One of the enduring appeals of good science fiction is that it allows
us to glimpse the future before having lived it, kind of like trying it
on for size. Science fiction off the planet or too far in the future
fails in this regard, but possesses other allures. Near-future science
fiction, like this book, is better for imagining how your grandchildren
will live.
THE MOCKING PROGRAM is set in Namerica, an amalgamation of Southwest
USA and Mexico that has been turned into one sprawling industrial park
called the Montezuma Strip. It is about a police inspector with Robo-Man
biomechanical extensions that make him nearly invulnerable. He is
also an intuit, a highly sensitive individual who can telepathically sense
when he is lied to or given an incomplete story. But of course the
bad guys have high-tech tools as well. In the course of a routine
homicide investigation, Inspector Angel Cardenas visits a house that is
booby-trapped to explode and kill him. He narrowly escapes and tracks
the surviving residents, who have fled, to a nature park in Central America
where all manner of simians live, including simians that have been made
as intelligent as humans by genetic engineering experimentation.
The killers, who had initially murdered and gutted the stepfather who once
lived in that house, are also on the track of his wife and 12-year-old
step-daughter. The step-daughter is a tecant, a technological savant, and
has been used by her real father, the villain of the piece, to store in
her almost infinite memory all the techniques and records required for
his criminal enterprises. He wants her back, and dispatches assassins/kidnappers
to the simian park to fetch her. Inspector Cardenas must save the
daughter and break through the levels of subterfuge that cloak the father's
criminal schemes.
In the course of his investigation, Cardenas moves through the brave
new world that free trade has wrought. Think of Las Vegas as an industrial
park, with tightly-secured workers and renegade groups of ne'er-do-wells
who cannot or will not fit in, so have been relegated to the sex parlors
and stimstick clubs of the Strip, or the underground tunnels that service
the great technological manufacturing plants above. Cardenas befriends
the girl and slowly devises a scheme to neutralize her father. To
his surprise, he finds out that the father has already died, but has initiated
an automatic program that can only be stopped by his command; with his
death, the program will be as relentless as any robot, unceasing until
it completes its mission or is destroyed.
One of the secondary joys of this novel is Foster's liberal use of
a high tech version of Spanglish, the newly-evolved language of Namerica.
VERDAD is the word used when one wants to agree with something: "It's the
truth." VERDES are ecological activists, or greens. SANJUANA
is the arcoplex comprising San Diego and Tijuana. NONZAFADO is an
adjective describing people who are out of it, not part of the "in" crowd.
SIRYORE is a male honorific that combines Sir and Senor. FELEON is
a really bad person, a combination of felon and feon, Mexican slang for
an ugly sucker. DISONY is the giant Disney-Sony multinat. Working
through a made-up language makes the early pages rather slow going, but
once the reader gets the hang of it (assisted by a glossary at the end),
it becomes local color for an intriguing story that pushes both the social
and technological envelopes.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard SeltzerFor a library for the price of a book, please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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