2015-12-24 09:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineFor a guy with as big and foul a mouth as Cherk Wendigo has on the twitternets and interwubs, it's no surprise that folks I get along with enjoy his writing (I peruse his blog on occasion, and sometimes trade comic volleys on the twitters), but this is the first time I've picked up his fiction. I mean, a guy who can incite the racist, homophobic portions of Star Wars fandom into such a frothy lather is probably somebody I'd enjoy having a literary beer with, right?
Zer0es is a fairly straightforward "AI goes rogue" story, told from the perspective of a group of tech-savvy folks who are dragooned into government service (and a couple of the government agents doing the dragooning). There are hacking events, chase scenes, shootouts - all the stuff of summer action movies, though it never feels so big that the ominous end-of-the-world implications it hints at seem to be happening, despite background details that suggest this is exactly what's going on. It just didn't seem to have the doomy immediacy for me, as a reader, that it seemed to warrant, because the characters themselves didn't seem to be greatly imperiled after a pre-climax OH THE FUCK YOU DIDN'T, Y'ALL moment.... the fact that the tension didn't ratchet up from that, but seemed to back off and not regain traction until the denouement (and, even then, it still felt somewhat small and lower-stakes than maybe it could have)... I was left feeling like there was a bigger payoff that didn't quite reach the page.
There are a lot of individually-fleshed motivations, though they tend towards being "one broad stroke per character, with a little shading on both edges" - there are a lot of guilt and redemption motivations, a nontrivial amount of justified mistrust of Big Brother and US policy in general, and a deus ex-ex machina character I had a hard time reconciling with the rest of the worldbuilding. There was some good action, some good conflict, some good atmosphere, and enough handwavium at the actual hacking to provide plausible deniability (because if there is one thing hacking stories almost invariably fuck up, it's how generally uninteresting it is to anyone not actually sitting at the keyboard or reading the chatlogs; Wendig smartly pulled the camera back enough to keep this from being a stumbling block).
Overall: Good with popcorn and a soft drink, if a bit lighter and fluffier than my tastes currently run. Five bits out of a byte.
Zer0es is a fairly straightforward "AI goes rogue" story, told from the perspective of a group of tech-savvy folks who are dragooned into government service (and a couple of the government agents doing the dragooning). There are hacking events, chase scenes, shootouts - all the stuff of summer action movies, though it never feels so big that the ominous end-of-the-world implications it hints at seem to be happening, despite background details that suggest this is exactly what's going on. It just didn't seem to have the doomy immediacy for me, as a reader, that it seemed to warrant, because the characters themselves didn't seem to be greatly imperiled after a pre-climax OH THE FUCK YOU DIDN'T, Y'ALL moment.... the fact that the tension didn't ratchet up from that, but seemed to back off and not regain traction until the denouement (and, even then, it still felt somewhat small and lower-stakes than maybe it could have)... I was left feeling like there was a bigger payoff that didn't quite reach the page.
There are a lot of individually-fleshed motivations, though they tend towards being "one broad stroke per character, with a little shading on both edges" - there are a lot of guilt and redemption motivations, a nontrivial amount of justified mistrust of Big Brother and US policy in general, and a deus ex-ex machina character I had a hard time reconciling with the rest of the worldbuilding. There was some good action, some good conflict, some good atmosphere, and enough handwavium at the actual hacking to provide plausible deniability (because if there is one thing hacking stories almost invariably fuck up, it's how generally uninteresting it is to anyone not actually sitting at the keyboard or reading the chatlogs; Wendig smartly pulled the camera back enough to keep this from being a stumbling block).
Overall: Good with popcorn and a soft drink, if a bit lighter and fluffier than my tastes currently run. Five bits out of a byte.
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If so, I'm curious how Zer0es compares, because I never really go a sense of escalation in that one, either, despite the fast pace of the prequel-but-not Blasphemy.
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Currently reading:
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And you may know Preston as half of Preston & Child, the guys who gave us The Relic and Reliquary, of which they made films of. They're good at speculative fiction, and their longest work together is a series built around an FBI agent with very unusual methods, Agent Pendergast.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloysius_Pendergast
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