Echopraxia by Peter Watts

Published by Tor Books on August 26, 2014

Echopraxia takes place after Blindsight. Transhuman Bicamerals (hive-minded faith-based scientists who speak in tongues), engineered versions of zombies, and not-quite-human but controlled and confined vampires are among the many background characters. Don't grind your teeth -- this is not another dumb zombie/vampire novel.

The central character is baseline human Dan Brüks, a biologist and tenured professor who resists all the wiring and implants that most people take for granted. As Exchopraxia begins, Brüks is in the desert where he finds Bicamerals threatened by a not-so-controlled-or-confined vampire and her zombie helpers. Soon the Bicams and the vampire join forces (more or less) because they appear to have a common but unidentified enemy. An attack from an unknown source sends Brüks and the Bicams and the vampire and a baseline military officer and some other characters scrambling to a spaceship that is itself chased and attacked by the unknown enemy. Figuring out who (or what) is engineering the high tech attacks is one of the plot's three mysteries. The second involves a mysterious something -- the "Angels of the Asteroids" is the roughly translated name bestowed by the Bicams -- and its association with Icarus, a space station that acts as a conduit of unlimited solar energy. The third involves the abrupt disappearance of the Theseus, a spaceship that investigated mystery number two, on which the military officer's son was serving.

Peter Watts has a better than average prose style. I like the way he renders dialog in a character for whom language is too slow to keep pace with thought. Characters have carefully designed personalities. Brüks and the military officer are both carrying a bundle of guilt, a byproduct of being baseline humans who can't jettison inconvenient emotions. The plot moves quickly, particularly in the novel's second half, but it does not short-change character development or the refinement of themes (including the benefits and disadvantages of being human rather than transhuman) that are central to the story.

The novel's background is filled with ideas, some familiar and others fresh. Watts doesn't assume that readers are stupid and need their hands held. Concepts that don't seem to make much sense initially (like "smart paint") are eventually made clear, usually through context rather than direct explanation. Watts scores points with me for avoiding needless exposition.

While Echopraxia is science-heavy science fiction, Watts also scores points for recognizing and engaging the limits of science -- which is not to say that the novel prefers a religious approach to understanding phenomena, despite the importance of transhuman monks to the story. Watts understands that too many people have blind faith in the ability of either science or religion to supply correct answers to all questions when, given our relatively primitive evolutionary state, we don't even know what questions to ask. Watts provides an antidote to arrogance, a reminder that it is wrong to belittle others because their understanding of the universe (or of our tiny part of our single universe) differs from our own. Echopraxia makes a strong argument for the importance of keeping an open mind about ... well, everything ... because the odds are good that whatever we believe to be true is fundamentally wrong.

Apart from being intellectually engaging, Echopraxia tells an entertaining story. The combination of an intelligent background, a fun plot, important themes, and strong characters make Echopraxia a rewarding read.

RECOMMENDED

Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini

First published in 1995; published digitally by Open Road Media on April 22, 2014

Jim Messenger is a lonely CPA. If he had the talent of Duke Ellington, he would write a ballad called "Blue Lonesome" for the woman who eats alone every night at the Harmony Café. He views her with a sort of "seductive bewilderment." Sensing a kindred spirit, Messenger tries to strike up a friendship. His efforts are rebuffed but he becomes obsessed with her. He soon learns that the woman, who has been living under an alias and withdrawing cash from a safe deposit box to meet her needs, has committed suicide.

Messenger makes it his mission to discover the woman's identity. The quest takes him to Beulah, Nevada, where he meets the woman's sister and learns about her past. Or rather, he learns a horrific version of the woman's past, a version he doesn't believe. That prompts him to search for the truth. Most people in Beulah don't want to know the truth. They are comforted by the lies they tell themselves. For Messenger, the small town of Beulah becomes a dangerous and unwelcoming place.

Bill Pronzini establishes Messenger as a dull man living a lonesome life, a man who is afraid to take chances (and who lost the only love of his life for that reason). Messenger's mission forces him to abandon his safe life and to take risks for the first time. Blue Lonesome is therefore more than a crime novel; it is a story of personal growth. As the story evolves, Messenger begins working as a ranch hand, an experience that transforms him as much as his growing feelings for the woman who employs him.

Blue Lonesome is not the best of Pronzini's crime novels. The crimes are ordinary and the "whodunit" reveal comes as no great surprise, although a wicked twist at the end is satisfying. In many respects, the story is secondary to the novel's other virtues. The atmosphere of a traumatized town that refuses to heal, a town built upon dark secrets and intolerant attitudes, is chilling. Unlike many current crime writers, Ponzini writes tight prose that moves the plot forward at a steady pace. While the characters in Blue Lonesome are better than the story, they are enough to make the novel worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

The Wraith by Joe Hill

Published by IDW Publishing on August 12, 2014

Joe Hill, the pen name of Stephen King's son, has written a couple of best-selling horror novels, including NOS4A2 . He has also written some acclaimed comic books. The Wraith combines the world Hill created in NOS4A2 with the graphic novel form. It is a self-contained, stand-alone story.

Charlie Manx drives a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith. The Wraith comes in handy when taking children to Christmasland, where every day is Christmas ... forever. Joe Hill's prose fills in Charlie's chilling personality as Charlie describes his upbringing (in which a combined mortuary-whorehouse figures prominently) and explains how, as the result of being swindled into investing in Christmasland, Charlie came to acquire the Wraith.

Eventually we get interlocking stories in different time frames about an uninsured guy who can't get medical treatment for his son and a group of convicts who break out of a prison van and get help from a fellow who helps people disappear. The fellow picks them up in ... you guessed it ... a Rolls Royce Wraith.

The story is strange until we arrive at Christmasland, when it turns truly bizarre. And gruesome. But intermixed with the gore are some poignant moments and sympathetic characters. The Wraith is not as memorable or as substantial as the work Hill did in the Locke & Key series, but it has its own bloody appeal.

RECOMMENDED

Hurricane Fever by Tobias S. Buckell

Published by Tor Books on July 1, 2014

Hurricane Fever starts with two improbably named characters -- Zee and Roo -- and engulfs them in a familiar plot that is nevertheless fun. Zachariah "Zee" Barlow steals a virus from a biotech lab and then injects himself with it. This seems like a bad idea since the virus kills him as he is on the phone to CDC. The virus is intended as a targeted weapon, a commonplace theme in technothrillers, but Zee's decision to infect himself with it isn't entirely believable. In any event, that plot thread fades into the background as the first two-thirds of the novel unfolds.

The novel follows Prudence "Roo" Jones, who should be outrunning bad weather on his catamaran with his nephew Delroy. Instead he drops everything to respond to a message he receives from the now-dead Zee. Roo and Zee were members of the Caribbean Intelligence Group back in the day. Roo picks up a flash drive that Zee mailed him and wonders what the weather data on the drive has to do with Zee's death. The reason for Zee's death also concerns Zee's mysterious sister -- mysterious because Zee never mentioned her to Roo.

Much of Hurricane Fever features the kind of chase-and-attempt-to-kill scenes that are customary in thrillers, along with some better scenes illustrating the dangers of hurricanes if you happen to live on a boat. The near-future plot plays with some high-tech gadgetry that would make 007's Q envious. Nearing the midway point, a turning point in the novel gives more depth to Roo than I expected to find. The plot, on the other hand, has little depth, as the reason the bad guy wants the virus turns out to be standard and unimaginative thriller fare.

The purpose of the virus becomes clear with about a third of the novel remaining. The pages that follow are filled with shootouts, chases, explosions, silly stunts, and predictable mayhem -- good fun that would probably look great on a movie screen, but nothing special on the screen of my imagination -- while the role played by the mysterious female eventually gives the novel an extra spark.

Hurricane Fever is a good beach read that mostly takes place on windy Caribbean beaches that are ever-threatened by hurricanes. While I wouldn't put this high on my list of recommended thrillers, it works well as fast-moving escapist fiction.

RECOMMENDED

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

Published by The Dial Press on June 10, 2014

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers features wonderfully eccentric characters, but this character-driven novel has the added virtue of telling a multi-layered story that combines humor with intrigue while exploring the mysteries that come from knowing (and depending upon) other people. The characters have, to varying degrees, invented their lives and hidden their pasts, or settled on histories that suit them in the moment, sometimes because they do not know the full truth, other times because they want to conceal it.

In 2011, when the novel opens, Tooley Zylberberg has settled down, having purchased a small used bookshop in a small Welch village. It is a quirky shop, the sort that every booklover wants to find, but it earns no income, forcing Tooley to pay her sole employee, Fogg, from her meager savings. Although she is marching toward insolvency, Tooley keeps the place because it makes her feel rooted after living a rootless life. She avoids friendships because friendships require a past ("your past only mattered if others sought to know it") and she would prefer not to have one. Or so she tries to tell herself until an urgent Facebook message sends her flying across the ocean to meet someone in New York, only to cross it again to visit another person from her past in Italy. Her travels prompt her to reinterpret her life and to develop new understandings of the friends who were once part of it.

We learn about Tooley's past (as she understood it at the time) when the novel begins to jump to earlier decades. In 1999, at the age of 20, Tooley's exploration of New York City leads her to a law student named Duncan McGrory. He becomes the new presence in her life, an addition to her current traveling companions: an elderly man with a Russian accent named Humphrey who blames his misfortune on "the Moron Problem" and an affable itinerant Canadian con artist named Venn.

The novel's third time frame begins in 1988 as Tooley leaves Australia and travels to Bangkok with Paul, a contractor who installs modems in small American embassies. There she encounters flighty Sarah, who afterwards continues to drift in and out of her life. The significance of Tooley's time with Paul and Sarah only becomes clear in the novel's last half. In fact, it is only in the closing chapters that Tooley puts the pieces together and begins to understand her life from a new perspective.

The novel's fragmented structure allows intrigue to build as the reader watches and anticipates the reconstruction of Tooley's life. By emphasizing the relative nature of time, the novel suggests that memory is a form of time travel and raises the possibility that we change the past whenever we visit it. In a related passage that I loved, the novel argues that readers keep their books because they contain our past, "the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect."

Apart from its thoughts about time and memory, The Rise & Fall is largely about the fictions that people make of their lives and the difficulty of piercing the fictions of others. As Humphrey says: "Nothing, not even dictionaries, can tell you what anything means. The reality of things is just sad, for the most part." And if reality is sad, inventing a happier version of your life is a way to cope. Yet when memories, in their retelling, "chip loose from the events themselves," detaching the present from the reality of the past, isolation can be the consequence of dishonesty. And while it may be impossible to penetrate the fictions of others, the novel wisely suggests that the key to understanding people lies is accepting "that to be surprised or disappointed or even betrayed [is] not a catastrophe." All of that is nutritious fruit to chew upon.

The opinionated characters in The Rise & Fall cover vast ground in their amusing conversations, from political systems to the myth of meritocracy, from the benefits of having faith in human beings to the advantages of living apart from them, from the perils to the joy of nonconformity. Some chats are silly, others are profound, all contribute to the eager turning of pages. Graceful prose, unpredictable characters, startling humor and rich insights into human nature make The Rise & Fall of Great Powers a true pleasure to read.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED