- Bracken, Matthew.
Foreign Enemies and Traitors.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-3-1.
-
This is the third novel in the author's “Enemies”
trilogy, which began with
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
(December 2009), and continued with
Domestic Enemies
(March 2012). Here, we pick up the story three years
after the conclusion of the second volume. Phil Carson, who
we last encountered escaping from the tottering U.S. on a sailboat
after his involvement in a low-intensity civil war in Virginia,
is returning to the ambiguously independent Republic of Texas,
smuggling contraband no longer available in the de-industrialised
and bankrupt former superpower, when he is caught in a freak
December hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and shipwrecked
on the coast of Mississippi.
This is not the America he left. The South is effectively under
martial law, administered by General Marcus Aurelius Mirabeau; east Texas
has declared its independence;
the Southwest has split off as Aztlan and secured autonomy in
the new Constitution; the East and upper Midwest remain under the
control of the ever more obviously socialist regime in Washington;
and the
American redoubt
states in the inland northwest are the
last vestige of liberty. The former United States have not only
been devastated by economic collapse and civil strife
stemming from the attempt to ban and confiscate weapons, but
then ravaged by three disastrous hurricanes and two earthquakes
on the
New Madrid
fault. It's as if God had turned his back on the United States of
America—say “no” to Him three times, and
that may happen.
Carson, a Vietnam special forces veteran,
uses his skills at survival, evasion, and escape, as well as
his native cunning, to escape (albeit very painfully) to
Tennessee, which is in the midst of a civil war. Residents,
rejecting attempts to disarm them (which would place them at
risk of annihilation at the hands of the “golden horde”
escaping devastated urban areas and ravaging everything in their
path), are now confronted with foreign mercenaries from such
exemplars of human rights and rule of law as Kazakhstan and
Nigeria, brought in because U.S. troops have been found too
squeamish when it come to firing on their compatriots:
Kazakhstani cavalry—not so much. (In the book, these
savages are referred to as “Kazaks”.
“Kazakhstani” is correct, but as an abbreviation
I think “Kazakh” [the name of their language] would
be better.)
Carson, and the insurgents with whom he makes contact in
Tennessee, come across incontrovertible evidence of an
atrocity committed by Kazakhstani mercenaries, at the direction
of the highest levels of what remains of the U.S. government.
In a world with the media under the thumb of the regime and
the free Internet a thing of the past, getting this information
out requires the boldest of initiatives, and recruiting
not just career NCOs, the backbone of the military, but also
senior officers with the access to carry out the mission.
After finishing this book, you may lose some sleep pondering
the question, “At what point is a military coup the best
achievable outcome?”.
This is a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the “Enemies”
trilogy. Unlike the previous volumes, there are a number of lengthy
passages, usually couched as one character filling in another
about events of which they were unaware, which sketch the
back story. These are nowhere near as long as Galt's speech in
Atlas Shrugged (April 2010),
(which didn't bother me in the least—I thought it
brilliant all of the three times I've read it), but they do
ask the reader to kick back from the action and review how we
got here and what was happening offstage. Despite the effort
to make this book work as a stand-alone novel, I'd recommend
reading the trilogy in series—if you don't you'll miss the
interactions between the characters, how they came to be here,
and why the fate of the odious Bob Bullard is more than justified.
Extended
excerpts
of this and the author's other novels are available online at the
author's Web site.
- Blum, Andrew.
Tubes.
New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-06-199493-7.
-
The Internet has become a routine fixture in the lives of billions of
people, the vast majority of whom have hardly any idea how it works
or what physical infrastructure allows them to access and share
information almost instantaneously around the globe, abolishing,
in a sense, the very concept of distance. And yet the Internet
exists—if it didn't, you wouldn't be able to read this.
So, if it exists, where is it, and what is it made of?
In this book, the author embarks upon a quest to trace the Internet from
that tangle of cables connected to the router behind his couch to the
hardware which enables it to communicate with its peers worldwide. The
metaphor of the Internet as a cloud—simultaneously everywhere
and nowhere—has become commonplace, and yet as the author begins
to dig into the details, he discovers the physical Internet is
nothing like a cloud: it is remarkably centralised (a large Internet
exchange or “peering location” will tend grow ever larger,
since networks want to connect to a place where the greatest number
of other networks connect), often grungy (when pulling fibre optic cables
through century-old conduits beneath the streets of Manhattan, one's
mind turns more to rats than clouds), and anything but decoupled from
the details of geography (undersea cables must choose a route which
minimises risk of breakage due to earthquakes and damage from ship
anchors in shallow water, while taking the shortest route and
connecting to the backbone at a location which will provide the
lowest possible latency).
The author discovers that while much of the Internet's infrastructure
is invisible to the layman, it is populated, for the most part, with
people and organisations open and willing to show it off
to visitors. As an amateur anthropologist, he surmises that to succeed
in internetworking, those involved must necessarily be skilled in
networking with one another. A visit to a
NANOG
gathering introduces him to this subculture and the retail politics
of peering.
Finally, when non-technical people speak of “the Internet”,
it isn't just the interconnectivity they're thinking of but also the
data storage and computing resources accessible via the network.
These also have a physical realisation in the form of huge data
centres, sited based upon the availability of inexpensive electricity
and cooling (a large data centre such as those operated by Google and
Facebook may consume on the order of 50 megawatts of electricity
and dissipate that amount of heat). While networking people tend
to be gregarious bridge-builders, data centre managers view themselves
as defenders of a fortress and closely guard the details of their
operations from outside scrutiny. When Google was negotiating to
acquire the site for their data centre in The Dalles, Oregon, they
operated through an opaque front company called “Design LLC”,
and required all parties to sign nondisclosure agreements. To this day,
if you visit the facility, there's nothing to indicate it belongs
to Google; on the second ring of perimeter fencing, there's a sign,
in Gothic script, that says
“voldemort industries”—don't
be evil! (p. 242) (On p. 248 it is claimed that the data centre
site is deliberately obscured in Google Maps. Maybe it once was, but
as of this writing it is not. From above,
apart from the impressive power substation, it looks no more exciting
than a supermarket chain's warehouse hub.) The author finally arranges
to cross the perimeter, get his retina scanned, and be taken on a walking
tour around the buildings from the outside. To cap the visit, he is
allowed inside to visit—the lunchroom. The food was excellent.
He later visits Facebook's under-construction data centre in the area
and encounters an entirely different culture, so perhaps not all data
centres are
Morlock
territory.
The author comes across as a quintessential liberal arts major (which
he was) who is alternately amused by the curious people he encounters who
understand and work with actual things as opposed to words, and
enthralled by the wonder of it all: transcending space and time,
everywhere and nowhere, “free” services supported by
tens of billions of dollars of power-gobbling, heat-belching
infrastructure—oh, wow! He is also a New York collectivist
whose knee-jerk reaction is “public, good; private, bad”
(notwithstanding that the build-out of the Internet has been almost
exclusively a private sector endeavour). He waxes poetic about the
city-sponsored (paid for by grants funded by federal and state
taxpayers plus loans) fibre network that
The Dalles installed which, he claims, lured Google to site its data
centre there. The slightest acquaintance with economics or, for that
matter, arithmetic, demonstrates the absurdity of this. If you're
looking for a site for a multi-billion dollar data centre, what
matters is the cost of electricity and the climate (which determines
cooling expenses). Compared to the price tag for the equipment inside
the buildings, the cost of running a few (or a few dozen) kilometres
of fibre is lost in the round-off. In fact, we know, from p. 235
that the 27 kilometre city fibre run cost US$1.8 million, while Google's
investment in the data centre is several billion dollars.
These quibbles aside, this is a fascinating look at the physical
substrate of the Internet. Even software people well-acquainted
with the intricacies of
TCP/IP
may have only the fuzziest comprehension of where a packet goes after
it leaves their site, and how it gets to the ultimate destination.
This book provides a tour, accessible to all readers, of where the
Internet comes together, and how counterintuitive its physical
realisation is compared to how we think of it logically.
In the Kindle edition, end-notes are bidirectionally
linked to the text, but the index is just a list of page numbers. Since
the Kindle edition does include real page numbers, you can type in the
number from the index, but that's hardly as convenient as books where
items in the index are directly linked to the text. Citations of Internet
documents in the end notes are given as URLs, but not linked; the reader
must copy and paste them into a browser's address bar in order to access
the documents.
- Rucker, Rudy.
Turing & Burroughs.
Los Gatos, CA: Transreal Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-9858272-3-6.
-
The enigmatic death of
Alan Turing
has long haunted those
who inquire into the life of this pioneer of computer
science. Forensic tests established cyanide poisoning
as the cause of his death, and the inquest ruled it
suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. But the
partially-eaten apple was never tested for cyanide, and
Turing's mother, among other people close to him, believed the death an
accident, due to ingestion of cyanide fumes from an
experiment in gold plating he was known to be conducting.
Still others pointed out that Turing, from his wartime
work at
Bletchley Park,
knew all the deepest secrets
of Britain's wartime work in cryptanalysis, and having been
shamefully persecuted by the government for his
homosexuality, might have been considered a security risk and
targeted to be silenced by dark forces of the state.
This is the point of departure for this delightful
alternative history romp set in the middle of the 1950s. In the novel,
Turing is presumed to have gotten much further with his work
on
biological morphogenesis
than history records. So far,
in fact, that when agents from Her Majesty's spook shop
botch an assassination attempt and kill his lover instead,
he is able to swap faces with him and flee the country
to the anything-goes international zone of Tangier.
There, he pursues his biological research, hoping to create
a perfect undifferentiated tissue which can transform itself
into any structure or form. He makes the acquaintance of
novelist
William S. Burroughs,
who found in Tangier's
demimonde a refuge from the scandal of the death of his wife
in Mexico and his drug addiction. Turing eventually succeeds,
creating a lifeform dubbed the “skug”, and
merges with it, becoming a skugger. He
quickly discovers that his endosymbiont has not only
dramatically increased his intelligence, but also made him
a shape-shifter—given the slightest bit of DNA, a
skugger can perfectly imitate its source.
And not just that…. As Turing discovers when he
recruits Burroughs to skugdom, skuggers are able to enskug
others by transferring a fragment of skug tissue
to them; they can conjugate, exchanging
“wetware”
(memories and acquired characteristics); and they are telepathic among
one another, albeit with limited range. Burroughs, whose explorations
of pharmaceutical enlightenment had been in part motivated by a search
for telepathy (which he called TP), found he rather liked being a
skugger and viewed it as the next step in his personal journey.
But Turing's escape from Britain failed to completely
cover his tracks, and indiscretions in Tangier brought
him back into the crosshairs of the silencers.
Shape-shifting into another identity, he boards a tramp
steamer to America, where he embarks upon a series of
adventures, eventually joined by Burroughs and
Allen Ginsberg,
on the road
from Florida to Los Alamos,
New Mexico, Burroughs's childhood stomping grounds,
where
Stanislaw Ulam,
co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and,
like Turing, fascinated with how simple computational
systems such as
cellular automata
can mimic the gnarly
processes of biology, has been enlisted to put an end to
the “skugger menace”—perhaps a greater
threat than the international communist conspiracy.
Using his skugger wiles, Turing infiltrates Los Alamos
and makes contact, both physically and intellectually,
with Ulam, and learns the details of the planned assault on
the skugs and vows to do something about it—but
what? His human part pulls him one way and his skug
another.
The 1950s are often thought of as a sterile decade,
characterised by conformity and paranoia. And yet,
if you look beneath the surface, the seeds of everything
that happened in the sixties were sown in those years.
They may have initially fallen upon barren ground, but like the
skug, they were preternaturally fertile and, once
germinated, spread at a prodigious rate.
In the fifties, the consensus culture bifurcated into
straights and beats, the latter of which Burroughs and Ginsberg
were harbingers and rôle models for the emerging dissident
subculture. The straights must have viewed the beats as
alien—almost possessed: why else would they reject
the bounty of the most prosperous society in human
history which had, just a decade before, definitively
defeated evil incarnate? And certainly the beats must
have seen the grey uniformity surrounding them as also
a kind of possession, negating the human potential in
favour of a cookie-cutter existence, where mindless
consumption tried to numb the anomie of a barren suburban
life. This mutual distrust and paranoia was to fuel
such dystopian visions as
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers,
with each subculture seeing the other as pod people.
In this novel, Rucker immerses the reader in the beat
milieu, with the added twist that here they really are
pod people, and loving it. No doubt the beats considered
themselves superior to the straights. But what if they
actually were? How would the straights react,
and how would a shape-shifting, telepathic, field-upgradable
counterculture respond?
Among the many treats awaiting the reader is the author's
meticulous use of British idioms when describing Turing's
thoughts and Burroughs's idiosyncratic grammar in the
letters in his hand which appear here.
This novel engages the reader to such an extent that it's
easy to overlook the extensive research that went into
making it authentic, not just superficially, but in depth.
Readers interested in what goes into a book like this
will find the author's
background notes (PDF)
fascinating—they are almost as long as the novel.
I wouldn't, however, read them before finishing
the book, as spoilers lurk therein.
A Kindle edition is available either from Amazon
or directly from the publisher,
where an EPUB edition is also available (with other formats forthcoming).
- Imholt, Timothy James.
Nuclear Assault.
Unknown: Zwicky Press, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-615-69158-9.
-
I am not going to fret about spoilers in this review. This book is
so awful that nobody should read it, and avoiding spoilers is like
worrying about getting a dog turd dirty when you pick it up with toilet
paper to throw it in the loo.
I acquired this book based on an Amazon suggestion of
“Customers who Viewed this Item Also Viewed” and
especially because, at the time I encountered it, the
Kindle edition was free (it is no longer,
as of this writing). Well, I'm always a sucker for
free stuff, so I figured, “How bad can it be?” and
downloaded it. How wrong I was—even for free, this botched
attempt at a novel is overpriced.
Apart from the story, which is absurd, the author has not
begun to master the basics of English composition. If I had
taken a chapter or two from this novel and submitted it as a
short story in my 10th grade English class, I would have received
a failing grade, and deservedly so. Scarcely a page in this 224
page novel is unmarred by errors of orthography, grammar, or
punctuation. The author appears to have invented his own way of
expressing quotes. The following is a partial list of words
in the text which are either misspelled or for which homonyms
are incorrectly used:
Americans OK advice affected an arrival assess attack bathe become
breathe chaperone closed continuous counsel enemy's feet first foul
from had hangar harm's hero holding host hostilely intelligence it's
its let's morale nights not ordnance overheard pus rarefied scientists
sent sights sure the their them they times were
When you come across an instance of “where” being used
in place of “were”, you might put it down to the kind
of fat finger we all commit from time to time, plus sloppy proofreading.
But when it happens 13 times in 224 pages, you begin to suspect
the author might not really comprehend the difference between the two.
All of the characters, from special forces troops, emergency room nurses,
senior military commanders, the President of the United States, to
Iranian nuclear scientists speak in precisely the same dialect of
fractured grammar laced with malaprops. The author has his own
eccentric idea of what words should be capitalised, and applies them
inconsistently. Each chapter concludes with a “news flash”
and “economic news flash”, also in
bizarro dialect, with the
latter demonstrating the author as illiterate in economics as he is
in the English language.
Then, in the last line of the novel, the reader is kicked in the
teeth with something totally out of the blue.
I'd like to call this book “eminently forgettable”, but
I doubt I'll forget it soon. I have read a number of manuscripts
by aspiring writers (as a savage copy editor and fact checker, authors
occasionally invite me to have at their work, in confidence, before
sending it for publication), but this is, by far, the worst I have
encountered in my entire life. You may ask why I persisted in reading
beyond the first couple of chapters. It's kind of like driving
past a terrible accident on the highway—do you really
not slow down and look? Besides, I only review books I've finished, and
I looked forward to this review as the only fun I could derive from
this novel, and writing this wave-off a public service for others who
might stumble upon this piece of…fiction and be inclined to
pick it up.