The Mocking Program

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing near-future mystery: a nice character in Angel
Review: THE MOCKING PROGRAM by Alan Dean Foster
ASPECT, Warner Books, August 2002

It's just another corpse--murdered, stripped of valuable organs and blood, and left to rot. Except Inspector Angel Cardenas suspects something more. The corpse is too well dressed for his neighborhood. When a deep scan reveals the impossible--multiple identities, Cardenas sets off on a hunt for a murderer who has amassed a criminal empire in a near-future North America. As assassins close in on the wife and daughter of a gangster leader, Cardenas wrestles with keeping them alive--and to get a grip on why anyone would want to kill them so desperately.

Classic S.F. author Alan Dean Foster delivers a taunt near-future mystery. The politics, economics, slang, and science in THE MOCKING PROGRAM are logical extensions from today's world grounding the novel and making it approachable. Cardenas is both sympathetic and heroic, his empathic abilities adding rather than detracting from his essential humanity.

Foster's writing engages the reader, keeps the pages turning, and asks questions about the nature of life and probes the nature of the relationship between man and machine.

Very nice.

Rating:
Summary: AI, Teenage girl/Mneumonic, Intuitive Profiler... try it.
Review: This book keeps the pace moving. The plot keeps you guessing (though one of your guesses will likely be right). The author isn't afraid to take you into very imaginative territory. There are the wugs. Insect like AI that never harm anyone, but form a very interesting element in the plot. A teenage Jenny Mneumonic with an abusive father. A jungle of semi intelligent genetically engineered primates that are exploring their humanity (good and bad). This author isn't afraid to take you anywhere.

You also get the feel that the author is teaching a little Spanish on the way (i.e. he'll use a phrase and then when it is repeated or used in some reflexive way, he'll switch in the Spanish term instead).

The book leaves you a bit in the sky wondering if the ending has really landed. True, the immediate problems are solved, but there remains a mystery. I imagine a sequel to this would be very facinating. You have a teenage girl who not only has to deal with the standard wiles of fading adolescence, but whose parents were killed, has a mneumonic computer for brains, and may still be hunted by her father (who supposedly died, and may not even be real in the conventional sense). You have a inspector who has intuition better than any psychic 900 number. You have an evoloving AI network that spans nations with an unknown and unsuspected agenda. .... A lot can still happen. Read some of the pages and find out for yourself.