose.

Perhaps these rivalries would have resolved themselves in time, allowing humanity to enjoy a more united future, but even this optimistic outcome is short-circuited by a terrifying, alien threat that escaped from a research station in the solar system's outer reaches and migrated to Venus where it has systematically transformed the planet into a great, energetic ring inside which the understood laws of physics seem to give way to the secrets of an ancient, advanced civilization that, though it has past into darkness, has left behind its powerful and unknowable technologies. Fear of the unknown initially precludes the various factions from exploring the ring, but soon a desire for revenge overwhelms their common sense and they chase an apparent saboteur into the ring and humanity's future.

The probable, bloody conclusion to the riveting Expanse series, Abaddon's Gate is a long and savage last stand against both ignorance and justice. James S.A. Corey, the pen name for the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, largely relinquishes the tropes of horror and science fiction, deployed to such heart-pounding effect in The Expanse's first two volumes, and takes up in their stead the more complex themes of sacrifice, faith and collective action, each of which prove to have nearly as many interpreters as human beings. For there is no clean sacrifice, just like there is no true god. There is only what we as individuals want to think is true and right, realities which often clash with the conceptions of other humans with devastating and debilitating effect. We can no more find accurate confirmation for our beliefs than we can touch god. We have to rely, instead, on clear minds and good intentions and hope that these lead us into the light.

There is no doubt that Abaddon's Gate suffers from this switch in scope. Where the prior two entries mined such profitable material from the genres of horror and survivalism, this most recent effort has much more in common with the modern conception of the Western, a play in which sociopolitical realities thoroughly give way to the relative simplicity of two opposing forces fighting over control, over how things ought to be done, over who gets to do them and why. This ambitious switch in theme mirrors the switch in perspective. For most of the towering figures introduced in the prior works, excluding a handful of necessary principals, are discarded in favor of a new cast of largely female actors who, though refreshing, fail to capture the reader's interest to the degree of prior casts.

Moreover, the new cast keeps the perspective trapped on the various ships jockeying over the Ring and all that it contains, robbing us of the opportunity to experience, to some degree, what life inside the ring is like. Perhaps future volumes will dispel some of the mysteries left here, but this is cold comfort to this reader who felt as though Abaddon's Gate lacked the balance of the previous works and failed to deliver all that the series had promised.

Notwithstanding its flaws, The Expanse, overall, is wonderful, dark, imaginative science fiction that challenges our conceptions and insists that we view our optimism for the future through the lens of today's political realities. For this, it has earned a place amongst the great SciFi series of the 21st century. We can only hope that future additions to this series will help make Abaddon's Gate feel less vestigial. (3/5 Stars),

A playful, charming world of swords and knaves in The Riverside Series

From The Week of May 20, 2013

Power is a fascinating and revealing component of civilization. For though it is sufficiently potent to rewrite the past and reprogram the future, to swell the influence of nations and crush the will of unfortunates, it is virtually impossible to evenly distribute. Power is neither tangible nor zero-sum. It can expand and contract, ebb and flow, on levels as grand as governments and as small as conversations. And yet, despite its elusiveness, power is forever being chased. For its accumulation can, at worst, ensure one's future and, at best, place one on an untouchable pedestal from which the world is malleable and enjoyable. This great game of trade and acquisition cannot be stopped. It can barely even be regulated. It is simply what humans do, consequences be damned. This Ellen Kushner illustrates to charming effect in her Riverside Series.

At the foot of a sprawling city shaped by nobles and blessed with beauty lies Riverside, a lowly quarter of knaves and workers who toil quite literally in the shadow of power. For it squats at the base of a hill upon which the rich and powerful plot and frolic, scheme and operate, its denizens barely heeded by the largely incestuous powerbrokers who occupy the upper reaches of its society.

For the most part, the citizens of Riverside are content with this arrangement. For the nobility has agreed to largely leave them be, to act as they please, within reason. Perhaps this is in deference to Riverside's enduring spirit. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement of its quiet menace. Or perhaps it is simply convenient for the duchesses and chancellors to ignore the little people while drawing from their depths talented arms to wield swords in their honor. For though Riverside might well produce many other goods, its most notable export is swordsmen, trained champions paid handsomely by nobles who seek, through duelling, to settle points of honor. Sometimes, these questions are small, requiring the combatants to engage only until the first drop of blood is shed. However, other times, only a death can settle a slight.

This dangerous game naturally produces its fair share of heroes, shadowy figures who are as skilled with the blade as their reputations are darkly grand. And though they fight in the name of the nobility, dependent upon them for their livelihoods, their code has nothing to do with the settling of noble questions. They perform as much for the glory of the contest as for the coin that will flow into their purses, delighting in the clash of steely wits that convinces them that they are alive.

Entangling the powerplays of the nobility with the fortunes of the swordsman, The Riverside Series is a delightful, dramatic romp through a land of political machinations and difficult, classist realities. Ms. Kushner combines the playwrite's sense of flair with a Romantic's aesthetic to create a familiarly medieval world where the intersection of plots and swords creates a wealth of vengeance and humor, tragedy and triumph. These emotions and outcomes drive these interconnected tales forward, enthusing them with dark wits and sad laments that call to mind films like The Princess Bride and the themes of Shakespeare, a land where playfulness and consequence can coexist without risking the story's slide into the darkness of depression or elevation into the airy-fairy of the inconsequential.

Though The Riverside Series pulls in any number of charming commoners, the story primarily revolves around the life and family of Alec Campion, a powerful nobleman whose appetites are as unpredictable as his moods. His languid charm is perfectly rendered by Ms. Kushner who invests Alec with a wonderful sense of indolent pride and endless power. It's through alec that we come to understand the series' political views. For it is he and his friends who pick up and toss away the lives of those beneath them, using them as pawns in their games until they grow tired of them and move on. Their machinations with one another are invariably more important, more vital, more real, than the consequences to the outsiders who happen into their orbits. Such would be impossible if not for the enormous disparity in power and wealth between the two classes which, though analogous to any number of past realms in our world, draws the closest comparison to Renaissance Italy.

A review of The Riverside Series cannot pass without commenting on its sexuality. Ms. Kushner, who began this journey in the late 1980s, has penned a truly post-gender fantasy series. Her characters are utterly unself-conscious about their tastes, or their habits. Yes, they judge one another for them, but only as a means of finding their place, finding their pleasures. In this, the series is not only groundbreaking, but its shamelessness allows the reader to improve his understanding of the essence of love, its boundlessness and its multi-facetedness. For this is a force that is only limited by the limitations we give it, not by anything else. Whether we find joy in the arms of those who are like us, or unlike us, matters not as long as we find joy in someone. This subtle but pervasive message is conveyed with grace and class in a series that, sadly, is as transgressive in 2013 as it was in 1987, when the journey began.

No, The Riverside Series is not weighty fare. It likely will not linger long, its schemes evaporating into the mental caverns in which we harbor the facts of past adventures. However, its quiet messages about sexuality and gender, power and class, make it eminently worthwhile. (3/5 Stars)

Survivalists, cold wars, and a Hellenic future in The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy

From The Week of April 29, 2013

As much as we treasure free will as a concept, many of us do not exercise it. For the world as we know it must have structure. It must have rules. And if those rules are to have any force or effect, there must be individuals willing to enforce them, to follow orders that they might find personally distasteful or disagreeable. This is the bargain these individuals make with society, the ignoring of their own right to choose in the name of advancing the greater good. But what if the orders they are asked to execute are so monstrous, so unimaginably beyond the greater good? What does the order-follower do then when all her training tells her to do what she's been told? Then the individual is divided between their duty and their honor, between the smart thing and the right thing. And heaven pity her if she chooses wrongly. Laura Reeve demonstrates in her uneven trilogy.

In a future where the limitations of faster-than-light travel have been circumvented by N-space travel, human civilization has reached for and grasped the stars. Humanity now inhabits any number of worlds and space stations, journeying between stars almost as commonly as as they once traversed the roads of old Earth. But for all this technological freedom and planetary diversity, harmony is an exceedingly scarce commodity. For once the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano on old Earth made inhabiting that planet challenging, at best, and Hellish, at worst, Earth and its colonies calcified into two distinct and antagonistic factions that, even many decades on, continues to fester.

One of the central events in this hot and cold war was the ostensible destruction of one of the Terran factions star systems via the use of a banned weapon capable of annihilating stars. This genocidal act not only fuelled Terran enmity towards the Autonomists, the one-time colonies of Earth that banned together in defiance of its power, it instigated a hunt for the war criminals who carried out the mission to destroy an inhabited star system.

Major Ariane Kedros was the pilot of that mission. An augmented human, re-engineered to survive the psychological stresses of N-space, she belongs to the autonomist's intelligence directorate, an organization of special operatives tasked with black missions in the defiance of the colonies. However, since that fateful mission, which now haunts the major's dreams, Kedros' service to the directorate has become somewhat involuntary, a forced relationship that, thanks to their protection of her identity, she cannot exit. For should she force their hand, they might reveal her true identity and consign her to a short, brutal life on the run.

With this blackmail firmly in place, the directorate tasks Kedros with a series of dangerous missions that result in the enemy suspecting her true identity. And yet, for as much as the Terrans may want to kill Kedros, she might well have access to something even greater than revenge, an alien artifact, that she and her partner discovered floating in space that belongs to no culture humanity's ever encountered. Revenge or discovery, justice or knowledge... Whatever the Terrans choose, Kedros will have to endure. For she will never escape her past.

A trio of action-packed mysteries, all of which, in some way, stem from Kedros' past, The Major Ariane Kedros Trilogy is an adrenalized but ultimately unsatisfying adventure through an inventive future world. Providing virtually no backstory for her bewildering amalgam of current and future technologies, languages, cultures and disputes, Ms. Reeve relies on her readers to tease out the vital links that will offer some sort of context to what is otherwise a dizzying array of alliances and cultures that fail to track with our own.

From all appearances, Ms. Reeve has used the Peloponnesian War as inspiration for her two primary factions, with the role of the democratic Athenians taken up by the autonomists and that of the autocratic Spartans represented by the Terran League. For anyone lacking in familiarity with this most ancient Greek conflict, the Terrans will appear to be as utterly unrecognizable to us as their motives are to the autonomists. This is not cleverness on the author's part, a slow unspooling of a dense and interesting mystery that's gradually filled in as the narrative progresses. It is a failure to communicate, to provide a basic framework from which the reader can intuit the rules of the game.

The setting, though, is only the beginning of the flaws here. Ms. Reeve fails, at virtually every turn, to endow her characters with three-dimensionality. Kedros' partner, her boss, even the Terrans who pursue her, are all only partially realized people, a constellation of dim stars that are only here to provide a means by which Ariane Kedros can act. Kedros herself, meanwhile, is a mass of contradictions. She is the embodiment of self-pity and guilt for what she's done, and yet she at no point exhibits remorse for what she's done. On the contrary, she insists that she would do it again. Perhaps this is merely bravado, but it certainly suggests an inconsistency of character that is all-the-more devastating for it being rooted in the trilogy's major protagonist. In fact, the only individual in this entire saga who appears to have consistent motives is one of Ariane's past crewmates who has been tormented and twisted by her guilt.

There are virtues here. The Minoans, Ms. Reeve's alien race, are fascinating creatures with a fairly original society and relationship with their technology. Moreover, the third human faction, space-born generationalists who have built enormous ships with which to slowly explore the universe, are a fascinating, inward-looking culture that is worthy of the time Ms. Reeve spends with them. However, these virtues are even more frustrating when one realizes that Ms. Reeve has genuine talent, especially for imagining alternate societies. She merely fails to fully animate them and bind them together with plots that will showcase them.

At times, a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the limits of human endurance, but ultimately marred by an unwillingness to take full advantage of the pieces of the puzzle... (2/5 Stars)

Turkey's contrasting cultures explored in Livaneli's moving Bliss

From The Week of April 22, 2013

What is the process by which our bodies, and indeed our lives, are chosen for us? Traditionally, religion has had the most pleasing answer to this existential question, trusting that only god has the power, the wisdom and the desire to assign our souls to the newborns of his choosing. This explanation has held sway for a long time, and why not? It's a satisfying answer, one which gives reason to why some of us are born into fortune while others are delivered into lives of misery. But what if it is nothing more than random chance? What if nothing but a simple quirk of fate stands between the child born of American splendor and the one born of Iraqi war? How different their lives would unfold, how different their experiences and dreams, all on the basis f a flipped coin... O. Z. Livaneli's novel cannot be read without musing over this question and all that it portends.

In present day Turkey, a country of religion and secularism, of modern cities and tribal mountains, of liberalism and honor killings, national identity is a tenuous thing. Forged by the will of a giant of history, and enforced by the overzealous military he bequeathed to his new nation, it is compelled to enshroud not only the westernized urbanites of Istanbul, but the sons and daughters of an ancient east, a place that owes more of its morality to the seventh century than to any other time, or institution. To the West, these are unimaginable stresses pulling at the fabric of society. For they have long since harmonized from helpfully homogeneous roots. But to the east, this is all too common, the chaotic and jumbled legacy of western colonialism and eastern empires that have made borders fluid and non-religious traditions scarce.

Meryem, a fifteen-year-old girl born into this world in flux, is a daughter of the east. Her life is duty and obligation. For she is subject to a skein of Islamic tradition that endows its women with the honor of the tribe. And should that honor be lost, she must be punished, not those who took the honor from her. Thus, when her uncle cruelly assaults her, she, not the uncle, is blamed for her lost virginity. Manipulatively encouraged to commit suicide as a means of restoring family honor, Meryem resists, thus beginning a journey across Turkey in the company of her war-damaged cousin, a journey that will carry her far from home while exposing her to a world of spiritual, intellectual and sexual freedom she could have never imagined.

Penned by one of turkey's most famous, living musicians, Bliss is spellbinding work. No piece of literature can ever truly capture the reality of a place. However, to w to whatever extent it can come close, Mr. Livaneli has succeeded, creating, with Meryem's journey across the physical and spiritual plains, a tapestry of Turkey that won't be easily dismissed. Deploying three main characters to represent the divisive, entrenched tensions that characterize modern Turkey, it exposes the reader to the nearly insurmountable challenge of uniting a place that harbors such disparate values. For the west, as represented by Irfan, the wealthy but aimless professor whose path crosses with Meryem, and who helps her to realize her potential, thinks of the east as backward and depraved, a place where religion claims the mantle of moral authority while doing nothing to discourage, much less halt, the suffering of the disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, the east, as represented by Cemal, Meryem's war-ravaged cousin who is tasked by his family with the obligation of quietly disposing of Meryem to restore the family's honor, views the west as soulless and weak. They have not fought and died for what they believe in. They have not suffered for the freedoms they enjoy. More than that, they are proud of their bloodless secularism, flaunting their sinful ways and exposing good men like Cemal to constant, torturous temptation. How such worlds can be reconcile is beyond the ken of these three souls searching for meaning and truth.

Mr. Livaneli is no master of prose. In fact, this is the novel's major weakness, a simplicity of style that reminds us that he is, here, out of his native element. However, whatever the novel loses in its composition it more than reclaims with its characters who are animated from their archetypal roots to become living, feeling creatures, damaged souls looking for truth and freedom in a world that's never asked them what they wanted.

This is at times a difficult read. It does not shrink from the cruelties of honor-based societies. But rather than languishing in them, rather than bemoaning their existence, it offers hope to the hopeless, believing that life can change for the better by merely offering everyone a chance to make their own choices. Wonderful sentiments for such a grave tale... (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)