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

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A riveting conclusion to an epic fight for survival in Dust

From The Week of March 3, 2014

For all of society's many virtues, for all that it is the mechanism by which civilization is thrust onward, it would grind to a halt without our lies to lubricate it. From secret projects to marital harmony, lies arm us with the means to avoid awkward confrontations with the truth that might tear apart our missions and our relationships, diverting what would otherwise be deathly blows into glancing hits that are soon abandoned to the trash heap that is our past. But while lies may normalize what could otherwise sunder us, they carry with them a terrible price. For each time they are used in the name of the good, they chip away at the trust of those we use them on until, eventually, their faith has been rubbled, leaving only anger stoked by being played the fool. Rarely has this rageful backlash been deployed better than in the conclusion to Hugh Howey's creepy and gripping series.

For the men and women of the Silos, the world is steel and stone. Having lived and died for centuries within 50 hermetically sealed arcologies, built 130-stories deep in the earth of a ruined world, they have no concept of Africa and America, of lions and monkeys, of snow and sun. After all, it is death to leave the silo, death to go out to the decayed remnants of what came before. And anyway, they have within their silos everything they could ever want: power, food, life and love. What could anyone else ask for?

But now, after centuries, the lies that have underpinned their lives are slowly being revealed, peeled back like layers of sediment to expose the whys and hows that lead them into these sealed lives, these stale existences proscribed by another's power. But rather than finding truths that will set them free, the people of the silos find only the ugliness of a plan so vile, so pervasive, that they will never be the same, knowledge so pernicious that it will spark a revolution that no one, not even the great men who set this scheme into motion, could have planned for. The result of this war will shape the world for millennia to come.

A worthy conclusion to one of the most successful pieces of terrifying science fiction ever penned, Dust is a work of beautiful dystopia. Eschewing the gory horror of the many previous works that have flirted with SciFi, and its nearly infinite capacity to imagine new and twisted worlds, Mr. Howey has brought to life a creepily, self-contained world, married it with a truly horrific premise and watched as his dark creation spawned stories to freeze the blood. Repeatedly, the reader is forced to look on helplessly as the people of the silos are battered by an enemy unfathomable to them, an omnipotent, controlling entity for which they have no analogue. Their collapse before its superior weapons and its mysterious knowledge is as inevitable as it is tragic, an all-too-familiar outcome when the strong clash with the weak.

And yet, where in past works the silos have lacked the tools to fight back, here, in Wool's endgame, the lies are seen for what they are. Precious knowledge that, hoarded for so long by the silos' overlords, has trickled out until the resourceful have glimpsed some measure of their master plan and used that knowledge to make, for the first time, plans of their own, to seize their autonomy, to realize that the truth actually can set them free. All of which would have been empty without Wool's previous works in which readers watched the silos bend under the weight of ignorance until it seemed as though they might all break and leave the world without hope. But with such a foundation in place, their outrage, their keen hunger for revenge, puts a fire in these pages that no criticism can douse, that no convenient turn of plot can reduce, that no force of the old world can stop. And it is a privilege to watch it all unfold.

Dust is not a revolution. Quite the contrary. It draws upon many established tropes to craft its tale. But where Mr. Howey supersedes those who've come before him is in the sheer terror he can instill in his environments. The doom, the claustrophobia, of the silos leaves the reader yearning for sunlight, for open spaces, for the world he knows. It leaves him wondering who will be the next character to fall in a war he can't possibly relate to. And in this, the author shows us the true power of knowledge. There are no clever villains spitting pithy lines about how knowledge is power. He doesn't need them. This truth scores every page and leaves no doubt that, short of the suns that give us life, knowledge has no peer.

For anyone remotely interested in scares and society, in prisons of the mind and the burdens of the heart, Wool is the bible you've been waiting for. Read it and its wonderful conclusion and thrill to literature done with style and cold steel. (5/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the risks and rewards of machine intelligence in On The Steel Breeze

From The Week of October 28th, 2013

For all but the last hundred years of human history, which now spans more than ten millennia, we have been the masters of our destinies. The social constructs into which we've been born have certainly constrained us, influenced us, coerced us, but nonetheless our labors were our own, our survival due in whole to our own talents, our own capacities. But now, with the rise of the technological age, all of that has changed. Where once we fashioned our own tools, measured our own medicines and manufactured our own weapons, these tasks and skills have been increasingly given over to machines which hold advantages over us in speed, efficiency and tirelessness. In fact, the disparities between man and machine when it comes to production are so wide that it would be nothing sort of self-sabotage to not surrender these traditional functions to them. And yet, they are not us; they will never be us. And so, when we do inevitably become completely reliant upon them for our societies, what will our futures hold? Alastair Reynolds deliciously speculates in his engaging novel of the future.

It is the 24th century and humanity has climbed off an environmentally ravaged Earth to live amongst the stars. Moons and habitats throughout the solar system have been colonized while Earth cools, populations free to experiment with technologies, with governments, even with immortality. Despite the obvious divisions this would cause, human civilization has been harmonized and pacified by the Mechanism, a pervasive network of machines, both neural and nano, that ensure that individual humans live nonviolently with their fellows. Cooperation and discovery have become the hallmarks of society which has largely abandoned the destructive sins of slavery and discord.

Quietly, however, matters have begun to change. With the discovery of an inhabitable, extraterrestrial world which has clearly been touched by aliens, humanity has been moved to journey to this distant place aboard Holo Ships, city-sized conveyances that can accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light. Ahead of these voyagers have been sent Providers, great machines that will land on this alien world and build cities for the adventurers to live in when they reach their new home, but the intelligence designed to govern these Providers has become temperamental and difficult, growing beyond its design specks to become something new, a mind unto itself, a force to be reckoned with. And it is willing to do what it takes to ensure its survival, placing it on a collision course with humanity.

The successor to Blue Remembered Earth, On The Steel Breeze is a work of singular creativity from one of science fiction's most innovative minds. Mr. Reynolds, who rose to prominence with Revelation Space, is an imaginative thinker who, throughout his published career, has rejected the notion that the laws of physics are too stultifying for fiction. Instead, he has embraced them and their limitations, providing for the layman some sense of the phenomenal spans of space and time that are unavoidable obstacles for any civilization with ambitions of being interstellar. In the past, this interest in the technicalities has sometimes lapsed into the obsessive, coming at the expense of qualitative storytelling. Not so here, where his characters, both human and artificial, run the gamut from desperate to ambitious while always remaining convincing and entertaining.

Notwithstanding its delightful creativity, On The Steel Breeze has the heart of a very old novel, asking an age-old question. How will man and machine coexist? Here, humanity has relied upon the Mechanism for so long that it has become unthinkable for it to be corrupted in any way, a truth that breeds the very complacency that allows it to be abused by an intelligence grown far too clever and powerful for any individual human to match. And yet, both the mechanism and the intelligence threatening it provide immeasurable benefits to humanity, organizing it, pacifying it, enabling it, in ways both wonderful and fantastic. Is the risk of the technology wriggling out of our control worth its many, glorious rewards? The answer to this question will be disputed for decades to come, and likely long after we have become far too dependent upon our machines to return to a simpler, more self-sufficient time.

Mr. Reynolds' view of this question is admirably pragmatic. He acknowledges both sides of the argument, the usefulness and the fear of losing command and control, all without siding with any particular faction. This allows his work to adopt an open mind about one of, if not the most, formative and pressing questions of the century to come.

Despite its engaging mysteries and fascinating actors, On The Steel Breeze is far from a perfect work. While Mr. Reynolds' choice to honor the laws of physics is respectable, this adherence boxes the author into a narrative corner he never escapes. On Earth, more than a full century expires while the work's core drama is unfolding in interstellar space, all without the author giving any sense of changing governments, social mores, even the forces of dogma. Providing such detail would have certainly prolonged an already sizeable tome, but its omission leaves the reader feeling as though nothing else in human civilization is taking place between moments of explosive action on the holo ships and the alien world they are destined for. The whims, the pursuits and the ideologies of an entire civilization are abandoned to service the plot which is primarily why we are here. But this lost color leaves the work feeling oddly disjointed, like a movie with no sound, or music with no message. It's an absence that is distractingly apparent.

Notwithstanding its flaws, Mr. Reynolds is worth reading for his creativity alone. Any sin of literature is forgivable when we can watch a skilled mind at play amongst the stars. (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)

The fusion of marketing, the Internet and SciFi in Pattern Recognition

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

As much as we would like to claim that capitalism rests on high-minded ideals of freedom and free markets, it is, inescapably, a system designed to encourage people to buy stuff. For it is only through this base consumerism that businesses can be profitable. Profitable businesses hire more employees which results in more people with employment. And what do employed people have? Money that they can spend on more products. This, capitalists argue, is a virtuous cycle, a means by which to iterate and innovate humanity towards a better, brighter future, but how can we know that it is not just a single, enormous pyramid scheme designed to line the pockets of the privileged few while everyone else is sold, through advertising, a vision of progress that most of them will never actually benefit from? Perhaps we can't know this for certain, but this first in William Gibson's contemporary works of science fiction will surely offer some cause to be cynical.

It is the summer of 2002 and the world is still recovering from the aftershocks of 9/11, an event which particularly haunts Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old advertising consultant who lost her father on the same day, and in the same city, as the World Trade Center attack. Possessing both an affinity for the cultural effectiveness of trademarks and a peculiarly allergic aversion to brand logos potent enough to drive her to completely eliminate branding from her wardrobe, she is an invaluable asset to corporations looking to capture the zeitgeist of consumers and ride that wave to unimaginable riches.

This insight into the nature and value of semiotics, however, is a double-edged sword for Cayce. For while it has provided her with a skill that is as rare as it is prized, it has also driven her to seek patterns in everyday life in a manner similar to paranoid schizophrenics. This obsession comes to a head when Cayce finds herself mesmerized by snippets of mysterious footage leaked onto the Internet, the origins of which she must find. With the encouragement and aid from her friends in an online forum, she journeys to Tokyo, London and Moscow in an attempt to untangle a knot she cannot resist. For it in it lies truths about herself and her father that she must know.

A departure from the cyberpunk dystopia that made Mr. Gibson famous, Pattern Recognition is a headlong plunge into the vagaries of modern marketing that represents the culmination of the author's peculiar ideas about the zeitgeist begun in The Bridge Trilogy. Mr. Gibson's unusual insights into the manner in which some people process information were best represented by that trilogy's protagonist, Colin Laney, a man modified by a cocktail of drugs to find patterns in oceans of data. Cayce is, in a literary sense, the origin of that story, a creature who manifests an earlier, and considerably less potent, strain of that particular talent and uses it to locate and unknot significant events of the moment. Few people have explored this avenue of thought. Even so, it is difficult to imagine anyone doing it more justice than the author has here with his unique blend of weirdness, grace and cool.

More broadly, Pattern Recognition is, in spite of its protagonist's aversions, transfixed by brands. Scarcely a paragraph goes by in which a product name is not referenced. Moreover, Mr. Gibson drives home the degree to which brand names have become synonymous with their products by only referring to them as brands, iBooks, not computers. This creates a delightful reading experience, but more than that it invites the reader to contemplate marketing's power which only promises to grow as people and algorithms get better at understanding our eccentric tastes.

Amusingly, this fixation conjures up Pattern Recognition's most charming feature, the degree to which it is rooted in the now quaint technologies and rhythms of the early aughts. Cayce uses Netscape instead of Chrome, newsgroups instead of social media, laptops instead of smartphones. Indeed, written five years before the first iPhone, the mobile economy and the extent to which it has completely altered the information-sharing landscape is not present here in any way. Had this book been written merely three years later, we can well imagine Cayce having found her mysterious footage on youtube which almost seems designed for the express purpose of feeding Mr. Gibson's information obsessives.

This is by no means a perfect work. The plot is weak unto non-existent. The author makes some attempt to connect Cayce's journey to something that resembles action and drama, but this has mixed results at best. No, this is a novel almost entirely about the merits and flaws of men and women who, for reasons both internal and external, are compelled to live outside the box. In this, it engages our every sense. But if such speculative musings fail to capture the reader's interest, there's almost nothing else here.

Charming, fascinating, and sobering work... (3/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of July 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

For civilization, devastation is a disease. For not only does it destroy buildings, disrupt basic services, and overturn the rule of law, it infects the humans exposed to its necrotic caress with a persistent sense of nihilism. It entices them to believe that society, as it was, is gone and that only fools would waste time re-establishing it. It convinces them that the only worthwhile virtue of their new existence, amongst the smoldering rubble of what was, is to survive and to do for oneself at the expense of everyone else in the name of that survival. But herein lies devastation's true perniciousness. For if everyone adopts this selfish attitude, then nothing is ever repaired, rebuilt, reborn. The world, staffed by survivors, is allowed to decay until even the memory of civilization is gone. This is the attitude that pervades the first three volumes of Jeff Somers' series and its one he wields to great and depressing effect.

It's the 21st century and life as we know it is gone. Nation states, and the individual freedoms they granted to their citizens, have been swept away by the System, an apolitical surveillance state that has, in the name of uniting the world, deployed bombs and droids, wars and assassins, as a means of establishing a new, peaceful order. For a time, widespread resistance to this new, globalist regime burned bright, but eventually even these organized pockets of rebellion were ground out beneath the ruthless bootheels of the System cops and their masters, men and women who would rather rule over rubble than not rule at all.

Through this dystopian world simmering with resentments slouches Avery Cates, a 27-year-old mercenary who barely remembers the world before unification. The totality of his adult life has been lived beneath the merciless eye of the system and their enforcers who roam the ruined streets of his native New York with a kind of brutal and uncaring vigilance. Cates' only means of survival in this world of solitude and disenfranchisement is to hire his gun out to those who can pay for murder. But though his skills have kept him alive for longer than most of his compatriots, his luck appears to have run out. For Cates has been tricked into killing a system Cop, a crime that generally results in long spasms of torture, at the hands of these new brothers in blue, prior to a painful death. His only escape from this particularly grim fate is to allow himself to become a tool for the director of the system Cops' Internal Affairs division, an exploitative relationship that will send Cates on a long, destructive spiral into the very bowels of his dirty, corrupted world.

A dark and difficult experience, The Avery Cates Series is a coarse and clumsy take on dystopian science fiction. Mr. Somers draws on 20th-century history to essentially recreate, in the 21st century, life imagined by the Third Reich, corporate fascism in which people were only allowed to act with the permission of the all-powerful, all-seeing state. This framework is then married to a series of explosive challenges for Cates to overcome at the expense of everyone around him. This union of historical influences and Hollywood blockbusterism initially stirs powerful emotions, particularly for those readers even passingly familiar with Nazism. Unfortunately, this is where the author's creativity ends. For all else is merely a stress test to see how far Cates can be pushed before he cracks and relinquishes what's left of his humanity.

Perhaps the most unpleasant part of Mr. Somers' work here, though, is his reliance on foul language. Any good story deploys its fair share of epithets which, when properly and sparingly used, have an unrivaled impact upon the reader. But the author completely rejects this philosophy, instead, peppering his work with every permutation of what George Carlin called the seven dirty words. Yes, to some degree, this harsh and violent language helps convey both the brutality and the hopelessness of Cates' world, but he accomplishes this at the expense of the reader's attention and respect, both of which are eroded by his reliance on such a flippant means by which to communicate personal and societal desolation.

There are virtues here. The Avery Cates Series challenges notions of what it means to be human. It adopts and darkly distorts proposed technologies such as digitized consciousness, mechanized exoskeletons and the artificial hivemind to create an affectingly grim view of a possible future. Imagining and spinning out such scenarios is not a simple achievement. And yet, this is at far as it goes. Mr. Somers does not grasp these tools and fashion something with which to advance the conversation. He has, instead, adopted the themes and the rhythms laid down by the masters before him and, sadly, re-constituted them with only marginal success.

For those looking to be entertained by a swift, atavistic plunge into a grim, pugilistic world, there is material here worth exploring. But for anyone seeking to find enlightenment amongst the ashes, such embers are few and far between. (2/5 Stars)

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)

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

From The Week of June 17th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wonderful, eerie and ultimately dated The Handmaid's Tale

From The Week of June 3, 2013

Of all the freedoms that human civilization has conceived, popularized and distributed throughout most of the world, those of the individual are of paramount importance. For though the powerful have always held largely unassailable positions, Olympian heights from which to judge and manipulate those less fortunate than they, the powerless have not. In times past, this uneven application of laws and privileges was justified by any number of self-serving notions such as Divine Right and Might makes Right. But thanks to both the Rule of Law and to those numerous champions of democratic freedoms, some of us now enjoy societies in which the homeless are sheltered by the same laws as the elites.

For some of us, these societies have nurtured us for the totality of our lives and the lives of everyone we know. But for others, these societies are but a dream, a fanciful theory of equality that may or may not ever come. For them, the present is defined by the rulers, for the rulers leaving the many to be merely pawns for their pleasure. This world Margaret Atwood vividly animates in her chilling, award-winning novel.

In the near future, the celebrated nation once known as the United States has given way to revolution. A dominionist organization calling themselves the Sons of Jacob, guided and inspired by the Old Testament, has orchestrated a devastating terrorist attack upon the seat of national government, wiping out most of the executive and legislative branches. Blaming the attack on Islamic terrorists, the Sons erect a military junta in the power vacuum created by the Republic's fall, a junta that proceeds to implement the Sons' particularly stringent form of Christian fundamentalism throughout what will henceforth be called the Republic of Gilead.

In the wake of these shocking developments, the rights of women and minorities begin to rapidly disappear. Jews are given a choice between conversion to Christianity or forced relocation to Israel. African Americans are reclassified as the Children of Hamm and deployed as plantation-style labor. Gay people are ordered to reconsider their sexual orientation or face lethal consequences. But for all of these dark developments, perhaps the worst plight is reserved for women who are forbidden to work, to read, and virtually to think for themselves. They are reduced to incubators for the next generation of Gileadians, with the most fortunate of them placed as wives to defenders of the state and the least exiled to work the vast, radioactive zones that occupy the outskirts of the republic.

Within this narrow, colorless world, Offred endures. A handmaid, or concubine, within the house of one of the regime's elites, she barely remembers her previous life as an American who worked, played, had friends, went out to parties. Her husband is gone and her daughter seized by the state for indoctrination. But worst is perhaps Offred's own re-education at the hands of a special segment of Gilead women who have been privileged to re-train society's women to obey, to please and, most importantly, to be fertile for their masters. Despite her many sorrows, Offred persists until her owner picks her out of the crowd of handmaid's, starting a series of events that will thrust her into an uncertain future.

As grim as it is introspective, The Handmaid's Tale is imaginative, dystopian fiction. The award-winning product of one of Canada's most famous authors, it posits a future America in the grips of a perverse fundamentalism that has seized upon America's ills as an excuse to carry out mass-slaughter and the mass-reorganization of society along patriarchal lines. In this, the work, originally published in 1985, is very much of its time. For these are concerns specific to the 1980s in which a succession of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, had encouraged, rather than choked off, the meteoric rise of those potent strains of American teleevangelism that would, in response to the liberalization of society in the 1960s and early 1970s, eventually coalesce into the Religious Right. This, combined with the dissipation of Women's Lib, which had already begun to devolve into various and somewhat competitive waves of feminism, created fertile ground for the imagination of an author and a possible, if not probable, future.

Consequently, though The Handmaid's Tale is chilling, its anachronism robs it of some of its power. We live, now, in an age in which threats emanate from the abuse of technology, not the distortion of faith. We live in a time in which the surveillance state is the dystopian boogeyman, not dominionism which is given about as much heed as Neo-Nazism. The idea that generals and scientists, market researchers and corporate executives would get together to create a new society in which they restricted their own behavior, in the misguided belief that they were executing God's will, seems silly from the hindsight of 2013 in which the heat has gone out of the culture wars and in which the freedoms of the individual are, if not expanding, then certainly static.

That said, The Handmaid's Tale is nonetheless a forceful illustration of the immense power of totalitarianism. Re-education has managed not only to turn women upon one another, distracting them from the greater goal of overthrowing their oppressors, it has succeeded in changing their norms, in convincing them that what they enjoyed before was wrong, sinful. This kind of behavioral conditioning is not only possible -- see North Korea --, it is terrifying. Ms. Atwood most convincingly demonstrates this power in the form of Moira, Offred's coarse, boisterous and combative best friend who, instead of being hardened into an opponent of the regime, is shattered by its oppressive practices. In this, Ms. Atwood leaves no doubt of totalitarianism's power, nor its willingness to use it, a demonstration that provides the novel with its best moments.

Moreover, Ms. Atwood's decision to make Offred her heroine is brilliant. For Offred is not a hero. She is not a survivor. She's not even especially interesting, or smart, or earnest. She does not stand on rooftops, calling out for change. She is gray, a plain, colorless canvas upon which the Republic of Gilead can scrawl out their beliefs. She is painfully and tragically average, just like most of us who will read her story. She is us in less fortunate circumstances.

For readers even passingly familiar with technological and societal trends, dated and even at times humorous. But for those even mildly interested in societies that care nothing for the rights of the individual, quietly gripping. (3/5 Stars)

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

From The Week of April 29, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Petrovitch Trilogy booms and sizzles like a Hollywood blockbuster

From The Week of April 15, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

From The Week of March 18, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Military science fiction done with violence and style in Dread Empire's Fall

From The Week of March 11, 2013
In the hands of tyrants, fear is a fearsome weapon. Not only does it have the power to scourge the courage out of the brave, it institutionalizes a sense of inferiority in those subject to the will of its wielder. It carves into their souls a belief that they must obey or face the prospect of punishments that will send their minds shrieking into madness. Fear compels us to abandon our sense of equality, of personal dignity. And without these virtues to bolster self-identity, without the belief that everyone is subject to the laws of the land, justice atrophies until all that is left is strict, authoritarian order, the likes of which rewards the rich while criminalizing the poor. This truth could ask for no better exemplar than Mr. Williams who demonstrates it to wonderful effect in his engaging trilogy.

For ten-thousand years, the Shaa have ruthlessly ruled the galaxy. Sewing conquest through the liberal use of force, intimidation and nuclear fire, they have subsumed the known races into the fabric of their dread collective, all in the name of their beloved Praxis, a vision of order and enlightenment that only they can truly comprehend. Naturally, most races resisted this shotgun unity, but the anti-matter bombs that the Shaa mercilessly dropped on their cities, their habitats, their worlds, put an emphatic end to that. Perhaps they even attempted to flee, but where could the intelligent species go when the Shaa had already seeded the known universe with stable wormholes through which they could spread their terrible power?

Eventually, unity came to seem natural to the Shaa's client races. As their faiths and traditions fell away, to be replaced by the omnipresence of the Praxis, they became compliant, even content in their bondage until, finally, after millennia of conquest and expansion, the Shaa began to wane. Having conquered every race they could find, having expanded their intelligence through unimaginably complex machines, they had experienced every emotion, explored every thought, sampled every horizon. The universe was no longer a mystery; it was a bore from which to escape. Slowly, through suicide, the Shaa's numbers reduced to one, one last god over the mortal races. And then even he removed himself from the board and exposed an empire of countless billions to a new, chaotic dawn, one far more terrifying than any the Shaa had imposed. This is the story of that dawn, a story of war and resistance, of fire and radiation, that might well burn hot enough to extinguish even the legacy of the Shaa and leave behind nothing but ashes.

Born from the mind of one of science fiction's most eclectic authors, The Dread Empire is a fascinating and engrossing journey through an apocalyptic war. Mr. Williams, who rose to prominence with the Hardwired Series of cyberpunk novels, turns his mind here to military fiction, reconstructing a universe of humans and aliens, of wealth and poverty, of aristocracy and criminality, with winning thoroughness. For the author has rejected the storytelling crutches of Transporters and faster-than-light travel to conjure up a wonderfully detailed reality that, for good and ill, is utterly faithful to its laws and customs. For this alone, the work should be celebrated. Not many possess such vision, much less the willingness to carry it out. And yet, the author has harnessed his talent for three-dimensional characters and deployed it here with vivid results that elevate the series from the mundane to the extraordinary.

Though war dominates the trilogy, The Dread Empire is notable for its politics. Mr. Williams has fused together futuristic technology with an Edwardian society to create a truly horrifying amalgam of privilege and corruption strongly reminiscent of our own colonialist history. In fact, it is an easy matter to regard the Shaa as the British, or the Roman, Empire, using its superior knowledge and tactics to conquer other races and impose upon them a societal structure that is both foreign to their minds and corrosive to their morals. Viewed this way, it is unsurprising that the characters in Mr. Williams' work devote much of their energy to subverting that order in the hopes of overturning it, of converting it into something that better suits ingenuity and personal skill.

Naturally, The Dread Empire has its fair share of flaws. Unlike the adrenaline-soaked pages of Mr. Williams' Cyberpunk work, this trilogy is characterized by long moments of quiet, cruel conniving followed by quick explosions of action and turmoil. Though this technique is not without its merits, the plod is too pronounced, too protracted, to be as engaging as the action sequences which are written with an exactitude that is admirable if somewhat bewildering for those not versed in non-conventional, three-dimensional military tactics. Moreover, Mr. Williams' choice to train the series' focus on only two primary characters leaves much of this universe unexplored. Martinez and Sulah are each wonderful conceptions, creatures of will and ambition who occupy a new space between hero and antihero, but they are both career military and both on one side of the conflict, leaving not only civilian life undeveloped but the enemy perspective as well. The trilogy could have benefited from dropping some of its Edwardian pomp in favor of a third point of view that would have balanced the tale.

Notwithstanding its flaws, The Dread Empire is wonderful work that ties together elements of politics, war, mystery and aristocracy to forge a world that is as familiar as it is foreign. Yes, the author uses thinly veiled conceits to ensure that this future is, in some ways, shockingly like our own, but these can be forgiven when they make possible a constellation of relatable characters and circumstances that keep us invested in the epic. A work of noteworthy imagination... (4/5 Stars)