Karma Kommandos | |||||
Paul Cook | |||||
Phoenix Pick, 212 pages | |||||
A review by John Enzinas
It's a slow intertwining of two stories. The first is the story of Rory Koestler. Rory is a member of the L.A.P.D's
Protean Set, undercover cops with the ability to change their appearance recruited from L.A's actors. The Protean
Set's reason for existence is a hallucinogen called Chuckle being dealt by a man named Bob Thermopylae. Their job
is to capture Thermopylae and get the quarantine of California lifted. The second story is about a Supercomputer
named Eidolon Rex that disappears from its lab at Eidolon Technology before reappearing 10 hours later. The
stories start to mingle when the scientists discover an anomalous number of Rex's programs containing the name
Rory Koestler. Then things get complicated when a third party appears literally from out of nowhere and zaps
people into what appear to be cold-induced comas.
Given my experience with author published works, I was not expecting much from this but decided to read it
anyway because of the strength of its first paragraph. Fortunately this quality continued through the whole
book as Mr. Cook weaved his way between Police procedural, Conspiracy thriller, and Technology forensics. He
transitioned smoothly in and out of action sequences and thankfully none of the technology writing pulled me
out of the reality thinking "That's just not right". This is not to say that there wasn't plenty of futuristic
widgets (from anti-gravity to darkness generators) but rather that no attempt was made to explain those away
with pseudo-science. This soft approach to the science are what helped keep this book from appearing dated
in this reprinting some eight years after the original.
It's very likely that some of the turn of the millennium sensibilities in the way of late period cyberpunk
that the book carries with it are what helped keep me so engaged in the first place. The book carried with
it the sort of flavour of Snow Crash with all kinds of plausible but absurd extrapolations of
current trends, but without a Neal Stephenson-style "ending" and no cryptography. It was weird and twisted
in a lovely way, but, I think that's to be expected when the cops carry anti-personal devices
called Tonya B. Hardings and the sky overhead often contains the Retro-Future blimp called The Fairuza Balk.
John Enzinas reads frequently and passionately. In his spare time he plays with swords. |
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