Whole Wide World | ||||||||
Paul J. McAuley | ||||||||
HarperCollins Voyager, 388 pages | ||||||||
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A review by William Thompson
Knowledge, both legal and even more so, illegal, is now the currency of the whole wide
world (world wide web). It is the realm of "script kiddies, stringers, programmers, coders, Web designers,
video editors, streaming media jockeys, database analysts, channel editors, online researchers and graphic
designers, a loosely affiliated tribe of technocrats careless of national boundaries." Anonymous
e-mailers reside in the third world, routing messages untraceable. Freeware mail spiders lurk among
attachments, waiting to be activated before overwriting every e-mail file, as well as itself, with random
zeros and ones. Illegal data spikes are hawked on the streets, and pornography has found a new
venue. The Internet has become a shadow realm, denizened by hackers, spooks and
criminals. "Information wants to be free," but someone is always watching, and privacy
has become a delusion, so much so that becoming invisible is the measure of real freedom.
Into this realm McAuley inserts the detective novel, in part traditional crime story, its cynicism and
gritty realism readily familiar to any that have shadowed that genre, in part science fiction in its
critical, if jaded, predictions of a world gone wrong, and that could easily become our own in the not
too distant future. Our protagonist is a man at the end of his career, measured more by his
failures than successes, called in on his day off to pick up evidence at a particularly brutal crime
scene that involves the use of video cameras and the theft of computer hard drives. For reasons
not immediately clear, our detective intrudes himself in the case, an involvement that soon becomes
a personal obsession, as well as a last, and some would say desperate, effort to vindicate a life
that has slipped from its track.
My first read of McAuley (I know... where have I been!), I will admit to approaching this work with a
certain degree of suspicion. So many authors associated with science fiction display a tendency
towards burying their story beneath an excess of conceptual or technical exegesis (or, alternatively,
littering their alien landscapes with creatures exhibiting the worst excrescences of a
Harryhausen -- ok, I'll lay off the prefixes, but you get my point), forgetting at times that one
of the primary purposes in fiction is to provide narrative, a quality that science fiction's
companion genre, fantasy, tends to wallow in without always point or purpose. Therefore, I
will confess to being excited in the opening to this work. Written with a style and panache
unexpected for the genre, the use of language and description is vivid and memorable, as is
McAuley's main character. True to the best detective novels, this work is as much a character
study as an investigation of a crime, and the world the author has created is grounded in a depth
of realism, psychological insight and detail representing the best of both genres
blended. McAuley explores his vision of the future with an imaginative yet critical eye,
leavening his narrative with perception and, as another reviewer has observed elsewhere, "that
rare balancing act of exploring big concepts while telling an absorbing and entertaining
story." And McAuley recognizes that perhaps the greatest seduction of the Web resides
in an illusion promoted by the Internet itself: "that I can have everything, and go
anywhere." There may well be already too much information in the world.
This is not a big book, more smart than profound. Yet I doubt anyone will be
disappointed, unless it is perhaps by comparison to the author's own and previously established
standards. The only thing that I could have wished for differently, is that, in the opening
chapter, the reference made to Elvis Costello had been to My Aim Is True, rather
than Armed Forces: Watching the Detectives seems more apt.
William Thompson is a writer of speculative fiction, as yet unpublished, although he remains hopeful. In addition to pursuing his writing, he is in the degree program in information science at Indiana University. |
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