Rosebud by Paul Cornell

Published by Tordotcom on April 26, 2022

The five crew members of the Rosebud are artificial intelligences taking the forms of (respectively) a goth, an aristocratic scientist, a swarm of insects, a half-tiger person, and a body creation artist (and his family, all waving their hands at once). Humans in physical bodies wouldn’t fit on the Rosebud because the ship is tiny. Some were human once. Bob was made to believe he was human, but he was created as a Russian bot to troll social media. Quin is a product of insects’ foray into AI, an experiment that didn’t go over well with humans, leading to hive burnings that are part of Quin’s ancestral memory. This is a recycled crew that, to some extent, is grateful to have a continuing digital existence.

The Company dispatched the Rosebud in the distant past to send rocks on a path that will take them near Earth, where other ships will mine them for valuable ores and minerals. The crew has a vague understanding of Earth. At least when they were created, it was a repressive place where transgenders had to identify themselves with pink and blue badges.

The Rosebud has detected a sphere that must be another tiny ship because it is too smooth and regular in appearance to be a rock. Is it a pirate ship? Is it the product of alien technology? The greatest fear of the Rosebud’s crew is that the Company will come to investigate the sphere and, in the process, learn that the AIs haven’t been following protocol. In the absence of updates, they have started to experience the horror of freedom. They kind of like it and don’t want the Company to mess with it. They regularly profess their loyalty to the Company, their gratitude that the Company saved them, in the hope that the Company will not decide they need to be reprogrammed.

The crew decides to conduct its own investigation, traveling to the sphere in artificial bodies that include a tiger-man, a wasp, Dracula, the body once inhabited by the aristocratic scientist, and Bob Ross (the TV artist who, older readers might recall, once taught viewers to paint). After they make contact, they experience moments which their memories and their memory backups seem to diverge. They develop a theory about alternate futures and altered pasts based on entangled particles and probability waves, an aspect of theoretical physics that fascinates me despite my utter inability to wrap my head around it.

The story makes clever use of theoretical physics, eventually making the reader understand that the past is whatever you want it to be, at least if you know how to control entangled particles. Paul Cornell leaves it to the reader’s imagination to fill in much of the story, including the origin and role of the mysterious Company. That’s not a problem for science fiction junkies, as a powerful Company, a private enterprise that functions as a (or the) government, is a fixture of futuristic fiction.

The theme of AIs who aspire to some sort of personhood is another fixture, but that’s not actually what’s happening in Rosebud. Some of the AIs are based on people who once lived and none of them really aspire to be human. They’re just happy to have developed their own personalities and, in that limited sense, to have slipped the Company’s yoke. That’s an interesting idea. Cornell develops the idea about as much as it needs to be developed to tell a story that comes to a satisfying resolution — or at least one that satisfies the characters, bearing in mind that aliens who control entangled particles, like writers, can create any ending they want, including one that makes everyone happy.

RECOMMENDED

Dream Town by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 19, 2022

Dream Town is the third novel to feature David Baldacci's private investigator from the past, Aloysius Archer. The novel takes place in 1952-53 and is set in Los Angeles, a prime location of American noir in the last decade of noir’s golden age. Compared to crime writers of the 1950s, Baldacci is more David Goodis than Jim Thompson. Like Goodis’ protagonists, Archer isn’t particularly hard-boiled, but Baldacci is similar to Thompson in capturing the corrupt atmosphere that contaminates glitter and shatters dreams of the City of Angels.

The novel’s gritty plot involves human and drug trafficking. Mix in blackmail, murder, and kinky sex in a soulless city and you’ve got the elements of a noir novel. The characters are largely connected to the movie industry, organized crime, or both.

Archer brings a twenty-first century attitude about women to the 1950s as he condemns a culture that requires women to sleep their way to success but won’t allow successful women to sign mortgages without a male co-signer. Well, good for Archer, but I’m not convinced a male PI in 1953 would have shared Thompson’s vision of a better world. I was more convinced by the female characters who understand the unfairness of a patriarchal industry (and society) but are determined to succeed — in some cases, by adopting the corrupt tactics of the men who control the system.

Archer works with his mentor, Willie Dash, in the Bay Area. He’s in LA to see Liberty Callahan, with whom he has (or had) a thing. They’re having dinner when Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter and friend of Liberty’s, turns up and tells Liberty of her fear that someone is trying to kill her. When Liberty explains that Archer is a private investigator, Lamb hires Archer to track down the source of her fear. Lamb promptly disappears, leaving Archer with a missing person investigation.

Archer’s investigation begins in Lamb’s house, where a man has answered the phone without identifying himself. Archer trips over a dead body in the house and, in the tradition of private eye novels in every era, is hit on the head and left in the house with the body.

Baldacci creates a seedy atmosphere with a mob-controlled establishment in Chinatown that takes advantage of desperate immigrants and blackmail victims to serve the unorthodox sexual interests of powerful men. Following clues to Lamb’s disappearance, Archer encounters violence in Chinatown, and on a beach where he stumbles across smugglers, and in Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and basically everywhere he goes. Archer is a violence magnet, an essential feature of a noir protagonist. Shootouts, fistfights, and car chases ensue.

The novel resolves, at least temporarily, Archer’s uncertain relationship with Liberty. It also portends a change in Archer’s career. He likes the Bay Area, but there’s more work available in LA and there’s something appealing about searching for reality in a city that is based on illusion.

The plot is intricate but, unlike a Chandler novel, it makes sense. Readers might want to make notes to keep track of all the relationships between the characters, and perhaps use pens of different colors to make clear that relationships change as the story evolves. The intricacy will keep the reader on his or her toes, making it a challenge to guess Lamb’s fate and the roles of the various characters who may or may not have been involved in her disappearance. If the ending is not entirely unexpected, that’s only because many possible endings are consistent with the plot. The one Baldacci chose is as good as any. Readers who enjoy 1950s noir and don’t want to revisit the originals should be entertained by Baldacci’s attempt to recapture the past.

RECOMMENDED

The Devil's Dictionary by Steven Kotler

Published on St. Martin's Press on April 19, 2022

While The Devil’s Dictionary borrows its title from Ambrose Bierce’s 1906 collection of satirical definitions, Steven Kotler’s book is a smart, energetic, and entertaining work of science fiction. The title refers to a scheme to “create life from scratch.” The scheme is the glue that binds the components of a richly imagined story.

Lion Zorn first appeared in Last Tango in Cyberspace. Zorn is an em-tracker. Riffing on ideas that William Gibson popularized, Kotler’s version of empathy tracking is a genetic evolution that enhances the ability to recognize patterns, to feel how cultures clash and blend. Apart from having enhanced empathy for every living part of the environment, em-trackers are “cultural prediction engines,” giving them the ability to sort through trends and make smart guesses about the future.

A pharmaceutical product called Sietch Tabr enhances empathy in a similar way for people who aren’t born with the genetic mutation. It also alters pheromones, making predators sense the drug user as a friend. Developed as a cure for autism, Sietch Tabr (a name that winks at Dune) became a popular street drug because of its psychoactive properties. Lion became famous — a hero to some and reviled by others — when he wrote an article extolling the benefits of “empathy for all.” The article sparked a social movement but sent Lion into hiding after the Splinter, a schism that divides humans who value empathy and those who don’t. The “us against them” theme, like the environmental destruction theme, represents Kotler’s attempt to give the novel allegorical relevance to humanity’s present.

Sir Richard became wealthy marketing Sietch Tabr. He took advantage of his wealth and the sudden spread of empathy to create the Pacific Rim mega-linkage, a long corridor that serves as an environmental refuge, giving animals and plants the chance to roam, countering restrictions imposed by humans. The selfish class — those who reject empathy — have spawned a Humans First movement that opposes attempts to elevate the status of non-human life. It doesn’t bother them that humanity’s insatiable hunger has multiplied the extinction rate of plant and animal life since humans arrived on the scene. In fact, they think human dominion over animals is God’s design. Whether God wanted us to wipe out species by the thousands is a question they forget to ask.

Against that background, Zorn comes out of hiding to search for friends who have disappeared after telling Zorn about a new drug called evo that makes users “trip evolution.” He discovers what might be a plot to hunt down em-trackers and a larger plot to build an AI that, using the genomes of all the animals in the world, can combine genetic data to build life from scratch.

The story sends Zorn on a quest that really can’t be summarized. It involves men who seduce Chinese virgins, deflower them, and encourage them to commit suicide. It involves a tattooed colony of people who developed empathic relationships with bats and occupied the Space Needle. It involves a poly-tribe that grew out of a hacker collective with a shared interest in ecology. It involves flying tree snakes and mechanical polar bears.

Zorn’s supporting cast is not particularly memorable, but Zorn is sufficiently anguished to give his characterization some depth. The story is filled with action, providing a nice balance against the complex plot. Internal plot summaries help the reader hold the plot in memory without slowing its development. While the novel doesn’t feel entirely fresh, Steven Kotler’s ability to weave together familiar science fiction themes and to create a rich background make The Devil’s Dictionary an engaging read.

RECOMMENDED

Scheme by Jeffrey Deaver

Published by Amazon on April 28, 2022

“Scheme” is an Amazon original short story. It might be slightly longer than an average short story, but not long enough to qualify as a novella.

A well-hidden bomb is found in a hospital, so well hidden that a robot can’t get to it. Why do the police believe that a caller was able to spot such a well-hidden “suspicious package”?  We’re never told.

The police conclude that the bomb was planted by a right-wing militia. What evidence supports that hypothesis? Well, some other bomb once was planted by a militia, so this one must have been too. Why does this pass for reasoning? We’re never told.

Somehow the police “tech” unit gets a warrant to search email sent from cellphones that were near the bomb at some point. All email, mind you, most of which will clearly have nothing to do with the bomb. The police managed this feat based on what probable cause? We’re never told because that’s not how warrants work.

The search yields an email containing the phrase “It’s in position,” which the police believe is a reference to the bomb. This leads to an earlier email to the presumed bomber that gives the date of the bombing but not the location. It does, however, include a bad poem. Why do the police think the poem has something to do with the bomb? We’re never told.

When the tech people find a second poem in an email, an English professor at the local college helps them decode it. The professor astutely concludes that the poems suck. The reader will likely agree, but the professor offers an academic perspective to explain why they suck. A third poem is no better.

The plot allows Deaver to give the reader an introduction to poetry, something that might be useful for readers who didn’t attend high school. The cop who works with the professor pays more attention to her “sparkly eyes” than her lectures about rhyming schemes, which leads to the cop showing his scars to the professor, which leads to … well, you know.

Meanwhile, other cops made a big drug bust that involves “the mob.” Since we hear about it three or four times, it will obviously tie into the poetry slam bomber at some point.

The story seems bizarre until it takes a twist at the end that explains the poems. The twist is also bizarre, but it at least forces the protagonist detective to admit that he was a fool for not asking obvious questions that readers will surely ask. The ending is meant to make readers feel good about some seemingly bad people, but it is so contrived that I felt bad for wasting my time.

The story ends with an information dump that is not the stuff of compelling fiction. Readers who like contrived stories about dull and moronic protagonists might get into “Scheme.” The rest of the reading world will lose nothing by giving it a pass.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Targeted by Stephen Hunter

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on January 18, 2022

Targeted is a novel of extremist paranoia, a work of propaganda that pushes all the far-right buttons, from “they’re coming to take away our guns” to “fake news” invented by mainstream media reporters (one of whom is described as “vagina-faced”). After reading Game of Snipers, a decent thriller with a minimal injection of politics, I expected better from Stephen Hunter. My expectations weren’t worth the paper the book was printed on, particularly the paperless digital edition.

A congressional subcommittee made up of “leftists” in Washington is investigating Bob Lee Swagger because they don’t have anything more important to investigate. Maybe Hunter wrote this novel before January 6, 2021; maybe he means to distract from it. Ruled by an evil leader who is clearly a stand-in for Nancy Pelosi (variously referred to as “the crazy lady,” “dragon bitch,” and “Mother Death”), the “leftists” (including a Democrat identified as “the mewling baby man”) are out to get Bob Lee Swagger, not because of his silly name, but because he is a true American hero who loves guns and isn’t afraid to use them. Sigh.

The novel’s tired premise is that the left hates heroes who use guns and wants to hamper the efforts of patriotic cops who are just trying to protect American citizens from suspicious people with dark skin. What better strategy could the “leftists” concoct than to investigate Swagger and have him prosecuted with the expectation that police officers will be crippled by the fear of similar consequences and will never again use force to protect white people from the criminals who terrorize them? The investigation is supposedly based on Swagger’s use of “unauthorized ammunition” (Swagger’s special recipe), a charge that will hardly dissuade the police from using conventional ammunition. Sorry Hunter, but nobody on the left would be stupid enough to think this investigation makes sense. Prosecuting Swagger would make him the poster boy for the next Blue Lives Matter campaign. Who needs that?

In the real world, the Justice Department isn’t going to indict the man who (in the previous novel) saved Obama’s life (and was prepared to save Trump’s) from a terrorist sniper because he did so by using “unauthorized ammunition.” Nor would Democrats vote to investigate a war hero in a wheelchair. Nor would a judge allow the case to go forward, since shooting a killer with “unauthorized ammunition” as the killer is lining up a shot to take out an ex-president doesn’t remotely constitute wanton endangerment, which (at least as described here) isn’t even a federal crime. The idiotic concept of Targeted is jaw-dropping. It’s also ridiculous to think that cops would care whether Swagger is prosecuted for using ammunition that they don’t use, given that the prosecution of Derek Chauvin didn’t deter other cops from kneeling on the necks of unarmed suspects.

Swagger is insufferably self-righteous as he feigns humility. His philosophy is simple, to match his simple mind: liberals weak, rough man strong. Hunter portrays everyone on the left as ignorant because, unlike the virtuous Swagger, they couldn’t possibly understand the crucial distinction between a bullet and a cartridge. At several points, the novel suggests that education is useless unless it relates to guns and killing. Swagger’s poor grammar is apparently intended to convey that “book learning” don’t mean nothing compared to knowledge of firearms. Oddly, Swagger likes to read histories of war but his reading ain’t improved his grammar none. When he isn’t crafting Swagger’s dialog, Hunter at least manages to construct sentences with pain-free grammar. Gosh, did Hunter acquire a dangerous education somewhere?

The point of this novel is not to tell a realistic story. The point is to push the intended audience’s propaganda buttons by demonstrating how, consistent with the fevered imaginations of conservative extremists, “leftists” hate cops and guns. This isn’t a fair-minded discussion of whether cops should be screened for racism and sadism or whether guns should be regulated. It’s a full course red meat dinner for readers on the far right who live in a fact-free echo chamber, readers who believe that “rough men” who use violence to protect us all must be free from criticism when they turn their violence against people who are armed with nothing but dark skin. Swagger gives a tedious speech about the long line of “rough men” in his family who preceded him and how we all love them when we need them. Dull stretches of this dull novel even follow one of his ancestors in 1780, apparently to make the point that “rough men” have always been vital to American life. And perhaps to suggest that a facility with guns is hereditary.

This nuttiness takes up the first half of a slow-moving story. Hunter tries to pick up the pace in the second half by introducing Chechen prisoners who steal a prison bus and perform the miraculous task of crashing into an otherwise impregnable high school auditorium where the congressional subcommittee is holding a hearing on Swagger. Why are members of Congress convening in a high school auditorium in Boise? Well, they thought it would be wise to meet Swagger on his home turf rather than Washington. Seriously? The real reason is that prisoners can’t easily drive a stolen bus into the Capitol — only insurrectionists on foot can manage that invasion.

The Chechens terrorize the “soft” liberals and guess who comes riding to the rescue? Hint: he’s riding a wheelchair. In fact, he’s zip tied to the wheelchair and (spoiler alert) has apparently been stabbed to death, but that doesn’t stop him from fighting armed terrorists because righteous tough guys always prevail. Unlike all the rough men wannabes who regularly threaten Nancy Pelosi from their parents’ basements, the true patriot knows that his job is to protect women, even the ones for whom he feels contempt. Mind you, Swagger makes clear that he wouldn’t mind if Pelosi were killed, but he’s willing to sacrifice himself to “make a point,” which apparently has something to do with the moral superiority of rough men with guns.

Unfortunately, every time the novel seems to be moving forward, Hunter takes a break to give us another diatribe, in one instance imagining a New York Times reporter dictating policy to the government’s hostage team, insisting that they use no violence because “the day of the heroes is over” and lamenting that Swagger might ruin the story by doing something heroic. The Times reporter, of course, doesn’t know the difference between Utah and Idaho. At other times, Hunter pauses the action to show us how bureaucrats, unlike rough men with guns, can’t get anything done. Hunter even takes a shot at Stephen Colbert, mistaking the comedian for a “political analyst,” likely because Hunter has no sense of humor.

The simple-minded mentality of Targeted comes down to the superiority of Men With Guns to Men Without Guns — not just superiority at shooting guns and killing people (although those are the only things that really matter to the celebrated Rough Men), but superiority at all things: making policy, raising kids, teaching history to white children. They probably bake better brownies; you can’t go wrong with Men With Guns. Put them behind keyboards, however, and you can’t count on them to produce compelling fiction, unless you need loving descriptions of guns to make your day.

NOT RECOMMENDED