Extinction by Mark Alpert

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on February 12, 2013

Extinction reads like a cross between The Six Million Dollar Man, a mediocre spy novel, and a cheesy "computers try to take over the world" science fiction novel. It is a fast-paced, unchallenging time-killer that doesn't stand out from other formula fiction.

Jim Pierce builds prosthetic devices. His estranged daughter Layla is a computer hacker. China's Ministry of State Security is displeased that Layla hacked the Chinese government's network with the help of a former Chinese agent named Dragon Fire. Dragon Fire (whose ability to travel unimpeded to the US on short notice goes unexplained) shows up in New York long enough to give Layla a flash drive with information about the evil Dr. Zhang, who has networked the brains of twenty-nine lobotomized dissidents. The network, hidden in a remote compound, is named Supreme Harmony. It is designed to analyze surveillance videos in real time. In a surprise to Dr. Zhang but not to readers of trashy thrillers, Supreme Harmony has an "I am alive" moment and develops a collective consciousness of its own, not unlike the Borg. And like all Computers Gone Bad, it decides it needs to destroy humanity to preserve itself.

Pierce lost his wife, son, and arm during an attack by "al Qaeda martyrs" in Nairobi, one of many overused plot devices upon which Mark Alpert relies. Now Pierce has a bunch of prosthetic arms. He can detach one and snap on a replacement in seconds. One incorporates a machine gun. Yes, a machine gun arm. That, at least, is good for a laugh, as is a Dr. Strangelove moment involving a different prosthetic arm. Even more amusing are the weaponized flies that are forever chasing Pierce and Kirsten Chan, the deputy director of the NSA, a woman who turns into a field agent solely to give Pierce a new romantic interest.  All of this may be based on sound science, but that makes it no less silly in execution.

Life is just a little too easy for Pierce, Kirsten, and Layla. When Pierce needs to make it through a roadblock, the police conveniently leave a gap big enough for Pierce's vehicle to squeeze through. When Layla needs to find a computer password, it's conveniently written on a Post-It note. When Layla needs to escape from a room, she finds a convenient ventilator shaft that's big enough to crawl through. A can of insecticide (handy for killing weaponized flies) seems to last forever. Two characters fortuitously find each other in a remote part of China. The leading characters seem to have infallible memories for trivial details, including maps and history, but the silliest aspect of this life-saving knowledge is Pierce's convenient recollection of a forty digit binary code that he had no reason to memorize. Pierce also has the amazing ability to "bury" specific memories, and to bury them in specific locations, next to his other buried memories. He can even choose to bury some memories deeper than his other buried memories. Really? I wish I could do that.

Much about Supreme Harmony is left unexplained. Why does Supreme Harmony find human behavior "inexplicable" if it has absorbed all the thoughts, memories, and emotions of the humans it has assimilated? Why does a machine intelligence care whether it survives? If it absorbed some sort of survival instinct from its human hosts, why didn't it also absorb the human instinct to preserve and perpetuate the human race? If it is offended by body odor, why isn't it offended by genocide? If it cares so much about the environment that humans have devastated, why doesn't it care about the humans? If it feels contempt for humans because they spend so much time hurting each other, why doesn't it feel contempt for itself when it decides to kill everyone on the planet? Is Supreme Harmony such a stupid computer that it seriously believes orchestrating a war between China and the United States will perpetuate its existence? If Supreme Harmony is so worried that someone might discover its existence and unplug it, why doesn't it worry about nuclear warheads raining down on its servers?

The background to Supreme Harmony is presented in expository chapters that make for dull reading. The novel as a whole is written in a style that ranges from ordinary to awkward. Despite the graceless prose, banal dialog, cheesy romance, and unoriginal plot, Extinction does offer some interesting information about drone surveillance and cyborg insects and biotechnology. The swift pace quickly brings the reader to concluding chapters that are more imaginative than the rest of the novel. Diehard fans of formula fiction might therefore get a kick out of Extinction, but I don't know how many readers will tolerate the silliness long enough to reach the ending. 

NOT RECOMMENDED

We Live in Water by Jess Walter

Published by Harper Perennial on February 12, 2013

Jess Walter's stories make me think of Donald Ray Pollock mixed with a dash of George Saunders. Many of Walter's Spokane-based characters are on the fringes of society. Walter writes about a homeless philosopher-beggar who, on good days, spends his money on a book instead of booze and asks his group counselor why he can't talk about his ideas instead of all of the stupid things he's done. He writes about an inmate who, released on a temporary pass to get dialysis, would rather go fishing. He writes about a tweaker who must choose between food and drugs.

Yet when Walter writes of these broken lives, he does so with such sensitivity that it's impossible not to identify with the characters -- with what they feel, if not with how they live. As one of his characters says, "Who isn't crazy sometimes?" His characters may be more extreme than most, but their unchecked behavior sheds light on thoughts and feelings that are buried within us all.

In a couple of stories, the narrator is living a conventional woe-filled life (divorce, career failure) but the story's focus is on a character from the fringe. The narrator of the title story (one of my favorites in the collection) has problems, but the largest of them is the hole in his life left by the father he doesn't remember, the father who left his son in a car when he inside a building to deal with a trifecta of trouble. Another story begins with the sentence "I'm on my way to Vegas with my friend, Bobby Rausch, to save his stepsister from a life of prostitution." In that story, a character's life is clearly headed for disaster, but it isn't the unfortunate stepsister.

Some stories are about relatively functional people who are a little off. A young man, ill-equipped for fatherhood but with high hopes for his three children, becomes obsessed with discovering which one is stealing from the coin jar that constitutes the family's meager vacation fund. A day trader sentenced to community service teaches algebra to high school kids and reads the same story to the same grade schooler every day. A stalker's job as a newspaper editor puts him in a position to mess with his ex-girlfriend's horoscope.

Sometimes Walter writes about people who do the right thing, like the mechanic who refuses to rip off an old lady. On the other hand, one of my favorite stories, a work of small genius, teaches that you never really know who you can trust.

"Don't Eat Cat" is a departure, a humorous take on zombie stories -- after the borders are closed, the fast food/finance industry has to rely on zombies to fill service jobs -- although it is, in the end, a tragicomedy. (It isn't the only departure ... the story about saving the stepsister from life as a prostitute is pretty funny, another instance of humor in a serious vein.)

Although the stories expose the rawness of life, they also expose the humanity that is common to us all. Not many writers can perform that balancing act with the deftness Walter displays in this collection.

RECOMMENDED

The Old Man and the Wasteland by Nick Cole

Published by Harper Voyager on January 22, 2013

Nick Cole published The Old Man and the Wasteland independently in 2011.  This appears to be one of the rare success stories of an author whose self-published work generated enough buzz to interest a major publisher.  It's easy to see why.

Inspired by Hemingway, The Old Man and the Wasteland is, according to Nick Cole's introduction to the revised (Harper Voyager) edition, an illustration of the lesson taught by The Old Man and the Sea: you can lose, but only if you give up will you be defeated. The Old Man and the Wasteland is short enough to qualify as a novella, and the revised edition reviewed here includes a preview of Cole's upcoming novel, The Savage Boy.

The old man in Cole's novel lives in a postapocalyptic wasteland in the American southwest. Like the other members of his village, he salvages whatever he can find that still has value. He was once a hero, having made great finds, a refrigerator among them, but later he became a symbol of bad luck, cursed for bringing a radioactive radio into the village. Now the old man hunts alone.

The novel addresses the three literary conflicts everyone learns about in high school English: man against man (a crazy hermit, a nomadic band of killers), man against nature (wolves, scorpions, monsoons), and most importantly, man against himself. As the old man searches for salvage, he strives to rekindle the person he once was, to find what he has lost within himself. At the same time, he knows that the key to survival is to "let go of what is gone," to set aside the pain of loss, to focus on the present, on salvage, not on "what had been or what was lost." The search for salvage is both a test of physical endurance and a test of character. Does the old man still have what it takes to find salvage that will help his village?

From Stephen King to Cormac McCarthy, post-apocalyptic tales have tended to be morality plays, allegorical explorations of good and evil. The protagonist journeys through a wasteland, encountering and rejecting evil in the quest for something good -- in this case, the quest for some part of the past worth salvaging. The falling bombs (and what could be more evil than nuclear bombs?) destroyed much of what was good, but the old man labors to restore the good, one scrap at a time. With determination, he may even be able to restore himself.

Cole wrote the novel in a style that is distinctly Hemingwayesque: plain and economical, deriving its power from the truth that the words conjure. One sentence -- "The line from where he had met the bee and the splotch of green was true and straight" -- aptly describes Cole's prose style: true and straight. The Old Man and the Wasteland tells an inspirational story that, in its own way, illustrates a life lesson just as effectively as the classic novel upon which it is based.

RECOMMENDED

The Spear of Destiny by Trey Garrison

Published digitally by Harper Voyager in December 2012 and January 2013 

The Spear of Destiny is a novel published as a three-part serial, each with its own title.  Part one is Black Sun Reich, part two is Death's Head Legion, and part three is Shadows Will Fall.

Given the influence of The Thule Society on the development of the Nazi Party, the pairing of demons and Nazis is natural but predictable. It's been done before. As an alternate history, however, The Spear of Destiny adds inventive elements to the story: Hitler came to power in Germany in 1922 as the result of a revolution; the Confederate States (CSA) still prohibit black citizens from voting while the Union States (USA) are mired in an economic depression; the USA fought alongside Germany in the Great War while the CSA sided with France and England (the Texas Freehold was studiously neutral). The alternate version of 1928 has some steampunk elements, including a flying city and "the largest Difference Engine ever built." Apart from its reference to a long-standing image of darkness, the Black Sun in the title refers both to the Black Sun rune in Wewelsburg Castle and to the dozen senior leaders of the Third Reich (one of whom was rebuilt as a "clockwork cyborg"), known collectively as The Black Sun.

Dr. Kurt von Dietel is on a secret mission. He and the people he represents have discovered that the powers behind the Reich are creating a group of "indestructible, unwavering soldiers" inspired by the mutated creatures that are arising in the Damned Lands, a transgenic abomination that, fancy terminology aside, can best be described as a cross between a demon and a zombie.  The formula for manufacturing zombies is glossed over with some mutterings about alchemy and radiation and mystical chants and the war opening a portal to another dimension, but in a novel that relies upon the supernatural -- not to mention zombies -- you don't really expect hard science.  Of course, the zombies  threaten the survival of the human race and must be stopped. The improbable key to victory (for both the Nazis and the good guys) is the Spear of Destiny, last known to be in the possession of the Jesuits. Reluctantly joining Dietel in search of the Spear is a Texan aviator named Fox Rucker. He's reluctant because another member of the team is his ex-wife. Technological help is supplied by Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla.

Once the Nazis have the Spear of Destiny, they will be able to make the zombies follow orders instead of eating everyone in sight.  Zombies can be made from both the living and the dead and, of course, anyone who is bitten by a zombie becomes infected and turns into a zombie. Rucker and his helpers try to find the Spear before the Nazis can get it, a quest that leads them to Romania, homeland of vampires. You just knew that vampires would sneak into this story, didn't you? Heck, there's even a golem.

Otto Skorzeny (the legendary SS officer who rescued Mussolini from captivity) plays a critical role in the novel. So does Hitler's favorite interrogator, the Skull, who somehow has developed psychic powers. The descriptions of the Skull's depravity seem gratuitous, although an extended encounter with the Skull does develop Rucker's psychological profile.

In the best tradition of heroic adventure novels, Trey Garrison establishes Rucker as a courageous man who refuses to accept defeat, the sort of leader who inspires others to give their best. That, of course, is what happens in a series of high energy action sequences that propel the story to its predictable conclusion.  Rucker being chased across rooftops in Rome seems like a scene cribbed from action movies but rappelling from one dirigible to another is more original. Given the setting, it's logical that the Romani would enter the story, leading to an interesting discussion of Romani legends. I appreciated that Garrison uses the story to remind readers that the Romani are the largely forgotten victims of Nazi genocide.

The most interesting aspect of The Spear of Destiny is not the plot so much as the background. The splintering of North America into several nations could have happened, and Garrison's construction of his alternate history reflects careful research and nuanced thought. There is a decided bias in favor of libertarian philosophy -- the Texas Freehold does so well because people are left alone, while the USA has gone to rot because of big government -- that would have made Robert Heinlein proud. The characters' discussions of political philosophy are simplistic and, in my view, not particularly accurate, but disagreement with a political point of view is no reason not to enjoy a novel.

I don't know that the steampunk elements add anything (they seem to have been inserted to make the novel appeal to steampunk fans) and I'm certain that a better novel could be fashioned out this background without resorting to demonic zombies. I'm not suggesting that every alternate history addressing Nazis needs to be as brilliant as The Man in the High Castle, but does the world really need another zombie novel?  The zombies themselves are rather dull, and an early phase of the final battle -- pitting werewolves and other monsters against the zombies -- doesn't have much spark. The zombies are ridiculously incompetent -- they can't penetrate a barrier of piled junk that the good guys are able to assemble and disassemble in seconds -- but I suppose death takes its toll on a zombie's brainpower. Still, the ability of thirty people to hold off several hundred zombies long enough to engage in hours of chit-chat weakens the story. I never had the sense that the zombies posed much of a threat at all.

Despite its weak ending, the non-zombie characters and the story's tongue-in-cheek attitude make the novel as a whole worth reading, at least for fans of the ever-growing category of zombie literature.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

First published in the UK in 2011; published by Europa on February 5, 2013 

Initially, two stories proceed on parallel paths in The Rage. The first focuses on Bob Tidey, a detective sergeant with the Dublin garda, as he investigates a murder. The other follows Vincent Naylor's robbery of a cash delivery service. By jumping frequently from one story to the other, Gene Kerrigan assures that something is always happening to hold the reader's interest. When Tidey's work is in its plodding stages, Naylor's crime is whizzing along, while the murder investigation gains steam after the robbery ends. The energy continues to shift from one story to the other throughout the course of the novel.

The murder: Emmet Sweetman, a corrupt banker, takes two bullets to the head and a shotgun blast to the chest. One of the bullets recovered from his corpse is tied to a gun used in the unsolved murder of Oliver Snead, a case Tidey investigated. Tidey is thus assigned to the team investigating Sweetman's murder. His investigation is hampered when his superiors seem content with a convenient solution, one that overlooks leads Tidey wants to pursue.

The robbery: Vincent Naylor, freshly released from prison, recruits his brother and two other men to steal cash from the equivalent of an armored car service. The heist is carefully planned but it goes wrong, making Naylor an angry man. During much of the novel's second half, Naylor is trying to channel his anger toward revenge without knowing who should be targeted.

Kerrigan takes care to establish his characters and set up his plot in the early chapters. Once the robbery commences and the murder investigation is underway, the pace quickens. The two storylines intersect at the novel's midway point, thanks to Tidey's friendship with a nun who witnessed the robbery's violent aftermath. The story is filled with mayhem (the novel lives up to its title), but violence never becomes a substitute for intelligent plotting and effective characterization. The final chapters pull everything together in a tense, refreshingly smart burst of storytelling.

Kerrigan has a realistic attitude about people who ordinarily occupy a position of respect. Tidey is critical of the garda officers he calls "little corporals," who live for the joy of forcing others to obey their petty commands, but he isn't eager to oppose them. Tidey isn't exactly Dirty Harry, but he doesn't always obey the law when it's more expedient to ignore it. One of Kerrigan's characters is a nun who was involved in a child abuse scandal. Yet Kerrigan doesn't demonize his characters, doesn't reduce them to one-dimensional caricatures. As Tidey tells the nun, "What you did, it's not all you are." Making a reader understand and even sympathize with characters who behave badly is a skill that many writers never develop. Kerrigan does it well.

The moral question that Tidey faces -- whether to disobey his superiors, who may be protecting well-placed individuals, in order to achieve a rough measure of justice -- is common in high quality police procedurals. The Rage might in that sense be formulaic, although Kerrigan takes the dilemma a step further, forcing Tidey to choose between two untenable outcomes. The phrases that begin and end the novel -- "There was no right thing to do. But something had to be done" -- encapsulate the novel's theme. Even if The Rage can be branded as formulaic, it couples the formula with tight prose, a steady pace, and a fair amount of suspense.

RECOMMENDED