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The Apolyton Science Fiction Discussion Group: July Votes
REMEMBER: Only vote for a maximum of 3 books!
Definitely learned something from this months nomination thread.
MarkG sent me a couple of link examples that had the picture of the novel + an easy link to Amazon to get to these books and asked me to use that format in future discussion threads. Since I haven't the slightest idea how the hell you did all that, sorry man.
Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds, nominated by JohnT.
"Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old--when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.
Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.
Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.
The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.
At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville, nominated by Stefu.
"When Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," she could have been talking about China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. The novel's publication met with a burst of extravagant praise from Big Name Authors and was almost instantly a multiaward finalist. You expect hyperbole in blurbs; and sometimes unworthy books win awards, so nominations don't necessarily mean much. But Perdido Street Station deserves the acclaim. It's ambitious and brilliant and--rarity of rarities--sui generis. Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's Dickensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.
Generous, gaudy, grand, grotesque, gigantic, grim, grimy, and glorious, Perdito Street Station is a bloody fascinating book. It's also so massive that you may begin to feel you're getting too much of a good thing; just slow down and enjoy.
Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world. --Cynthia Ward "
How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove, nominated by Lonestar.
"In 1862, the Confederacy won the War of the Rebellion (not by interference of time travelers, as in Turtledove's Guns of the South, LJ 9/1/92, but by their own skillful military and diplomatic efforts). The defeated North has stewed for nearly 20 years. In this alternate history, the South exercises an opportunity to purchase Sonora and Chihuahua from the bankrupt Mexican Empire, having already wrested Cuba from Spain. James G. Blaine, now president of the United States, arrogantly seizes upon this pretext and invades with the aim of reunification. Lincoln has become an outcast of the Republican Party and preaches socialism while Custer is a frustrated and embittered colonel on the frontier, Samuel Clemens a fiery newspaper editor in San Francisco, and Rosecrans the inadequate head of the Union Army. Turtledove is an accomplished professional at this sort of thing and has given us an entertainment that makes us think somewhat about why we are the way we are. Highly recommended for history, historiography, military, and popular fiction collections.?Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."
Diaspora by Greg Egan, nominated by St. Leo.
"In the 30th century, few humans remain on Earth. Most have downloaded themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual realities, escaping death--or so they believe, until the collision of nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.
Diaspora, written by Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Greg Egan, transcends millennia and universes in the tradition of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix Plus, Camille Flammarion's Omega, and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Diaspora is packed with mind-bending ideas extrapolated from cutting-edge cosmology, physics, and consciousness theory to create an astonishing hard-SF novel inhabited by very strange yet always believable characters. Diaspora is why people read SF. --Cynthia Ward "
Slaughtermatic by Steve Aylett, nominated by Static Universe.
"Slaughtermatic is a tale of a (hopefully) far future where crime is an art and being a victim makes a citizen the police's primary target. No need to worry about witnesses, either; they're doomed, too. These aren't crooked cops; they're Gordian knots of corruption and insanity.
All in all, it's a hoot. Many of the best lines are laugh-out-loud funny, or groan-and-roll-your-eyes bad. And both kinds are good.
That's the upside. Slaughtermatic is a mess. A chaotic, confusing tangle of virtual and fictional reality that, at times, is impossible to decipher. At times, it's easiest to let the prose wash over you and wait for understanding to catch up. Sometimes it doesn't, but by the last page the overall picture is clear enough, and the lasting impression is a positive one. Just don't insist on comprehending everything at once. Or every little word. Look for the big picture."
Starfish by Peter Watts, nominated by Jon Miller.
"Peter Watts's first novel explores the last mysterious place on earth--the floor of a deep sea rift. Channer Vent is a zone of freezing darkness that belongs to shellfish the size of boulders and crimson worms three meters long. It's the temporary home of the maintenance crew of a geothermal energy plant--a crew made up of the damaged and dysfunctional flotsam of an overpopulated near-future earth. The crew's reluctant leader, basket case Lenie Clarke, can barely survive in the upper world, but she quickly falls under the rift's spell, just as Watts's magical descriptions of it enchant the reader: "Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass."
Watts is investigating monsters. Gigantic deep sea monsters, surgically-altered-from-human monsters, faceless jellied-brain computer monsters--which monsters are human, which are more than human, which are less? Watts keeps the story line stripped down to showcase the theme of dehumanization. The anonymous millions who live along the unstable shore of N'AmPac come under threat (a triggered earthquake, and perhaps a disaster that's slower but even more pitiless) from their own dehumanized creations. But Watts is less interested in whether Lenie can save the dry world as in whether she can save herself. In Starfish, Watts stretches the boundaries of humanity up, down, and sideways to see whether its dimensions reveal anything we'd be proud to be a part of. --Blaise Selby --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."
The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod, nominated by Chegitz Geuvara.
"The Stone Canal is Ken MacLeod's second novel. It is in the same future history as his first novel (The Star Fraction) and his third novel (The Cassini Division) but it can be read without difficulty on its own, and I found it to stand alone just fine. At a first brush, MacLeod reads like "Iain Banks meets Bruce Sterling". The novel's opening, with a somewhat smart-alecky "human- equivalent" robot briefing a confused newly-awakened man, and its structure, alternating chapters on different timelines, definitely echo some of Banks' work. (Note that Banks acknowledges MacLeod's help with Use of Weapons, in terms which suggest to me that he may have helped with that book's unusual structure.) The deeply political concerns, and central character's habit of talking at length about politics, as well as some of the technology and the attitude towards technology, reminded me of Sterling (and also, in a different way, Kim Stanley Robinson. Which is to say, at times this book is a bit talky.) But in the final analysis, The Stone Canal is a very original, very impressive novel. It's true SF, chock full of sense of wonder concepts, interested in new technology, in future politics, and in how technology affects politics (and human life in general).
The novel opens with a man awakening in the desert of a Mars-like planet, accompanied by a "human-equivalent" robot. Soon we meet another robot, Dee Model, this one a "gynoid" (female android), who has escaped her owner (for whom she was a sex toy), and is proclaiming her autonomy. The man is soon revealed to be Jonathan Wilde, a legendary figure of political resistance among the inhabitants of New Mars, and the gynoid is based on a clone of Wilde's long-dead wife. The two encounter each other, and both end up in the hands of the "abolitionist" movement, which favors freeing intelligent robots from human slavery. Soon they are jointly involved in lawsuits brought by Dee Model's owner, who is Wilde's friend, long time rival, and apparent murderer, Dave Reid.
This seems like plenty of background for a novel in itself, especially given the interesting environment of New Mars, with its single City, 5/6 of which is given over to "wild machines", and with the pervasive semi-VR technology, the grounds for speculation about the nature of human vs. machine intelligence, and the semi-anarchist political structure of the colony. But in parallel tracks we follow the early life, on roughly present-day Earth, of Jonathan Wilde, Dave Reid, and the two important women in their lives: Myra and Annette. Reid is a diehard Trotskyite socialist, and Wilde an anarchist and "space nut"; and the tension between their political views, as well as the tension resulting from their relationships with the two women, is followed over the decades. Both men become very powerful in the decaying near-future environment; as both in their ways push to open up space travel for people in general.
The two timelines inevitably converge, and the real concern of the novel comes clear: understanding of the nature of the "fast folk" (originally human simulations run on very fast computer hardware), and understanding the link between New Mars and Earth. MacLeod speculates fascinatingly on nanotechnology, virtual reality, and astrophysics. Everything is well-tied together in the end, although in a slightly disappointing manner. (The first and last lines of The Stone Canal, by the way, are both stunners, if a bit contrived also (as overtly "stunning" lines often are).) The characters of Wilde and Reid are very well presented, though the female characters are a bit sketchier. The novel's weaknesses are an occasional tendency to talkiness, the rather familiar setup of the relationship of the main characters, along with their realization of enormous political power, and the slight flatness of the ending. But all in all this is an excellent pure SF novel, and one which bodes well for a career to watch."
Jennifer Government by Max Berry, nominated by GP.
"In the horrifying, satirical near future of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, American corporations literally rule the world. Everyone takes his employer's name as his last name; once-autonomous nations as far-flung as Australia belong to the USA; and the National Rifle Association is not just a worldwide corporation, it's a hot, publicly traded stock. Hack Nike, a hapless employee seeking advancement, signs a multipage contract and then reads it. He discovers he's agreed to assassinate kids purchasing Nike's new line of athletic shoes, a stealth marketing maneuver designed to increase sales. And the dreaded government agent Jennifer Government is after him.
Like Steve Aylett, Alexander Besher, Douglas Coupland, Paul Di Filippo, Jim Munroe, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, Max Barry is an author of smartass, punky satire for the late capitalist era. It's a hip and happening field; before publication, Jennifer Government (Barry's second novel) was optioned by Stephen Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section 8 Films for a major motion picture. However, the level of literary accomplishment varies wildly among practitioners, from brilliant (Di Filippo and Palahniuk) to amateurish (Besher). This field is so hot, its writers needn't be nearly as accomplished as they'd have to become to break into any other form of fiction.
That said, like many of his fellow turn-of-the-millennium satirists, Barry is uneven. He has a lively imagination and a sharp eye for the absurdities and offenses of hypercorporate capitalism. But, with its sketchy characters and slow dialogue, Jennifer Government will disappoint anyone who believes the cover copy's grandiose claim that this is "a Catch-22 for the New World Order." --Cynthia Ward "
Definitely learned something from this months nomination thread.
MarkG sent me a couple of link examples that had the picture of the novel + an easy link to Amazon to get to these books and asked me to use that format in future discussion threads. Since I haven't the slightest idea how the hell you did all that, sorry man.
Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds, nominated by JohnT.
"Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old--when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.
Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.
Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.
The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.
At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville, nominated by Stefu.
"When Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," she could have been talking about China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. The novel's publication met with a burst of extravagant praise from Big Name Authors and was almost instantly a multiaward finalist. You expect hyperbole in blurbs; and sometimes unworthy books win awards, so nominations don't necessarily mean much. But Perdido Street Station deserves the acclaim. It's ambitious and brilliant and--rarity of rarities--sui generis. Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's Dickensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.
Generous, gaudy, grand, grotesque, gigantic, grim, grimy, and glorious, Perdito Street Station is a bloody fascinating book. It's also so massive that you may begin to feel you're getting too much of a good thing; just slow down and enjoy.
Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world. --Cynthia Ward "
How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove, nominated by Lonestar.
"In 1862, the Confederacy won the War of the Rebellion (not by interference of time travelers, as in Turtledove's Guns of the South, LJ 9/1/92, but by their own skillful military and diplomatic efforts). The defeated North has stewed for nearly 20 years. In this alternate history, the South exercises an opportunity to purchase Sonora and Chihuahua from the bankrupt Mexican Empire, having already wrested Cuba from Spain. James G. Blaine, now president of the United States, arrogantly seizes upon this pretext and invades with the aim of reunification. Lincoln has become an outcast of the Republican Party and preaches socialism while Custer is a frustrated and embittered colonel on the frontier, Samuel Clemens a fiery newspaper editor in San Francisco, and Rosecrans the inadequate head of the Union Army. Turtledove is an accomplished professional at this sort of thing and has given us an entertainment that makes us think somewhat about why we are the way we are. Highly recommended for history, historiography, military, and popular fiction collections.?Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."
Diaspora by Greg Egan, nominated by St. Leo.
"In the 30th century, few humans remain on Earth. Most have downloaded themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual realities, escaping death--or so they believe, until the collision of nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.
Diaspora, written by Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Greg Egan, transcends millennia and universes in the tradition of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix Plus, Camille Flammarion's Omega, and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Diaspora is packed with mind-bending ideas extrapolated from cutting-edge cosmology, physics, and consciousness theory to create an astonishing hard-SF novel inhabited by very strange yet always believable characters. Diaspora is why people read SF. --Cynthia Ward "
Slaughtermatic by Steve Aylett, nominated by Static Universe.
"Slaughtermatic is a tale of a (hopefully) far future where crime is an art and being a victim makes a citizen the police's primary target. No need to worry about witnesses, either; they're doomed, too. These aren't crooked cops; they're Gordian knots of corruption and insanity.
All in all, it's a hoot. Many of the best lines are laugh-out-loud funny, or groan-and-roll-your-eyes bad. And both kinds are good.
That's the upside. Slaughtermatic is a mess. A chaotic, confusing tangle of virtual and fictional reality that, at times, is impossible to decipher. At times, it's easiest to let the prose wash over you and wait for understanding to catch up. Sometimes it doesn't, but by the last page the overall picture is clear enough, and the lasting impression is a positive one. Just don't insist on comprehending everything at once. Or every little word. Look for the big picture."
Starfish by Peter Watts, nominated by Jon Miller.
"Peter Watts's first novel explores the last mysterious place on earth--the floor of a deep sea rift. Channer Vent is a zone of freezing darkness that belongs to shellfish the size of boulders and crimson worms three meters long. It's the temporary home of the maintenance crew of a geothermal energy plant--a crew made up of the damaged and dysfunctional flotsam of an overpopulated near-future earth. The crew's reluctant leader, basket case Lenie Clarke, can barely survive in the upper world, but she quickly falls under the rift's spell, just as Watts's magical descriptions of it enchant the reader: "Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass."
Watts is investigating monsters. Gigantic deep sea monsters, surgically-altered-from-human monsters, faceless jellied-brain computer monsters--which monsters are human, which are more than human, which are less? Watts keeps the story line stripped down to showcase the theme of dehumanization. The anonymous millions who live along the unstable shore of N'AmPac come under threat (a triggered earthquake, and perhaps a disaster that's slower but even more pitiless) from their own dehumanized creations. But Watts is less interested in whether Lenie can save the dry world as in whether she can save herself. In Starfish, Watts stretches the boundaries of humanity up, down, and sideways to see whether its dimensions reveal anything we'd be proud to be a part of. --Blaise Selby --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."
The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod, nominated by Chegitz Geuvara.
"The Stone Canal is Ken MacLeod's second novel. It is in the same future history as his first novel (The Star Fraction) and his third novel (The Cassini Division) but it can be read without difficulty on its own, and I found it to stand alone just fine. At a first brush, MacLeod reads like "Iain Banks meets Bruce Sterling". The novel's opening, with a somewhat smart-alecky "human- equivalent" robot briefing a confused newly-awakened man, and its structure, alternating chapters on different timelines, definitely echo some of Banks' work. (Note that Banks acknowledges MacLeod's help with Use of Weapons, in terms which suggest to me that he may have helped with that book's unusual structure.) The deeply political concerns, and central character's habit of talking at length about politics, as well as some of the technology and the attitude towards technology, reminded me of Sterling (and also, in a different way, Kim Stanley Robinson. Which is to say, at times this book is a bit talky.) But in the final analysis, The Stone Canal is a very original, very impressive novel. It's true SF, chock full of sense of wonder concepts, interested in new technology, in future politics, and in how technology affects politics (and human life in general).
The novel opens with a man awakening in the desert of a Mars-like planet, accompanied by a "human-equivalent" robot. Soon we meet another robot, Dee Model, this one a "gynoid" (female android), who has escaped her owner (for whom she was a sex toy), and is proclaiming her autonomy. The man is soon revealed to be Jonathan Wilde, a legendary figure of political resistance among the inhabitants of New Mars, and the gynoid is based on a clone of Wilde's long-dead wife. The two encounter each other, and both end up in the hands of the "abolitionist" movement, which favors freeing intelligent robots from human slavery. Soon they are jointly involved in lawsuits brought by Dee Model's owner, who is Wilde's friend, long time rival, and apparent murderer, Dave Reid.
This seems like plenty of background for a novel in itself, especially given the interesting environment of New Mars, with its single City, 5/6 of which is given over to "wild machines", and with the pervasive semi-VR technology, the grounds for speculation about the nature of human vs. machine intelligence, and the semi-anarchist political structure of the colony. But in parallel tracks we follow the early life, on roughly present-day Earth, of Jonathan Wilde, Dave Reid, and the two important women in their lives: Myra and Annette. Reid is a diehard Trotskyite socialist, and Wilde an anarchist and "space nut"; and the tension between their political views, as well as the tension resulting from their relationships with the two women, is followed over the decades. Both men become very powerful in the decaying near-future environment; as both in their ways push to open up space travel for people in general.
The two timelines inevitably converge, and the real concern of the novel comes clear: understanding of the nature of the "fast folk" (originally human simulations run on very fast computer hardware), and understanding the link between New Mars and Earth. MacLeod speculates fascinatingly on nanotechnology, virtual reality, and astrophysics. Everything is well-tied together in the end, although in a slightly disappointing manner. (The first and last lines of The Stone Canal, by the way, are both stunners, if a bit contrived also (as overtly "stunning" lines often are).) The characters of Wilde and Reid are very well presented, though the female characters are a bit sketchier. The novel's weaknesses are an occasional tendency to talkiness, the rather familiar setup of the relationship of the main characters, along with their realization of enormous political power, and the slight flatness of the ending. But all in all this is an excellent pure SF novel, and one which bodes well for a career to watch."
Jennifer Government by Max Berry, nominated by GP.
"In the horrifying, satirical near future of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, American corporations literally rule the world. Everyone takes his employer's name as his last name; once-autonomous nations as far-flung as Australia belong to the USA; and the National Rifle Association is not just a worldwide corporation, it's a hot, publicly traded stock. Hack Nike, a hapless employee seeking advancement, signs a multipage contract and then reads it. He discovers he's agreed to assassinate kids purchasing Nike's new line of athletic shoes, a stealth marketing maneuver designed to increase sales. And the dreaded government agent Jennifer Government is after him.
Like Steve Aylett, Alexander Besher, Douglas Coupland, Paul Di Filippo, Jim Munroe, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, Max Barry is an author of smartass, punky satire for the late capitalist era. It's a hip and happening field; before publication, Jennifer Government (Barry's second novel) was optioned by Stephen Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section 8 Films for a major motion picture. However, the level of literary accomplishment varies wildly among practitioners, from brilliant (Di Filippo and Palahniuk) to amateurish (Besher). This field is so hot, its writers needn't be nearly as accomplished as they'd have to become to break into any other form of fiction.
That said, like many of his fellow turn-of-the-millennium satirists, Barry is uneven. He has a lively imagination and a sharp eye for the absurdities and offenses of hypercorporate capitalism. But, with its sketchy characters and slow dialogue, Jennifer Government will disappoint anyone who believes the cover copy's grandiose claim that this is "a Catch-22 for the New World Order." --Cynthia Ward "
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