A thoughtful glimpse of civilization's fall in The Last Policeman

From The Week of March 31st, 2014

Civilization is so pervasive, so consequential, that it's all-but impossible to imagine our lives without it. It has sparked ideas and ignited industrialization, enshrined the rule of law and elevated the power of the people, but it has also virtually blinded us to the truth, that it has bound us up in its conformist chains. This is a good bargain. After all, whatever we lose by way of personal freedom we more than gain back in enlightenment and wealth. This is indisputable. But just what have we surrendered? Is the absence of civilization truly so destructive? Would a world predicated on personal freedom necessarily be anarchic? Philosophers and anthropologists have been asking themselves these questions for generations, but Mr. Winter's has run the experiment. And though the destination may not be revelatory, the journey certainly is entertaining.

It is virtually certain that, in six months, everyone on Earth will be dead. This is the truth that confronts Harry Palace one unforgettable morning when he wakes to the news that a planet-killing asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. A policeman in a quiet, new-England town, one would expect that he, like every other living human, would be tempted to throw off the boring mundanity of daily existence, either by revelling in the freedom of these final days, or by ending it all on their own terms. But Harry Palace is not like the thieves and the opportunists, the professors and the pilots, who have forsaken their lives and their posts for a final, explosive experience. Harry palace holds the thin blue line against the darkness, righteously holding up the law in a world going to pieces.

The only problem is that it's almost impossible to be a policeman in the endtimes. Cell service is spotty, hospitals are barely staffed and the police force's investigative powers are being shut down. After all, what's the point in solving any sort of crime when there's so little time left? But to harry palace, truth is truth, right is right, and an oath is an oath. And even if it kills him, he's going to hold that line until the bitter end, as best he knows how.

An engaging journey through a tragicomic landscape, The Last Policeman and its successor Countdown City are pieces of imaginative near-future fiction. Ben Winters, though far from the first to attempt to conceive of a world careening through its last days, nonetheless manages to lay it out with style, with passion and with originality. His post-Announcement New England is vividly and organically drawn, a place where, though law and order is practically maintained, the soul has been ripped out of the community. There remains a societal superstructure within which to operate, but families are deteriorating, services are decaying and people are wandering off to please themselves before the end. Consequently, the author's world is not one of instant and gratuitous violence, but one in which the social, economic and civil webs that bind us all together are being sundered thread by thread, widening existing holes through which yet more vulnerable people slip into oblivion.

More than its rich environment, though, The Last Policeman's protagonist is also relatively rare. In a world slowly fraying at its seams, harry Palace is a humble, even geeky, rock of stability. He's a square, a man who does good because he has never thought to do anything else. While many of his fellows escape their obligations, he stays to do the job he's always wanted to do, an unthanked, unwanted, and unacknowledged pillar of civilization that someone will eventually break. In this, Palace does the series wonderful service as both an object of amusement and admiration. The former comes as the reader snickers at his naivety and his earnest doggedness; the later arrives when we come to understand just how much he must sacrifice in order to stand up in the face of a tide that even he seems to know will wash him away.

The first two volumes of the Last Policeman are by no means perfect. The author's mysteries are as threadbare as they are insignificant. Thus, as Harry labors to solve them, we are left to snicker and scorn him for either his thick-headedness or his gullibility. And given that Harry was already a square, having these attributes emphasized in this way is less than flattering. Moreover, we're often left with the impression that Harry's humanity only exists as a means by which to highlight its absence in everyone else around him. Which draws scrutiny to Harry's spotless character that it cannot withstand. Howevermuch the works may be flawed, the extent to which Mr. Winter's has avoided the cliches of apocalyptic fiction, and attempted instead to ask intriguing questions about what the world would realistically look like if all our deaths were as certain as sunrise, grants his work imagination and depth that easily overcomes its shortcomings.

An interesting idea that is neither boring or derivative... (3/5 Stars)

Corruption and the new France in the dark The Marseilles Trilogy

From The Week of December 16th, 2013

Corruption is a cancer that, when unchecked by the will to do good, spreads malignantly through the body of society, devouring virtue at every turn until civilization is simply a wasteland of broken dreams. Other crimes, other sins, lack this power to spread and infect. They are either regulated by the good around them, or quarantined into small ghettos where such behavior is, if not normative, then certainly expected. But corruption cannot be confined in this way because of its most potent weapon, the communication to the minds of the good that they are fools for playing by society's rules, that only dupes refuse to partake of the sweet fruit of all of corruption's temptations. No other form of wickedness can so swiftly convince the good to do bad, a truth made abundantly clear in Jean-Claude Izzo's engaging trilogy.

In the late 1990s, at the dawn of modern Europe, life in the French port city of Marseilles, the first city of the third world, is difficult and divisive. Not only are jobs relatively scarce, making rife the exploitation of the vulnerable, poverty and the influx of immigrants have created fertile soil for the racist National Front to bed down and nurture their cruel plots against all those who do not look like them. But underneath the drumbeat of the Front's marches, beyond the screeds of their pamphlets, is an even deeper threat from Italy, a Mafia culture that threatens to reach out and worm its corrosive tentacles into every aspect of European life.

Fighting a one-man war against these threats, which are as foul as they are pervasive, is Fabio Montale, a cop come reluctant crusader who has lived all his life in this dirty city of discontent. A hoodlum in his youth, he found his way onto the side of justice when he could no longer stomach the nihilism of criminality. And yet, while Fabio finds purpose with the police, he does not find peace. For they, in their own way, are just as corrupt as the world they seek to marginalize. Isolated in his quiet quest to keep the Mafia and the national Front from ruining Marseilles, Fabio is ill-prepared for the lengths they are willing to go to win, against him and against the world they want to own. Killing his friends, or even just people seen with him is nothing. What will Fabio have to surrender to continue on the path of righteousness? And does he have the right to endanger those closest to him to fight a war he cannot win?

Adventures through the racist and corrupt underbelly of this French city, The Marseilles Trilogy is as riveting as it is sloppy. Mr. Izzo, whose work helped create the genre of Mediterranean Noir, of which this trilogy is a stalwart, has created a gritty and wine-soaked world that more-or-less operates at the behest of organized crime. These syndicates, in penetrating governments and the police, have largely sheltered themselves from mainstream prosecution, allowing them to conduct their consequential business well outside of the light of day. This cunning investment has short-circuited resistance against them, leaving it to individual journalists, policeman and social crusaders to fight against a monolithic machine they have no hope of destroying.

Which leads us to Mr. Izzo's most singular and effective creation, the battered and beleaguered Fabio Montale, a man who staggers from crisis to crisis without plans, without hope, and certainly without any reasonable expectation of victory. Fabio is aware of all of these truths. And yet, miraculously, despite the pain this world has caused him, he persists in pursuing it precisely because of what said world has cost him. This may be insane; it's most certainly foolhardy; and it will someday, undoubtedly, get him killed. But whatever flaws of character Fabio may possess -- a closed-off heart, an inability to relate to the women he loves --, he is not a coward. He introspects. He reminds himself of what others deserve and he uses this motivation to deal small defeats to a darkness that will endure until long after he is gone.

the Marseilles Trilogy is rich with detail, with chaotic streets and crowded bars, with cynical racism and elicit drugs, with new music and old loves, all of which provide a rich tapestry around its reluctant hero, Fabio. But for all its sensory hedonism, for all that its leading man is worthy of the silver screen, its plots leave a great deal to be desired. At practically every turn, Mr. Izzo falls back on the old chestnut of the murdered woman Fabio could have loved to galvanize him into action. This an effective trope, one that has withstood the test of time, but when overused so blatantly, it gestalts into a writer's crutch that, when kicked away, leaves no other foundation upon which the tale can rest. Moreover, the resolution of these stories are so dizzyingly swift that they are in no way clear or coherent. The author's reluctance to grant Fabio any major victories is understandable in light of his overall message, but his manipulations, to keep Fabio from anything like triumph, is too readily apparent. The reader is never allowed to feel as though his conclusions are organic outcomes of real scenarios.

Nonetheless, The Marseilles Trilogy and the genre in which it has found such a profitable home, is a valuable work that not only speaks to the challenges faced by lone crusaders and large institutions trying to resist the infestations of crime, but to the kind of society that results from allowing the wielders of corruption to operate with relative impunity. These lessons grant these works their potence and their passion. (3/5 Stars)

A profound journey through the shoals of fame in The Zuckerman Trilogy

From The Week of December 1st, 2013

Our lives are defined by pivotal moments, convergences of chance and self-determination that redirect us towards new and unexpected destinies. Of these impactful moments, we remember the negative outcomes with far more clarity than the positive, not only because it is in our natures to rue our failures more than we celebrate our successes, but because these misfortunes leave us grasping vainly for our fleeting triumphs, leaving us to dream of what could have been. But while this is understandable, perhaps we should give more thought to the consequences of our successes as well. After all, achievement doesn't come without its own costs. In fact, often, those costs are cloaked by the warm glow of having advanced our interests, making it all the more difficult to brace for them. This is a lesson driven home by Philip Roth's at-times mesmerizing trilogy.

It's not easy being Nathan Zuckerman. He may have come from good, Jewish stock that drove him to be his best; he may be an ambitious and talented writer with a deep desire to make his mark on the world; he may even be a man of some considerable attractiveness and charm, allowing him to enjoy all of society's various pleasures. But these advantages, both external and internal, are of little comfort to a man haunted by his most famous, and infamous novel, a work of fiction that drew on aspects of his own youth to make some difficult and pointed comments about American and Jewish culture.

For anyone else, becoming a famous author would be cause for celebration, and perhaps it was for Zuckerman too, for a time. But as the years accumulate, he finds himself, his family and his relationships increasingly defined by the audaciousness of that novel which deeply offends his father and compels his mother to continually guard herself against the snide and insinuating comments of her neighbors. This ever-increasing burden robs Zuckerman of his health and his happiness, plunging him into a succession of relationships that are as torrid as they are dysfunctional. Eventually, Zuckerman's bitterness completely seizes hold of his existence, making a mockery of his dreams, his plans and his hopes and leaving him with nothing but his dark emotions.

A journey as brief as it is profound, The Zuckerman Trilogy is a fascinating examination of the life of a man blessed and cursed by talent. Mr. Roth, widely thought to be one of the greatest living American authors, creates something of an alter ego in Zuckerman and then heaps upon him all the punishments of ambition and unrestrained desire which feast upon him until there is nothing left of the man but the most jagged of emotions. In lesser hands, such a premise might seem like the height of arrogance and self-indulgence. Writing harshly about one's own fame, knowing that to do so will only make one even more famous? It seems rather cynical. And yet, Mr. Roth is such a keen observer of the human condition, and is so disgustingly skilled at conveying his own revelations through taut, imaginative prose, that the reader is left humbled by his prowess rather than being amused by his conceit.

Of the three works, the first is the most narratively engaging. While introducing us to Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer posits the idea that Anne Frank survived her ordeal with the Nazis and emigrated secretly to New England where she proceeded to live out a quiet and secretive life, cognizant that revealing her existence would inestimably reduce the power of her diary which she never expected to be published. This is a delightful thought experiment and one that helps carry the novel to a complex conclusion. But it's The Anatomy Lesson, the trilogy's final work, that finds Mr. Roth at his most spellbindingly profound. From about the halfway point of the work, the author goes on what must be one of the most powerful and entertaining rants in literary history, one that combines conceit, cowardice and cruelty in a manner that cannot but move the reader to conclude that the author is truly as skilled as his puppet Zuckerman is disfigured by a life lived at odds.

For all of the wonderful ideas and exchanges contained within these pages, however, most lasting is Mr. Roth's implication that fame is an uncontrollable beast. Zuckerman sets out to be successful, certainly, but he never contemplates what that fame might do to him and to the people he's closest to. Nor does he realize that the moment he publishes his work, he loses every ounce of control he has over his public life. He cannot dissuade people from judging him, much less judging his parents. He can't unmake the work. He can't unmake the thoughts people have about the work. He cannot make a plea for people to not read the book. He has made himself subject to the riptides of history and popular opinion which he is in no way able to steer, or even to influence. This is a delicious insight that lends fire and force to the trilogy throughout.

Challenging at times, but well worth the contemplation. For this is nothing short of work that stretches the boundaries of fiction. Such blazing lights are exceedingly rare. (4/5 Stars)

Blade Runner redux in Montero's Tears in Rain

From The Week of August 26th, 2013 Exploitation is one of the enduring quandaries of our age. For there can be no doubt that it is an unavoidable necessity of human progress. Be it the labor we capitalize on, or the resources we pull out of the ground that gave us life, our creations come at the expense of someone or something else. And yet, this very same progress, which drives us to create ever-more powerful technologies and to harbor ever more rational ideas, is the only means by which exploitation can be eliminated. So which is it? Press on in hopes of banishing the scarcity of resources that drives such exploitation, knowing that it will create even more of it in the interim, or return to a simpler time in which exploitation still existed, just in a gentler and more localized form? Neither option is very appetizing, however, it will be a question we'll increasingly ponder over the next fifty years, when many forms of alternative life, from the artificial to the posthuman, are introduced into society. Rosa Montero pegs out her pragmatic position in this debate with her interesting if problematic novel. The year is 2109 and Earth is not what it was. Not only does it harbor guests from alien worlds, it is now the hub of a modest interstellar civilization composed of colonies and artificial worlds. Its wars, of which there have been many, fought over everything from robots to political ideologies, have been largely outsourced to androids known as Replicants, fully fleshed and self-actualized beings grown from stem cells. Due to their rapid development -- they mature in approximately 12 months --, they are implanted with false memories, written by talented writers and thinkers, that substitute for actual experiences. Armed with this core knowledge, Replicants are deployed as laborers and security guards, functionaries and pleasure slaves, as a means of improving life for the standard strain of humanity. Through this tense, exploitative society prowls Bruna Husky. A combat Replicant, she has taken up work as a private detective since her discharge, managing to keep a moderately low profile, that is, until her neighbor, herself a Replicant, has a nervous breakdown in front of her which culminates in the woman tearing out her own eye. This dramatic and traumatic episode leads Bruna to the chilling discovery that the female victim is only the latest in a series of Replicant suicides. Hired by an aggressive Replicant organization to get at the bottom of the deaths, Bruna plunges into a world of drugs, schemes and false memories that will only yield up the truths she seeks if she's willing to confront her own constructed identity, the plumming of which might well break her before someone can kill her for snooping. At times entertaining and melodramatic, Tears in Rain is a thoughtful work of science fiction that never quite manages to escape its derivative roots. Ms. Montero, who has had a distinguished career both as an author and a journalist, has created an interesting, detailed world that has all-but-turned identity into a commodity, to be bought and sold, written and implemented, at whim. This notion has grave implications for humanity which, at the best of times, is tempted to exploit individuals and groups for its own gain. Doing so to people who can be programmed at any time to d as they wish, to fulfil whatever desire they wish, would not require a second's thought. Given such weighty issues, one would expect Tears in Rain to be a read as difficult as it is depressing. However, despite the amoral world in which it is framed, the tale rings surprisingly loudly with hope for the future. It is uplifted by the belief that individuals will always have the power to stand up and effect positive change. That change may be limited; it may even come at a terrible cost, but it will come. And that kind of incremental progress is both priceless and cumulative. However, notwithstanding its positivity and its engaging heroine, Tears in Rain cannot distinguish itself from the masterworks that preceded it. Clearly inspired by 1r\& and the short story from Philip K. Dick that gave it life, Ms. Montero virtually copies the idea of the Replicants as represented in those works, changing only the means of their creation. All else, from their artificially limited lifespans, to their tailored occupations, to their constructed memories, is unchanged, a fact which would be insulting if the author wasn't so quick to acknowledge these formative works. Heavens, even the protagonists hold the exact same occupation! The rot, though, runs deeper than the mere appropriation of ideas. Ms. Montero's true sin here is that she does so and fails to say anything that wasn't said, or implied, by these prior works. It's one thing to channel one's inspirations as a means of making your own vital statements about life and society; otherwise, the sum total of English literature would belong to William Shakespeare. But it's entirely another to do so and fail to expand on these existing ideas. The whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants is to be a link in the chain of knowledge and progress, not so that you can take advantage of the poor schmuck you're standing on. Interesting, but its failure to be what others have done better firmly mires it in banality. (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 satisfying, imaginative piece of futurism in the engrossing Blue Remembered Earth

From the Week of June 24th, 2013

What are the costs of success? Our world, as of this writing, is awash in political strife, sectarian violence and organized criminality, all of which stain our civilization. But for all the damage these chaotic elements cause, they are at least reminders that we are, in a key sense, free to act as we choose. What if, in the near future, as seems possible, technology advances to the point where we could prevent crime, re-enforce the democratic process, and allow us to heal our world of the pollution and the corruption we've imposed upon it? Our civilization would be, by every measure, better off, but at what cost? These values would have to be imposed upon everyone. And though most would agree to them, would that uniformity not rob us of a fundamental ability to choose to be foolish? These sticky questions are brilliantly tackled by Alastair Reynolds' mesmerizing first volume of a promising trilogy.

The year is 2162 and Earth is at peace. Humanity has weathered the anthropogenic storms and endured the nihilism of sectarian and resource conflicts to create a newer, better world, one shaped by an admirable dedication to non-violent progress. Genetic engineering, nanotechnology and virtual reality are commonplace, deployed as mechanisms for aiding in both the enjoyment and the interconnectivity of humanity. This utopian society, which is lead by Africa, with India and China as somewhat secondary powers, is managed by the Mechanism, an omnipresent surveillance system that prevents violent actions through painful and debilitating stimulus applied to the human brain via their nanotechnological augmentations.

Having spread to both colonies in the solar system and to cities under Earth's seas, humanity appears to have reached the zenith of its progress. Technological advancement has slowed from the frenetic pace of the previous century, leading some to wonder if the Mechanism-imposed peace has retarded the chaotic creativity of earlier decades. However, this view is undermined when two members of the Akinya family, a powerful African outfit that have earned incalculable riches by creating some of the key technologies that have enabled the cultivation of the solar system's many resources, stumble upon secrets left behind by their clan's recently deceased matriarch. Geoffrey, a biologist, and Sunday, an techno-artist, together and individually, begin to investigate their grandmother's past in hopes of unearthing the mysteries that characterized her long, legendary existence. In doing so, they initiate a series of events that might well irrevocably change human civilization.

The rich product of one of science fiction's brightest minds, Blue Remembered Earth is a tour de force. Mr. Reynolds, an astronomer turned author, has not only spun out a well-paced, dramatic tale, he has deviated from 50 years of western tropes and divined, in their stead, a complex future world that oozes authenticity. No one writing from the early years of the 21st century can do more than guess at what life will be like in the 22nd, but Mr. Reynolds' refreshing brand of futurism immerses the reader in such inviting, mesmerizing layers of verisimilitude that this hard truth is happily discarded for an world that won't soon be forgotten.

Mr. Reynolds is by no means the first to conceive of a future world that takes for granted technologies that are currently only in the embryonic stage of development. No, the genius here lies in the manner in which he imagines their unspooling over the next 150 years, leading eventually to a probable future that has advanced well beyond the crude interfaces of screen and keyboard so ubiquitous today, embracing, in their stead, biotechnologies that interact directly with our minds. These electrifying technologies not only play a substantial role in the unfolding of the narrative; they are explored by an author interested as much in their philosophical outcomes as their tangible ones.

For all its brilliant futurism, however, this first entry in the Poseidon's Children trilogy suffers from one significant systemic flaw. One of Mr. Reynolds' imagined technologies allows individuals to project their consciousnesses into automatons, ranging from robots to lifelike androids, designed to allow humans to interact over long distances. But though this technology is deployed to great effect by the plot, the author fails to explain why, when these disposable bodies are readily available, and fully capable of extending a human's reach well out into space without having to leave the safety of Earth, humans do not simply stay on Terra Firma and allow their mechanical proxies to endure the dangers of both space travel and Blue Remember Earth's plot. Perhaps the humans of Mr. Reynolds' future simply have too strong a desire to explore for themselves, to feel the ground of other worlds crunching beneath their booted feet, but when set against the overwhelming advantages of avoiding the deterioration of the human body in reduced gravity, and given that proxies could obviously possess attributes humans cannot, this seems like a flimsy excuse. Should we develop this proxy technology, I imagine most humans will explore the solar system with their minds, not their bodies.

Beyond the science here, Blue Remembered Earth's plot holds up well. From the rapidly evolving landscapes of Mars to the bohemian refuges of the dark side of Earth's moon, we're introduced to vistas and characters into whom Mr. Reynolds has breathed life. There are missteps, certainly. The author's puppetmaster's strings are allowed to show far too often, with actors just happening to arrive at precisely the right moment to receive clues to a mystery only they are destined to solve, but these are forgivable sins when the goal is so rewarding.

A wonderful, captivating beginning to a trilogy of immense promise... (4/5 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)

Scams, corruption and the new Africa in Ferguson's 419

From The Week of April 8, 2013

What do we owe one another? More than seven billion people inhabit our planet, seven billion souls who dream as we do, work as we do, fail as we do. They possess different personalities, different goals, different cultural ethics, but they are fundamentally beings built from the same blueprint, individuals who descend from a common place and a common time. And yet, with this being true, we still fight one another, steal from one another, denigrate one another, all in the hopes of reserving for ourselves the largest portion of available resources and privileges possible. Some might argue this is right and proper. After all, of those seven billion, we will only ever meet a vanishingly small fraction. And we don't owe anything to people we'll never meet. Or do we? What are the costs of acting against those we'll never know? Will Ferguson ruminates in his intriguing novel of modern reality.

Known colloquially as a 419 scheme, drawing its name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it, this infamous practice attempts to defraud an individual of their savings by making the victim an offer temptation won't allow them to refuse. Having risen to prominence with the popularization of email, the Nigerian Scam is the most famous strain of this disease. Though it has various derivations, the scam generally offers the victim a lucrative payout if they will wire the scammer a substantial sum of money, ostensibly used by the scammer to unlock an even greater sum of money such as an inheritance. In reality, however, the scammer has no intention of paying back the victim. For the entire enterprise is a fiction used merely to capture the victim's initial investment. Though the odds of success are low for the scammer, the rewards are high enough for them to persist until they find someone credulous enough to fall for their lies.

Laura Curtis, a copy-editor living in Canada, is made painfully aware of the price of this scam when, after her father's death in a car accident, his bank accounts and email history reveal a devastating truth, that he is only of 419's victims. Preying on his chivalry, the scammer has defrauded the elder Curtis out of not only his savings but the money from a loan Curtis took out to aid a fictional girl. Though Laura's brother is enraged, haplessly threatening to sue everyone involved, Laura is the only one determined to act. Driven by grief, she attempts to track down the specific scammer, traveling to Nigeria where she is immersed in a world utterly foreign to her, a world of vicious criminal gangs, ruthless government troops, cold-hearted oil companies and beleaguered natives of the Nigeria delta trying to survive in a hellish, ever-changing environment.

A slow and steady build towards a darkly moving crescendo, 419 is at times laborious and mesmerizing. Mr. Ferguson deploys three primary protagonists, a Nigerian scammer, a native of the Nigerian delta and a beleaguered, pregnant girl from inner Africa, to draw the reader into a noisy world as utterly foreign to the West as it is harsh on its inhabitants. As the narrative switches between Lagos, the delta and the dubious roads and polluting oil derricks that connect them, we can feel modern Africa in all of its post-colonial splendor and corruption. Through the eyes of these partially empowered actors, we come to understand not only the heavy burden of colonialism's legacy left on the souls and the societies of this continent, but the razor-sharp keenness of the Resource Curse that afflicts Nigeria, miring it in so much corruption that it's nearly impossible for the country to lift itself out of economic chaos.

For all of the emotive power of 419's African characters, Laura Curtis is the novel's driving force. Sharing with the reader both culture and ethics, Curtis channels the reader's empathy and outrage which she shapes into a cold sword of justice. She is a bright spot of familiarity and vengeance amidst a sea of foreign ways and means. And yet, for all that she is the reader's port in the storm, she is also the novel's downfall. For Mr. Ferguson is never able to bring Laura to life in the same way he does the Nigerian cast. He tries to inject her with grief and rage, but these powerful emotions seem to slide off of her impenetrable exterior, leaving behind an austere shell. We sympathize with her plight and cheer on her desire for action, but this never coalesces into anything like a human being we'd recognize.

With an engaging cast of characters, cinematic prose and an expanse of quality research into both Nigeria and 419, Mr. Ferguson has produced an interesting read that pays off those who persist with it. However, periods of inactivity and the occasional slide into spiritualism prevent it from truly standing out. (3/5 Stars

Humor, tragedy and social injustice in the excellent The Observations

From The Week of April 1, 2013

We are what we make of ourselves, not what others make of us. This is a fundamental truth of human existence that seems, today, inarguable. And yet, for centuries, it was rejected for a more convenient truth, chiefly, that we are born into the fates and the circumstances that suit our personalities. If a man was born into a life of slavery, then that was what he was best suited for. Similarly, if a woman was born to a life of prostitution, then her character was capable of nothing else.

The appeal of this view is obvious, for it re-affirms to the holder that their world is exactly as it should be. To view the slave or the prostitute as we would, that they were forced into those circumstances by ill fortune and socioeconomic pressures beyond their control, would shatter the holder's conception of the world, would reveal to them the fundamental unfairness of their society and would call upon them to change a system that would have seemed to them monolithic. So they wrapped themselves in their biases and condemned untold millions to proscribed lives. This unbearable narrowness of life is beautifully, and humorously, captured in Jane Harris' outstanding novel.

The year is 1863 and life for a poor Irish girl, trying to make her way in Scotland, is far from easy. And yet, this is the lot of Bessy buckley, the Catholic daughter of a woman of ill repute and dark disposition who, alone and sixteen, is attempting to find a place that will allow her to get ahead in the protestant world. Made aware of a job opening in what she imagines to be a castle, young Bessy stumbles, starving, into an estate outside of Glasgow where she encounters the intellectual wife of a lawyer who offers Bessy everything she could want: a wage, a roof and all the food she could desire. Only, as with everything in life, there are certain...strings.

At first, Bessy imagines she can cope with the lady's odd requests. Beginning a daily diary and handing it over to the lady isn't terribly onerous. Nor is acceding to the lady's desire to take every conceivable measurement of her head and body. But when Bessy learns the truth, that she is little more than a pawn in a demeaning game, she's had enough. And her response will set into motion a chain of events that not even she can imagine.

A finalist for the Orange prize, The Observations is first rate historical fiction. Narrated in Bessy's mesmerizing brogue, it exquisitely animates 19th-century Britain in all its narrowminded, classist claptrap, revealing, through Bessy's sharpness of mind and wit, the depths of her society's idiocy. This, naturally, is thanks to the skillful and steady hand of its author, Ms. Harris, who possesses not only a keen eye for the entwined polarities of humor and tragedy, but the the often-times devastating consequences of cause and effect. She deserves, here, every bit of acclaim that has and will come to her.

Of the work's many virtues, though, none shine more brightly than the degree to which it demonstrates the travesty of a society, and a culture, that invests importance in classes and casts. The notion that we somehow deserve, or are tailored for, our lots in life is laughable now that we understand that we are born to a particular life, but that we are shaped by the circumstances into which we are born. Thus, if we are born of tailors, and our society makes it difficult or even impossible to rise above our station, then of course we too will be tailors. We have no other option. But rather than comprehending this obvious truth, Victorian Britain goes the other way, believing that people wind up in the occupations they are made for, awfully convenient for a society trying to justify its unimaginable disparities in income, privilege and opportunity. And yet, though society is inarguably damaged by this reality, the people are moreso. For the women who wish to be scientists are barred from that life. And the poor men with keen minds for finance and politics are cordoned off from the halls of power. The misery of people forced to endure lives unsuited to their natural talents is unimaginable.

The Observations has its shaky moments. Its plot is, at times, too tidy, with every piece fitting neatly into place, holding little of the messiness of real life. Moreover, its resolution strikes this reader has too hopeful for the time and place. And yet, even these flaws seem like small sacrifices in the name of irony and poetic justice, virtues that Ms. Harris puts to good purpose throughout.

A deeply enjoyable romp through a tragically narrow world. It won't soon be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

a fascinating if cold glimpse of a possible near-future in The Dervish House

From The Week of March 25, 2013

In the 21st century, technology is the driver of societal change. And though it is tempting to think it has always been thus, this instinct would be in error. For while innovations, from the bow to the printing press, have invited periods of positive disruption, change, historically, has been caused by a complex stew of changing climates, population pressures, natural disasters and geological good fortune, all of which have kept humanity on the path of progress. No longer... Where our species was once subject to fate's whimsy, we now create the tools of our own destiny. With every line of code we write, we program the look, the feel and the morality of our future. Technology has bestowed us with the responsibility for our own success or failure. And while that burden may be heavy, it is one we must shoulder if we are to advance to the next stage of civilization. This is a truth well-explored in Mr. MacDonald's intriguing novel of the near future.

The year is 2027 and Turkey has acceded to the European Union. The dream of a free and secular nation that began with Ataturk has finally, after a century of military coupes and Islamic politicians, been realized in a safe, prosperous country in which men and women, old and young, can succeed. Turkey, once nothing more than the sick man of Europe, once little more than the desiccated heart of a decaying empire, now embodies the American Dream 2.0, the hope for a stable and prosperous Asia.

For all this, Turkey is still subject to profound and disparate forces that threaten to crater its ascendency. A radioactive Iran, demolished by Israeli bombs, is a seething, ecological disaster to its east while Russia, floating on a sea of oil profits, looms to the north, having the power, with a flick of a switch, to end the flow of precious hydrocarbons into Turkey and the West. And these are just the external threats that do not account for the Kurds and the Islamists the disruptive technologies and the thieving capitalists, who trouble it from within.

In this sprawling place, caught between east and west, religion and science, the Deep State and the Islamic state, the interconnected lives of men and women, living in an apartment building in Istanbul, unfold. The economist mourning his past while facing his end of days, the deaf boy who dreams of adventure, the young female professional who yearns for her talents to be recognized, and the young Islamist who is troubled by divine visions all, in their own ways, hold small pieces of a plot to use nanotechnology in an act of terrorism. Their conflicting agendas, and those of the Turks and Greeks, scientists and zealots, they encounter promise to make this hot week in Istanbul, the queen of cities, one to remember.

A thoughtful contemplation of what the world might look like in twenty years, The Dervish House is engaging, if cold, science fiction. Deploying the literary conceit of nesting his host of disparate characters in a single apartment building, Mr. Macdonald is able to craft a varied cast of characters and entangle them in two overlapping mysteries which he then slowly and skillfully unknots during the course of the work. This, along with the liberal use of nanotechnology and terrorism, financial chicanery and geopolitics, allows the novel to be as erudite as it is fictional, a snapshot of a possible, largely optimistic future for a nation that has, for thousands of years, been the cultural hinge of the northern hemisphere. To glimpse it in such detail is pleasing.

For all its imagination, however, The Dervish House is flawed work. For though Mr. MacDonald succeeds in animating his characters with drive and purpose, he fails to invest them with much, if any emotion. Gleefulness and melancholy, ambition and despair, certainly make cameos here, allowing for moments of exultant triumph and crushing defeat, but these explosions are all the more notable for the affectless postures his characters otherwise adopt. We are interested in their machinations, and even occasionally root for their momentary victories, but we rarely love, admire, or even root for them, the notable exception being the young, deaf boy who is easily the novel's strongest character.

Moreover, Mr. MacDonald fails to properly balance the knowledge, about Turkey and the world, he wishes to convey with the plot, about perfidy and nanotechnology, he wishes to execute. Swaths of the novel are consumed by culture, economics, Islam and Turkish history, all of which are interesting in their own rights, but too often we're left to feel as though Mr. MacDonald is showing off his erudition rather than building a better, more engaging story for his readers to consume. His references to the Deep State and financial scams, terrorism and history, ought to add color. Instead, they largely succeed in making the novel seem shallow and flashy.

The Dervish House is high-minded fiction that should be lauded for its attempts to come to grips with the future in all its promise and its politics. It boasts some interesting characters and some complex plots, but the pieces never gestalt into a product that must be devoured. (3/5 Stars)

Entertaining historical mysteries in The Hangman's Daughter series

From The Week of February 25, 2013
As much as the well-heeled would have us think otherwise, society runs thanks to dirty work. From glittering skyscrapers to speeding trains, from internet searches to life-saving medical equipment, countless men and women had to lay those bricks and dig those tunnels, unspool those undersea cables and test those machines, knowing that failure would, at best, cost people their lives and, at worst, undermine society's faith in the virtues of civilization. It is easy for us to forget these truths. For the souls who labor to keep our streets safe, our supermarkets stocked and our houses electrified are largely invisible, their efforts unheralded by a world far more fixated on the feats of the extraordinary than the toils of the masses. The efforts of millions to make the human world go round... This is a truth as relevant now as it has been at any point in the history of agricultural man and it is one explored with delight and darkness in Mr. Potzsch's entertaining series.

Seventeenth-century Germany was a grim and savage place. Riven by the Thirty Years' War, an apocalyptic conflict that claimed the lives of millions while leading to the widespread disintegration of law and order, it was comprised of a series of fiefdoms at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. It laid claim to philosophers and universities, powerful armies and advancing technologies, and yet it was also consumed by the corrosive fire of religious discord that, having erupted from the rise of Protestantism, had spent the last hundred years washing across much of civilized Europe. But as much as the war's cost was monetarily incalculable, it took an even graver price from the men who were paid or compelled to perpetrate its atrocities and from the families who were forced to bear its deprivations. Such scars are generational, wounds that cannot easily be forgotten.

Jakob Kuisl's entire life was defined by the great war. The son of a town hangman, he disavowed his family's calling for the life of a mercenary. But when, after many years of senseless slaughter, this life proved too dark for his soul, he took up his father's fallen sword and became an executioner. As much healer as killer, Kuisl is as skilled with poisons as curatives, as capable of breaking bones as mending them. And yet, though he and his brothers perform necessary services for the people, they are viewed with suspicion and disrespect by the communities that pay them, communities that impose upon the hangmen a dishonor emanating from their own shame. Despite the obvious injustice, there's nothing Kuisl or his like can do about this disregard except live with honor and do what must be done.

Home from the war, circumstances conspire to keep Kuisl busy. For not only does his hometown require his services, but murder seems to follow him wherever he goes. Devils and ghosts, priests and traitors, stalk his steps and those of his fiery daughter who herself is enchained by the hangman's life. Together, they must endeavor to live free in a world that scorns them, all while meting out some kind of justice in a world that has been without it for so long it might not even recognize its righteous glow.

Though far from masterpieces of fiction, the novels of The Hangman's Daughter are entertaining fair from a promising German author. Translated into English and sold through an amazon imprint, each of the collections stories -- there are four to date -- follow the familiar mystery model, kicked off by a death, often gruesome, that the heroes then proceed to solve over the next several hundred pages. Though this formula is, by now, quite wrote, the deep-seated historical flavor of Potzsch's work elevates the series out of the mundane and into the engagingly foreign as our familiar, modern moralities and customs are thrown aside for a world rooted in gods and superstition.

This is undoubtedly the series' greatest virtue. For though its three core characters -- Kuisl, the bearish and brooding hangman; Magdalena, his stubborn and tempestuous daughter; and Simon, her diminutive but devoted admirer -- are interesting, if somewhat predictable, it is the world that mesmerizes. For though religion is still prevalent in the 21st century, it is a faith confined largely to the church. Science has compelled Christianity to largely withdraw in defeat from the battlefield of society, government, philosophy and especially medicine, leaving our days to be defined by data, by logic, by facts. The opposite is true in Potzsch's conception of 17th-century Germany the society of which is almost entirely subsumed by religion. Every mystery and every murder, every insult and every dispute, is viewed through the lens of faith which, unfortunately, allows many of the men and women raised in this time to seize upon God as an easy answer. Strange markings on the backs of children? It must be witchcraft. Women succumbing to fever and moments of madness? It must be the devil. snap judgements are made because they can be, because there is nothing like science to stand up to these unreasoned conclusions, to refute them with researched truths.

But though the series succeeds in its wish to entertain, it falls short of excellence. For Potzsch is far too captivated by masterminding Kuisl into a 17th-century detective to actually show us the man's occupation. Rarely do we actually see Kuisl perform his duties, let alone with anything other than supreme reluctance which smacks to this reader like an author unwilling to sully his hero with even a whiff of injustice. Strange, really, for Potzsch is quite content to bestow upon Kuisl a savage backstory, but this too is glimpsed only through faded recollection and not the fullness of Potzsch's dark prose. A similar criticism could be leveled at Magdalena, the eponymous hangman's daughter if, that is, she was relevant enough to bother with criticism. The woman may be charmingly self-possessed, but she is rarely anything more than a device for the author to advance the story. We're never truly made to feel the chafing of the constricted life she is forced to lead.

Entertaining work. These are fun mysteries to blow through on a weekend. However, they suffer from the plain fact that others have done better. The inevitable comparisons with Ariana Franklin and the like do not flatter The Hangman's Daughter. (3/5 Stars)

Lauren Myracle vividly explores small-town culture in mysterious Shine

From The Week of December 31, 2012
While there exists, in most of us, an appreciation for the rhythms and the purity of small-town life, these modest communities are defined by a darkly potent catch 22 that makes actually living there problematic. For the great virtue of small town life is its hospitable culture, a set of values that make neighbors of strangers, that make family of the forlorned, which speaks to a generosity of spirit rarely found elsewhere. However, this ethos, spawned from homogeneity, from shared values and shared customs, creates both a distrust of, and a distaste for, other, those individuals who, through gender or genetics, race or religion, present as different. These outsiders are shunned by these same, generous people, not because the shunners are evil, narrow-minded, or cruel, but because they live in sameness, in normalcy, in a world that is never challenged by chaos or elseness. Their kindness is purchased at the expense of multicultural inclusiveness. And this Ms. Myracle wonderfully demonstrates in her vivid, young-adult novel.

Darkness has come to the small town of Black Creek, North Carolina. For, as much as its country residents may wish to think otherwise, one of their number has committed a crime so violent, a sin so vile, that they can barely bring themselves to believe it's actually happened. Someone they go to church with, someone they have gone to the movies with, someone they've said hi to in the street, someone whose held a shop-door for them, used a baseball bat to beat unto death a sixteen-year-old boy before tying him to the town pump and pouring gasoline down his throat. There is only one thing about Patrick, the victim, that could have inspired such hate, only one characteristic that could have unearthed such rage. Patrick is gay. Not quietly gay, not passing gay. Resplendently gay. And for this he lies in a hospital, fighting for his life.

Tormented by this crime, Cat, herself sixteen and Patrick's dear friend, refuses to accept the sheriff's assertion that the perpetrator must have been a drifter, an evil sort who came and went, stopping only long enough to leave his mark. No, she knows better, that some people in Black Creek aren't talking, that people who once met her eyes will no longer look at her, that secrets are being kept about that fateful night. Unwilling to allow Patrick to go unavenged, she embarks upon an investigation to unearth Patrick's would-be murderer, little knowing the price that must be paid for the exposing of a town's deepest secret.

Though characterized by a simplicity of prose endemic to mainstream youth fiction, Shine is exquisite work. Ms. Myracle, herself a child of small-town life, captures, to a chilling degree, the blessings and the curses of homogeneity, the excruciating awkwardness of adolescence, and the subtle devastation done to the outsider by the society that refuses to love him. For while toleration has become commonplace, while it has become standard practice, toleration is not acceptance. It is not willing. It is reluctant, a begrudging sentiment born of culturally imposed political correctness. This narrow mindedness not only does damage to the individual who does not belong, it discredits the community that shuns him, making a lie of all the values they stand for.

Shine is no glorious mystery. It is not a tale to withstand centuries. But what it lacks in epicness it amply makes up for with pluck and grit. Cat, its heroine, is a fantastically tough hillgirl, a creature formed of indomitable spirit who, nonetheless, manages to be achingly vulnerable and enduringly flawed. Moreover, she has been embedded in a world that is brought into vivid reality by Ms. Myracle's hand. We can feel the heat, see the beauty, taste the dirt of these ancient hills. We can smell the life here, that strain of human stubbornness that refuses to change for anyone. And in this, the author has demonstrated a rare gift, the painting of a portrait in words that can be long-remembered by the mind's eye.

For anyone interested in cultural critiques, gender politics, or even coming-of-age stories, Shine will not steer you wrong. As pleasing as these hills are enduring... (4/5 Stars)

The Moreau Series by S. Andrew Swann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

From The Week of July 02, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cut by George Pelecanos

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Though war produces many devastating consequences, levelling cities, ruining economies and changing the destinies of nations, perhaps it's profoundest affects are reserved for those who prosecute it. For even in this technological age, war requires warriors to fight, men and women plucked from normal lives and sent to do hellish deeds, the enduring consequences of which no amount of training can prepare them for. Their only defense is the necessity of their mission and the approval of their brothers in arms, a potent combination of drivers that make possible the ultimate sacrifice.

But what if this bulwark is insufficient? What if the necessity of the thing cannot guard the warrior against the depravities he's forced to actualize? What if the action, the killing, gets into his blood and refuses to depart even when he's returned home to the stability of his old life? Mr. Pelecanos speculates in his spare but striking novel.

A veteran of the most recent Iraq War, Spero Lucas has Washington D.C. in his blood. The adopted son of hard-working Greeks, he was a head-strong boy of 19 when the September 11th Attacks changed the history of his nation. Feeling the pull of patriotism, he entered the marines and was shipped out to Iraq where he lost a sizeable chunk of both his innocence and his twenties. Home once more, he contents himself with freelance, investigative work for a high-profile attorney who isn't above defending the odd violent drug-dealer.

Missing the action and the camaraderie of the war, Lucas is receptive when one of the attorney's clients,currently in jail pending trial, approaches him with a deal. Someone has had the temerity to steal from the marijuana kingpin while he's incarcerated and that simply cannot be allowed to stand. If Lucas agrees to recover his stolen property, he can keep 40 percent as his cut for making right what fools put wrong. With memories of the war singing in his veins, Lucas agrees to the arrangement, plunging himself into the underbelly of a city that not so long ago was the murder capital of America. Remnants of these violent times linger on in the American capital, remnants that might well allow Spero to feel like he's once again a warrior.

Comprised of the fatalism of The Wire, the cool of Elmore Leonard and the mystery of the classic detective novel, The Cut is crime fiction at its most engaging. Spare unto skeletal, Mr. Pelecanos prose could well be criticized for a lack of affect and sentiment were such expressions and emotions not left to flow from the words and deeds of his small but vivid cast of characters, rather than from the author's own flowery pen. In this, he asks of his readers more than is obvious in the first few pages. For it is an easy thing for an author to euse prose to omnipotently fill in the gaps for his readers, to use the thoughts of his characters to spell out what cannot be said. In assiduously avoiding this convenience, this crutch, Mr. Pelecanos insists that his readers peel the literary onion, that they feel out the scenarios his characters get themselves into, that they understand the urges and the drives of a world they will likely never know.

But more than the work's structure has made The Cut a success. For Spero Lucas is a captivating presence. A young man possessed of vitality and drive, he is as urgent as he is hampered by inexperience, as eager as he is damaged by war. For while he has managed to re-engage with civilian life more or less successfully, re-awakening all the hungers of a vibrant, healthy male, he has been forever changed by the war which has imprinted upon him a dangerous desire for action that must be sated. For this thirst has become the cornerstone of Lucas' life, the guide by which he tracks through this half-forgotten world. To abandon it would be to abandon who he's become. And yet this need is a sire's song that will lead him down a dark and treacherous road.

This is both breezy and affecting, quiet and thunderous. It is easy to see why Mr. Pelecanos and The Wire formed such a devastating partnership. (4/5 Stars)

The Virex Trilogy by Eric Brown

From The Week of April 16, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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