The conclusion to A Song Called Youth trilogy ends with a bang... or rather, a very gruesome whimper. That's not to say it's sad, but after so much dystopian reality so close to what we have now and a rich and nasty strain of ultimate fascism threaded through the text, I feel like we've been living it.

Okay. Maybe I'm overexaggerating a LITTLE. But still, it's chilling to see a truly pan-racist fascism crop up among the religious right, the generally hateful, the fearful, and the power-hungry.

This one ends with freedom fighters and selective germ-warfare, an antidote to the disinformation machine, and the few good men (and women) standing up against the face of evil.

All in all, it's still an epic and sprawling fight against fascism worldwide and on a colony off the planet. Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll punk against the machine, baby. :)

Oh, and there's a very nice cyberpunk Plateau going on here, man. Counterculture for the win! :)

Honestly, tho, I think the most important thing to realize here is that this trilogy is just as timely now as it was back in the mid-eighties when it was first published. In context, I'm actually pretty astonished. Even more astonished than I would be during a re-read of Neuromancer. Some things age better than others, and this one has aged fine.

A fine non-wine cocktail of cocaine and hard-liquor. ;) ( )

My reaction to reading this novel in 2002. Spoilers follow.

Like the first two books in the Song Called Youth trilogy, this book shows Shirley’s skill and inventiveness in creating a near future in a fair amount of depth, has dated rather badly, and shows good and bad in its literary skill and political sophistication. Shirley, here, comes across almost as inventive as Bruce Sterling in creating cyberpunk near futures and more politically sophisticated than Sterling's Islands in the Net.

In this book, he introduces us to the hacker underground who interacts with the media Grid and also, on occasion, jacks themselves up with electronic interfaces with implanted chips. Sterling usually seems to know something about computer technology and usually makes his future tech seem plausible. However, his brain-biological interfaces (we had seen the “extractors” in previous volumes -- machines that can read and record a person’s thoughts and memories) via implanted chips don’t seem all that plausible even less so than the brain wave readers of William Gibson’s cyberspace. Still, I liked his automated military hardware and jails.

I suspect Shirley’s whole trilogy was completed prior to 1985 (though I understand it has been recently modified for a new edition) but the publication of the second two volumes was delayed when Eclipse’s publisher, Bluejay, when bankrupt and Shirely had to switch to Questar Science Fiction. Thus, the book may gave been written prior to 1985 which explains a mention to a 1989 student-led revolution in China. Of course, the Soviet Union is dead now for ten years and so couldn’t be a factor in Shirely’s future 2021. The fundamentalist Islamic arcology of Badoit was interesting, its underground location perfect for sealing its inhabitants physically and morally and culturally from the rest of the world (outside media sources can’t penetrate underground and the government controls the above ground antennas). However, Shirley having Badoit swear off the Jihad tendancies such groups actually exhibit dates the narrative (though he correctly captures Islam’s many factions).

Shirely’s prose is often interesting in its descriptions. His characterization is often good including the psychological drives behind the sado-masochist sex of Torrence and Bibisch (less so the earth-goddess fetish of Jerome for the obese Bettina and definitely less so with Witcher’s odd relationship to his voyeuristic sex-toys/bodyguards) and the guilt that Torrence and Bargeman feel about surviving when so many comrades and other people have died.

On the minus side, Shirley can’t resist the old liberal, especially cyberpunk, cliche that mere knowledge and news will change the world. When his hackers broadcast their montage of the Second Alliance holocaust onto the Grid (and into the “entelechy” -- basically a version of the pseudoscience idea of morphogenetic fields), the world is changed. In the real world, people have all sorts of defenses that prevent them from being swayed or changed by news, even true news. Shirley the ex-musician also can’t resist another music scene, this time with Jerome. And the doomed Rickenharp, from the first volume, playing atop the Arche de’Triumphe makes another appearance in the propaganda broadcast. Having Torrence and Claire (who constantly finds herself attracted to men with qualities her hard nosed, rationalistic feminism, has qualms about was a nice touch) get back together again after Torrence loses Bibisch and Claire loses Russ Parker was cliched and convenient too.

Though this trilogy is an extreme example of what some have seen as a defining concern of American sf with race, Shirley proves himself no knee-jerk liberal. In the character of New Resistance patron Witcher, we see an all to plausible example of the murderous drive toward a just and rational utopia -- which only needs a few billion people to be murdered. As Stoner says after hearing Witcher explain how the world will be cleaner, more racially just, and better ordered after 90% die from a virus he bought from the SA, he’s a liberal version of the SA’s fascism. NR fighter Pasolini (who makes Bargeman and Torrence uneasy) is a believable figure too. Seeing humans only as units, the deliberate killing of innocents to ostensibly better the lot of even more she unleashes a non-racially specific plague in Berlin and kills hundreds of thousands. Steinfeld, the hero of the trilogy, the NR’s organizing figures, turns out, in the end to have been corrupted by her way of thinking and doesn’t effectively stop her plan to unleash the virus and blame it on the SA. (And the lie that the SA released the virus is part of the final propaganda broadcast though only Steinfeld knows its a lie.) It is his guilt which leads him to make an unnecessary suicide charge on the surviving SA hierarchy.

Shirley also does a nice job showing that personal matters influence political matters. Barrabas’ attraction for Jo Ann leads him to defect from the SA with the knowledge of its viral genocide. This is also somewhat reflected in Watson’s undoing partly being the result of his dislike of the fanatical boy Jebediah (originally designed to be the avatar, by Randy Crandall, of a new SA man) and having him murdered. Throughout the book, Shirley shows the SA’s philosophy of racial superiority undermining it with overconfidence and underestimating non-white NR operatives.

In some ways, this book is an extreme example, with its “entelechy” and the Grid and the SA’s sociobiological experiments in fomenting racism, of viewing the world as an information system. Here that extends to viewing human behavior as a data system manipulated with the right input. (There are shades of this in other cyberpunk works who mainly look at the manipulative power of advertising.) Cooper’s work, as Barrabas points out, shows how anyone can be made racist through pushing buttons everyone has. Smoke notes that the Collective Mind (whose existence is never conclusively verified in the story) usually holds only truths and that one of these is the brotherhood of all man. Shirley doesn’t intend it, but you could argue that “racism” is a universally valid belief not held by this Collective Mind. After all, as Cooper notes in the second volume, racism is a logical response, in drastic circumstances, to potentially threatening strangers who will be looking out for their group’s self-interest under the same imperatives.

All in all, a complex, thoughtful cyberpunk trilogy even if the approximately 15 years since it was written has dated it. ( )