Immigrant communities and the future Local in the dystopic On Such A Full Sea

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

Customs and traditions, laws and codes, shape our cultures, giving them their definition, their structure and their uniqueness. And yet, to us the culture simply is, the ever-present framework in which we have the experiences that make up our lives. It is as familiar to us as our friends, and so its trials and tribulations are taken as what must be, the tapestry of our individual existences. It's only when we absorb the strangeness of other cultures, either ones with which we share a world, or the ones that fell before our times, that we come to understand that what we assume to be normative, customary, is not so because it is the right way. Rather, it is simply the way it is done, for us and no one else. This is a powerful truth. For it grants us perspective not only on the human capacity to acclimatize, but it teaches us that nothing is as it must be, that everything is subject to change, to evolution, to improvement. This, if little else, is a point delightfully made in Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian novel.

In a near-future world blighted by widespread, environmental upheaval, life for the many has become difficult and often brutal. In the region formally known as the United States, society has devolved into three distinct groups which are characterized by varying degrees of autonomy and economic power. The Facilities are coastal communities, agrarian settlements that have grown up in the hollowed-out cores of former seaboard metropoli. They are nourished by trade with the Charters, a collection of seemingly powerful and healthy enclaves made prosperous by their isolation from the rest of the world. Occupying the wild, untamed lands between these two kinds of communities are the Open Counties, a seemingly lawless region of broken land in which the unfortunates of the world eke out a meager existence and to which tourists from more stable lands visit out of anthropological curiosity.

A resident of a Facility which has grown out of old Baltimore, Fan is a Tank Girl, a laborer tasked with ensuring the livelihood of the Facility's stock of essential sealife. She seems largely content with her existence until, one day, her boyfriend disappears into the Open Counties, to where and what end no one knows. Fearing for him, Fan decides to follow in his footsteps, forsaking the relative safety of her familiar little world and entering into the great, dangerous beyond. Repeatedly beset by powers much more ruthless and potent than she, Fan must continually scrabble for a foothold in this strange place, little knowing if the winds of fate will carry her to or from the boy she loves.

A fascinating treatise on the nature of expectations and human malleability, On Such A Full Sea is, nonetheless, a failure as a work of entertainment. Mr. Lee, an author and professor of literature, has fashioned a darkly captivating world full of half-glimpsed political machines and well-thought-out immigrant communities which have adapted to the violent tides of history by coalescing into their own, largely self-sufficient units. In this, they convey one of the work's most powerful ideas, that power is fundamentally local, that the global superstructure we've managed to erect over the last century is fragile, and that any significant disruption to the world order will plunge us back into a world where community is everything and where banishment from the collective is a punishment worse than death. In the hands of a skilled author, this is a notion brought vividly to life in this richly imagined future.

However, in almost every other way, On Such A Full Sea is an irritating bore. Its most frustrating element by far is its composition. Written in a kind of observational prose, the narration is from the perspective of an omnipotent first person, a collective we that hovers over Fan and her quest while remaining removed enough to provide the reader with details of the world that Fan may not know. This style certainly helps Mr. Lee make broader points about class and culture, and it absolutely lends the work a literary polish rarely seen in genre fiction, but it also precludes us from feeling any emotion from, much less for, the actors on its elegantly wrought stage. On Such A Full Sea is the literary equivalent of buying the worst ticket to a 50,000-seat house. We are left to watch from the nosebleeds while tiny ants down below execute their intricate skills, every nuance of detail and emotion occluded by distance. Worse in this case because while purchasing the ticket is a conscious act, a voluntary imposition, here, it is imposed on us for negligible gain. Mr. Lee could've illustrated his broader points without reducing Fan from a living, breathing person into a tiny puppet, propelled by the winds of plot and fate.

It pains me to be so critical of such a rare work. For infrequent is the genre novel with aspirations of being more than a pulpy adventure. On Such A Full Sea is as much sociological study as it is an adventure novel, and anything that bucks the norm should be welcomed. But enjoyment here is made all-but-impossible by the work's tone which suppresses the value of the individual to such a degree that caring about anyone is difficult at best. A fascinating failure... (2/5 Stars)

A first-rate heroine mired in a second-rate tale in The Fool's Gold Trilogy

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

For humans, endurance is a strange and potent virtue. Through tragedy and turmoil, pain and grief, it drives us onward, motivating us to plow through the difficult and traumatic obstacles arrayed before us with little regard for the odds of success. Often, this doggedness serves us in good stead, allowing us to escape the immobilizing grip of deadly despair and to achieve our dreams, but this determination comes at a cost. After all, it is a force, not a guide. We cannot reason with it. We cannot tell it to be silent when we have been defeated, when all hope is lost. And so we scrabble in the dirt of our unmaking, trying to live just a little bit longer. This idea, in all its hope and all its loss, is well-captured in Jude Fisher's interesting if troubled trilogy.

In the land of elda, where the forces of individualism and conformity stand in such stark contrast, life is rarely easy. Divided into two realms, Eyra in the north and Istria in the south, one's gods, fortunes and laws are determined by the place of their birth. Reared in the northern island, under Eyran skies, and one is raise in a world of clans made up of fiercely independent souls who skill at working wood and stone is matched only by their capacity to sail the open seas. To be born in the southern Istria, meanwhile, is to be inculcated in a world of casts and religiosity, a place where personal advancement is as scarce as god's mercy. There is little law that isn't handed down from the selfish nobility who in no way check the power of those who would burn their own people for the most mild of blasphemies.

These opposing realms have little in common except for the Allfair, an annual, two-week extravaganza of trade, schemes, exploitation and opportunism of which both the high and the low partake. This particular year, however, proves to be even more explosive than most. For Katla Aranson, the talented, pugnacious, flame-haired daughter of one of Eyra's most illustrious clan chiefs has attended and she thinks of nothing of wandering wherever she pleases, even onto rocks sacred to the Istrians and their goddess. Arrested and sentenced to burn for her crimes, this single act of recklessness ignites a series of life-altering events that will shape the futures of two realms. For the gods and their minders have also come to the Allfair and their schemes will leave no one untouched.

An eminently readable series, The Fool's Gold Trilogy is entertaining fare that manages to be dark, wry and consequential without ever awakening the emotions, much less the sympathies, of the reader. Ms. Fisher's background in Scandinavian languages has had a profound influence here, causing the tale to read very much like the Norse sagas, full of flawed and imprisoned gods and the the rash and headstrong mortals who worship them. With such a cast of characters, it would be impossible for the trilogy to be anything other than a dark and winding adventure, full of crushing lows and brief, explosive successes. And yet, despite these wild swing in fortunes, despite a host of actors who range from the monstrous to the earnest, the series fails to animate into anything the reader can love.

While Ms. Fisher has assembled a host of interesting and complex characters, the world that they inhabit is far too black and white for their gray. There are soem commonalities between the realms, particularly pertaining to the rights of women to act as they see fit, but otherwise the fun-loving northmen, with their songs and their ships and their freedom, is so cliched, particularly when set against the typically hedonistic southerners whose desert ways are a perfect match for their religious fanaticism. These are not just old themes, they are tired ones. And Ms. Fisher has failed to breathe ay life into them.

For all her difficulty with world and plot, Ms. Fisher has created a winner in Katla Aranson who rises like a proud eagle above Elda's fray. Her strength and tenacity, her riotousness and adventurousness, are enchanting. For they imbue Katla with a wild, irrepressible power that moves beyond the crudeness of gender stereotypes and to new and fertile ground rarely tilled by any author. However, even this, Ms. Fisher's greatest success, ends up hobbling her work. For Katla shines so bright that she serves to highlight the continental gap in quality that exists between her and every other actor on her stage. Every time the narrative leaves her, the reader is desperate to return and once again be touched by her mesmerizing spirit. Had just one or two more of her companions risen to this level, The Fool's Gold Trilogy would have overcome its flaws. As it is, Katla is left to hold up a nearly 2,000-page odyssey on her own. And not even her sculpted and straining shoulders can manage that feat.

Thrilling and disappointing... An interesting adventure that pulls few punches, but cannot bring its readers to care about the punches it does throw. (2/5 Stars)

Blade Runner redux in Montero's Tears in Rain

From The Week of August 26th, 2013 Exploitation is one of the enduring quandaries of our age. For there can be no doubt that it is an unavoidable necessity of human progress. Be it the labor we capitalize on, or the resources we pull out of the ground that gave us life, our creations come at the expense of someone or something else. And yet, this very same progress, which drives us to create ever-more powerful technologies and to harbor ever more rational ideas, is the only means by which exploitation can be eliminated. So which is it? Press on in hopes of banishing the scarcity of resources that drives such exploitation, knowing that it will create even more of it in the interim, or return to a simpler time in which exploitation still existed, just in a gentler and more localized form? Neither option is very appetizing, however, it will be a question we'll increasingly ponder over the next fifty years, when many forms of alternative life, from the artificial to the posthuman, are introduced into society. Rosa Montero pegs out her pragmatic position in this debate with her interesting if problematic novel. The year is 2109 and Earth is not what it was. Not only does it harbor guests from alien worlds, it is now the hub of a modest interstellar civilization composed of colonies and artificial worlds. Its wars, of which there have been many, fought over everything from robots to political ideologies, have been largely outsourced to androids known as Replicants, fully fleshed and self-actualized beings grown from stem cells. Due to their rapid development -- they mature in approximately 12 months --, they are implanted with false memories, written by talented writers and thinkers, that substitute for actual experiences. Armed with this core knowledge, Replicants are deployed as laborers and security guards, functionaries and pleasure slaves, as a means of improving life for the standard strain of humanity. Through this tense, exploitative society prowls Bruna Husky. A combat Replicant, she has taken up work as a private detective since her discharge, managing to keep a moderately low profile, that is, until her neighbor, herself a Replicant, has a nervous breakdown in front of her which culminates in the woman tearing out her own eye. This dramatic and traumatic episode leads Bruna to the chilling discovery that the female victim is only the latest in a series of Replicant suicides. Hired by an aggressive Replicant organization to get at the bottom of the deaths, Bruna plunges into a world of drugs, schemes and false memories that will only yield up the truths she seeks if she's willing to confront her own constructed identity, the plumming of which might well break her before someone can kill her for snooping. At times entertaining and melodramatic, Tears in Rain is a thoughtful work of science fiction that never quite manages to escape its derivative roots. Ms. Montero, who has had a distinguished career both as an author and a journalist, has created an interesting, detailed world that has all-but-turned identity into a commodity, to be bought and sold, written and implemented, at whim. This notion has grave implications for humanity which, at the best of times, is tempted to exploit individuals and groups for its own gain. Doing so to people who can be programmed at any time to d as they wish, to fulfil whatever desire they wish, would not require a second's thought. Given such weighty issues, one would expect Tears in Rain to be a read as difficult as it is depressing. However, despite the amoral world in which it is framed, the tale rings surprisingly loudly with hope for the future. It is uplifted by the belief that individuals will always have the power to stand up and effect positive change. That change may be limited; it may even come at a terrible cost, but it will come. And that kind of incremental progress is both priceless and cumulative. However, notwithstanding its positivity and its engaging heroine, Tears in Rain cannot distinguish itself from the masterworks that preceded it. Clearly inspired by 1r\& and the short story from Philip K. Dick that gave it life, Ms. Montero virtually copies the idea of the Replicants as represented in those works, changing only the means of their creation. All else, from their artificially limited lifespans, to their tailored occupations, to their constructed memories, is unchanged, a fact which would be insulting if the author wasn't so quick to acknowledge these formative works. Heavens, even the protagonists hold the exact same occupation! The rot, though, runs deeper than the mere appropriation of ideas. Ms. Montero's true sin here is that she does so and fails to say anything that wasn't said, or implied, by these prior works. It's one thing to channel one's inspirations as a means of making your own vital statements about life and society; otherwise, the sum total of English literature would belong to William Shakespeare. But it's entirely another to do so and fail to expand on these existing ideas. The whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants is to be a link in the chain of knowledge and progress, not so that you can take advantage of the poor schmuck you're standing on. Interesting, but its failure to be what others have done better firmly mires it in banality. (3/5 Stars)

A difficult and disgusting descent into the mind of an American Psycho

From The Week of August 19th, 2013

Superficiality is a dangerous and pernicious force. For in deadening our spirits, draining meaning from our dreams, and attenuating our connections to the world, it robs us of the capacity to have both genuine emotions and authentic relationships. It allows us to skim along the surface of existence without ever plunging down into life's depths, the dark, challenging undercurrents where truth abides. This is reason enough to avoid it, and yet, this is nothing next to the damage superficiality does to cultures, to civilizations, infecting them with a kind of euthanizing, materialistic hunger that cannot be easily uprooted. For once superficiality has been embraced, the humiliation inherent in rejecting it, in being forced to acknowledged that it was, even for a short while, accepted practice, is too much for most to bear. This is the lesson taken to remarkably disturbing heights in Brett Easton Ellis' notorious classic.

It is the dying days of the 1980s and New York city is a cesspool, a collection of alleys spewing trash, of streets clogged with the homeless, and of clubs laden with narcotics. Crime, fuelled by the rise of Crack Cocaine, is rampant, a cancer that eats away at the soul of one of the world's foremost metropolises. And yet, for all of their destructive power, these are but venial sins when set against the awesome greed of Wall Street, an assemblage of banks and trading firms who, gripped by the feverish desire for wealth and power, strain mightily against the ever-weakening legislative chains that bind them.

Through this modern morass glides Patrick Bateman, a cog in this Wall-Street machine who notices brands, not people; who thirsts for gratification, not enlightenment; and who values besting his fellows, not uplifting them. A conglomeration of glitz and glamour, he absorbs this toxic environment and uses it to fuel his own psychosis which expresses itself through bouts of misogyny and misanthropy so violent and depraved that no one believes it of him even when he confesses it. This is his world, a creature of its creation and an aspect of its evolution. He cannot be put down.

A vicious and difficult novel, American Psycho is an adventure in filth. Characterized by orgiastic episodes of abject cruelty, it is an exercise in shock, with large swaths of the work surrendered to the unchained lusts of the greedy, insecure id. Pornography and murder are the primary forms of this authenticity of the foul, coming together to create such a potent mixture of ugliness that, even 20 years on from its original publishing, in a culture far more accustomed to such degradations, sexual and otherwise, it has lost none of its overwhelming force. It is not at all hard to imagine why the novel was released to such widespread outcry.

However, dismissing it as nothing more than the wet dreams of sadists would be a mistake. For this is not just atavism run amok; it is a commentary on the height of American materialism. It is a characterization of life at the heart of American Gomorrah and the existential price its occupants pay. Patrick Bateman is inescapably wicked, and yet, he is by no means alone. He is merely a more virulent strain of a virus that ravaged this place, at this time, an adherence to superficialities at the utter expense of the real that severed the bonds of mutual decency and submerged its victims into desiccated lives, sucked dry of all meaning. This is powerfully manifested in the work's obsessive attention to commercial details, brands, songs, the price of luxury goods, all of which help these victims of a decaying culture to deny their own emptiness.

But while American Psycho has value, its length is indulgent. Mr. Ellis could have made the same, provocative point with a book half its length. Not only would such a slimmed-down version have increased the sharpness of its satire, it would have shortcircuited the suspicions of even open-minded readers that this was an exercise of endurance, a challenge to see precisely which moment of wickedness finally succeeded in alienating its consumer. Instead, we have a 400-page celebration of depravity whose repetition dilutes its objective and leaves the reader wanting a shower and the comfort of good friends.

This is emotive work. Patrick Bateman will likely go down in history as one of the most despicable characters to ever be realized in literature. And at least in this, Mr. Ellis and his stylized distillation of a dark moment in American history won't soon be forgotten. However, being remembered is not the same as being valued. (2/5 Stars)

A vivid but disappointing sea-stained journey in Jamrach's Menagerie

As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.

Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.

Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.

A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.

Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.

And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.

A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)

As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.

Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.

Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.

A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.

Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.

And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.

A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 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)

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 West's intellectual debt to the Arab world in The House of Wisdom

From The Week of April 8, 2013

Human history is defined by instability, a tumultuous sea of clashing cultures the waves of which bear aloft the victorious while its depths claim the defeated. And yet, such fortunes, or misfortunes, do not linger long. For like with the brief, violent life cycle of a wave, the victorious can be easily drowned. For in order for a culture to climb to the peak of civilization, it must innovate and create; it must streamline and strategize; but mostly it must supplant its foes, foes who, in the darkness of their subordination, nurse their battered pride and make of their wounds an enduring enmity that, someday, will contribute to a change at the top. Supremacy can never last forever. This much, if little else, Jonathan Lyons elucidates in his troubled history.

In the centuries following the death of the Roman Empire, while Europe was enshrouded in the gloom of cultural stagnancy and religious zealotry, the Middle East was experiencing a new dawn. The inheritors of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, thanks to the alexandrian scholars who preserved such knowledge, the formerly disparate and warring tribes of Arabia had, under Mohammed, forged themselves into a new kind of empire, one built on the principles of a single book designed to provide a moral and political framework for their civilization. Eventually based in Baghdad, this Arab society flourished under a succession of rulers who encouraged scholarly learning, fashioning their subsequent insights into innovations that could transform their cities into palaces that would forever leave behind the plains of the dusty deserts from which they'd come.

From astronomy to philosophy, from the measuring of the earth to the understanding of the human body, this Arab awakening endured for more than three centuries, hundreds of years in which their doctors and metaphysicists would have been the envy of the world if the rest of the world, at least to the West, had not descended into superstition and ignorance. Thoughtful souls from far and wide came to learn at the court of these Arab masters until the rise of the Mongols ended all that they had built, smashing it beneath the hooves of their mountainous horses. Fragments remained. These same Arab tribes remained powerful enough to overthrow Byzantium and to make of Constantinople the seat of a new, Ottoman empire, but the dream of wisdom was over, leaving it to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution to catalyze the advancement of civilization and transform the world into one empowered by western commerce and western technology.

For all its research, for all that it illuminates centuries of world history spitefully ignored by a self-referential West consumed by its own manifest destiny, The House of Wisdom is deeply flawed work. Mr. Lyons' intentions are good, to right a historical wrong by elevating to their proper place of prominence those Arab kings and thinkers who preserved and then improved upon the knowledge of the ancients and, in doing so, created an advanced civilization. However, instead of immersing the reader in the lives of these men and women, largely unknown to western minds, instead of bringing them to life with their histories, their struggles, their crowning achievements, the author chooses to castigate the dimness of western thought during the Middle Ages, devoting swaths of his history to describing Western barbarism and the many wars and tribulations that resulted from it. He must have intended for this to provide some kind of contrast to Arab learning. And yet, his tone is unavoidably reproachful of a culture that is now centuries dead and, thus, unable to hear his howls.

There are some exceptional Arab minds represented here. al-Haytham and al-Khwarizmi, amongst others, have numerous pages devoted to their deeds. And so the tome is not without moments of clarity that educate the reader. Moreover, Mr. Lyons is certainly right to argue that the Western mind receives an inexplicably skewed education in history, with the West forever marching towards enlightenment and freedom while the rest of the world is mired in chaos and darkness. And to whatever extend the author's work here corrects that gross misapprehension makes the enterprise worthwhile. But Mr. Lyons does not celebrate Arab learning. He uses it to sneer at a medieval West lost to doctrine. For proof of this, one needs only look to the work's protagonist,Adelard of Bath, who, despite being a fascinating character in his own right, is a westerner who realizes his culture is hopelessly behind Arab society. Yes, Adelard brings some Arab learning to the West, satisfying one of Mr. Lyons' themes here, but what he gains in this he more than loses in not truly embracing his subject, the prominence and power of post-roman Arabia.

This could have been wonderful work. But its twisted perspective ties it in knots from which it never untangles itself. A shame. For Its cause is just. The torch will have to fall to another to be carried forth. (2/5 Stars)

A ringing condemnation of prisons in Abramsky's American Furies

From The Week of March 25, 2013

Of the many pillars of progress that have marked humanity's existence none have had more of an impact than civilization. For it is this gestalt of societal evolution that creates beautiful structure from tribal chaos, that sews together peaceful communities from antagonistic cultures, and that carves out harbors of innovation to elevate us above stagnancy. Our thoughts and our dreams, our extraordinary brothers and our earth-shaking sisters are all remembered by civilization which allows each successive generation of the species to stand on the shoulders of those who came before. And yet, not all of us contribute positively to civilization. In fact, there are a substantial number who, for various reasons, threaten civilization with strains of destructive violence that range from the nihilistic to the greedy. Are we not entitled to seal these criminals away? Is it not right that we remove from them the freedoms the rest of us enjoy? Perhaps, but to think that we do so without consequences would be deeply unwise. This point Mr. Abramsky drives home in his uneven work.

In much of the world, prisons are stressful and dangerous places, institutions that contain the worst humanity has to offer. For years on end, men and women who have broken society's laws endure in these hard places, suffering a kind of purgatory in hopes that, some day, they will be released back into the world and have restored to them the privileges they once enjoyed. This is the hope. But so scarring are these penitenturies, so fraught with animalistic violence and cognitive decay, that this is nothing more than wishful thinking, dreams one holds to when nothing else remains.

It was not meant to be this way. In the breathy reforms of the post-Renaissance West, where it was no longer sufficient simply to execute troublemakers, prisons were conceived of as places of rehabilitation, idealistic schools of reform that would capture destructive non-conformists and shape them into healthy, stable influences. But while some penal systems still notionally cling to this hopeful ethos, the United States does not. Despite drastic reductions in crime over the last 40 years, more and more Americans, every year, are forced into these violent pens, compelled to sleep, eat and endure alongside society's worst. Many of these offenders haven't even committed violent crimes. And yet, here they languish, either worked for pennies or neglected to count down their days, with rapists and murderers, pimps and traffickers, until they can rejoin a society that will only ever half-heartedly welcome them back.

From Jeremy Bentham's optimistic conceptions to the cold, present-day realities, from the harshness of Joe Arpaio's Arizona to the ruthlessness of Miriam Shehane's Alabama, American Furies seeks to chronicle, through statistics and anecdotal accounts, the price, both fiscally and societally, the United States has paid for its punitive approach to crime. Mr. Abramsky, who leaves no doubt that his sympathies lean heavily towards the imprisoned, lays before the reader a series of movements and societal attitudes that go some way to explaining the heartlessness with which Americans approach incarceration. His conclusion, that a toxic combination of the depravity of sensationalist crime and the ongoing privatization of the prison system has lead the US to its current state -- a higher percentage of its people behind bars than Stalinist Russia -- is passionately argued. And yet, there are profound flaws here.

As strong a case as Mr. Abramsky makes, his account tries to be all things and succeeds at none of them. He attempts to make two cases, one based in dry statistics and the other ground in hard reporting. And yet, when he combines his academic research with his face-to-face gum-shoeing, the result does not become a pleasing souffle of passion and erudition. It does not become, as the author so clearly wishes it to be, a declarative statement against the evils of American-style incarceration. It is, instead, a scattered jog through an ever-changing landscape of shifty characters and inferred agendas that imply a great deal but conclusively prove little.

This is not to imply that I disagree with Mr. Abramsky. His argument rests on firm ground. There's been a great deal of sociological research that has attempted to explain the rise of the prison population and why that rise has suspiciously corresponded with the building of new prisons. However, Mr. Abramsky's goal here was to distill that research into a work of narrative non-fiction, capped off with a passionate appeal for understanding and sympathy for prisoners, many of whom are non-violent offenders. And, sadly, that task he failed to accomplish.

Valuable, but ultimately uninspired. The American prisoner will have to rest their hopes for a brighter future on other shoulders. (2/5 Stars)

The virtues of the Internet's open systems championed in Wikinomics

From The Week of March 11, 2013
Though there is a great deal of complexity, in both our world and our universe, nearly every one and every thing can be reduced to polarities. Ones and zeros, yin and yang, white and black... We are consumed by states of Good and bad, left and right, full or empty. Perhaps this is nothing more than an issue of perception, an understanding of the laws of nature shackled by our own ignorance. But it might well be that opposition is a universal necessity, that reality itself demands that its component forces shake down into conflicting camps that eternally vie for dominance. Perhaps conflict itself is a necessary part of life, the engine that drives us to strive for better days. If so, our future is bright. For few of these polarity wars are hotter, and more central to our increasingly technological world, than, open systems versus closed systems, the former of which is exhaustively championed here by Misters Tapscott and Williams.

Defined as a system that relies on altruistic collaboration for its energy and its innovation, open systems are vital to our 21st century infrastructure. From apache and Linux, platforms that provide the Internet its software backbone, to Wikipedia and Reddit, services that shape the information it conveys, the Internet would be marooned without the creative efforts of men and women who eschew profit for cooperation, financial power for social status. Every day, billions of people freely use these and many other services not only with the expectation of never being charged by them, but in the knowledge that they will work, that, even though they are not helmed by CEO masterminds and billionaire companies, they will be reliable and useful in an ever-changing age.

How is this possible? How can relatively unfunded open systems, that seem at times almost adverse to earning profit, deliver products as polished and as useful as the million-dollar alternatives developed by fortune-500 corporations? Pointing out that millions of minds are better than hundreds, or even thousands, Misters Tapscott and Williams argue that open systems triumph thanks to the wisdom of many minds working in concert, training their combined powers upon a singular problem. Moreover, they contend that open systems foster non-hierarchical working groups that empower everyone to voice opinions, provide feedback and, most importantly, make contributions without fear of incurring the censure or the blowback typical of hierarchies. This assemblage of skill, knowledge, goodwill and energy, rather than creating confusion and discord, generate a nearly unstoppable engine of positive change that will, in the decades to come, transform economies and societies as we know them.

Published in 2007, Wikinomics is engaging and energetic work that is, nonetheless, fatally flawed. Adopting an optimistic tone that, at times, borders on cheerleading, Misters Tapscott and Williams investigate the open systems rising to prominence in the modern world and argue that theirs is the model of the future. From Myspace to Wikipedia, from Dig to Linux, they pepper their work with snippets from dozens of interviews with innovators and technologists, all of whom re-affirm the authors' contention that no company is capable of solving a problem faster or better than the will of the educated masses. These are lovely sentiments, ones that most of us will agree with. For it is easy to root for open systems; they are, after all, natural underdogs disrupting the bloated and inefficient ware from gigantic corporations. Moreover, it espouses a heartening vision of humanity that is immune to the corruptions of wealth and power, rejecting them for community acceptance and societal utility.

However, none of this changes the fact that this is a simplistic view that surpasses the naive and approaches the disingenuous. Undoubtedly, it is easy to use the hindsight of these last six years to look back at the heady, Internet world of 2007 and dismiss these conclusions as hopelessly dated. After all, when this book was published, the iPhone, a revolutionary product developed by one of the most closed companies in recent memory, had not yet been made commercially available. Moreover, Twitter and Facebook, the dominant social technologies of the moment, both of which have cynically used the open model to grow before closing it to become profitable, were merely tiny dots on the cyberspace landscape. The fact is, though, that the authors of Wikinomics clearly contend that open will defeat closed, that its native advantages will slay closed, backward-thinking corporate culture. And this simply has not happened. There have been advances, certainly, but open systems are profitless vacuums. Sadly, they cannot generate even a fraction of the revenues that closed systems can. And greed will, at least for some time, win out.

It's a shame that Misters Tapscott and Williams were wrong. For theirs is an optimistic view of humanity that our culture would benefit from embracing. But it turns out, at least as of this moment, the war of open and closed is far more gray than their account would have us believe. A pity... (2/5 Stars)

How Pleasure Works tells us virtually nothing about...wait for it...pleasure

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Of the various fundamental motivations that stir us to action, few are as essential and as wide-ranging as pleasure. For it is this desire to experience joy and reward, happiness and satisfaction, that compels us to achieve our dreams. Without it, life would be a dreary exercise, a plodding monotony that would culminate in nothing more elevating than the completion of ones tasks. It is pleasure that activates our passions and drives our needs. It is pleasure, and its pursuit, that make us more than what we are. And this is a truth championed in Mr. Bloom's brief and troubled exploration.

From food to sex, from competition to gender, pleasure has captured the human mind for thousands of years. It enlivens our days and makes of our nights realms of anticipation and glee into which we all wish to plunge. But what is the essence of pleasure? And how does it manifest? Mr. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, draws upon the theory of Essentialism to answer these basic questions. From the whys that underpin why people will pay more for a celebrity's dirty clothes than for their clean ones to why boys and girls distinguish themselves before the broader culture sorts them out, he argues that human pleasure is derived from our understanding of the world, both in its categorization and in its structure, and that everything from why we drink bottled water to why we believe in spiritualism can be traced back to how we perceive and comprehend our world. Peppered in amongst this philosophical journey are fun facts about how humans relate to the world, tidbits that lend focus to the author's broader arguments.

However much How Pleasure Works may be convincing to scientists and philosophers, there can be no doubt that is a disaster as a piece of literature. Mr. Bloom possesses a lively voice that finds little difficulty in switching between hard science and soft anecdote in order to maintain the attention of his readers. In every other respect, though, he fails miserably in both his attempt to entertain and his attempt to built a case for his argument. Large swaths of this all-too-brief excursion into the roots of human pleasure are unimaginatively surrendered to anecdotal science, singular events that will be familiar to anyone that has consumed the news in the last ten years. To anyone that has cracked a book on popular science in that same timeframe, though, they are not only uninspired and repetitive, but deeply suggestive of cherry-picked circumstances deployed here to support what is, in every other respect, the ephemeral notion that human pleasure is connected to a metaphysical view of our world. In this, the reader is left feeling chilled by the absence of a genuine demonstration of the author's own research which is almost nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Bloom is a deeply accomplished individual, a man whose achievements must be respected. But in the wake of the disgrace of characters like Jonah Lehrer, men who not only read sweeping, societal conclusions from scientific data, but take dicey shortcuts to do so, we must be wary of books that use anecdote to draw conclusions about human nature. We must have higher standards. For How Pleasure Works reads like a cheap attempt to earn a little coin from the credulity of those seeking answers, none of which will be found rooted in what is clearly more of a philosophical text than an empirical one. If we do not demand more, this is what we will get, 150 pages of one man's half-hearted attempt to say something profound.

Thoroughly disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

The Bridge Of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

From The Week of September 17, 2012 Though we endeavor, throughout our lives, to exert as much control over our destinies as possible, Fate is always there, ready to spoil our well-made plans. For while we may find it within ourselves to plot our own futures, we cannot dictate broader events. these are the gestalt of other actors who, in chaotic concert, weave a tapestry of action upon which we must work. Most of us will be indifferent to this fateful intersection of individual and world; after all, most of us experience customary lives which lack the mass to change the pattern of life. and yet, those rare few who do stand at the heart of things will find themselves utterly changed by Fate's hand, a caress that will steer them far from happy lassitude and into painful turmoil. Ms. Berg illustrates in her four-part epic.

Connected by an ancient, mystical bridge that spans the unfathomable void between their two worlds, the lands of Leiran and D'Arnath should have much in common. For centuries, D'Arnathy sorcerers have mingled in medieval Leiran, restoring its sick to health and filling its land with life. but where magic comes easily to the sons and daughters of D'Arnath, it has never been found in the bloodlines of Leiran families, an absence that has encouraged suspicion within the Leiran nobility, suspicions that the realm's priesthood has galvanized into prohibition. Eventually, a ban on sorcerers is found to be insufficient. Now, nothing short of a gruesome death shall be the punishment of any mage found to beoperating within Leiran lands.

One might imagine that the D'Arnathy, superior in every imaginable way to the Leiran, would simply depart, leaving their inferior cousins to their ignorance, but an ancient war with demigods on their own world has reduced 90 percent of their homeland to rack and ruin. what was once beautiful and green is now deserted and brown, the consequence of the wielding of unimaginable power. The D'Arnathy, then, are a people in peril, a people on the brink of homelessness, a people of peace made into the children of war who may yet be wiped clear of the canvas of history.

In The Son of Avonar, the epic's opening volley, we meet Lady Serriana of Leiran, a duchess who has accepted disgrace for living in sin with a D'Arnathy healer. having found in her lover only kindness and steadfastness, her life is shattered when the truth of his identity is publicly revealed and he is put to death in a most cruel fashion. This, coupled with the death of her son by this same man, compels Serriana to reject her life and her station, to withdraw to a distant cottage and spend the rest of her days in solitude.

this reverie, however, is broken when a young man barges into her world. Deeply damaged, he seems not to know his own name, let alone possess any capacity to sensibly communicate with the woman whose life he's interrupted. despite the barriers separating them, though, Serriana comes to believe that this stranger may well come to play a key role in the consequential events to come. For the bridge that has long-connected Leiran with D'Arnath is crumbling. and its falling may well spell the end of freedom on both worlds.

In Guardians of The Keep, the epic's second volume, Serriana's life is once again skewered by fate. having been pardoned by the Leiran king for her relationship with a D'Arnathy, she has returned to Conigor, the keep of her birth, to settle the affairs of her dead brother. duke Tomas' son, however, soon acquires her full attention. for in addition to being somber and sullen, he is deeply suspicious of his aunt who he's been taught to despise. when he fatefully runs away from Conigor, Serriana endeavors to bring him home, but she and her friends are too late. Her brother's son has been welcomed into the arms of the Lords of Zhev'Na, the destructive enemies of the D'Arnathy and they are ready to make of him a god of chaos to stand with them in the ruination of the worlds.

In The Soul Weaver, the epic's third entry, Serriana is again tapped by fate to intercede on behalf of her land when the queen of Leiran herself seeks her out to plead for her aid. the king of Leiran has been incapacitated by agents of the Zhev'Na, a crime which may or may not be connected to the disappearance of their daughter. Serriana agrees to help them even though she is burdened by her own labors. her family, such as it is, is set to be ended by the culmination of the destructive plans of the Zhev'Na. Only a miracle can save them, and Leiran, from ruination.

In Daughter of The Ancients, the final instalment in the epic, the arrival of a thousand-years-dead princess from the wastelands of the Zhev'Na throws the slowly recovering world of the D'Arnathy into chaos. How will she, the eldest heir to the D'Arnathy throne be integrated into the existing ruling structure? Is she as innocent and wronged as she seems, or is she the last ditch ploy of dying gods for one final measure of revenge.? Serriana and her family endeavor to discover the Princess' ultimate purpose while the fates of three worlds hang in the balance.

a sweeping epic, full of consequential deeds and unimaginable dangers, The Bridge of D'Arnath is a difficult, messy adventure. Ms. Berg commands a lyrical pen that does wonderful credit to her work here, blessing it with prose nearly as fine as poetry. But while her facility with language is second to very few, her plots leave a great deal to be desired. Events in this epic lurch from apocalyptic catastrophe to apocalyptic catastrophe, rarely pausing to allow its actors, let alone its readers, to catch their breath. Worse than its implausibility, though, is the degree to which the all-too-frequent explosions, like a bad summer blockbuster, numb the reader, inoculating him to the drama of the piece.

More than the troubled plot, though, Ms. Berg's epic is hobbled by a cast of characters who are rarely allowed to be themselves. Minds are sundered, identities are stolen, and souls are forced into the bodies of those who do not want them. And while these devices allow Ms. Berg to play with ideas of fate and consequence, of identity and personality, they leave the reader with little grasp of what these people are like when they aren't being bombarded by any number of mystical forces. It is, then, no surprise that Serriana is the series' most successful character. for in addition to being a strong-willed heroine worthy of the thousands of pages devoted to her, she is the only one who does not, at some juncture, have her mind scrambled by one godlike force or another.

Let there be no doubt that there is quality here. for all its flaws, The Bridge of D'Arnath bears strong resemblances to the giants of fantasy whose works inspired it. but instead of coalescing from its source materials into its own, distinct being, it is a Frankenstein of Tolkienian questing, Martinian betrayals and Jordanian beauty. It's as if the author conjured up a heroine and welded onto this framework her favorite bits of any number of her own heroes. Unfortunately for her, the weld points are all-too visible to the naked eye.

Interesting work, but the degree to which it is bedeviled by a bloated plot and deformed characters prevents it from taking flight and ascending to the upper echelons of the genre. (2/5 Stars)

Social Engineering by Chris Hadnagy

From The Week of September 10, 2012 Ever since humans possessed the power of speech, they have been in the con game. For we are social, hierarchical animals, qualities which lend themselves to the manipulation of the thoughts and feelings of those closest to us. These tweaks of ego, these posturings for status, needn't be malevolent, or even harmful. They might be as innocent as looking our best in order to make a good impression upon someone we desire, to get a job we wish to have, or even to express our trustworthiness to those who might otherwise judge us. But they can just as easily bear cruel intent -- deflating truths murmured into the trusting ears of our competition, misdirections knowingly bestowed upon the credulous --, actions which allow us to gain advantages at the expense of both the feelings and the fortunes of others. Though these skills have always played important roles in human interplay, they have never loomed larger than they do now in our interconnected, global world. Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates in his uneven work.

Defined as the victimization of individuals through trickery and manipulation, social engineering is one of the most powerful and pervasive weapons in the world of modern espionage. Deploying a host of tools, from confidence games to software exploits, the social engineer typically preys upon both the kindness and the credulity of strangers in order to achieve one of three customary goals: to penetrate and control computer networks, to test the security systems in place to protect such networks, or to harvest information for fun and profit. Though

Whereas hacking requires the hacker to possess extensive knowledge of both computers and the languages used to program them, social engineering demands that one only possess enough charm to convince the innocent to unknowingly act against their own best interests. Consequently, while its weakness resides in the fact that the exploiter needs a mark upon which to prey, its great strength stems from its capacity to entirely bypass every form of computer encryption implemented to protect sensitive systems. A social engineer does not need usernames and passwords; he does not rely upon the manipulation of ones and zeros. He hacks people, not computers. And but for their own sense of self-preservation, humans have no such safeguards.

As frustrating as it is enlightening, Social engineering is a sometimes fascinating journey through the world of human hacking. Mr. Hadnagy, who has specialized in this field for some time, discusses numerous, nightmarish scenarios in which data vital to both corporations and individuals has been stolen by simply convincing a receptionist to put a USB key into her work computer. The gravity of both his claims and his observations have been backed up by two recent cases, that of Matt Honan and of Stuxnet, both of which used social engineering to destroy an individual's digital life, in the case of the journalist, and to significantly damage an Iranian nuclear reactor, in the case of the worm. In this, Mr. Hadnagy reveals a most critical truth, that a system is only as secure as its weakest point.

Hackers are not foolish. Why lay siege to a digital fortress when one can poison its wells, or parachute onto its walls? A clever exploiter probes for weaknesses, flaws in the system, and attacks there, applying as much pressure to the most vulnerable point until it yields to his demands. It is not the fortified gates we must worry about. It is the smiling, friendly person who can be used as an unwitting pawn in a game they cannot understand.

But while Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates this point with admirable clarity, Social Engineering reads, in every other respect, as an exercise in self-aggrandizement. These 350 poorly composed pages are saturated by the author's ego, the masturbatory fantasies of which stain the entire work. I have no doubt that Mr. Hadnagy has helped people. Nor is there any question that his work may arm the credulous with weapons against the attacks of the devious. And yet, it is impossible to escape the smugness with which Mr. Hadnagy conveys these lessons. Consequently, his supercilious tone, which is as offensive as his prose is childlike, mars the work irreparably.

This is an important topic. And though Mr. Hadnagy has much to teach, his ego and his pen both fail him. (2/5 Stars)

The Diving Universe by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Though it is now fashionable, particularly in entrepreneurial circles, to marginalize the value of history in favor of the sciences, there is perhaps no field of study more vital to the continuity of our culture and our worldview than history. For while the sciences have engineered our civilization, bestowing upon us a society uplifted by technology, history has blessed that world with knowledge of the arts and of philosophy, giving color and depth to a world otherwise reduced to mathematics. What's more, history has made the technological world possible by preserving the wisdom of the ancients, meticulously storing their insights for a future in which our finest minds can further chip away at the mysteries of the universe. Without history, we have no link to our past, no cultural heritage to proceed from, no knowledge to rely upon, and no wisdom to help us avoid the catastrophic mistakes of fallen civilizations. We are merely creatures eking out an existence identical to those experienced by our ancestors, grubbing in the mud for food and shelter. Ms. Rusch demonstrates this truism effectively in her uneven series.

Millennia from now, humanity will have travelled so far from Earth that the planet's location, even its appearance, will be little more than a memory. Humanity will have explored the Milky Way galaxy, finding on its millions of habitable planets little by way of intelligent life. It will consider itself supreme. But eventually, so much time will have past that some of these human cultures will have spun off from the main body of humanity, creating their own civilizations, their own histories. Attempts will be made to re-knit the fabric of humanity, but those efforts will fail, allowing these limbs of humanity to drift off, set upon their own paths, their own futures. Eventually, they will even forget their origins, truths gilded and enshrouded by legend and myth.

Now, more than 5,000 years have past since the exodus from Earth. But though this should have provided ample time for the various arms of humanity to evolve and develop technological wonders that would obviate any need for sweat and strife, this is very much not so for one of its lost limbs. In this region of space, humanity has long since descended into imperialism and war, as a retrograde empire ruthlessly tries to maintain its grip over its far-flung holdings while keeping its greedy gaze fixed on the Nine Planets alliance, a loose affiliation of worlds who have so far resisted the Empire's attempts at conquest. Such has been the Empire's thirst for war that history and the more peaceful sciences have been neglected, abandoned so that adolescents might play with the weapons of the gods. This has resulted in a society whose overall knowledge is rapidly regressing, a society held up only by the needs of the moment.

In Diving Into The Wreck, the series' first instalment, we are introduced to Boss, the eccentric captain of Nobody's Business, a mid-sized spaceship customized for salvage and exploration. Boss, something of an expert in archaeological digs in space, has, for years now, hired out her talents to tourist groups interested in the ruins of spacecraft which, with the passage of time, have lapsed into legend. It's by no means a perfect life, but considering that she's lucky to even be alive, Boss isn't complaining. After all, the childhood experiment that not only claimed the life of her mother, but lead to her father abandoning her, could have easily claimed her life as well. But it didn't and now, regardless of the nightmares, Boss is determined to be her own woman.

However, when she discovers the wreck of a lifetime, everything changes. All her plans for her future, along with the walls she's put up between herself and her past, are threatened when she verifies that, yes, she has just stumbled across the ruins of a Dignity Vessel, rumored to have been part of an old Earth fleet that's now thousands of years dead. Purported to have lacked faster-than-light travel, the vessel should not be anywhere near this region of space. And yet, there it is, the archaeological dive of a lifetime. Boss must know its secrets, even if they bring her uncomfortably close to deeply disturbing truths about her own past.

In City of Ruins, the second volume in The Diving Universe, boss finds herself the reluctant but determined spearhead of two distinct missions, the most vital of which is to preserve the independence of the Nine Planets alliance. For the Empire, she's learned, is attempting to recreate lost technologies found in the wreck she discovered in Diving Into The Wreck, technologies that will certainly grant them the power to overwhelm the worlds that have so far managed to maintain their independence from the Empire. Feeling responsible for these technologies falling into imperial hands, Boss begins a crusade to re-balance power throughout the region, little knowing that it will put her in direct opposition to the father who abandoned her.

Her second mission, however, comes upon Boss rather shockingly when she unexpectedly comes face-to-face with humanity's past. For an accident has brought into her time a living, breathing dignity Vessel complete with a bewildered crew of humans who have travelled 5,000 years in an instant. As the men and women on the ship try to adjust to this crushing revelation, boss attempts to establish first-contact with these legends. Though her efforts are thwarted by cultural and linguistic barriers that have calcified into thick walls in the five millennia separating their times, they manage to establish a connection just in time to realize that the Empire is keenly interested in Boss' activities and the awesome discovery she has unearthed.

In Boneyard, the most recent effort in the series, boss and the captain of the dignity Vessel try to integrate their teams under a single corporate umbrella which will continue the search for lost technologies, for the discovery of the lost dignity Vessel has prompted Boss to realize that her civilization is actually behind the one that existed 5,000 years ago. But while she and captain Cooper continue to seek outt the fate of the fleet that his ship once called home, a member of Boss' team has been captured deep in imperial space. Knowing that the Empire will stop at nothing to pry the secrets of Boss' mission from her friend, boss must try to rescue her, but at what cost?

Energized by its unusual approach to science fiction, The diving Universe is, in turns, entertaining and infuriating. Ms. Rusch, an author of works that range from Star Wars to Fey, writes in clear, unchallenging prose that invites a wide audience to enter into her unusual universe. For where other series concentrate on wars and aliens, weapons and conspiracies, Ms. Rusch devotes herself to a much more quiet and methodical world, one in which reason and patience rescue her characters from peril far more often than heroism does. Her emphasis on archaeology is a bold choice. For it asks the reader to re-imagine the field from the perspective of an outsider. Our digs try to rediscover our own past, but what would it be like to have someone else try to rediscover ours? What if we were nothing more than dusty bones buried under centuries of collapsed infrastructure? This, combined with a vivid expression of her passion for diving, lends Ms. Rusch's work a charmingly rustic feel for a series set in space.

However, as much as its conception is inventive and its setting is imaginative, the series' characters and their circumstances are, at times, disastrous. As much as I am inclined to grant the author the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps her actors are simply acting in accordance with the customs of their future society --, they can be incredibly pedantic. Identical arguments are not only held more than once in the same novel, similar disputes are repeated across the entire series, causing the unified whole to feel as though it's running in place. Worse, Ms. Rusch spends virtually no time developing this supposedly villainous empire. Readers are left completely uninformed about its structures, its customs, even its rulers. Its only representatives are individuals who already have tangled and thorny histories with the story's characters which makes it impossible to distinguish the Empire's villainy from the ill-feeling created by personal disputes. It seems clear that Ms. Rusch wants her readers to take the Empire's authoritarianism on faith, to view it through the same biased lens that Boss does, but this prevents us from building up our own trepidation of the Empire. Instead, we must adopt Boss' view which hardly argues for anxiety and urgency. What's the point of having an enemy in a story if we do not fear it?

The Diving Universe is empowered by interesting ideas and intriguing approaches, but it is unfortunately marred by a narrowness of execution that left me wanting much more background and much more urgency. Entertaining, but deeply flawed. (2/5 Stars)

Eona: The Last Dragon Eye by Alison Goodman

From The Week of August 27, 2012 For all of the good it can do when properly harnessed, power remains a terrifying tool. When wielded as a weapon, it has the capacity to devastate entire nations, tearing down societal edifices that have stood for centuries. When wielded for personal gain, it can carve destructive swaths through families and relationships, casting aside the debris of broken lives in order to attain its master's ultimate goal. But perhaps most calamitous to us all is when it is captured, or bestowed upon, the young and the unready, those poor souls who desire it but lack the will and the wisdom to control it. For such an outcome is surely the first step down the road to anarchy. Power can please or harm, heal or annihilate, build or crush. Ms. Goodman demonstrates in the meandering conclusion to her epic duology. In a world of swords and emperors, noblemen and villagers, peace and magic flows from the Dragoneyes, twelve men who have bonded themselves to spiritual dragons whose captured power helps to keep the land fertile and safe. These revered conduits are second only in power to the emperor who ostensibly commands them, though, it is difficult to imagine how even he would prevent them from working in concert against him, such is their might. And yet, for all of their immensity, the power of the spiritual dragons has been slowly fading for generations, to the extent that feats once easily accomplished are now a struggle for these legendary men.

The product of a desperate scheme, Eona, a girl disguised as a boy in order to be allowed into the choosing ceremony for new Dragoneyes, was unexpectedly selected by the Mirror Dragon, the Emperor's own dragon thought long lost. But Eona's elevation has caused an upheaval in imperial society, the tides of which have washed the emperor from his throne and allowed cruel, power-hungry usurpers to take his place. They desire the concentrated power of all of the spiritual dragons and they are more than willing to kill Eona to attain it. Forced into exile, Eona is awkwardly folded into a resistance movement against the new imperial order, but is her destiny in step with the mission of vengeance her comrades have chosen, or will the power she can barely control destroy friends and foes alike?

The riotous conclusion to the epic begun in Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, Eona: The Last Dragoneye struggles to recapture the grace and the exhilaration of its progenitor. The essence of what made Eon wonderful yet remains, the Asian-tinged mythology, the awkwardness of youth, the pain of gender confusion, and the agony of divided loyalties, but the song of these virtues is drowned out by the noise of its story. Hampered by a meandering plot that lurches her characters from peril to peril, Ms. Goodman left this reader benumbed and seasick by the endless spikes of danger its heroine is forced to overcome in order to achieve her destiny and the story's resolution. What's more, several of the narrative's threads are dropped for convenience, signaling a quiet acknowledgement that, while Ms. Goodman had a solid vision of the entwined destinies of Eona and the dragons, she did not know how to advance her characters to the threshold of that conclusion. Consequently, the reader is tossed onto the wind, blown here and there, before finally being deposited on a foreign shore, helpless to watch the story's climax roll in.

Make no mistake, Ms. Goodman is a wonderful talent. And such was Eon's excellence that even Eona's faults are tolerable in order to share in the author's final vision of the piece. But there are simply too many holes, too many conveniences, too many cliches and too many pouts for the work to be enjoyed. Nonetheless, for lovers of coming-of-age fiction, the duology, on balance, is worth a look. It is just a pity that the flow Ms. Goodman enjoyed in the opening effort is not carried on here.

A troubled ending to a bold and ambitious series... (2/5 Stars)

Gardens Of The Sun by Paul McAuley

From The Week of August 13, 2012

Tyranny has always been a powerful and destructive force. For it gives over to the one the authority and the freedom of the many, an authority which can then be used as a powerbase from which the tyrant can impose his ideas, his values and his will upon the world. But until recently, tyranny has been hobbled by certain limitations, chiefly, the tyrant's inability to directly command those who are not within his immediate vicinity. After all, a tyrant's will is considerably less fearsome when it is conveyed by letter, or by messenger, and not in person where the receiver can be influenced by all the trappings of the tyrant's station.

With the dawn of the technological age, however, the rules of the game have changed. With instantaneous communication across the length and breadth of the world, tyrants can impose their wills like never before. They can augment their powerbases with technologies that manipulate media, suppress dissent and annihilate resistance. And if such is possible today, what will be possible tomorrow? What will be possible in a century? Can democracy survive such powerful tools falling into the hands of tyrants? Mr. McAuley speculates in a novel that brings to a close the saga begun in The Quiet War.

It is the 23rd century and humanity has reached the stars. Fuelled by enormous leaps in genetic engineering, which have made possible the growing of crops in non-traditional environments, planets and moons from Mars to Saturn, Io to Titan, have been colonized by explorers and adventurers, philosophers and fortune-seekers, all of whom have fled Earth's political corruption and environmental decay. The Outers, as they come to be called, found their communities on utopian ideals of democracy and free will which help to harness the powers of experimentation and creativity which allow them to make huge, technological strides. They consider themselves the future of humanity, a species capable of adapting to any environment, of taking on any guise, of embarking on any adventure.

On Earth, meanwhile, the necessities of repairing a broken climate have nudged Earth-bound humans in an entirely more authoritarian direction. A toxic combination of radical greens, opposed to any form of genetic engineering, and hardline militarists, intent upon holding the reins of power, have abolished all forms of democracy and due process, replacing them with various strains of fascism that range from simple dictatorships to political clans. And so, while the people scrub and scrape at the torn, gray earth, trying to inject life into the corrupted soil, the powerful descend deeper and deeper into intolerance. Finding that they can no longer abide the democratic threat of the Outers, they move against them with nukes and warships, trying to impose upon them the fascism and slavery in such vogue on Earth.

But though the Outers are vanishingly few compared to the billions on Earth, and though they have been decisively defeated in the opening salvos of the Quiet War, they possess what the Earth powers do not, freedom, freedom to change, freedom to adapt, freedom to think beyond the narrow confines of their world. Their weapons are their ideas, viruses that, once they take hold, are almost impossible to uproot. But can these weapons work fast enough? Can they bear fruit before the last of the Outers are wiped out? Only time will tell.

Though at times troubled by aimlessness, Gardens of The Sun nonetheless builds on the creative successes of the work that gave it form. Where The Quiet War preoccupied itself with familiarizing the reader with the various influential factions in the author's fascist future, Gardens of The Sun is much more of a rumination on rebellion and the pros and cons of various forms of government. Here, the environmental alarmism of the first novel gives way to a re-imagination of a kind of American Revolution 23rd-century style, with a band of overmatched freedom fighters trying to live beyond the clutches of a corrupt and cruel aristocracy. All the characters from The Quiet War reappear, though, it's by no means essential to have read that novel. For, here, time moves much more swiftly, covering decades where the prior work managed only months.

For as much as Gardens of The Sun brings this duology to a satisfying conclusion, it is equally clear that Mr. McAuley was, in large part, at a loss as to how to reach the ending he envisioned. Substantial swaths of the work read like summaries of events that either needed to be covered in far more depth or ignored altogether. For the middle road the author has chosen causes the work to read like a book review more than a work of literature. Moreover, in as much as the novel's conclusion is pleasing, it is one of the least earned endings to a successful series I've ever encountered. After spending hundreds of pages building up to the series' political climax, events proceed without hardly any agency being exercised by any of the author's characters. They are, like the readers, left to look on while the world radically changes around them. Perhaps Mr. McAuley was endeavoring to make a point about the nature of change, that it takes whatever form it desires, ignoring the wishes of its prime movers, but it seems far more likely that he did not know how to bring about his denouement.

For all of the work's flaws, let there be no doubt that Mr. McAuley possesses a formidable intellect and a passion for biology. Any science junkie will be well-entertained by this duology while most political animals will find, here, much to maintain their interest. But these talents cannot, here, make up for the deep-seated flaws in plot that prevent the work from reaching anything like its full potential. Solid but disappointing... (2/5 Stars)