Company Town by Madeline Ashby

I have had trouble starting this review. I think it's because, in the main, I want to recommend this book. And I do! However, there is one chapter where I think the book falls apart a little bit, and although it picks itself up again quite nicely, it confused me so much that it does stand out as the low point, at a section of the plot that should really have been an apex.

Let's explore what I mean in more details - which means there will be some spoilers. If you don't want spoilers, let me say that this is very good Canadian cyberpunk, set on a rig off the coast of Newfoundland, where many of the characters are unionized sex workers, and many of the others new corporate lackeys.

This does, however, mean that we fall into difficult territory of a string of murders of dead prostitutes, which is dangerous and tricky territory. It is, though, as Ebert always said, not what it is about, but how it is about it. So, I want to think about that. These are not faceless women - they are the friends of the main character, who at the start of the book, worked as security for the sex worker's union, protecting the women who are being killed. In what might be splitting hairs, while these deaths are bad ones, they are not sexualized.  It's closer to the main character in the Maltese Falcon trying to avenge his partner than anything else.

I'm still a little on the fence about this, but nothing felt egregiously wrong, if that makes sense. It's just hard territory to get right, and I'm not really sure what right would look like.

What is the plot, do you ask? Hwa is a young woman with a genetic condition that covers her face with a red blotch - incidentally, this messes up facial recognition software, and makes her particularly useful in doing security, which she does for the sex workers union, after having dropped out of school. She lives and works (and never leaves, few people ever leave) on an oil rig/city out on the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, and you can hear the Newfoundland slang in the characters' voices.

Near the start of the book, though, she gets hired by the new company in town, the one that has bought the whole place, lock, stock, and all the property in between. The youngest son of this family business has been receiving death threats, and she is hired to go back to high school with him and keep him safe. Her handler is Daniel Siofra, a man whose past is a mystery - even to himself. Her charge, Joel, is an earnest and likeable young man - far too likeable to be the next likely successor to a multi-national.

Attacks do come, some by someone invisible. Meanwhile, some of the women Hwa used to guard, her friends, are killed. She keeps the corporate job because it gives her computer access to investigate what happened to the women who died. Oh, and there might be interference in what's going on from the future. There's a lot going on.

I generally really liked this book. However, there is one chapter where the pacing broke down. I seriously thought that section was a dream - the character thinks that idly, and in a short number of pages, we were jumping locations and events in what felt like a dream-like fashion, and so I wasn't bothered that too many huge plot twists were happening in a single chapter. I was sure that they were Hwa putting pieces together unconsciously and that the events hadn't actually happened.

I was wrong. They did all happen. And although Hwa had a seizure at the end of the chapter, and the previous pages could be her altered state of mind leading up to the seizure, we never got to be with her as she sorted out what happened and what didn't and why. So then I was playing catch-up, trying to move events out of the spot where my brain had sorted them as dream-stuff, not real-stuff.

It's just the one chapter. Either the pacing is bad, or it's a good effort to try to capture her state of mind in the middle of an insanely stressful situation, but lacks the follow-up to bring that home. It's unfortunate. Outside of that, though, this is very sold cyberpunk, rooted solidly in class and gender disparities.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Written in September 2013

Minor Spoilers Near the End

Somehow I am nine reviews behind, and although I wanted a day or two more to think about what to write about Snow Crash, if I don't force myself to do it, it won't get done! And then I'll be even more behind! (I started the summer twelve books behind on my progress towards my reading goal this year. Now I'm twelve books ahead. How did that happen?)

Thankfully, I can report that I quite enjoyed this one, and had none of the bumpy ride that Cryptonomicon gave me. The casual misogyny was nowhere in sight, thank goodness. Also, at only 400 pages, this was a much tighter story, and better because of that. Stephenson's still packing in a million ideas a minute, but that's okay, I can deal with that. In fact, I quite enjoy that.

Snow Crash sits happily within the cyberpunk tradition, on both the "cyber" and the "punk" sides. Sometimes I hear cyberpunk splashed around as a term too liberally, applied to anything with human alteration, transhumanism, or just a lot of technology. Let's not forget the punk side of the equation - not the music, of course, but the general feel that that term implies, the ways the world is and has and continues to go to shit. And here, complete with corporate takeovers of just about everything. You can be a citizen of a corporation, but that only applies on the small patchwork of turf they own.

Hiro Protagonist (guess what he is!) is a hacker, pizza delivery guy, and swordmaster, all in one. Both in the real world, and in the Metaverse, of which he was one of the first to stake his turf, and remains the best man with a sword (and can back it up with statistics.) But all is not well in the Metaverse. A digital drug is frying the brains of hackers, and in the real world, more and more people are falling prey to an outbreak of glossolalia. Are these two things connected?

(Pedantic historian of religion sidenote: Stephenson gets the terms right when he refers to both glossolalia and xenoglossy, but then attributes both to Pentecostalism. In fact, while early Pentecostals thought that the gift of tongues was actual other languages, like Chinese, and that that would help them greatly in their mission work, as they could go out as missionaries without ever bothering to learn the language, confident that God would provide the words, they were mightily disappointed when they tried it.)

Stephenson does an interesting job of weaving myth into his world here, with both overt discussion of Sumerian mythology, an open reference to one character's actions as Ishtar descending into the underworld, and more subtle aspects, such as Hiro's last name (okay, not that subtle), or Raven and his entire persona.

While I enjoyed the neurolinguistic digressions, I have to note that I know nothing of neurolinguistics, so they might send people who actually know into fits. The ideas were provocative, even if extrapolations Hiro made on them seemed, well, farfetched, to say the least. Wait, how would he know that the metavirus controlled the rest of the galaxy? Based on what?

At any rate, this was a lot of fun, even if I'm skeptical of some of it. I don't need to believe it, though. I just need to enjoy it. And I am very, very thankful that my second encounter with Stephenson was better than the first.

When Gravity Fails by George Effinger

When Gravity Fails was pretty good, without ever quite achieving greatness. I enjoyed it, but the pieces never entirely came together and swept me away. It was, however, part of my ongoing project to read all the Hugo nominees for novels. It's going to take a while.

This book is cyberpunk, with a strong dash of noir. (Not that that's surprising - a lot of cyberpunk seems to revolve around noir storytelling.) It is less sterile than Neuromancer, much messier and more lively. So, if it's cyberpunk, what are the modifications that have been made to bodies that bring whether or not someone is still human into question?

In this case, moddys and daddys. Moddys are other personalities that you can plug into your brain and act as they would act. They're used for sex, a lot. And also so you can be James Bond. Given the fear the main character has of these types of modifications, and how he describes plugging in Nero Wolfe (and I did totally love that it was Nero Wolfe), outside of the sex, I'm not sure why people would want to. It might be helpful, I suppose, but it seems like you're a passive observer while another personality takes over your brain. That's interesting. I'm just not sure why it's so enticing that Marid, the main character, is known as the one man who doesn't have plugs in his head.

Daddys, though, they do seem more interesting. A little like a babelfish, but more limited in scope. They're add-ons, languages, skills, hunger suppressants, reflex sharpeners, whatever you could want to give yourself an edge.

This world, though, is not the corporate one we see in a lot of other cyberpunk. It's set in the Budayeen, a crime-ridden district in a city in the Middle East that I don't think is ever named. We get flashes about the rest of the world - Russia, the States, and most of Europe have fractured into tiny states. The context for this book is Islamic, and that was definitely interesting and unexpected.

The other major modification is that sex changes seem to be relatively easy (although I don't think they're cheap, which raises the question of how people from this very, very poor district are all affording them). I'd be hard-pressed to go back in the book and find a woman who was born a woman. Although there are plenty of men who were born men. This perspective on the fluidity of gender could be interesting, but it's not handled as well as, say, Varley does it. Once "changed," women who were born men fall into the most stereotypical of gendered behaviours. That's a bit of an issue.

Marid, the lead character, is approached in a bar about finding man's son. But that man is shot to death right in front of him, by James Bond. Marid tries to walk away, but one of his friends comes and approaches him for help, and then disappears. Shortly thereafter, other people start turning up dead, some tidy assassinations, others horrific and bloody. And Marid is caught in the middle, and employed by the local crime lord (who he swore he'd never work for) to look into it.

Marid is a reluctant hero, and a lot of the book is him lounging in bed not looking into things when he really should be.

But the mystery is suitably twisty, and the world very interesting. The characters were a little weak, but this is worth checking out if you're looking for a different kind of cyberpunk.

Booklinks:

I read this book as part of an attempt to read all the Hugo Nominees