M. M. BucknerRezensionen

An interesting premise, perhaps, but not good writing. Characters were caricatures with no depth. And the author has a very annoying habit of misusing commas.

It's the 23rd century, and the world is a wasteland caused by pollution and global warming. Exposure to the unfiltered air or water leads rapidly to cancer or other nasty conditions. Giant corporations, now known as Coms, dominate the world, and their privileged executive class as well as many of their protected employees, or "protes", live in domed cities. The Coms are in a more or less constant struggle with the Orgs, especially the biggest, baddest Org of them all, the WTO. (It's worth mentioning that a significant, and possibly dominant, part of the WTO are its AIs.) The Coms are not the good guys.

This doesn't seem like a promising set-up, and I have many complaints about the details. Despite that, I found myself enjoyng the book.

Dominic Jedes has wealth and position beyond the dreams of avarice. He's the (cloned) son of the president of ZahlenBank, one of the most powerful of the Coms. If he's lately been having some disagreements with his father, finding some of his decisions affecting protes to be a little too ruthlessly pragmatic, he nevertheless believes in the system and loves his father. His father's approaching death is an added source of tension between them, as the elder Jedes has chosen to forego what aggressive medical care could do for him, in favor of creating a neural profile that will live on in the computer network after his physical death.

On what proves to be the last day of his father's physical life, Dominic unwisely makes a joke in a board meeting about dealing with the problem of an unprofitable mining sub that ZahlenBank got in a foreclosure by freeing the protes and giving them the sub. This unfortunately strikes his father and the board as a wonderfully clever idea--no costs for continuing to support these now-useless workers! Then Dear Old Dad promptly dies, the freed protes start broadcasting to the world for more discontented protes to join them, and ZahlenBank is suddenly in deep, deep trouble. The WTO steps in with an offer to arrange negotiations, if Dominic will meet with the protes alone, accompanied only by a WTO agent. He reluctantly agrees, and unhappily finds that he is accompanied also by the hated neural profile of his dead father. (The NP insists it's the real thing; Dominic does not agree. Dominic also believes it lacks the humanity and honor his father had; I think the evidence is that he had an overly-rosy view of his father.) In short order, Dominic is getting a very exciting look at how the other 90% lives.

As I said, I have a lot of specific complaints. The background feels as if it was insufficiently thought out. Europe seems to be about all that sort of survived the collapse. If the ice caps completely melted, why didn't all that cold, fresh water running into the Atlantic do bad things to the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift? If Europe is the last economy standing, why is the basic currency the deutchdollar rather than the euro? And if giant multinational corporations are the bad guys, how can the WTO be the good guys? And Dominic seems quite improbaby naïve. What Dominic isn't, though, is either stupid, or improbably virtuous. He's a basically likable guy who's a product of his society and upbringing. He has believably human and reactions to the individuals he meets, for both good and ill, and alters his assumptions about how the world really works only with a plausible amount of resistance and mental pain. All in all, this is an enjoyable light read.

Buckner's new novel is set in the same post-environmental collapse world as her earlier Neurolink, this time among a group of aging executive-class extreme sports enthusiasts. They call themselves the Agonists, and their "extreme sport" is war surfing—taking fast, and thoroughly recorded, runs through the war zones of 23rd-century labor relations. Their leader is Nasir Deepra, two and a half centuries old, old enough that he lived through the collapse as an adult, and remembers an Earth whose surface was still habitable.

Nasir and his aging comrades are at the top of their sport, but they have a weakness they don't recognize yet: Nasir is infatuated with a beautiful physical therapist, Sheeba, who's in her twenties, and too well-adjusted to regard him as anything other than a father figure. Nasir, in his dogged pursuit of Sheeba, will do anything to please or impress her, including strong-arm his buddies into including her on their war surfs. This quickly goes—somewhat humorously—wrong, knocking the Agonists out of first place, and in fact down to fourth place, in the standings but, after some stressful moments melding Sheeba into the team while fatally weakening Nasir's ability to veto a surf he knows will be disastrous, a surf of the orbital factory called Heaven. Nasir is chairman of the board of the company that owns Heaven, and he knows what none of the others do—what the labor dispute is about, and why Provendia is so very determined to hide it. When Nasir's suit malfunctions on the surf, and Nasir and Sheeba find themselves stranded inside Heaven, with its unexpectedly young and naturally suspicious prote ("protected employees", the 23rd century's lower classes) population, Nasir, the protes, and even Sheeba—the most sensible of them all—are in for some shocking and dangerous re-education about how the world really works, and the reader gets an exciting ride.

There are some weaknesses here, and the ending is a bit heavy-handedly sentimental, but this is a fun book, and Nasir, with all his self-deceptions, is another believable, basically decent and likable character.

see http://www.sfsite.com/04a/ws221.htm

The premise: ganked from BN.com: It is the polluted and gritty future, saved, sort of, by technofixes. Young skydiver Orr Sitka wants no more from life in future Alaska than he already has: a woman he loves and the chance to dive. When he makes a reckless, record-breaking jump that catapults him into celebrity, he’s courted by corporations that want to exploit his talent to make him a sports media star.

The dangerous jump that wins Orr infamy turns out to be a breaking point for his loving girlfriend, Dyce, who is wooed away by a promising job in the thriving underground city of Seattle, a world media center in a crumbling civilization. Separately, Orr and Dyce are sucked into nightmare lives that take a terrible toll on each of them. When Orr learns that Dyce has become addicted to virtual reality, controlled by an eccentric media billionaire and his decadent daughter, he does everything in his power to rescue her. But is Orr strong enough to get through to Dyce and break them both out of hell?

My Rating: 7 - Good Read

Anyone who was enamored and awed by Felix Baumgartner's Red Bull Stratos jump, let alone fans of skydiving in general, need to get their hands on this book. It's a quiet, futuristic fiction that manages to take so many little things and weave them into a believable, recognizable future. It's a character-driven novel that's complex as the world the characters live in, and if there's one flaw to the book, it's that the reader is never really sure what's going on and why until closer to the end of the book, when the stakes are revealed and all seems practically hopeless. It's a very good read, and one I'm glad I finally got around to. Also, Buckner lives in Tennessee, and I'm always happy to promote and support Tennessee authors in the genre, especially since there doesn't seem to be that many of them.

Of course, that's neither here nor there. It's a compelling read, and fans of the genre, readers who want something closer to home, something more believable than hard-edged military SF or eye-candy space opera, should definitely give this a shot.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. The full review may be found at my blog, and as always, comments and discussion are most welcome. Just click the link below to go directly to the full review!

REVIEW: M.M. Buckner's THE GRAVITY PILOT

Happy Birthday!

The year is 2125, and the earth’s surface is uninhabitable due to pollution. Corporations rule the world, people live underground, and worker rebellions are cropping up here and there. Jolie Sauvage, the novel’s narrator, makes a living as a surface tour guide, which requires extensive use of protective gear to guard against the deadly pollution. While conducting a tour, she meets and embarks on a relationship with handsome actor Jin. Through Jolie, Jin meets Dr. Merida, a neuroscientist who is working on an experimental surgery for hyperthought, a state that involves intense sensory perception. Jin is eager to have the surgery, but things don’t go exactly as planned.

The novel starts off with a bang, and seems promising. Then it gets bogged down in a tedious, largely uninteresting, and never-ending rescue scene that seems to occupy half the novel. Meanwhile, the reader never gets a good sense of what hyperthought is, or why it might be important, useful, dangerous, etc. Further, in many ways we are supposed to believe that Jolie is a strong, independent woman, but she frequently enters a ditzy state and repeatedly blames her behavior on her female hormones. Weird. So, overall, this was a disappointment.½

I borrowed this 2005 e-book from the Downloadlibrary.com. An interesting read, but the plot was a bit scattered.

Jolie is a guide who specialises in tours on the dangerous surface of an Earth now toxic with continuous dangerous weather. When Jin, the son of one of the owners of a Big Three corporation, takes her tour, she is fascinated by him. He so badly wants to do the 'right thing', but can't see how he can *know* for sure what that is. To this end, he goes with Dr. Merida, a neurologist who promises that she can enhance his brain to the point of omniscience. Jolie is sure this is too dangerous, but Jin won't listen to reason. When Jolie gets an ambiguous message from Jin, ending with "wish you were here", she is convinced he needs rescuing.

Most of the characters seemed a bit scatterbrained, but I guess that just makes them more real!

"The Gravity Pilot" is an excellent Science Fiction novel with many layers. It's a love story (drawing loosely from the myth of Orpheus), a sports novel, and a dystopian tale. The main character, Orr, is an Alaskan skydiver who makes a record-breaking jump that catapults him to stardom. That same jump has caused him to lose his girlfriend, Dyce, who had asked him to choose between her and diving. Dyce leaves Orr and Alaska to take a job in subterranean Seattle, and with her departure, Orr loses a bit of himself. Dyce finds that the job of her dreams is more of a nightmare, and she becomes one of the countless people who are addicted to fully immersive simulated worlds.

Even in the future, in a world that has nearly been destroyed, people still love their sports stars and a father/daughter team are quick to jump on the chance to exploit the young skydiver. They use his talents to create more complex and addictive sim games, and the plot builds as Orr tries to save himself as well as Dyce.

Trying to explain any more of the plot than that would give away too much -- the story builds and plunges, dips and dives, and carries the reader on a path similar to some of the jumps that Orr makes. I definitely recommend it to Science Fiction fans.

Sometimes I wonder why is that if something is that if I find out that fashionable my first reaction is turning away. Intellectually I know that popular items and ideas can also have plenty of value, but emotionally I am turned off for them. I am often more interested in the obscure as if scarcity in itself would be of value. I know that the answer to my reactions is buried somewhere in my personal background and the circumstances of how my taste in music, literature, fashion and even ideology developed. In communist Hungary underground culture was more alive and relevant than the public one. At least for me.

When I was reading M. M. Buckner's Hyperthought I had mixed reactions for the above reasons. On one hand I utterly enjoyed the fast paced science fiction and the ideas it explored. On the other hand I had a negative gut reaction to some of the themes it explored. Pollution, global warming corporations overtaking the roles and functions of nations... these are all valid and important concern but in recent years they became popular memes in science fiction novels. Extrapolating these trends is a common pastime nowadays for authors.

I am aware that it is essential to point out the dangers and consequences of where we might heading and sci-fi is a perfect medium for that. Furthermore Buckner did a good job of item, because he painted a believable scenario and filled it with action and characters who are beyond the black and white superhero/villain dichotomy. Nevertheless it took some effort for me to fully accept that it is OK to write about popular themes. If you're OK with it too, than read the novel, because it has originality beyond the commonalities with other books.

Interesting concept, but spoiled by poor writing. The characters were cardboard when secondary, and random when primary, particularly the protagonist and the human antagonist, behaving firmly how the plot required them to whether or not it made any sense in terms of their supposed personalities. I think the resolution was scientifically implausible given the nature of the beast, but then so was much of its behavior.½

Nanotech combines with silicon refuse and other stuff, trying to escape from big corporate dumping grounds. The nanswarm, eventually called the Watermind, is not anthropomorphized. Most of story is from the POV of a science dropout who stumbles upon it. I never warmed up to the characters much, but I thought it was quite good, allowing for speculation without spoonfeeding readers (reminding me of Sharman DiVono's under-appreciated *Blood Moon*). For instance, unexpected acts by characters could be explained by others' influence, but to explain more would be a spoiler.

pretty straightforward stuff; reads nice and clean, no clutter. mildly interesting characters, well-portrayed. near-future dystopic. i'd give it a 3 & a half star rating: doesn't try to do much, hits its marks. except that, written in 2004, it perfectly predicts the actual 2009 crash, the worldview that made it, the banking practices, the end result. for a junk sf thriller, that's a pretty accurate extrapolation, i'd say, so points for that.

Two hundred years from now, Earth has become a toxic wasteland. Everyone lives in domes. Global warming has pushed the temperate climates farther north, rendering the area around the equator uninhabitable. Corporations called coms have takien over, ruling billions of protes, or "protected persons" (actually, little better than slaves).

Dominic Jedes is about to become president of ZahlenBank, the only institution more powerful than the coms. He isn't just the son of Richter Jedes, the bank's founder, he is an exact genetic copy of his father. He directs the bank to give two thousand protes their freedom, trapping them in a rusting, malfunctioning submarine at the bottom of the ocean. They are supposed to die, but they don't. They broadcast an untraceable and continuous message over the Net, encouraging others to join them. The free protes get thousands of takers.

Every minute that the message is broadcast, ZahlenBank's financial condition is damaged. Dominic is forced to go to the sub, and somehow shut off that message. For someone who has spent his life in filtered air, and with the finest in designer medicines in his bloodstream, when Dominic enters the sub, he feels like he has descended into hell. It's hot, stinking, packed with people, and the oxygen-generating system is on the verge of collapse. People are constantly putting up walls everywhere, so any attempt to reach the bridge quickly becomes impossible. Within minutes, Dominic feels like he has contracted some major disease. When he first reaches the sub, Dominic wants to reach the bridge, expose the sub's location, have everyone arrested, and get back to cleanliness as soon as possible. The longer he remains on the sub, the more sympathy he has for these people, and the more he wants to help them, instead of turning them in.

This is a strong, well done piece of writing. It has good characters, good society building, and an interesting story. The reader will not go wrong with this novel.

The premise: Nasir Deepra is a 248 year old execute whose one of the select few who rule 23 century Earth. He looks and acts nothing like an old man, and in order to make life actually INTERESTING after so many years, and he and friends "war surf," which means they sneak into a war zone, get involved in the scuffle and broadcast all of the footage on the net. But things change when Nasir becomes obsessed with a twenty-something year old woman named Sheeba. Just being around her makes him push all his limits and break all his rules, and soon he's going to break the biggest rule of all: to surf the orbiting satellite called Heaven, which is the most dangerous war surf of all, and where all of his secrets will be revealed if he isn't careful.

My Rating

Give It Away: which isn't an entirely fair rating, but I can't sit back and say it's worth the cash either. It's somewhere in the middle. I think it's because the story, in the end, is worth the time you put into the book: it's a fast read (sometimes the voice reminded me of Palahniuk, but that's sometimes, not often) and has some interesting ideas once you get to the meat of the plot, which is what's REALLY going on in the orbiting satellite of Heaven and how the narrator is involved. However, you've got your work cut out for you. Nasir's no picnic of a person, and he gets really annoying, really fast. Most of the characters do, but I find that's because the characters are all products of their world, rather than the "fault" of the author (though, I've not read anything else by the author, so maybe she DOES have characterization issues). This book also has a splash of Lolita which is evident in the voice and the narrator's obsession with Sheeba, but there's more to the book than that. It does take a while to get there though, so that's why a rating for this sucker really isn't clear-cut at all. I will, however, be more than happy to read more of Buckner's work, so that in and of itself should say something.

The full review, which includes vague spoilers and also has cover art commentary, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome. :)

REVIEW: M.M. Buckner's WAR SURF

Happy Reading! :)

In the future the world will be going to hell in a hand basket. Hell, it will be best described as a basket case. The biosphere will have been devastated, cultural collapse will have occured, and the clock will be ticking on outright human extinction. Know something though? There will still be people who don't have enough excitement in their lives.

That's the situation corporate executive Nasir Deepra is in. When he should be making like an Eloi he's still flirting with the Morlocks, via the ultimate thrill sport of making timed expeditions into danger zones with his best buddies, the "war surf" of the title.

The one problem is that Nasir had forgotten that the ultimate danger is sometimes to care, as between wanting to impress this bright young thing and offering a kindness to his jaded comrade looking for a final high, he allows himself to be manipulated into tackling the ultimate target; a space habitat gone bad. That is where the real adventure begins, and it puts Deepra into the position of paying the price that caring demands.

While I had been prepared to give this novel some benefit of the doubt due to the nature of its climax, when I bounced some ideas around with my reading group I decided that I had to mark this novel down as a failed exercise. One friend, who had been an avid rock climber, just couldn't believe that the main character was really a thrill junky. This is fine, except that it means that Buckner missed some fine oppertunities for irony.

On further thought there is also the problem that Nasir really does lack a foil, apart from possibly the younger self that he's lost touch with, which does mean you might wind up finding his company tiresome. I really expected the supposed love interest to be an agent out to set Nasir up for a fall, and when that didn't happen much of the suspense went out of the novel for me; sometimes a ditz is just a ditz.

PHULE