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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fractionalized Politics, 27 Oct 2002
Those who like the safe, the normal, the everyday commonplace should not read this book, as it is certainly anything but. Macleod creates a world where the US/UN is the bad guy, where England is divvied up into many semi-autonomous city-states, each of which have their own idea of what the perfect society should be, and most of whom are at gun-point loggerheads with all the others, where the Net is pervasive and invasive, and may just be the locus of the real world power, a conscious AI, and where your ideas and assumptions about anarchy, communism, socialism, and capitalism will be stood on their head.The main characters of Moh Kohn, mercenary extraordinary, Janice, bio-chemist, Jordan, programmer and rebeller against the purantistic creed of his birth society, and Catelin, idealist and Kohn's former lover, are well realized and interact with each other and the rapidly changing socio-political environment in believable manners. The plot is very fast-paced, almost too much so. At the beginning of the book we are dropped into this wildly different future with very little explanation of where you are or what the overall world picture/history is or how it got that way. The casual reader who is not steeped in science fiction, in being able to accept things as they are presented, and hold his questions in abeyance will probably feel lost and confused. These items are really not explicated in cohesive detail till near the end of the book, with bits and pieces presented all along the way, as the reader is carried along pell-mell through this odd society with each twist and turn of the plot. Stylistically, the work uses pretty utilitarian prose which gets the job done and is normally unobtrusive, but is not likely to garner any awards. Although there is a fair amount of techno-babble, there is very little use of British slang, always a problem for their American cousins to understand. At a few places, Macleod inserts some sly insider references to other science fiction works and writers - which frequently caused me to have a laughing fit, as the irony used was beautiful. A rich mixture of cyber-punk and politics, a rather terrifying view of a possible future, and strong action make this a page turning mind-enhancing trip through the land of a fantastic and all too relevant tomorrow.
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by Ken MacLeod
by Ken MacLeod
by Ken MacLeod
