Opinions of a Wolf

Summary:
In an alternate history, the personal fax machine, not computers, became the quintessential technology, and one company, BelisCo, is running much of the United States.  San Jose is now run entirely by BelisCo, and it boasts all the best of modern planned living: adult-only zones, smoking and non-smoking zones, clean and reliable transportation, and legal weed.  Marcus Metiline is a PI in San Jose, and his whole world gets turned upside down when he agrees to take a job for BelisCo itself.

Review:
This is one of my accepted ARCs for 2015, and I went for it due to its interesting slight twist on the noir genre.  I was intrigued at the idea of a PI in an alternate world where fax machines were the status quo instead of PCs. It felt almost like a steampunk. Techpunk? There should be a world for this when the old tech isn’t steam-power.  In any case, although I found the world very interesting and I enjoyed visiting it, the plot left me dissatisfied.

This book is an enjoyable read even when the plot is doing weird things.  The sentences flow smoothly, and the settings and characters are clearly rendered.  I really enjoyed this alternate world.  I liked it so much that I was disappointed by how little time we spend in it.  Marcus is quickly scooped out and plopped into another world, and I didn’t like that one nearly as much or find it as interesting.  The first world Marcus inhabits is creative and new.  The other worlds are more dull and are things I’ve seen before.

It’s difficult to review this book without giving much away, but suffice to say that there is physics in the book, and while I appreciate the fact that science of it is good and well-explained, it also is a physics I’ve seen in scifi many times before, and I don’t think this particular rendering brought anything fresh to the table.

There are three really important characters in the book: Marcus, the owner of BelisCo, and a doctor.  All three of them are male.  This makes the book read a bit like a boys’ club, and it bugged me.  The book would have instantly been more unique and interesting if, say, Marcus had been a hard-boiled woman PI.  When every main character is basically the same (an intelligent white male), it’s just dull.

So, the non-spoiler reason of why I wasn’t into the plot is that I felt it took things just one twist too far, rendering things a bit ridiculous.  If you want more explanation, see the spoiler-filled paragraph below.

*spoilers*
Basically, Marcus finds out that San Jose is some sort of Matrix-like simulation aka not the real world, and he is encouraged to break out of it.  When he does, the buildings of San Jose start falling apart and people are mad at him.  We discover that the reason for this is that the simulation was being done on a bunch of cancer patients.  The science here didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but basically they would live longer if they were in the simulation, giving them more of a chance to beat the cancer.  Everyone entered the simulation through Marcus, and they had to keep him believing it to keep the experiment going.  This whole experiment is highly illegal, and they blow up the building to get rid of the evidence.  There are then hints that there are more worlds and simulations than these.  First, I found the whole we’re in a simulation and this isn’t real life thing to be a very been there done that plot.  It took us out of the much more interesting simulation world and into a computer simulation that I’ve seen before.  The second twist of it actually being cancer treatment and them needing Marcus to stay in the world just sent the whole thing off into left field for me.  Particularly since I found the science of the cancer treatment to be weak compared to the physics earlier.  While I appreciate to others it may read more like a cool idea, to me it just took things on a path from super interesting to I’ve seen this before to wtf was that.  It just really didn’t work for me.
*end spoilers*

Overall, readers who are intrigued by the world in the summary and who don’t mind multiple plot twists and a predominantly male cast will enjoy this read.  It is well-written and interesting, but readers expecting to linger in the fax machine world of the plot summary should know that this world is soon left behind.

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3 out of 5 stars

Length: 114 pages – novella

Source: Kindle copy in exchange for my honest review

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