The Original Definition of the Metaverse: Neal Stephenson's Triumphant Snow Crash

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

When you've been given the name Hiro Protagonist, you're typecast from the day your birth certificate was completed. Luckily for our hero Hiro, however, he fits the name quite nicely: he's a world-class swordsman when wielding the katana his father left him, not to mention being a world-class hacker. On that last point, he's one of the original founders of the virtual-reality world known as the Metaverse — which means he can get into its most famous virtual nightclub, the Black Sun, any time he wants. In real life, Hiro's found that freelance hacking jobs are sparse and swordplay doesn't pay at all, so he's employed as a deliveryman for the Mafia. A pizza deliveryman...

A partnership of convenience is formed when Y. T., Lolita-esque blonde skateboarding "Kourier," saves Hiro's bacon by delivering his last-ever pizza (last ever 'cause his car was at that time sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool). They'll partner 50:50 to deal in information, the only real currency in an age where trillion-dollar bills ("Meeses") are most useful when shredded for kitty litter, and most worldwide franchises print "local" money that's far more stable than the poor ol' greenback.

The Footage Shall Reveal...

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

The generation born in the 1970s and '80s has benefited from a revolution in the way our world functions; a sea change of the magnitude of steam power, Ford's assembly line, or the refutation of the heliocentric universe. Never before has information spread at such velocity. Consider "dancing baby" and "all your base are belong to us," phenomena that circumnavigated the globe at the speed of thought. To our grandparents, fashion and commerce were local: the corner bakery, the town tailor and milliner, a grocer served by local farms and gardens. Today, however, children the world over identify the icons of our age regardless of their native alphabet; they recognize the swoosh and the golden arches and the red and white soda can at a distance of a thousand paces.

Graham and Land Pen a Stealth YA-SciFi-Romance-Thriller

The Rising - Heather Graham and Jon Land

Perhaps the most interesting thing about 18-year-old Alex Chin is that he’s blue-eyed and blonde, unlike his mainland Chinese parents. The official reason’s simple – he’s adopted. The real reason is a little more complicated…

…and that complication is the reason football star-slash-stone fox Alex and his tutor Sam (short for Samantha) are on the run, pursued by oily-smelling cyborgs and an ashy-gray something that just ain't quite real. Oh, yeah, and Alex has a protector guy that he never knew about with a super-neat weapon; a good thing since the pseudo-people chasing him murdered his parents and are heck-bent on taking him back. Somewhere.

Fortunately for Alex (if you can say “fortunately” about a freshly-orphaned teenager), with her dying breath his mom provided the key to his real back-story. Yup, Alex isn’t a normal red-blooded teenage boy (though his appraisal of Sam seems to suggest otherwise). Alex is – tada! an alien! He’s an alien who, his protector says, holds  the key to Earth’s survival; though just what that key might be and what it might unlock are complete mysteries. If you thought things were already complicated, an angry billionaire is also hunting for Alex, and as far as Langston Marsh is concerned, the only good alien is a dead alien – and his storm troopers are closing in.

Alex and Sam, however, are about to have a rip-roarin’ good time as they flee marauding aliens and a cadre of mercenaries – but have no fear, they’ll be fine.

They’ll be fine because 1) The Rising is a YA novel (albeit rather stealthy about it) and 2) if the kids don’t survive, authors Heather Graham and Jon Land won’t be able to attempt to spin the novel into a series. Not that it’s really worth it…

Now I’m not opposed to YA novels; I rather like them. I realize they’re supposed to appeal to people the age of my grandkids, and should be expected to touch on all the themes familiar to fans of Harry and Katniss. No doubt about it, the classic tropes about “coming of age under fire” and “recognizing her beauty once she takes off her glasses” figure prominently. Just as common these days, regardless of the target audience, is that “evil billionaire” plot thread Graham and Land shoehorn into the plot, presumably to make the kids’ flight even more perilous – it’s like the Fellowship being attacked simultaneously by Sauron and Saruman…

Like I said, I’m OK with YA novels (see my multitudinous Pittacus Lore reviews). I’m not OK with sloppy pseudoscience – in an era when kids are pounded relentlessly with STEM, I suspect that rubbish like “It had been formed of subatomic, programmable particles based on nanotechnological principles” will make them retch like it did me - -both times it appeared. And then there’s the notion that a particle accelerator acts as a power source: “once activated, a particle accelerator of this size and magnitude [sic] would generate power on the millisecond level equal to that powering an entire city or even a state.” Geez, guys, instead of just throwing science-y words on the page, why not call the local university and ask for help?! On a side note, it’s interesting that one author thinks the phrase is “honed in on,” while the other prefers “home in on” (for the record, it’s home…). Sloppy editing, I guess.

All in all, it’s just a YA thriller with a little young love (super-chaste – just one little kiss) and a heaping helping of pseudo-science. The thing is, in the Harry Potter stories kids know the fantastic stuff is magic. Here, they’re supposed to think it’s present-day Earth and all this stuff is based on real science and technology.

But it’s not, and that isn’t a good thing for The Rising – not at all.

copyright © 2015-2017 scmrak

Gibson blends technology, politics and espionage in a cyberpunk melange

Spook Country - William Gibson

That William Gibson is about as geeky as the average suburban housewife probably comes as a surprise to most familiar with Gibson. He is, after all, the man who coined “cyberspace” two decades ago in Neuromancer, the first book ever to win all three science fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick). Yet Gibson freely admits that he’s no more in tune with what’s inside his monitor or his keyboard than you or I. That’s pretty much on a par with learning that A-Rod has never heard of Cooperstown or that Norm Abram can’t tell walnut paneling from wood-grain wallpaper.

When a Crime Writer Turns to SciFi: Saturn Run

Saturn Run - John Sandford and Ctein

Spotting it was a happy accident, on the order of the discovery of penicillin – maybe even better. The deck of photographs of Saturn, taken at half-hour intervals by a telescope in Earth orbit, shouldn’t have shown anything interesting – but they did! A gigantic ship had entered our Solar System from interstellar space, decelerating to a halt in the sixth planet’s ring system. And although the ship soon departed without ever bothering to visit Earth, that planet’s two major powers immediately started a race to get to the tiny moonlet the ship had visited and collect the “alien tech” that surely must be there. 

Social Media Gone Wild: The Affinities

The Affinities - Robert Charles Wilson

I've heard sociologists bemoan the phenomenon of the internet in general and of social media in specific. Many are concerned that society, rather than being enhanced by this alleged interconnection, is actually harmed as society devolves into self-identified fractions and factions. One need only consider the conservative and liberal “echo chambers” to know that many people now choose to – at least online – associate only with others who share their beliefs and values. As speculative fiction writers so often do, Robert Charles Wilson has decided to comment on such fractionation; the result is The Affinities.

Adam Fisk never fit particularly well with his kin. As soon as he was old enough, he left the somewhat well-to-do merchant family in upstate New York to pursue art. When his grandmother, the only supportive member of the Fisk family, passed away, he thought his fling was over. That was before he tested as a Tau…

Repopulating the Race from Seven Eves: Neal Stephenson Goes Post-Apocalyptic

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

You want to love Seveneves. You do. You want to love it because, well, Neal Stephenson wrote it and it’s a massive volume filled with big characters and massive (as well as micro) technology and huge ideas that are described in careful, glittering detail. You want to love it because it’s about as big a novel as they come, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction that pares the human race down to the bare minimum and then keeps on going. Most of all, you want to love it because it’s big, big, big!

But that just might be the main reason it’s so hard to love…

Something – no one will ever know what, we assume – shattered the moon into seven giant pieces. It looked awfully darned cool at first, until a couple of big domes realized that those big pieces would continue to bang into each other, chipping off ever-smaller chunks until millions of bits the size of Toyotas began raining down on Earth – and once that happened, it would be all over but the shouting. The hurry-up plan developed to save the human race? Ship a few thousand of them into space, accompanied by as many defining artifacts of humanity as possible and carrying the seeds (genetic material) necessary to start over: a Noah’s Ark, 21st-century style, built around Izzy: the International Space Station complex.

Mo Speaks (This Machine Kills Demons!)

The Annihilation Score - Charles Stross

It used to be that your local library (for you millennials, that's a building filled with books patrons can borrow for a couple of weeks) had a shelf or two of “science fiction.” In olden days, the books were about adventures in space and on alien planets. Some bright (not!) librarian decided to combine science fiction with fantasy: soon the shelves were overrun with sword-and-sorcery tales, many of them strangely similar to Tolkein adventures – you know, fellowships, talismans, epic struggles of good and evil; that rot. Now, even worse, the shelves are chock full of vampire and werewolf tales, far too many of them in the sub-sub-subgenre of VampRom.

But there is hope, albeit with a Lovecraftian bent (you kids who don’t know who H. P. Lovecraft was, head for Wikipedia…): Charlie Stross and the Laundry Files. File number six, The Annihilation Score, is now available.

When last we saw Dominique “Mo” O’Brien and Bob Howard, they had decided on a trial separation. It’s not that the two aren’t in love, it’s that their jobs – in the strange world of The Laundry – make them want to kill each other. Luckily (?) for Mo, she has a new assignment, one that (in theory) means she doesn’t need to unlimber her demon-killing bone violin, "Lecter." I told you it was Lovecraftian…

Book One of Another "I Won't Read Book Two" Trilogy -- The Park Service

The Park Service - Ryan Winfield

Aubrey van Houten’s is your average post-apocalyptic world, one in which the last surviving humans live in a manmade cavern several kilometers below the surface. Space and resources are limited, so their society has made “adjustments.” The citizens come of age at fifteen, at which time an algorithm assigns them their careers based on a day-long test. But wait: they get to retire at thirty-five! Except that retirement means they’re sent to Eden… apparently some sort of “cloud storage” of their minds. All that and algae crisps at every meal…

With his father just weeks from retirement, Aubrey turns fifteen and receives his (yes, Aubrey’s a boy) assignment; the first person in memory sent up to level I. But on the way to his assignment, the maglev train crashes and Aubrey finds himself both miraculously alive and on the park-like surface of the world he’d always been told was a radioactive ruin. Lie #1… And there are other humans on the surface, too – but they live in hiding, in constant fear of “the Park Service.” As Aubrey learns when a Park Service drone murders an entire community, they’ve been hiding for good reason. But Aubrey will come to find that everything he learned as a child comprises lies #2 through about #1,000,000 – and the hits just keep on coming.

There's Just One Word to Describe Marcus Sakey's Brilliance: "Brilliant!"

Nick Cooper – just “Cooper” to his friends – might be considered a traitor to his kind. His kind is the gifted, also known as brilliants, abnorms, twists, freaks… the small segment of humanity born with special abilities. Not X-Man powers like teleportation or pyrokinesis, though: just a little tweak to the brain that makes them much, much, much better at one thing than “normal” people. Imagine an NFL running back who can see where the defense will be in two seconds instead of where they are now; or a savant who can predict to the microsecond when any stock will rise or fall. Get the picture?

Cooper’s gift is pattern recognition. He can look at a person’s face and instinctively know what they’ll do; what they’ll say. He can even look at a person’s cell phone bill or credit card charges and figure out precisely where they’ll be tomorrow. That ability makes him invaluable to his employer; the government agency charged with fighting a “silent” war against abnorm terrorists, terrorists like John Smith. For a decade, Smith has been killing innocent civilians and, for a decade, “Equitable Services” and Cooper have been on his trail.

That’s about to change: in a desperate move, Cooper goes underground, into the giant Wyoming compound of the abnorms. His cover story? He triggered a terrorist bomb that killed over a thousand; and now his old unit is on his trail – and they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.

What Cooper learns inside that compound, however, will change his life…