Resurrection Inc. [Paperback]

Resurrection Inc. is a disturbingly different kind of novel than most are used to. This could have been a painfully bad read, if the idea for the story had been put into the hands of a less qualified author. Kevin Anderson has done a suprisingly good job of taking a very "out there" premise and crafting it into a compelling novel that is hard to put down once it's started. There's a few problems with the story that occur here and there, but they are offset to the point that one could almost ignore them completely by the dead-on stinging social commentary and overal excellent story crafting present.

The story behind the novel is that sometime in the future the medical process for reanimating an otherwise inanimate corpse has been discovered and put to a very profitable use. Why pay a worker every two weeks for the rest of his natural life - complete with benefits and medical insurance, when for the price of just one normal worker's yearly salary you could have a unquestioning servant to do any simple or physical work, no matter how distatestful or strenous, and never pay another penny. While this sounds great to all the employers out there, this of course causes a huge problem for all the blue collar workers who have no higher education or technical skills to set them apart from the undead servants.

With this backstory it would appear that the author is trying to create a dystopia, and while there are elements here that could create dystopia (such as all the out of work, lower caste individuals playing the part of the "proles" from the novel 1984, or the futuristic technology gone horribly wrong ala Brave New World), it never fully manifests, which unfortunately lessens the impact of the book slightly.

There are three main organizations who hold power in the universe of this novel - the first is the actual company called "Resurrection Inc." which creates the servants, the second is the "Enforcers" who are privately owned military/police who have destroyed the need for government run police. The final orginazation is the prominent religion of the time frame - Neo Satanism. Were not talking real modern day LaVeyan style satanism either, but the "ye olde" satanism where a literal devil figure is worshipped. At first glance, this seems completely out of place in a novel about the medical advances of the future, but as the novel progresses it becomes easy to understand why this element is in the book. Anderson is contrasting mankinds technological advances with their personal and intellectual advances. While the ability to create unlimited slave labor via the dead, and a vastly complicated network of computers and every day appliances have been strung together succesfully, man still remains the gullible and superstitious sheep they have been since the dark ages. As the reader will discover part-way through the book, this religion was created specifically for the purpose of separating the sheep from those who can think for themselves, and several real world examples are made (painfully so to the members of the religions mentioned). For example, when two of the people responsible for the advent of Neo Satanism are discussing how to go about creating the religion, one of them mentions how they should fake some physical evidence to back up the outrageous claims of the religion, the other person replies caustically, "Proof? We can just say the angel Moroni popped down and did away with all the evidence, it's been done before." in a reference to the very same thing occuring in the Mormon religious doctrine.

The actual main story, that of the hero of the novel, an undead servant named Danal, is an interesting read on it's own, regardless of all the social issues surrounding the story. It seems Danal, despite all odds, can somehow remember things of when he was alive - which of course raises all kinds of fun questions about life after death, the morality of slavery, the "cosmic consciousness", and all that other stuff that man will be bickering about until the end of time. *Partial spoiler ahead here* The main thing about the story that bothered me was it's ending - it was happy. Everything worked out for the heroes and all the "bad guys" got what they deserved. This completely destroys the point that the author was trying to make. The unhappy endings worked in "1984" and "Brave New World" because it showcased the themes of the novel. The happy ending in this novel cheapens the impact, as it seems to concede some ground, as though the author is saying, "Yeah, I've got this amazingly great point to make, but I'd better cave in and give the very kind of people I'm writing about a happy ending so they don't actually think about anything and start asking any questions".

Looking past the few problems the novel has, "Resurrection Inc." is an excellent read, and highly recommened, just be prepared to take some abuse if you are one of the sheep the author is writing about.

First I must state, I am an avid fan of Kevin J Anderson's writings. I have tried to read any of his works that I can find, especially the Dune and Seven Suns novel series. This novel, Resurrection Inc. had just the right combination of characters, plots, and scenes to make for a wild and fun ride. The only reason I couldn't give it a full five stars is that I didn't want it to end, I wanted to know what happened next. I can only hope the muse strikes Anderson to write a companion novel to this story.

Kevin Anderson's debut novel "Resurrection InC" has some very good passages, and the action(once it starts) moves fast. Danlo, a newly formed "Servent" that is a corpse that is animated by a microprocessor, becomes "self-aware", and tries to figure out if he remembers his life before his death. Parts of the novel "pay homage" to "1984", with a doomed heroine named Julia that awakens a cog in a monsterous machine to the evil he is doing. Villain is of course, power-hungry, condescending and slightly insane, using a form of "Satanism" as a joke to fool the masses. Nice use of San Francisco here, and good reference to R.U.R and Kapek.