- Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Bantam Books; Reprint edition (Feb 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0553575481
- ISBN-13: 978-0553575484
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 10.7 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,231,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
The most dangerous commodity of all...
Joe "Skid" Marak, aka the pilot, is a compulsive smuggler. For him, borders are an outrage to freedom. He lives with his pet rat in the abandoned spire of Manhattan's TransCom Building. His friends are outcasts in a world ripped by plague and repression. The pilot knows his days are numbered. On his ECM-pak, he watches helplessly as his freetrading comrades vanish from the screen: victims of a mysterious force known only as "Bokon Taylay."
The brother of his Rollerblading, go-go-dancing girlfriend is Taylay's latest victim. All that is left behind is a smuggled message telling the pilot he must locate the one man who can break Taylay's code, the legendary author of the Smuggler's Bible--a man who may not even exist. It's a risk worth taking. Because to the pilot, there's only one contraband more valuable than life--freedom.
Joe "Skid" Marak, aka the pilot, is a compulsive smuggler. For him, borders are an outrage to freedom. He lives with his pet rat in the abandoned spire of Manhattan's TransCom Building. His friends are outcasts in a world ripped by plague and repression. The pilot knows his days are numbered. On his ECM-pak, he watches helplessly as his freetrading comrades vanish from the screen: victims of a mysterious force known only as "Bokon Taylay."
The brother of his Rollerblading, go-go-dancing girlfriend is Taylay's latest victim. All that is left behind is a smuggled message telling the pilot he must locate the one man who can break Taylay's code, the legendary author of the Smuggler's Bible--a man who may not even exist. It's a risk worth taking. Because to the pilot, there's only one contraband more valuable than life--freedom.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I got into George Foy when I found a copy of The Shift in a local Forbidden Planet a few years ago, and it was fantastic reading. So with his follow up, it's pleasing to find he's stayed within the same universe, expanded upon it, but all the while remembered to keep a plot, characters, and empathy at the core. Instead of being shallow, it works brilliantly.
Imagine a postmodern world where VR replaced TV, as people have gained an illness from too much schlocky soap operas, where everything is a fusion of random cultures (people dancing Waltz-Mosh, Cuban-Chinese fusion food), a place where smugglers live by a Bible, and the EU is a police state, while American towns are now live-in shopping malls.
That's where the action takes place, and the universe itself is great to read about. But the story too is brilliant. It focuses on Joe Marak (AKA The Pilot) combing the globe to find Charles Hawkley, author of The Smugglers Bible, and his list of companions (including God, a rat), while being chased down by BON, who are aiming to eliminate hackers, smugglers, and anything else. I won't ruin too much of it, but it combines Palahniuk with Neil Gaiman, yet remains totally original. Worth a read, just to realise I'm not making this up.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
fast and dense
2 Jan 1998
Format:Paperback
a quick, clever book, hewing to the best of the noirish traditions of cyberpunk. criticizing the plotting (which i really rather liked) and characterizations misses the point; the meat of the story resides in the hallucinatory feel of the pilot's life and reality, the fine attention to his consciousness and the gradations of change which it undergoes in this fine "journey" novel. the pilot functions at the edge, which, as the author reminds us, is where almost everything interesting happens . . . and where authority, in all its guises, wants to keep its subjects from venturing.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Contraband
10 Jun 2002
Format:Paperback
Intelligent, stylish and well-realized near-future SF. Foy does well at portraying popular culture and infusing humor. His writing here is often beautiful.
Contraband, the story of a pilot in a world where secret cargo cults do battle with governnment agencies, follows one of the cargo cult philosophies: the journey is the destination. The plot is circular, and not especially strong. Still, the reasonably appealing characters, the original worldbuilding, and the strength of Foy's language carry the reader along.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A superb technothriller quest!
13 Aug 1999
Format:Mass Market Paperback
A wonderful novel about what technology enables the power structure--and the individual--to accomplish, told through the quest of a small band of people seeking their own freedom. Highly readable, blending a nice sense of computer-based semi-magical realism ("Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic", to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke), this is a book that stays in your memory, both for its attention to detail (believability) and its themes.
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