Contraband

Intelligent, stylish and well-realized near-future SF. Foy does well at portraying popular culture and infusing humor. His writing here is often beautiful.Contraband, the story of a pilot in a world where secret cargo cults do battle with governnment agencies, follows one of the cargo cult philosophies: the journey is the destination. The plot is circular, and not especially strong. Still, the reasonably appealing characters, the original worldbuilding, and the strength of Foy's language carry the reader along.

Contraband is set in an extremely believable very-near-future in which multinational corporations dictate international law and second-generation biohazard mutants staff the toxic-waste dumps which were formerly known as wetlands. The Bureau of Nationalizations, or BON, is an international entity set up to interdict and dispose of smugglers like the pilot, who transports goods and people across international economic boundaries. The BON is a servant of the multinationals, whose economic interests are threatened by free trade. The BON regularly uses deadly force against smugglers; because of the economic challenge they provide to the multinationals, smugglers are considered equivalent to terrorists under US and international law. Typical of Foy's work, Contraband is much too complex to summarize in a couple of paragraphs. The main character is the pilot, Joe "Skid" Marak, a good guy and professional smuggler who likes any mode of transportation that goes extremely fast and has a pet rat named God. BON has a programmer who has recently developed algorithms that allow BON to substantially increase their smuggler interdiction rate. Interdiction leads to immediate death or to sentencing without trial to a commercially-managed interrogation facility from which no one has ever been released. The increase in the interdiction ratio - which has resulted in the capture and sentencing of one of the pilot's best friends, the death of another, and a couple of very serious near misses on his own part - leads Marak on an international quest for the near-mythical Hawkley, who publishes the well-respected Smuggler's Bible and who reputedly knows what the new BON algorithm is and thus how to work around it. Plus, there's lots of Foy's characteristically highly insightful treatment of human relationships, both romantic and otherwise. He also reinforces themes introduced in The Shift, such as people developing severe personality disorders which derive from a need for constant A/V stimulation and others perpetually confusing VR-delivered programming with real life. And in one nice and very subtle little twist, in one chapter intro Foy quotes one Mr. William Gates as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Committee (a tool of the BON, of course) as stating "... these people actually think they have the right to trade freely... without any regulation or permission from the government...". George Foy is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. I couldn't put Contraband down.

A wonderful novel about what technology enables the power structure--and the individual--to accomplish, told through the quest of a small band of people seeking their own freedom. Highly readable, blending a nice sense of computer-based semi-magical realism ("Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic", to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke), this is a book that stays in your memory, both for its attention to detail (believability) and its themes.

a quick, clever book, hewing to the best of the noirish traditions of cyberpunk. criticizing the plotting (which i really rather liked) and characterizations misses the point; the meat of the story resides in the hallucinatory feel of the pilot's life and reality, the fine attention to his consciousness and the gradations of change which it undergoes in this fine "journey" novel. the pilot functions at the edge, which, as the author reminds us, is where almost everything interesting happens . . . and where authority, in all its guises, wants to keep its subjects from venturing.