One of the major differences between a review and a criticism is not specifically the quality, but the content. One must be able not to say simply I liked this story / I didn´t like this story.
Be as it may, many reviewers/bloggers/writers before me has already threaded upon this way, and much better. So I´ll try to do my best and change a little my way to do things and improve my reviewing technique, trying to turn it into a critical approach. And there is no best work to begin right now than the first two books of David Louis Edelman´s Jump 225 Trilogy: Infoquake and Multireal.
These novels are all about worldbuilding, but not in the widest sense of the word. The Jump 225 Trilogy is, first and foremost, about economy. Both about the economy of worldbuilding and the economics in worldbuilding.
That is, creating a timeline along with a new geopolitics is not an easy feat. One is often tempted to simply extrapolate from the daily facts, also doing a bit of research to fill in the expected blanks. Anglo-American writers, however, tend to put the US in the center of the discussions, even fifty or a hundred years from now. Keep in mind I´m not saying it´s a flaw, but maybe, with all the world conflicts and also the global response to them, both via heinous terrorist acts or by means of meetings and summits such as the World Social Forum, it´s time to acknowledge the existence of other global powers, both good and bad, some of them intent on dialogue, some not, but different cultures which finally came to the forefront, and just can´t be ignored anymore. Any science fiction story that tries to circumvent this by putting the US (ou even the European Union) still in the vanguard of progress after 2020 or 2030 is risking all its money in an old, tired horse. (A recent example I´ll write about later is the Time Odyssey series written by late master Arthur C. Clarke with Stephen Baxter, where, in 2037, US still take the lead, and major conflicts simply doesn´t seem to be happening, aside from minor conflagrations in Afghanistan.)
Earth in 2009 C.E. is a strange place. And I´m not even mentioning the conflict in Gaza: we are living in a world where people do care more about their smartphones and computers than with their neighbor - but then, human beings were always like that, weren´t they? Aside from that, we are witnessing a paradigm shift (seriously, this is no management-level pep talk) from the days of well-centered governments with agendas written in stone to more fluid ones (or liquid, if we want to use the term coined by Zygmunt Bauman).
Extrapolation to the near future is now more difficult than it ever was. Only now we are really starting to assimilate this major change, following the quotidian actions of the younger generations who follow the lead of Richard Stallman (the father of copyleft) and Bruce Sterling ("information wants to be free") and who are taking the future in their hands. They are in control - or at least they are really trying, and that´s something we didn´t see since the Paris barricades of May 1968 (an epochal event that unfolded in several countries, including Brazil and Japan).
All this friction and its consequences are present in Edelman´s books, even though they take place (very wisely) in the far future. The discontents of our civilization are very much alive in the world he created circa four hundred years in the future. Starting with the geopolitical arena, which is not restricted to a country anymore, because the concept of countries has just disapparead, to be substituted by a new, updated version of ancient city-states. This fragmentation (or better, this rearrangement of the pieces of the puzzle) is much more convincing than to expect that any of the current world powers will continue to prevail for so long.
But some things doesn´t seem to change ever - and that´s what Edelman shows us in the opening of Infoquake.
The epigraph, borrowed from Karel Capek´s R.U.R., should serve as a caveat lector:
The product of an engineer is technically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of nature.
Of course, such saying must be taken with a grain of salt. In the play, who says this sentence is the owner of Rossum´s Universal Robots, trying to justify his work. In the end, though, his work will be so close to perfection (by human cultural standards, that is) that the robots develop autonomous intelligences and destroy humankind.
Infoquake is not about the Frankenstein Complex, but about Faust. Natch (only Natch, no last name) is a famous programmer and owner of Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, and his only concern at the moment we first see him is to be Number One on Primo´s, a kind of Fortune 500 for developers of bio/logics applications.
The infodump starts right in the beginning, and it´s almost perfectly intelligible. We can understand and relate to the situation right away - it´s a corporate meeting. The SFnal element is in everything around Natch and his employees, Horvil and Jara, both of whom aren´t in Natch´s apartment in the flash, but in multi, a mix of virtual and telepresence projection. Along with this, we soon notice that bio/logics is the next step of nanotechnology, for they can download almost anything they want to their systems, from research data to patches that emulate behaviors and stimulate body and mind (apps like PokerFace and NiteFocus would certainly have a market right now).
Natch´s Fiefcorp is specializing in creating some of the best bio/logics apps ever in the Data Sea (the Web of the future, much more pervasive and efficient than the Internet), and his main goal in the beginning is just to render the competition obsolete.
But things doesn´t happen the way Natch wants. He will be Number One on Primo´s, but then it won´t matter anymore, because he will be involved in something much more interesting - specially to him. Natch is an orphan who had to open his way through the bio/logics market using all kinds of strategies - and he couldn´t care less for ethics. Even though Natch is our protagonist, he is very far from being a hero, or a good guy. He is a shark. But, then, who is a good guy in the corporate world?
But all his competence and attitude will not go unnoticed. Margaret Surina, the heiress of Creed Surina, one of the most prominent organizations of his time, becomes very interested in Natch, and coopts him to help her launch a brand-new technology called MultiReal, which combines Multi projection with quantum manipulation of probabilities. Naturally, there´s no thing as a free lunch: Natch will pay a very high price for this offering. This first novel ends with a terrible event called the infoquake, a lethal burst of energy that disrupts the bio/logic networks and causes a huge damage all over the world. Natch is one of the suspects behind the infoquake, and he will have to prove his innocence.
Infoquake provides us not only with a good, well-thought narrative, with convincing dialogue and characters (the plights of Natch remember, in a way, those of Victor Hugo or Émile Zola´s characters, and that´s a compliment - Edelman manages to create realistic figures almost to the point of melodrama, but keeping a balance so they have internal coherence, filled with purpose but being at the same time contradictory in their choices and actions. (The relationship between Jara and Natch is a vivid example of this inner tension.)
In Multireal, the reader is swept right to the eye of the hurricane. This time, the epigraph is from Walt Whitman´s Song of Myself:
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Natch is missing, and he is wanted as a dangerous felon by the Defense and Wellness Council, which is (I´m quoting from the excellent glossary at the end of both novels) "the governmental entity responsible for military, security, and intelligence operations throughout the system." Meanwhile, Margaret Surina, grand-daughter of the great Sheldon Surina, creator of bio/logics and daughter of Marcus Surina, researcher of the science of teleportation, must fend off the attacks of High Executive Len Borda (who may have something to do with Marcus´s untimely death many years back) and who want to take control of Creed Surina for political and economic purposes.
By then, the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp, created by Natch and Margaret to exploit MultiReal technology, is all but finished, his members dead of disbanded across the globe. But every member of the former fiefcorp, that is, Horvil, Jana, and the newbies Merri and Benyamin, will do their best not to lose face and to survive all this, under the new leadership of Jana.
Things will converge to a major showdown between Natch, Len Borda, and a figure from Natch´s past, an ex-colleague who he almost killed as a child and with whom he now decided to make a very risky alliance. MultiReal ends in a clever cliffhanger, making the reader crave for the third and last book of the series, Geosynchron, due to early 2010.
Infoquake and MultiReal are very refreshing novels. For one thing, their characters are not twodimensional. They don´t function like clockwork, because this is just what you can´t do when creating believable characters. Jorge Luis Borges used to say that you can´t explain everything to perfection, because then the story ends up being unbelievable. You must always leave some space to chance. Or to a pseudo-random sort of attitude, for that matter.
While William Gibson was interested in obtaining aesthetical and narrative effects, his friend Bruce Sterling was more into politics. Edelman took this Sterling-esque trend and stretched it as far as he could - and he did a hell of a job.
Because Edelman focus in economics. Which is always a great thing to think about in business, because almost all the far future novels we read use to focus in the social and historical aspects of humankind (or our relationship to alien species), but very few turn its attention to the economical aspects of future worlds. Few books that do it successfully come to my mind now: Kim Stanley Robinson´s Mars trilogy and Jack Vance´s The Languages of Pao are good examples.
Many authors like to create a universe where not everything is explained. This because they intend to explain it fully in further installments or simply to maintain the suspense (or the suspension of disbelief). David Louis Edelman´s Jump 225 Trilogy has been compared so far to Dune. Frank Herbert´s magnum opus has certainly several points in common with Edelman´s trilogy, specially in the visible part, as in the glossary, for example.
But, aside from that, Edelman´s story doesn´t really have so much in common with Dune. Herbert deliberately created a universe so distant in the future that he end up creating interstices between which everybody could write something to fill in the many blanks. (That is, by the way, what Brian Herbert, with Kevin J. Anderson, have been exploiting for the past decades - although I would discuss the quality of some of their stories, I´m also ready to admit, as a Dune fan, that I´ve been reading it all along. But, as a fan, everything goes.)
This is not the case here. In Infoquake and Multireal, Edelman has strived for a well-thought, really thorough examination of politics and society of the universe he created. A good writer can do no less when setting out to do something in that level.
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