Dani Kollin

So... meh. I give it three stars instead of two because it is a debut, and first books are (almost) always a bit rough.

Good stuff:

1.) I like new authors. New voices are good.
2.) There is a good story here... though, see below.

Main problems:

1.) Getting clubbed over the the head with repeated, repeated, repeated socio-political-economic talk; it's not as bad as e.g. Ayn Rand (maybe 3 - 4 pages is the worst here, no 20-ish pages diatribes), but that's not exactly praise.
2.) Paper thin characters; especially female characters. Even the nemesis is barely a caricature.
3.) Okay, this is just a pet peeve. "Narticles." Really? Don't coin words just to coin words. Man... "narticles." Why?
4.) Gaping holes in history. This isn't a problem per se, except the book goes into the history of this future in some detail. Key things in history don't make any sense: the 'VR Plauges' wiped out most of humanity because first world people all became, essentially, helpless hyper-addicts who died of starvation. Without the economic activity of the first world, the third world all starved. (Wait, what?) China and India and Turkey (I forget, actually, who the third player was) all nuked each other. (Really, just when the US and Europe self-destruct, then China and India decide to go to war?) What was left of the world was dominated by the 'Alaskan Federation', which united the world by force. Everyone is, apparently, some kind of American, just futurized (just how much ethnic cleansing was involved in the Alaskan Federation's take-over...?) One wonders what all of non-third world Africa, South America, Australia, etc. were doing, even in this skewed world history.

Oddly enough, this was one of the things that bothered me the most about this book: it's not just the Ayn Randishness, or the thin characters, or the ridiculous portrayal of current (real) society and government... its that I can't help but feel a kind of not-so-subtle... Xenophobia? No. Rascim? No. I don't think those, per se.... but something. It's the hyper-American-centric libertarian fantasy of it all... so jingoistic. That's it. It's the barely concealed American libertarian jingoism.

It so starkly jars with the real world that using the real world as a touch point in the book just keeps 'breaking the illusion' that this kind of SciFi needs.

Damn, I think I just convinced myself to lower this to two stars.… (altro)

I had a real on again, off again relationship with this book. For parts of it, I was forcing myself to go on. But other parts were very engaging. Then I got to the completely lame ending and I really gotta wonder if this book was produced in a hurry after the first one in the series unexpectedly sold well and a trilogy was requested by the publishers... On the other hand, I haven't read the first book either - maybe it was just as lame a cliffhanger.
This is barely a three book on average, think stretches of 2 and peaks of 4 here and there.… (altro)

Pretty good. There is a very interesting premise: A man from roughly our time goes into suspended animation and is re-animated several hundred years in the future, where veritably every person has sold stock in himself/herself.

Stock is like debt, except that instead of having to pay your creditors back a fixed amount, you have to pay them a certain fraction of your income. Someone who owns 1% of the stock of a corporation is entitled to receive 1% of the corporation's profits. Also - and much more importantly - a corporation's stockholders have the right to vote on certain decisions the corporation makes. If you own 1% of the stock, you control 1% of the votes.

Now imagine that other people had the right to make these decisions for you. For example, in this fictional universe, if you want to be a musician, but your stockholders think it's in their best interest for you to become an actuary, they can vote to force you to be an actuary! Horrible!

Our hero, having been born centuries before this became prevalent, is one of very few people who has no stockholders who own a stake in him. Some people really don't like this example of person who has the right to do whatever he wants, without being ensnared in the constraining legal and financial web of stock ownership. They fear the masses will be inspired by the example of this "Unincorporated Man" and will press to end stock ownership of individuals.

That's the basic set-up and conflict. I don't want to give any more specifics, to avoid spoilers.

Other comments:

• The main villain is one of the better-drawn ones I've seen in a long time.
• There is a very good surprise near the end.
• It would have been 4 stars, but for some didacticism, some incompletely-thought-out economics and politics, and a love angle that I somehow just didn't find interesting.
• Also, the divagation on virtual reality seemed like a setup for something that would reappear later in a big way, but it never did.
• And the ending is blatantly unresolved, plainly to set up a sequel, because we don't find out what happens to the villain. (Update: It turns out that there are three sequels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
• Overall, good, and the end seems to come faster than the 479 pages would suggest.… (altro)