Contraband

Rating:
Summary: Good Cyberpunk, but with a lame ending
Review: "Contraband" is set in Foy's "The Shift" world. I like his future, its noir and gritty. The Pilot is a compulsive speed freak who makes a living smuggling contraband (organic memory chips, drugs, and illegal aliens) into the US. And the borders are tight. Suddenly, the borders get a lot tighter and the smuggler underground starts to collapse. The pilot starts a quest to find the king of smugglers to stop the end of his way of life.

Foy is good. His narrative is good. His tech is good and so are his characters. However, he can't end a story. "Contraband" grinds to halt the way "The Shift" fizzled in the end. I suspect Foy is a novella-length story author with novel-length book contracts. Read it for the scenery.

Rating:
Summary: fast and dense
Review: a quick, clever book, hewing to the best of the noirish traditions of cyberpunk. criticizing the plotting (which i really rather liked) and characterizations misses the point; the meat of the story resides in the hallucinatory feel of the pilot's life and reality, the fine attention to his consciousness and the gradations of change which it undergoes in this fine "journey" novel. the pilot functions at the edge, which, as the author reminds us, is where almost everything interesting happens . . . and where authority, in all its guises, wants to keep its subjects from venturing.

Rating:
Summary: A superb technothriller quest!
Review: A wonderful novel about what technology enables the power structure--and the individual--to accomplish, told through the quest of a small band of people seeking their own freedom. Highly readable, blending a nice sense of computer-based semi-magical realism ("Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic", to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke), this is a book that stays in your memory, both for its attention to detail (believability) and its themes.

Rating:
Summary: Jame Joyce would be proud, but the rest of us will be bored.
Review: As a "stream of consiousness" novel (ala James Joyce's Portrait of an Arist as a Young Man), this book is rather good. However, for the casual sci-fi reader, this book comes across as confusing, disappointing and sadly, rather boring. The author shows great skill when delving into thoughts, emotions and matters of the human mind, but his lack of (or inattention to) plot dooms this work to the realms of banality.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent, engaging, and thought-provoking read.
Review: Contraband is set in an extremely believable very-near-future in which multinational corporations dictate international law and second-generation biohazard mutants staff the toxic-waste dumps which were formerly known as wetlands. The Bureau of Nationalizations, or BON, is an international entity set up to interdict and dispose of smugglers like the pilot, who transports goods and people across international economic boundaries. The BON is a servant of the multinationals, whose economic interests are threatened by free trade. The BON regularly uses deadly force against smugglers; because of the economic challenge they provide to the multinationals, smugglers are considered equivalent to terrorists under US and international law.

Typical of Foy's work, Contraband is much too complex to summarize in a couple of paragraphs. The main character is the pilot, Joe "Skid" Marak, a good guy and professional smuggler who likes any mode of transportation that goes extremely fast and has a pet rat named God. BON has a programmer who has recently developed algorithms that allow BON to substantially increase their smuggler interdiction rate. Interdiction leads to immediate death or to sentencing without trial to a commercially-managed interrogation facility from which no one has ever been released. The increase in the interdiction ratio - which has resulted in the capture and sentencing of one of the pilot's best friends, the death of another, and a couple of very serious near misses on his own part - leads Marak on an international quest for the near-mythical Hawkley, who publishes the well-respected Smuggler's Bible and who reputedly knows what the new BON algorithm is and thus how to work around it.

Plus, there's lots of Foy's characteristically highly insightful treatment of human relationships, both romantic and otherwise. He also reinforces themes introduced in The Shift, such as people developing severe personality disorders which derive from a need for constant A/V stimulation and others perpetually confusing VR-delivered programming with real life. And in one nice and very subtle little twist, in one chapter intro Foy quotes one Mr. William Gates as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Committee (a tool of the BON, of course) as stating "... these people actually think they have the right to trade freely... without any regulation or permission from the government...".

George Foy is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. I couldn't put Contraband down.

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately Disappointing
Review: Contraband is set in the distopian near future, where the world is run by an increasingly repressive government that monitors all of its citizens activities and movements. The main charater is a smuggler living outside the law.

When the government creates a new system for catching smugglers, based on intercepted communications traffic and predictive modeling, the Pilot's world falls apart. He is shot down and nearly killed. His former girlfriend ends up in Bellevue when her brother, also a smuggler is presumed killed. The smuggler then goes off with a rag tag band the search for the creater of the smuggler's bible.

The book started off as a bit of a slog. At this point about two hundred pages in, the book started to pick up. Unfortunately, it didn't really last.

From here on the plot became progressively stranger and began to have some rather gaping holes. When told to go east, the pilot heads directly to a god forsaken spot in Asia with access soon to be cut off by the winter snows. We never find out why he went to this particular place.

The characters have a series of increasingly strange adventures, culminating their return to NY no closer to their objective of shutting down the government's new system. The characters clear up their personal growth issues and the book just ends with them deciding to go their separate ways. The story is never actually resolved, leaving me disappointed.

While the quality of the writing is excellent and the characters are well developed, if a bit odd, the plot is full of holes you could drive a semi through. And, the book was difficult reading. It only grabbed me briefly. Most of the time, I was just reading it because of my compulsion to finish the books I start and my hope that it would improve.

If science fiction set in the dismal future is your thing, you may enjoy this more than I did. I mostly found it depressing and not very interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately Disappointing
Review: Contraband is set in the distopian near future, where the world is run by an increasingly repressive government that monitors all of its citizens activities and movements. The main charater is a smuggler living outside the law.

When the government creates a new system for catching smugglers, based on intercepted communications traffic and predictive modeling, the Pilot's world falls apart. He is shot down and nearly killed. His former girlfriend ends up in Bellevue when her brother, also a smuggler is presumed killed. The smuggler then goes off with a rag tag band the search for the creater of the smuggler's bible.

The book started off as a bit of a slog. At this point about two hundred pages in, the book started to pick up. Unfortunately, it didn't really last.

From here on the plot became progressively stranger and began to have some rather gaping holes. When told to go east, the pilot heads directly to a god forsaken spot in Asia with access soon to be cut off by the winter snows. We never find out why he went to this particular place.

The characters have a series of increasingly strange adventures, culminating their return to NY no closer to their objective of shutting down the government's new system. The characters clear up their personal growth issues and the book just ends with them deciding to go their separate ways. The story is never actually resolved, leaving me disappointed.

While the quality of the writing is excellent and the characters are well developed, if a bit odd, the plot is full of holes you could drive a semi through. And, the book was difficult reading. It only grabbed me briefly. Most of the time, I was just reading it because of my compulsion to finish the books I start and my hope that it would improve.

If science fiction set in the dismal future is your thing, you may enjoy this more than I did. I mostly found it depressing and not very interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Contraband
Review: Intelligent, stylish and well-realized near-future SF. Foy does well at portraying popular culture and infusing humor. His writing here is often beautiful.

Contraband, the story of a pilot in a world where secret cargo cults do battle with governnment agencies, follows one of the cargo cult philosophies: the journey is the destination. The plot is circular, and not especially strong. Still, the reasonably appealing characters, the original worldbuilding, and the strength of Foy's language carry the reader along.

Rating:
Summary: Right Concept; Wrong Author
Review: The concept behind the book is a good one, but it was rather poorly executed. It started off okay, but as it got further, it became more of a chore to read. It didn't seem as if the author's heart was really in it. To see how this concept fares when properly executed, try Walter Jon Williams' *Hardwired*.