- Suarez, Daniel.
Influx.
New York: Signet, [2014] 2015.
ISBN 978-0-451-46944-1.
-
Doesn't it sometimes seem that, sometime in the 1960s, the
broad march of technology just stopped? Certainly,
there has been breathtaking progress in some fields, particularly
computation and data communication, but what about clean,
abundant fusion power too cheap to meter, opening up the solar
system to settlement, prevention and/or effective treatment
of all kinds of cancer, anti-aging therapy, artificial general
intelligence, anthropomorphic robotics, and the many other
wonders we expected to be commonplace by the year 2000?
Decades later, Jon Grady was toiling in his obscure laboratory
to make one of those dreams—gravity control— a
reality. His lab is invaded by notorious Luddite terrorists
who plan to blow up his apparatus and team. The fuse burns down
into the charge, and all flashes white, then black. When
he awakes, he finds himself, in good condition, in a luxurious
office suite in a skyscraper, where he is introduced to the
director of the Federal Bureau of Technology Control (BTC).
The BTC, which appears in no federal organisation chart or
budget, is charged with detecting potentially emerging
disruptive technologies, controlling and/or stopping them
(including deploying Luddite terrorists, where necessary),
co-opting their developers into working in deep secrecy
with the BTC, and releasing the technologies only when
human nature and social and political institutions were
“ready” for them—as determined by the BTC.
But of course those technologies exist within the BTC,
and it uses them: unlimited energy, genetically engineered
beings, clones, artificial intelligence, and mind control
weapons. Grady is offered a devil's bargain: join the BTC and
work for them, or suffer the worst they can do to those who
resist and see his life's work erased. Grady turns them down.
At first, his fate doesn't seem that bad but then, as the
creative and individualistic are wont to do, he resists and
discovers the consequences when half a century's suppressed
technologies are arrayed against a defiant human mind. How
is he to recover his freedom and attack the BTC? Perhaps
there are others, equally talented and defiant, in the same
predicament? And, perhaps, the BTC, with such great power
at its command, is not so monolithic and immune from rivalry,
ambition, and power struggles as it would like others to
believe. And what about other government agencies,
fiercely protective of their own turf and budgets,
and jealous of any rivals?
Thus begins a technological thriller very different from the
author's earlier
Dæmon (August 2010) and
Freedom™ (January 2011),
but compelling. How does a band of individuals take on an
adversary which can literally rain destruction from the
sky? What is the truth beneath the public face of the BTC?
What does a superhuman operative do upon discovering everything
has been a lie? And how can one be sure it never happens again?
With this novel Daniel Suarez reinforces his reputation as
an emerging grand master of the techno-thriller. This book
won the 2015
Prometheus
Award for best libertarian novel.
June 2018 