The Nightworkers by Brian Selfon

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on October 6, 2020

Crime novels that focus on criminals are almost always more interesting than crime novels that focus on cops. Where unimaginative crime fiction portrays cops as righteous protectors of the helpless who are preyed upon by evil villains, writers who create empathy for criminals understand that good and evil lurk in every heart. The path one follows is often dictated by circumstance as much as choice.

Shecky Keenan, Keresha Brown (Shecky's niece), and Henry Vek (the son of Shecky's cousin) have made themselves into a family. Shecky operates a money laundering business. Henry supervises the runners, the people who pick up illicit cash and send it to foreign accounts through various money transfer services. Keresha is a 23-year-old former addict who helps Shecky and Henry with her sharp eyes and a talent for burglary.

Shecky is getting older. Nothing matters to him as much as Henry and Keresha. He knows they won’t stay in his house forever. He “fears a silent house above all else.” Yet he’ll cross any line to protect them, even if he might lose their affection by crossing lines against their will.

Shecky probably identifies with Keresha because his parents were less than nurturing. Keresha’s mother cared more about heroin than she cared about her daughter. Keresha is on probation and obsessed with her court-ordered therapist, who isn’t pleased when she breaks into his home at night to share her problems. Keresha struggles with bad lifestyle choices because that’s what people do, but the fact that she continues to struggle sends a message of hope.

Henry enjoys making art and admires the murals and other work of a young man he befriends named Emil Scott. Against Shecky’s advice, Henry takes on Emil as a runner. Emil seems to be unusually honest and reliable until the day Henry assigns him to pick up a large bag of cash. Both Emil and the cash disappear. Henry worries that he misplaced his trust while Shecky worries that the owner of the cash, an unsavory customer named Vasya, will make his displeasure known with violence.

Shecky’s problems are compounded by his fear that the police are closing in. “Suspicious transaction” notices are leading to closed accounts. A police surveillance camera seems to be focused on his house. Bad things are likely to happen. The questions that loom are why they are happening and whether anything bad will happen to characters the reader cares about.

The other two key characters are Zera and Lipz. Zera is part of the Human Trafficking Task Force, a woman from Montenegro who “was born of evil and had known evil all her life.” The goals she wants to accomplish are not within the ambit of conventional police work. Lipz is Henry’s long-time friend. She’s a heroin dealer who helps Henry and Shecky find new customers but engages in dangerous behavior in her quest for a share of the profits.

The plot is smart and focused. Brian Selfon delivers graceful prose that is stripped of redundancy and unnecessary explanations. The story is sufficiently complex that it keeps the reader guessing but not so convoluted that the reader will become lost.

While the story is entertaining, Selfon’s characters form the heart of the novel. Central characters evolve as the story progresses. Some of them are casting aside the defenses they created to respond to adversity and are opening themselves to a feeling of self-worth. At the very least, they may come to appreciate the importance of friendship and family. Being there for another person will always help you feel better about yourself, will make you feel less alone in an alienating world. These are the kind of sympathetic characters who make me extoll the virtues of crime fiction that focuses on criminals.

RECOMMENDED

Machine by Elizabeth Bear

Published by Simon & Schuster/Saga Press on October 20, 2020

Machine is a space opera infused with a mystery. The setting — a hospital in space — is fresh, allowing Elizabeth Bear to breathe new life into familiar science fiction themes.

Brookllyn Jens is a human trauma doctor who zips around the galaxy in a super-fast medical vessel that is the spacefaring equivalent of an ambulance or rescue vehicle. One might expect most space accidents to end with a quick death but Jens tells us that she regularly saves lives. Perhaps ships are so rugged that they routinely sustain enough damage to need a tow and a doctor without coming apart. In any event, Jens’ anecdotal tales of lifesaving aren’t so important to the plot that the reader needs to buy into them.

Jens’ rescue vehicle is crewed by two other Terrans, a couple of aliens, and an autonomous Artificial Intelligence named Sally that runs the ship. The galaxy, it turns out, is a crowded place. Humans have taken their place with syster races and AIs in the Synarche. Conflict is largely avoided by “rightminding,” a form of education and brain tinkering that reduces aggression and inclines disparate beings toward cooperation.

A distress signal brings Jens to a generation ship that left Earth a long time ago. Jens finds a ship of methane breathers attached to the generation ship. There are life signs on both ships but no obvious activity. Jens investigates and discovers that the generation ship’s crew members are in cold storage. They are guarded by an AI who has occupied a peripheral in the shape of a female humanoid. The ship is also infested with mechanical blocks that seem to be eating the hull. The methane breathers are sound asleep in their own ship. All of this is ominous but Jens’ duty is to save life when she can so she brings some of the sleeping humans and aliens back to the hospital (Core General, much to the chagrin of the humanoid AI (whose name is Helen Alloy) who isn’t sure the rescuers can be trusted.

The rescue mission is plagued by technical glitches that Sally can’t explain. Back at Core General, even more glitches are occurring, perhaps as the result of sabotage. The hospital administrator, who happens to be a tree, wants Jens to investigate because (a) she has clearance to see medical files and (b) she used to be a cop. Jens discovers a mysterious wing in the hospital that nobody will talk about and wonders whether it is connected to the sabotage.

Getting to the bottom of the mystery is a long but pleasant walk. The reveal is a bit disappointing — it hinges on an overused science fiction theme, the kind that makes readers think “not another one of those stories” — but the mild disappointment is tempered by Bear’s ability to pull the reader into the story. The book is set in Bear’s White Space universe, a fully realized background that is interesting in itself, but the real fun is in Bear’s imaginative look at how a hospital designed as a space station might minister to the needs of various races that require different atmospheres and diets and gravitational settings to survive.

Agency is a popular theme in current science fiction — the notion that individuals have the power to make independent choices (actually, it’s always been a theme, but sf writers have only recently turned to the label “agency” to describe it). Jens felt she had no agency as a child. Her character development, as is customary in science fiction, focuses on her ability to find creative solutions to problems. One of her problems is unexplained pain that has gripped her throughout her life, pain she endures with the help of an exoskeleton that aids her movement. At more than one point in the novel, Jens thinks about surrendering to a pain-free existence, but in the science fiction tradition, sacrifice is the definition of heroism.

Bear’s aliens are assembled with the kind of convincing detail that makes it easy to suspend disbelief in their existence. Their conflicts, rightminding notwithstanding, add to the story’s interest. A number of action scenes contribute excitement to the story, but Machine doesn’t rely on the conventions of shoot-em-up science fiction. The story might have been a bit tighter — Jens’ struggles after the reveal go on a bit too long — but that’s a small complaint about a book that gives us another of Bear’s smart takes on the subgenre of space opera.

RECOMMENDED

Man of My Time by Dalia Sofer

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14, 2020

Man of My Time is told from the agonized perspective of a man who regrets being the person he allowed himself to become. As countless people who serve brutal leaders have done, the narrator considers whether survival is worth the cost of living in disgrace. He comes to understand that survivors avoid disgrace by growing into a personal mythology. The distance between mythology and reality, though, is the distance that the mythical figure must place between himself and everyone he has ever cared about.

When Sadegh Mozaffarain is cremated, his son Hamid visits New York, meets his brother, and returns to Iran bearing part of his father’s ashes. Most of Man of My Time is told in memory as Hamid recalls the life that alienated him from his father and later from his wife and child. Sadegh was a professor at Tehran University and an official in the Ministry of Culture who spent a lifetime constructing an encyclopedia. Sadegh explains to Hamid that he was against the system until he became the system — a dynamic that will replicate in Hamid’s life.

As a young man, Hamid performs an evil act that symbolically (and in a sense actually) destroys his father. Having demonstrated his capacity to betray his own family, Hamid is offered a job as a prison interrogator. Hamid claims he meant well when he took the job, although the alternative would have been to submit to an interrogation about the graffiti that he scrawls in Tehran, signed “Man of Revolt.” While he enjoyed playing the role of revolutionary gadfly, Hamid was less committed to an ideological cause than he was to impressing a student he hoped to seduce.

Hamid feels “a pang of loss” for his revolutionary days but grows into his role as an interrogator all too comfortably. Hamid, who once used art as a means of expressing support for revolution, becomes a religious censor and judges the fate of artists and others who stray from a righteous and permissible path. The job leads him on a journey that darkens his soul.

While Hamid’s parents and brother escape the revolution  by moving to the United States, Hamid stays in Iran. “Freedom with no lifeblood has no meaning for me,” he tells his brother.

Hamid meets Noushin when he interrogates her about a foreign film found on her VCR. They marry and have a daughter named Golnaz. Their lives seem happy until Hamid is overtaken by the ideology of his masters. He becomes seduced by the Ayatollah’s promise to end oppression by submitting to the rule of God over human affairs. Noushin comes to regard him not as a husband but as a “warden with a wedding ring.” She leaves him five years before Golnaz leaves. Hamid’s insistence on enforcing a strict moral code on Golnaz, and to use force to accomplish that end, extinguishes his relationship with his daughter.

Hamid eventually betrays friends just as he betrayed his father and just as his father betrayed friends. Despite an inevitable epiphany that causes him to regret the choices he has made, Hamid is not so foolish as to believe the choices can be undone. He can move forward, try to atone, attempt to reconnect with Golnaz, but the novel makes clear that nothing can undo the past. He will forever occupy "a skipped generation, a hiccup in history." His father lived in a time of relative intellectual freedom while his daughter's generation doesn't "want to hear about your revolution any more. We want good friends, devoted lovers, nights of music, days of discourse and ideas. It's life we want, and love . . . ."

Dalia Sofer does not try to make the reader sympathize with Hamid. Rather, she provides insight into how the life of a man like Hamid might develop and how he might deal with his grief when he realizes he has constructed a life based on self-deceit. Sofer’s prose is an exceptional blend of elegance and power. The book is quotable and timely. It is a book that will always be timely unless the world finally rids itself of oppressors who impose their religious edicts on those who are do not have the kind of power or freedom that allows them to live as they please.

RECOMMENDED

The Silence by Don DeLillo

Published by Scribner on October 20, 2020

Reasons for fear multiply every decade. Bioweapons. Nuclear weapons. Genetic warfare. Satellite surveillance and cellphone tracking. An overheating Earth. Microplastics in our air, water and food. The characters in Don DeLillo’s The Silence consider multiple sources of fear as they try to explain the inexplicable. Has time collapsed? Have our minds been digitally remastered? Is human existence “an experiment that happens to be falling apart?”

What exactly has taken place in the near-future (2022) setting of The Silence is unclear. A power failure silences televisions and brings the world to a halt, but what caused the power to fail? Sunspots? An electromagnetic pulse? An alien invasion? If we are all living inside a form of virtual reality, perhaps someone pulled the plug. Or the newfound silence might portend the stilling of normal experience, “a deviation in nature itself.” One character asks, “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”

The relatively brief story follows a handful of characters. Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens are on an airplane, talking about the randomness of human memory (as opposed to the completeness of digital memory) while Jim reads aloud the flight data from a monitor — “Filling time. Being boring. Living life.” The plane crashes, apparently while landing, although Jim is upset that they missed the pre-landing snack. Tessa remembers that they were “sort of floating” as the plane came down and Jim remembers banging his head on the window, leaving him with a minor injury. An ambiguous van transports them to an ambiguous clinic where Jim gets ambiguous treatment for the cut on his head. Perhaps to celebrate still being alive — if they are — Jim and Tessa duck into a restroom for a quickie. Others who enter the building have their own stories: stalled elevators, an abandoned subway, barricaded storefronts. Building employees have no explanations — they are there to stitch wounds, not to answer questions — and they surely don’t have a better understanding of “the situation” than anyone else.

Jim and Tessa were planning to join Diane Lucas and Max Stenner for the Superbowl. Martin Dekker has dropped in on Diane and Max, although he does not seem to be an entirely welcome guest. Diane taught physics before she retired and Martin is her former student. When the television screen goes dark, Max surveys their neighbors and reports that they are not blaming the Chinese for the power outage. The implication is that Max might. It seems the absence of evidence will not stand in the way of conspiracy theories that are growing in the street, although without the internet, they need to spread from mouth to mouth.

Martin channels Einstein while Max adds color commentary to the game that has disappeared from the screen. Diane wonders if the game is still unfolding in Deep Space and only Max is attuned to it. Whatever the cause, Diane is happy to see Max so animated after so many years of watching him become one with the television.

Reading The Silence reminded me of watching Lost on television. I loved the characters while I wondered about the explanation for the story’s strange events. Early on in The Silence, I thought “maybe these people are all dead and not yet prepared to enter Heaven.” That would be even more disappointing coming from Don DeLillo than it was coming from the writers of Lost. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. (I have to say, though, I was a fan of the writing on Lost until the writers wrote themselves into a corner from which they couldn’t escape.)

Characters ponder explanations for their surreal present. Martin wonders if the Earth has entered a makeshift reality, a “future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet.” Tessa suggests this might be “some kind of a living breathing fantasy.” She asks: “What if we are not what we think we are? What if the world we know is being completely rearranged as we stand and watch or sit and talk?” But what has happened and why is something DeLillo chooses not to reveal. Perhaps he means to tell us that speculation about possible causes of a consequential event (like a pandemic) can become more important than the actual cause. Or perhaps his point is that the best use of a disaster is to reflect on how little we understand about our own existence.

The story is certainly open to interpretation. It seems in part to be a commentary on the role that technology plays in life. The more advanced we are, the more vulnerable we become. When facial recognition systems go down, how can we be sure of our identities? How does one respond to a loss of the systems that drive modern life? Should we be philosophical or should we concentrate on the concrete: “food, shelter, friends, flush the toilet if we can? . . . Touch, feel, bite chew. The body has a mind of its own.”

Martin reminds us that Einstein thought the next war would be fought with sticks and stones. Are we prepared for that possibility? Martin has difficulty thinking without reference to two-factor verification and gateway tracking. When he pronounces, “The world is everything, the individual nothing,” Max can only stare into the blank screen that once brought the Superbowl into his living room. Without a connection to the world, perhaps we have nothing. How can we survive without our cellphones and email to sustain us? How do we know our place in the world if we don’t know who won the Superbowl?

Having centered White Noise around “an airborne toxic event,” DeLillo is no stranger to fictional disasters. While White Noise is a dark comedy, I was never sure whether I was meant to laugh at The Silence. Characters have conversations that are amusing, primarily because the topics are unexpected, but the humor that lightens the darkness in White Noise is largely absent from The Silence. On the other hand, it is never clear whether the power failure in The Silence is the harbinger of darkness to come or a temporary glitch. That uncertainty prevents the novel from being categorized as dystopian.

This is a shorter and less ambitious novel that most of DeLillo’s work, but the style is vintage DeLillo — every word carefully chosen, every phrase a perfect encapsulation of beauty, every sentence infused with raw energy, every paragraph a surprise. Readers might want to pull The Silence off the shelf every now and then to see whether a fresh reading will unlock new meanings. Few writers encourage me to revisit their work in the hope of undiscovered rewards, but DeLillo is one of them.

RECOMMENDED

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on October 13, 2020

Attack Surface is a near-future novel of ideas. Science fiction is supposed to be the literature of ideas, but quite a bit of it, while fun, is shallow. There’s nothing shallow about Cory Doctorow. When he isn’t writing science fiction, he writes penetrating essays about intellectual property and electronic surveillance. He’s an activist, a blogger, and a celebrated author of speculative fiction that often explores threats to privacy in a digital world.

Attack Surface is set in the same future as, and has some characters in common with, his novels Little Brother and Homeland. Both of those novels have a creative commons license so you can read them for free, but Attack Surface is a standalone that doesn't demand an acquaintance with the earlier books.

Attack Surface tells a timely story about the struggle for justice. But worthwhile fiction reflects themes through characters, so Attack Surface is also about the protagonist’s struggle to become a better person — a person she can live with and might even take pride in being. The novel suggests the possibility of redeeming bad choices by making good choices. Redemption doesn’t erase the pain we cause others — as one character observes, life isn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system that allows ethical debt to be canceled by good deeds — but regretting the past should not be an obstacle to moving forward on a better path.

The story involves two competing corporations, Zyz and Xoth (they both hired the same branding company), that provide technology and strategy to American law enforcement agencies and foreign dictators. The technology enables a surveillance state and crowd control. Used maliciously, the technology permits its users to take control of self-driving cars and direct them toward swarming protestors. The malicious use of such power is likely inevitable, or so the protagonist concludes.

Through his characters, Doctorow warns of the risk that governments and/or powerful corporations can take over the microphones and cameras on cellphones and computers, track the movement of people who carry them, spoof cellphone towers with drones to identify everyone who attends a protest, and yes, hack self-driving cars and every other bit of wired technology, from your Alexa to your smart refrigerator. And he makes it clear that there’s not a damned thing you can do, from a technology standpoint, to protect yourself from it. Reading books like Attack Surface is scary but necessary.

The plot follows the present life of a young woman named Masha while revealing her backstory in time-jumbled scenes that eventually cohere. Masha was a bright and deliberately underachieving student who had a strong grasp of internet technology. She went to work for Homeland Security, excusing her contribution to the surveillance state with self-assurances that patriotism can’t be bad. The lure of money and patriotism took her to Xoth Intelligence and its rival Zyz. Her work took her to Iraq and to Central America before she was assigned to help the dictatorial government in Slavstakia stifle dissent. Masha tried to balance her tech support for oppression by giving aid and comfort to the dissenters.

Back in America, where Zys is handing the techniques of oppression to the Oakland Police Department and is hoping to score a similarly lucrative contract with San Francisco, Masha is blackmailed by Xoth, a company that portrays itself as a more ethical provider of systems that help the police control and spy upon the populace. While trying to cope with corporate superpowers, Masha uses her free time to help politically active friends shield themselves from surveillance, an effort she knows to be futile. The friends believe in her inner decency despite her decision to work against their interests in her various jobs.

The importance of friendship, in fact, is a key theme of Attack Surface. Masha gets through life by compartmentalizing. Don’t get too close to anyone and you don’t get hurt, she thinks. By the novel’s end, she begins to realize that putting friends in compartments only denies pain by denying love. Not just love of friends, but the larger love of humanity that helps us stay human.

Reading a Cory Doctorow novel leaves the reader with a lot to unpack. The world is complex and getting more complex every day. Doctorow cuts through the noise to caution us about trends that are changing the world in ways that will leave most of the next generation with considerably less privacy than we have been able to enjoy.

Attack Surface invites the reader to ponder serious issues: Cutthroat corporations that act in their own interests to the detriment of everyone who lives outside the upper echelons of the corporate bubble. The government’s use of private sector contractors to violate laws so that the government can pretend to have clean hands. The increasing tendency of police departments to conduct unlawful surveillance and justify their actions as necessary to fight domestic terror. The use of social media, not exclusively by Russians, to interfere with democracy. The importance of unrelenting activism to hold the forces of oppression at bay.

The novel also asks hard questions. Is surveillance technology ethically sound when a government uses it to control white supremacists? The technology might save lives, but what happens when white supremacists take over the government and use that same technology against their enemies? Perhaps the way to control white supremacy is not through technology but through empowering people to stand up against it.

Masha’s moral and ethical journey makes compelling fiction, but the story’s urgency lies in its reminder that most of the events in the novel could take place tomorrow. Attack Surface is compelling fiction because of its importance and a fascinating read because Doctor is such a convincing storyteller.

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