Review: Mirrored Heavens by David J. Williams

The year is 2110 and the world a hellish reflection of today – global warming has wrecked everything, the environment has been all but destroyed with places like the Amazon nothing but a polluted wasteland, and humanity has endured and multiplied. The US has evolved into a near-fascist state controlling the Western Hemisphere; a Russo-Chinese government dominates the east, with a neutral Europe in the middle. A fragile peace emerges after a long cold war and an unknown terrorist organization strikes at the heart of the world order.

Mirrored Heavens (US, UK, Canada) tells its story through the eyes of the soldier-agents of David J. Williams’ world – following three arcs to the conclusion. Each arc generally focuses on a pair of individuals, each similar with a high-tech agent (razor) working with a high-talent physical force (mech). The razor hacks into the cyber-world known as the zone and the mech blows things up. Each pair follows a mission of sorts, fights for survival and understanding, leaving a staggering body count in their wake.

Williams’ take on a post-cyberpunk military sci-fi presents an interesting perspective – near enough in the future to be relative, far enough to be a shadow of what we know today. The political and environmental realities represent today’s worst-case scenarios and the world is decidedly not a better place. But, Williams doesn’t get far into it – this is the Hollywood-video game version, all action, all octane, and things blow up. Depth is hinted, but not realized; characters created, but who can trust those creations when their very memories were probably invented by those in charge to fit the circumstances necessary. Trust no one, believe nothing, and carry a big stick. It’s a strange combination of left-leaning ideas, right-leaning violent response, terrorism, and government betrayal and corruption.

Utilizing this made-for-Hollywood script of all action and little depth, Williams manages to sneak in some interesting ideas with a subtle (and exaggerated) allegory to 9-11 and various reactions, with a seeming nod towards conspiracy theories. While I would have loved to see this aspect further explored, it certainly wouldn’t fit well with rough ‘em up, shoot ‘em up approach taken.

The prose is serviceable, the characterization adequate (at best) and the action nonstop. In fact there is so much action, and detailed description of it, I became somewhat desensitized to it – which is big word for bored. While the plot was fun and interesting (and has a few good twists along the way), the all-out focus on action assaulted me to the point of not caring. I could easily put the book aside and not pick it up for ages – in stead of being an addicting page-turner, it often found use as a coaster.

David J. Williams’ debut novel hits the ground running and never slows down. The cover blurbs speak true and untrue – they praise the action and vision of the future, but calling this a next-generation Neuromancer (US, UK, Canada) goes too far. Mirrored Heavens should especially appeal to a younger audience addicted to Hollywood and video games and its marriage of military sci-fi and a post-cyberpunk world. In the end Mirrored Heavens is a forgettable book that may be a fun way to pass the time for those who need a break from gaming and their home theatres. 5.5-6/10

Review: Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

In Altered Carbon, the debut novel by Richard K. Morgan, cyberpunk grows up, has a seedy affair at a whorehouse in ‘licktown’ and hires a private investigator to investigate its own murder. After that, things get nasty.

Altered Carbon introduces us to Morgan’s recurring hero, Takeshi Kovacs, an ex-military Special Forces officer (known as Envoys) with specialized training and conditioning making him both more and less than human. Kovacs has become something of a private investigator with a dislike of authority and law and a complicated moral code – just like any other hard-boiled private dick you’ve read about. The difference is in the setting – humankind has spread throughout the galaxy and conquered death through the use of direct digital download of person’s consciousness into a cortical stack implanted at the base of the brain that can transferred to a new body as needed (if you can afford it).

In Altered Carbon Kovacs is hired by a rich, powerful and long-lived man on Old Earth to determine if his client was murdered or committed suicide (death and the like can get a bit complicated when a backup consciousness can be stored).The resulting chain of events is typical of hard-boiled, noir stories – there’s a love interest or two (with somewhat graphic description), ass-kicking, past catching up, trouble with cops, trouble with organized crime, visits to whorehouses, drugs, sex, guns, knives, lasers, etc. All is told in colorful language, vivid description and around a twenty-fifth century setting reflective of our world but sufficiently advanced to be fascinating.

In many ways this is a ‘man’s book’ – there are lots of witty dialogue, ass-kicking fights, some gratuitous sex, and women are generally objectified while being limited to overly sexualized characters (admittedly, some of them do kick ass) – of course the guys are rarely caste in a very positive light either. This is a book that won’t appeal to all, and will likely find its biggest audience bearing a Y chromosome.

Kovacs is well characterized in the gritty-gray zone one would expect. He is dark, dangerous and comes with a scarred past that hasn’t healed completely. With his slightly psychopathic tendencies (the slight part is debatable), death and destruction is never all that far away.

I found Altered Carbon to be an immensely enjoyable and fun book to read without the usual stumbles first-time authors usually make. It’s a dark and dangerous world – definitely not a place you want to talk to your mother about. I can’t wait to read the further adventures of Kovacs in Broken Angels and Woken Furies. 8/10

Review: Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a mathematics professor who has at times made a career of writing with 30 books to his credit, Postsingular being one of his latest. Rucker’s take on the singularity, the oft-considered inevitable merger of humans and computers, draws from an irreverent approach to the world and his background in mathematics and computer science. The result is a mixed a bag of quantum physics, alternate dimensions, nanotechnology, sociopathic megalomaniacs, and cephalopods that just didn’t quite work for me.

Postsingular follows a variable array of characters around San Francisco in a not-too distant future. Through the course of the book, we see two separate singularities occur through the development of nanotechnology – one event destroys everything, replacing it with nanomachines referred to as nants and creating a virtual earth. Another singularity event occurs where nanomachines serve as means for linking humanity through a virtual ‘orphidnet’ that allows for the equivalent of telepathy, mind-reading, and seeing through people’s clothing. The varied cast includes the brilliant, and somewhat absent-minded, inventor of the nanotechnology, his autistic son, his sociopathic, megalomaniac business partner with a tortured past, his wife, friends, visitors from an alternate dimension, and a group of free-loading, orphidnet junkies who augment their intelligence and coast through life. Buried within are love stories, tragedy, and the rescue of the world from real and virtual destruction.

The concept of Postsingular is just the quirky, irreverent take on life and a possible future that appeals to me, making it all the more disappointing when it did not work for me. The two areas that I struggled the most with are the dialogue and the jumbled mess of a plot. In a book that is 320 pages long, at page 150, I could not have told you what the point of it all is; there was no satisfactory idea of what the book was even about. The ideas within Postsingular are great, but it seems that Rucker just couldn’t find a good enough story to go along, or the story that was found is told in such a convoluted way that making sense of it all is too a daunting task.

The dialogue that Rucker forces into the mouths of his characters ranges from merely adequate to flat-out horrible. I suspect that the goal was to be both clever and a bit cheesy in a good way, but I could never get past that cheesy stench. Rather than a smell of the feet of angels, Rucker’s dialogue smells of the feet of bad B-movie directors.

Somewhat, but not completely, redeeming Postsingular are its characters. These are real flawed people. They have real problems, addictions, troubled love lives and often come with a past. There are some surprisingly touching human’ moments that are ultimately spoiled by Rucker’s choice of an ending. Included in the cast of characters are a few clearly satirical leaders that may look familiar. This is just the sort of thing I love in a book, but rather than pulling off a cleverly silly satire, Rucker seems to reach too far, becoming kitsch.

Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular takes some very interesting ideas, mixes them around with some rather interesting characters and attempts to create a brilliant mess of novel. For me it was simply a mess – but it does come with a great cover. 5/10

Brasyl by Ian McDonald

Imagine a trip abroad where they don’t speak your language, the climate and smells are all different, the rapid pace makes you believe everyone must be on methamphetamines, and all the while you see clear yet seemingly out of place influences from the good old USA. You’ve got your guidebook in hand, but for all the help it is once you step out of the airport you should throw it away.

“You like this car? You like it?” She was shrieking like a shoutygirl-presenter. João-Batista looking pityingly at her. On the car cams the boys looked as if a bomb had gone off under their Knight Rider LEDS. Don’t bail, Lady Lady Lady, don’t bail. “It’s yours! It’s your big star prize. It’s all right, you’re on a TV game show!”

McDonald drops us into a Brazil where the reader is the tourist in a foreign land, McDonald the ex-pat guide fully immersed in local culture, and it’s a constant struggle at first to keep track of what’s going on.

Brasyl begins in Rio in the year 2006, following a morally ambiguous producer of reality-shock TV setting the stage for her next show. Immediately thrown into a high-octane police chase full of the sights, sounds, and lingua franca of Brazil, the reader is left trying to catch up and make sense what exactly is happening. I imagine this approach is designed to grab hold of the reader with an immediacy they are not prepared for, however, this early disorientation made it harder for me to connect and involve myself in the story. The glossary thoughtfully provided by McDonald offers some reprieve, but breaking the carefully constructed rhythm of the prose looses much of its effectiveness.

Each of the three ultimately inter-related story arcs and their main characters embody the time-line they come from and McDonald’s view of the world as it was, is, and could be. The first arc introduces us to Marcelina Hoffman, trashy television producer. McDonald utilizes Hoffman and her pop-culture ties to orientate the reader to Brazil. Her up-to-the-minute fashion sense and stratospheric ambition form a shallow shell around a confidently clueless core as we see Brazil through her distinctive point of view. Marcelina slowly realizes who she is and what she truly desires in life as she is literally confronted with herself.

In the second arc we jump ahead to a mid-21st Century Brazil and the fringes of an Orwellian society. Here we follow Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, the sixth son of a sixth son, a semi-legit businessman of the slums of São Paulo who becomes enthralled by Fia, a black-market quantum physicist pawning her skills to crack quantum tracking devices in stolen goods. Edson struggles with his identity and sexuality as he cons his way through life as his world overlaps with others, his puppy-love for Fia at the heart it all.

The third arc takes us back in time to 18th Century Brazil where Father Luis Quinn, a Jesuit priest, embarks on a journey to the dark heart of the Amazon to confront a renegade Jesuit missionary. Father Luis is accompanied by the French intellectual and spy, Robert Falcon, a friend and foe. Both are brilliant, introspective, hard and dangerous men with the best of intentions of this dark past.

Brasyl is the first novel by McDonald I have read as the oft-compared River of Gods languishes in The Stack of books to read. McDonald has earned a reputation for his stylistic prose, and he certainly justifies it. Brasyl is a stylistic tour de force where the techno-punk soul of quantum physics permeates his multidimensional Brazil. The emotional response invoked in this American was as otherworldly as any SFF book set in its own created world.

McDonald carefully styles the look and feel of each story arc with a rhythm not often found in SFF writing. It’s almost a beat you could dance to (you, not me) that changes from arc to arc. This rousing Latin beat begs a soundtrack and McDonald happily obliges with a set list provided at the back of the book. The beat of 2006 is fast and reckless with the occasional moderation of elderly, more sedate characters.

Gunga spoke the rhythm, the bass chug, the pulse of the city and the mountain. Médio was the chatterer, the loose and cheeky gossip of the street and the bar, the celebrity news. Violinha was the singer, high over bass and rhythm, hymn over all, dropping onto the rhythm of gunga and médio then cartwheeling away, like the spirit of capoeira itself, into rhythmic flights and plays, feints and improvisations, shaking its ass all over the place.

The beat of the future has the same fast and reckless feel of 2006 with an added bi-polar identity crisis and at times, extreme paranoia.

The loading ramp extends, lowers. Steel hits road. Sparks shower around the brothers Oliveira. Black Metal beckons them again: Come on, come on, on the ramp. Sparks peel away round Edson as he lines up the run. He’s a businessman, not a stunt-rider. Edson edges forward: the concentration pill gives him micro-accelerations and relative velocities. Wheel on wheel off wheel on wheel off, wheel on; then Edson throttles hard, surges forward, and brakes and declutches simultaneously.

The 18th Century slows down to a more traditional and introspective classical dance of events while keeping the feel that Brazil is not like any other place.

Luis Quinn sipped his coffee, rapidly achieving equilibrium with the general environment. An unrelenting climate; no release in the dark of the night. A cigar would be a fine thing. After months of enforced chastity aboard Cristo Redentor, he found his appetite for smoke had returned redoubled. The beginning of attachment, of indiscipline?

While stylistically superb, Brasyl falls short with a lack of resolution of its plot. The 18th Century story arc of Father Luis concludes well, while the other two offer more ambiguous conclusions. Ambiguous conclusions often add strength and the feeling of the right kind of completeness to a plot, and if each of the three story arcs existed independently, this would be the case. The problem arises with the inter-relation of the three arcs and their eventual convergence. At the point of convergence the plot just ends, leaving over-arching questions about the nature of quantum universes, human existence, and the mysterious factions in conflict unanswered. Early ascertains for award recognition may be justified, but for me, Brasyl falls flat at precisely the time it should and could have blown my mind.

Brasyl reflects the high-on-meth, ambitious, and paranoid times suffering an identity crisis emerging in the world around us and infuses it with the Latin beat of the Brazilian melting pot. It’s a view of our world and its possible future directions as reflected in a seemingly warped mirror. Brasyl is a good book, but for me it failed to reach its full potential as a great book, an important book. Even so, dust off the thrown-out guidebook and read Brasyl, but don’t don’t don’t lick the frog.

7.5/10

Infoquake by David Louis Edelman

New ideas in the world of science fiction are hard to come by, and to be honest, I’m not sure just how new Infoquake really is, but it feels new. David Edelman’s debut is about cutthroat economics, technologic innovation, and government control that are played out in corporate boardrooms, work stations, and product release presentations. Most importantly, Infoquake remains engaging throughout.

Far into the future, corporations dominate the world economy under the guidance of a world government. Humanity nearly faced extinction when it developed AI machines that ruled the world; in the aftermath science and technology were shunned as the world put the pieces back together. A charismatic and brilliant scientist changed this track by developing bio/logic technology, allowing people to harness programmable nano-machines in the body to revolutionize human existence. The world evolves into a ruthless economic system based on the creation of the bio/logic programs for the human body and mind with the usual power struggles between corporations, government, and the equivalent of religious organizations.

The corporation at the heart of the story is the Natch Fiefcorp, run by the Natch, a brilliant and darkly motivated young master with a shady past. The Natch Fiefcorp is on its way up in the world through any means available, and then comes the offer it can’t refuse – the key role in developing the next technology to revolutionize humanity. A technology the government will do anything to keep out of the hands of the general population and leaves Natch’s long list of enemies salivating for a piece.

Edelman has created a fully-realized future with many parallels to the world we live in now – the boom and bust, high-tech, high-rolling economy will be familiar to many of us, as are the questionable actions of corporations and the world government. But the real power of this novel is in the players. Natch is brilliantly intimidating and mysterious and Edelman is at his best as he delves into Natch’s past. We know what his motivations are, we know how he came to be this way, but do we know what he will do next? Balancing Natch are the apprentices Jara and Hovril and his childhood guardian. These characters all function in some form as Natch’s conscience – not that he listens very often.

At first I was a bit worried to see 10s of pages of appendices, including a glossary and history of the world – I feared that the book would bog down in technical terms and the need to constantly consult supporting material. However, these fears were not realized – the book is a remarkably ‘easy’ read with a good flow and pace. The supporting material is just that, supporting.

Infoquake is a futuristic corporate thriller of a different sort and the first installment of the Jump 225 Trilogy. The book is compelling and suspenseful while it stands well on its own, the reader is left wanting more, needing to know what will happen next. Edelman’s first book is wonderful debut and one of the best books released this year – 8/10.

Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson

While I can’t claim to have read lots of books that would be considered Cyberpunk, I can say that what I have read hasn’t captivated me in the way other sci-fi and fantasy tends to. Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson is a Cyberpunk novel that did.

Snow Crash was first published in the early 1990s and set in an alternate reality where hyper-inflation has caused the essential crash of government with private corporations stepping up to take control. These corporations operate as independent nations with ‘franchises’ throughout what remains of the U.S. that operate as city-states under a corporate rule. The computer world has evolved into the creation of the ‘Metaverse’, which is a 3-D virtual reality version of the internet. An interesting note is that Stephensen independently coined the term ‘avatar’ for use in his Metaverse; though at this time it was in use elsewhere.

Hiro Protagonist (did I mention that Stephensen enjoys the occasional pun?) is a 30-year old independent hacker who is working as a pizza delivery guy for a ‘franchulaite’ operated by the Mob. Hiro is the half black, half Korean son of a WWII vet who carries a Samurai sword and is the best sword fighter in the world. A series of unfortunate events leads to the formation of a partnership with a 15-year old courier named Y.T. (not whitey ). A new drug on the scene known as Snow Crash threatens the Metaverse and society as a whole…

As I’ve come to expect from Stephensen, this book is a not-so-subtle commentary on the corporate institution and the role of religion in the basic human condition. The origins, consequences, and benefits of religion are explored in interesting ways as Hiro, his ex-girlfriend, and a librarian daemon dig into Snow Crash. Another fun sidebar is that this book appears to be an origin for the comment of Agent Smith in The Matrix about humanity being a virus.

The first 10 pages were the hardest as they required me to adapt to the writing style, though in retrospect it was a great stand-alone short story. The pace picked up once I became acclimated, and by 100 pages in I was thoroughly into the book. Translation – a bit of slow start, but well worth sticking with it. A few leaps in logic occur, but generally the book is very well written with an engaging story in the clever writing style of Stephensen. On my 10-point rating scale where 5 is a take-it-or-leave-it novel and 10 is unsurpassed, I rank Snow Crash at a solid 7.5. I highly recommend the novel to fans of Stephensen and the Cyberpunk sub-genre as well as those who aren’t traditionally fans of this style.