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Kai Wai Cheah

Autore di Hollow City (Song of Karma Book 1)

3 opere 5 membri 2 recensioni

Opere di Kai Wai Cheah

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Unmasked: Song of Karma book 2 ended up being a very 2020 book. While the events of this book are simply the inevitable consequences of everything that was setup in Hollow City, it feels very much like today with a highly politicized trial of a police officer for a death in the line of duty leading to racially charged riots and civil unrest. Of course, there are also a bunch of people running around with superpowers to spice things up.

Halo City, Adam’s home and the setting for Unmasked, faces a major crisis in the trial of Adam Song. Much like Adam, HC is locked into an endless cycle of violence because of the consequences of past decisions. Also, much like Adam, it cannot alter this destiny because it is unwilling or unable to change itself in order that justice and mercy might kiss. The fundamentally unsatisfactory situation with both rampant lawlessness and harsh policing continues simply because the people in charge prefer it that way.

Political power in Halo City comes not from the consent of the governed, nor from technocratic managerial excellence. Rather, it accrues to anyone who can deliver the goods. Accordingly, we see hints that bribery, corruption, and blackmail are the hidden springs that move events within HC. In the past, this all might have even been broadly acceptable to the people at large, as machine politics was often effective at delivering jobs for the boys and protection from rivals. However, decades later, the system has ossified into racial and ethnic enclaves beholden to businesses whose primary advantage is how well-connected they are.

Something has to change, but change would mean a loss of power and influence for people who are very much used to the status quo, and have the ability to stave off the reckoning, at least for a little while longer. So nothing ever changes. Forget it Adam, this is Halo City.

Adam, in the other hand, is portrayed more sympathetically than his city and its masters. However, Adam is nonetheless at the beginning of this book precisely what he is accused of being: a vigilante who solves his problems by killing them first. The dark humor of the situation is that Adam, dutiful as he is, would likely not have crossed the line that he did had his employers backed him up. He was, after all, following their rules and doing their bidding when he killed Emmanuel Ruiz and Sofia Vega in the course of serving a warrant.

Adam wouldn’t even have the money to pay for his lawyer except that he relieved some mid-level criminals of their ill-gotten gains in the last book. Even when he goes rogue, he ends up doing much the same things he did before: shaking down small-fry for information, seizing assets from those unlucky enough to fall in his grasp, and killing those who threaten him or those he cares about. The difference is that once Adam is out on his own, he reverts to his natural sense of justice, rather than the rules of the system in which he is embedded.

This tension in Adam’s life, between procedural justice of fair play and following the rules, and a sense of equity or just deserts, is both important and utterly unresolved. This theme is heightened in the middle section of the book, when Adam spends a great deal of time protecting a Buddhist monk he knows from kidnapping. I don’t know enough of Buddhism to know whether Cheah plays this part well, but I respect his portrayal of Catholics here and elsewhere, so I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Adam Song’s unfailing sense of justice drives him to do what he does, but it also will not let him rest. The doctrine of karma says that violence is repaid with violence, no matter what its justification. Thus, Adam has no rest, as his nature cannot allow him to sit by when violence is done to others, which brings on endless cycles of strife. While in some ways Adam wants freedom from this cycle, he cannot really act otherwise.

Something we didn’t really get in book 1 is a sense of how the various books in the Heroes Unleashed work together. Halo City is embedded in a world where Primes are a feature of everyday life. With book 2, we see how events in the broader world begin to affect what happens to Adam, and hints of a grander story lurking in the background. Adam is not as alone in his struggles as he probably feels himself to be.

What that means, I suppose we shall see.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
bespen | Dec 10, 2020 |
Hollow City is the second book in the Heroes Unleashed universe I have reviewed. I picked up this copy on my own, so you can’t blame the author for my opinions.

My opinion is: I like this book. Adam Song is a fascinating character, and I’ll delve into why at some length. Adam’s interests and profession also make this book a kind of gun pr0n, which is fun for me since I am also interested in firearms. Finally, I am enjoying the Heroes Unleashed take on superheroes, which doesn’t make them mundane, but at least routine. Not everyone has super powers, but you better take the possibility into account when making any kind of serious plan.

I doubt this review would pass a strict spoiler policy, but I’ll try to keep it under control. Consider yourself warned.

Let’s get into why I find Adam so interesting. Adam Song is a cop. Not just any cop, but a member of the elite Special Tactics and Rescue team. He is a doorkicker, a life-taker, and a heart-breaker. Well, probably not the last, now that I think about it. In so far as Adam has killed an average of one person a year in the course of his duties with the Hollow City Police Department, he definitely qualifies as a life-taker. But he lacks the dark triad traits that make murderers and terrorists the recipients of gushing fan mail in prison. If anyone’s heart is going to be broken, it is probably Adam’s.

Adam also has a secret. He is a Prime, the Heroes Unleashed version of a superhero. His powers are precisely what elevated him to the STAR unit. At the beginning of Hollow City, Adam has been a cop for six years, but a member of STAR for only eighteen months. Which just happens to coincide with the time since he gained his powers. This is because STAR, like Detroit SWAT, specializes in no-knock raids. But in Hollow City, unlike Detroit, the guy on the other side might have superpowers too, so HCPD makes sure to even the odds by having a Prime on the entry team. In that capacity, he goes by his codename Amp, and wears a mask when he is working.

Many men in Adam’s position would probably be insufferably arrogant, but Adam strikes me as a quiet, unassuming type. In part, this is a matter of self-protection, since his public persona would be liable to reprisals if his enemies knew where he lived, but also I get the feeling Adam would have acted the same way in public if there were no danger. His primary motivation is not fame or money, but duty.

His dutifulness is the prime hinge of his character, and the source of the two major conflicts Adam experiences in the book. In each case, he feels duty-bound to do two-incompatible things. In a sense, his life [and this book] is a quest to reconcile these moral imperatives.

First, Adam is first-generation Chinese immigrant. His parents brought him to America when he was thirteen, by way of Singapore and Hong Kong. He was old enough to remember his previous life, but also young enough to imprint on his new home. His parents have definite ideas about what constitutes honest employment, and neither his previous job [Marine] nor his current job [Cop], meet that definition. In the straightforward expectation of his culture, duty would require him to follow his parent’s wishes, and work in the family business.

Aaron and I were outsiders. Always had been, always were. In Singapore, primary schoolers made fun of our funny accents and weird speech patterns. In Halo City high schoolers did the same. Everywhere we went, the old rules no longer applied. We had to learn quickly, adapt even faster.

Aaron kept his head down, submerged himself into the local Chinese community, and followed in Father’s footsteps. I almost did the same, until I saw my first USMC recruiting advertisement. In the Marines, I saw a way to become a man. I wanted to prove that I was an American, more American than everyone else.

In America, duty primarily means service to the nation, rather than the family. So when Adam decides that he wants to be a good American, he does the thing that is expected of him as an American. He travels to distant lands, meets interesting people, and kills them.

This decision flows into his second conflict, which is secondary to his character, but primary to the plot. After Adam gets out of the Marines, his duty to the nation fulfilled, he naturally flows down to the next lower level of loyalty, and joins the Halo City Police Department. In America, the basic motto of any police department is To Protect and to Serve. It just happens that Adam is really really good at protecting the public by shooting bad guys in the face.

Which is exactly what he is hired to do once he becomes a Prime. Adam’s history with the HCPD prior to the STAR unit is a bit less explored in the book, but we do know that Adam was the trigger puller in more than one OIS [officer involved shooting] before he joined the high risk STAR unit. It is possible that this was overlooked in the overwhelming need to put an already employed Prime officer into the high risk STAR unit, but I suspect it is more likely that this was seen as a feature and not a bug.

At least until he became a political liability by killing an admittedly dangerous man [a Prime with the ability to shoot anything he pointed at] who was also the son of a gangster in the process of crossing the line between crime lord and pillar of the community. When Adam was in the Marines, this was his job, full stop. You killed anyone who was dangerous, and you did so in a way that maximized your odds of coming home at the end of the day. This is uncomplicated when you can identify your targets as enemy combatants, and potentially explosive then they are American citizens who are innocent until proven guilty.

In this way, Adam serves as the personification of the militarization of the police in the United States. The actual military is famously forbidden from engaging in police activities by the Posse Comitatus Act, but there is a creeping influence which can probably be measured by looking the kind of uniforms police officers wear, as can be seen by the image above of a no-knock raid training exercise. The fear is that the distinction between accused or suspected criminals and open enemies of the state is being erased.

There is also a positive sense, insofar as the militarization of the police has coincided with a professionalization of the police. Cops used to do pretty much any damn thing they felt like. Now, there is at least a standard to which they are expected to adhere. At the best, this means less chance of death for both the cop and the perp, insofar as options are sought that seek to maximize that outcome.

Adam Song occupies the ground precisely where that question comes into play. A question that is interesting to me is where does the line lie for police work as opposed to war? When is it acceptable to kill a man who might be a danger to public order? Or who is definitely dangerous, but not currently in the act of shooting his victims? For a soldier, that question is relatively simple. You act with maximum force at the first opportunity. For a police officer, the answer is always NO, you cannot kill except when your life or the life of another is directly at risk, or at least that is the moral and legal presumption in our society. What makes this hard is that a lot of former soldiers eventually find themselves in service as cops. Men just like Adam Song.

For Adam Song, what makes a strait-laced cop go rogue is the feeling of betrayal when your superiors throw you to the wolves for doing precisely what they hired you to do. Adam’s job, as Amp, the HCPD Prime, is to serve the warrants on dangerous Primes that would otherwise simply kill all of the arresting officers and then disappear.

This gets even more complicated when your job is to arrest the bad guys that are widely known to be bad, but who of course enjoy the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial. When you mix in Halo City’s high-diversity, low-trust environment, along with a dash of corruption, you get a lot of guys like Adam, who start to feel that the military way has its attractions. Adam clearly loves his city, but he also feels like there are good guys, and bad guys, and he isn’t particularly interested in watching the bad guys take advantage of a system that was designed for a high-trust environment.

Since I happened to read Hollow City at about the same time I read Timothy Zahn’s Dragonback series, I was struck by the differing trajectories the main characters in these books take. Jack Morgan starts as an outlaw, and over the course of the series eventually is reconciled to polite society. Adam Song starts out as a respected member of the community, and ends up becoming exactly what his detractors call him: a rogue cop, a vigilante, and a criminal defendant.

However, in many respects, what each of them do isn’t actually that different. Jack mostly tries to avoid killing, but his symbiont Draycos, the K’da warrior-poet who possesses the rights of judge, jury, and executioner in one person, kills a man in the first book because Draycos seems him commit a murder. This can only loosely be called defense of another, since the man was threatening Jack, but the book makes it clear that Draycos is like a monster of legend, as much greater in combat power than a human as a powerful Prime like Amp is. Also, Jack’s AI guardian, Uncle Virge, does lots of killing, it is just the kind where he shoots down other ships to protect Jack.

Once I realized that, my whole opinion of the weight of the Dragonback series started to shift. There are some real similarities, but also some real differences with Adam Song’s Halo City. Jack Morgan’s universe is a lot further down the path of societal dissolution that Halo City is only starting to tread. Is Adam’s vigilantism worth it if it prevents open slavery and corporations hiring mercenaries to fight literal turf battles over their commercial interests?

Even if we temporarily ignore the question of how probable the odds of success are for Adam’s attempt to stave off further dissolution, this is a worthy question. In the moral and legal framework of the United States, which is clearly the setting of Halo City, which I take to be an analogue of Los Angeles, Adam is pretty clearly beyond the pale. However, the reason I bring in Zahn’s more speculative universe here is that other arrangements that still seem just are imaginable.

Adam is pretty clearly doing what he finds to be his duty, in the circumstances he finds himself. We might judge that he has nonetheless crossed a line that should not be crossed, even if the results are otherwise just. That tension is exactly what makes this book fascinating. I don’t know what Cheah has in mind for Adam after this, but I would like to find out.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
bespen | Apr 26, 2019 |

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