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Neo-opsis Review
Project Maldon
By
Chris Atack
NY: Baen, 1997. 375pp
ISBN0-671-87786-0
Chris Atack's Project Maldon, is a surprisingly
good read. Indeed, I was so surprised that I decided to go to the trouble of
actually writing a review. I hope to convince you to rush out and buy a copy of
this debute novel, in spite of the apparently good reasons not to.
I must confess that I had originally bought the book
only out of a sense of completion: I try to keep my Canadian sf library up to
date. (That, and because Mr. Atack turned out to be standing next to me when I
asked the clerk about new Canadian sf, and I was too embarrassed to reject his
book with him actually standing there, watching.)
I admit I really wanted to put the book back. The
cover art -- two poorly drawn stealth bombers apparently attacking a space
station, complete with firery explosions -- is not what you would call
promising. The artwork is also, as it turns out, completely irrelevant: there aren't
any space battles in the book. (Okay; there is a rather tense board meeting in
Earth orbit, but I don't think that counts.) Worse even than the artwork is the
typography: "Project Maldon" juts out of the cover like some cheezie
movie marque. Even the author's name works against him, summoning up visions of
glorified violence and hacknyed mayhem. This is not, I am sorry to say, a cover
that would draw a second glance from even the most fanatical devotee of
milateristic space opera.
But never one to judge a book by its cover, I turned
to the blurb. Where it appears that Project Maldon is yet another
redundant entry in the seemingly endless procession of cyberpunk cash-ins: the
dystopian future; the god-like AI, the slow slide towards Armageddon. Gibson's
once-original vision has been rehashed by so many talentless hacks, that I
swear I'll give up sf if I have to read one more of these annoyingly
predictable, formulaic, mass market, processed cheese substitutes. Cyberpunk is
an idea whose time has past, okay folks? I mean I teach in a town where half
the population still thinks that giving women the vote was a bad idea, and yet
even my most isolated rural students routinely debate the finer details of
artificial intelligence on their web pages. I'm telling you, this isn't sf any
longer, it now belongs to the genre of "bad mainstream bestsellers". I
fully expect the next cyberpunk offering to be by Danielle Steele.
Front cover art and back cover blurb notwithstanding,
however, this first novel is well worth your attention. Atack's strong
narrative skills and engaging style elevate Project Maldon above the run
of the cyber-mill, and the familiarity of the Canadian locales and future
history added to my enjoyment. (That the story is told from the perspective of
a dashing sociologist didn't exactly hurt either. I haven't enjoyed a
sociologist as protagonist this much since Chad C. Mulligan in Brunner's Stand
On Zanzbar.) Drawn into the action, I found myself reluctant to put the
book down again, even though much of it is Canadianly-depressing.
Atack is clearly carrying on a long tradition of
Canadian sf. There is no happy ending, for example, no American-style
saved-by-the-calvalry rescue. Almost everybody we care about gets killed, the
good guys lose, and our protagonists fails to achieve his major goals. In the
end, this turns out not to matter terribly, because most of the battles he has
been fighting were the wrong ones anyway. The ending is typically Canadian in
its ambiguity: our side didn't win, but neither did the bad guys. Are things
better or worse than when the book started? We can't tell, and won't know until
history passes judgement years later, though it is already clear that almost no
one got what they thought they wanted.
Atack's future is depressingly familiar and
believable, though the strong narrative carries us past the bleak cityscapes at
a sufficiently page-turning pace that you'll be hooked anyway. Unlike many
books set in the near future, Atack resists the temptation of spelling out the
details of that future history. None of Atack's characters can really
understand how the country came to be in such a terrible mess, which is both
more believable and more emotionally satisfying for the reader than any pat
explanation would be. As a sociologist, I almost always find authors'
predictions to be annoyingly niave, but Atack simply avoids the whole issue by
sticking to nicely vague allusions, and the occasional cliched encyclopedia
entry.
I also really appreciated that Atack left much of the
old world quietly in place, untouched by the developments around them. The
protagonist's office is next door to a soap factory, for example, which
continues to pump out detergent pretty much as it always has, even while
everything else around it is going to hell.
There are a lot of such nice touches in this book.
Although admittedly a novel in the cyberpunk tradition, it is sufficiently
original to warrant attention, particularly given that it is Atack's first time
out. Project Maldon is easily comparable to Robert Sawyer's first novel,
Golden Fleece, and might even be the best first since Sean Stewart's Passion
Play. Atack is, therefore, clearly worth watching.
Review by Robert Runté.
Originally published in Under the Ozone Hole.
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