One of the enduring appeals of good science fiction is that it
allows us to glimpse the future before having lived it, kind of
like trying it on for size. Science fiction off the planet
or too far in the future fails in this regard, but possesses other
allures. Near-future science fiction, like this book, is
better for imagining how your grandchildren will live.
THE MOCKING PROGRAM is set in Namerica, an amalgamation of
Southwest USA and Mexico that has been turned into one sprawling
industrial park called the Montezuma Strip. It is about a
police inspector with Robo-Man biomechanical extensions that make
him nearly invulnerable. He is also an intuit, a highly
sensitive individual who can telepathically sense when he is lied
to or given an incomplete story. But of course the bad guys
have high-tech tools as well. In the course of a routine
homicide investigation, Inspector Angel Cardenas visits a house
that is booby-trapped to explode and kill him. He narrowly
escapes and tracks the surviving residents, who have fled, to a
nature park in Central America where all manner of simians live,
including simians that have been made as intelligent as humans by
genetic engineering experimentation. The killers, who had
initially murdered and gutted the stepfather who once lived in
that house, are also on the track of his wife and 12-year-old
step-daughter. The step-daughter is a tecant, a technological
savant, and has been used by her real father, the villain of the
piece, to store in her almost infinite memory all the techniques
and records required for his criminal enterprises. He wants
her back, and dispatches assassins/kidnappers to the simian park
to fetch her. Inspector Cardenas must save the daughter and
break through the levels of subterfuge that cloak the father's
criminal schemes.
In the course of his investigation, Cardenas moves through the
brave new world that free trade has wrought. Think of Las
Vegas as an industrial park, with tightly-secured workers and
renegade groups of ne'er-do-wells who cannot or will not fit in,
so have been relegated to the sex parlors and stimstick clubs of
the Strip, or the underground tunnels that service the great
technological manufacturing plants above. Cardenas befriends
the girl and slowly devises a scheme to neutralize her
father. To his surprise, he finds out that the father has
already died, but has initiated an automatic program that can only
be stopped by his command; with his death, the program will be as
relentless as any robot, unceasing until it completes its mission
or is destroyed.
One of the secondary joys of this novel is Foster's liberal use of
a high tech version of Spanglish, the newly-evolved language of
Namerica. VERDAD is the word used when one wants to agree with
something: "It's the truth." VERDES are ecological
activists, or greens. SANJUANA is the arcoplex comprising
San Diego and Tijuana. NONZAFADO is an adjective describing
people who are out of it, not part of the "in" crowd.
SIRYORE is a male honorific that combines Sir and Senor.
FELEON is a really bad person, a combination of felon and feon,
Mexican slang for an ugly sucker. DISONY is the giant
Disney-Sony multinat. Working through a made-up language
makes the early pages rather slow going, but once the reader gets
the hang of it (assisted by a glossary at the end), it becomes
local color for an intriguing story that pushes both the social
and technological envelopes.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer |
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