Summary
Published: 2006
Length: 540 pages
In brief: Futuristic economic thriller combines technology and plot to delicious result.
Rating: 8/10
Edelman’s Infoquake debuted in 2006 to rave reviews. The first book in the Jump 225 trilogy, I stumbled across a recommendation in late 2010. Having not heard anything about it other than this one review, I was a little dubious that it stood up to the hyperbolic acclaim splashed across the inside covers.
After about twenty pages, I realised my doubts had been ill-founded. Infoquake is excellent, a fantastic mashing of hard SF and economic thriller that few have tried and fewer still have succeeded at. Edelman, though, throws the competitive high-pressure worlds of finance and technology together with some ground-breaking ideas and carries everything off with enough pace and pizazz that you don’t realise you’re reading about people running a company until you’re in, and then you’re hooked – BLAM!
Infoquake is set in the middle-future – far enough away that technology has fundamentally changed what we do as humans, yet close enough that societal structures and methods of thinking are familiar. The characters are all recognisable, fluent, and three dimensional. The story sweeps you up and carries you away at an appropriately hectic pace. We meet our hero and secondary characters and immediately identify with their struggles. The story opens with Natch, entrepeneur, programmer, conniving bastard, genius, struggling to reach the top rankings of the future’s equivalent of the Forbes Top 100 Companies list. While his employees try sane measures, Natch throws spanners into everyone’s plans by engaging in ruthless business tactics, superhuman efforts, and blatant manipulation. His eventual successes open up new opportunities for them all, some of which have the lives of millions hanging in the balance.
Worldbuilding
Good Science Fiction is Art, and needs beauty as well as truth to succeed. Edelman has built a beautiful world to host his story. Rich, colourful and convincing, Edelman has gone a step above and beyond what one would expect from a debuting writer. Not only has he provided a plausible and convincing history over several hundred years to detail how humans have gotten to where they are in the novel, he goes beyond the normal date-based timeline that many authors use. Instead, Edelman presents an appendix at the back of the story with milestones set out with an explanatory paragraph. This extends the timeline’s space in the book to beyond the cursory one-page feebleness that many authors deem sufficient. Edelman covers the rise and fall of families, the advent of new technologies, and the formation of the corporations, fiefdoms and political structures that play vital roles in the book. Going into detail like Edelman does saves characters from having to do those awkward info-dumps that are so prevalent at the start of SFF novels.
Technology
The technology we’re given to play with in Infoquake is complex and, for a better word, stunning. Readers with a sense of historical irony know that nanotechnology is our generation’s radiation in terms of pseudoscientific hand-waving. One can easily imagine an author going “Huh, I need something fantastically improbable to happen, or want someone to have superpowers. What can I use…” They scan their eyes down a familiar list of tropes. “No dragons in this story….. No wizards… Nowhere for a nuclear waste dump… Ah ha! Nanobots did it!”, a little hand-waving, and voila, instant plot device. Edelman has, wisely, avoided this temptation.
This brings us neatly to the second point of my fascination with Infoquake. In Edelman’s futuristic world, there is plenty of scope of a fairly standard adventurous SciFi novel. There are villains ready-made, the Ludditic Pharasees who scorn modern technology – there are remote outcasts, like the Islanders, who only use the resources available to them begrudgingly – and there is the all-seeing, all-pervading Council, glaring malevolently at everyone from their castles like a laser-powered Saruman. These are all low-hanging fruit, though. Edelman has something better in store for us.
Edelman takes us on a different journey, with an experience of cut-throat commercial negotiations, the struggle for market share, and hows us how worlds are really changed. His characters struggle, connive, back-stab, lie and slave their way through setback after setback. This works fantastically well on two counts. One, it lets Edelman shift and develop the conflict along the way as Natch and his coterie grow to meet each new challenge. Secondly, it lets us delve deeper and deeper into the technologies that make up the world of Infoquake.
Infoquake revels in a parallel series of advanced technologies. Humans have long become adjusted to having thousands of nanotechnological machines swarm through their bodies, changing the parameters of what it means to be human in all sorts of ways. Stimulants, perception altering, medical diagnosis and repairs, communications. Combinations of intelligent projection networks and human-brain interfaces let people project versions of themselves all over the world, hopping across continents instantly. Teleportation is a real, but prohibitively expensive, technology available in this world. Natch and the others are bio/logic programmers, able to tinker with the building blocks of the programs that run their world. I don’t want to spoil anything, and Edelman does a better job of outlining his inventions than I can, so let me just give you a teaser instead.
Natch could practically hear his bio/logics proctor at the Proud Eagle on his first day at the workbench. Reach into your satchels, pull out a programming bag. Any one, it doesn’t matter! You have twenty-six bars, marked A to Z, each with three to six separate functions. Twelve commonly recognized hand gestures. The grip. The point. The hitch. Unlimited possibilities before you! Unlimited combinations.
A ruthless antihero
Natch is the hero of the story, and a more endearing bastard I haven’t come across since Scott Lynch’s Locke Lamora. Natch is introduced to us as a ruthless, megalomaniacal, obsessively driven psychopath, and nothing we’re given later changes our opinion of him. He drives himself and his staff relentlessly, manipulating them and everyone else around him without pity or remorse. In an early flashback, we see Natch defeat a string of bullies and enemies by mercilessly outsmarting and out-manoeuvring them.
Natch has two trusted accomplices in his commercial endeavours. The first, Jara, narrates a significant amount of Infoquake, letting us see Natch through the eyes of someone who is drawn to his magnetic personality. Jara, an intelligent and capable analyst in her own right, is pulled into Natch’s world by a series of small entrapments, coupled with a sexual magnetism that confuses her a much as it draws her onwards.
Horvil is a childhood friend of Natch, having grown up in the same synthetic development community. In a world where everything can be outsourced, and children are unusual if they’re grown in-vitro, parents can choose to have their children raised by the futuristic equivalent of boarding schools. These phyles share some philosophical trait or technological leaning that the parents want to imbue their children with. Horvil is a more pedestrian figure, a programmer working for Natch, whose simple good-naturedness highlights the difference between him and Natch’s megalomania.
Ripping Yarns, future-style
With heroes as adept and complex as these, Edelman is hard tasked to come up with some interesting antagonists to pair them off against. Luckily, he’s risen to the challenge, and some serious competition is waiting out in the world for Natch and his crew. From early childhood and an initiation ceremony that creates a deadly, life-long enemy, through to Natch’s first experiences in the cutthroat world of bio/logic entrepreneurship, there are enemies aplenty waiting to trip up our heroes.
I’m sorry I didn’t get onto these books sooner. With Infoquake, Edelman has built a rich, scary, complex future and then set some dangerously engaging character loose in it. While we only get a taste of one part of the setting Edelman crafted, the next books in the series, Multireal and Geosynchron, will come to colour and flesh out this magnificent world Edelman has given us.
David L Edelman’s Infoquake comes flying out of the near-future gates and thunders down a racecourse of high-tech thrills and cutthroat commercialism. Stunning!
I rate Infoquake at eight animated atoms. The world is shoring up nicely, we’ve got a right bastard for a hero, and forces are gathering against him. A must-read for an soft-to-hard SF fans, and a great step into a rich new world for commercial thriller readers who want to dip a toe into a new pool of literature.I can’t wait to get into the other two books in the trilogy and see what happens.
Read this book, now.
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