Book Review: Looking Glass, James R. Strickland
As of late, my corner of this blog has shown signs of becoming the All About Flying Pen Press Show. This post will in no way counter that impression, as it’s part one of a two-part review of one of that publisher’s debut titles, James R. Strickland’s Looking Glass. I’ve got opinions! Therefore I blog! Rar!
And they’re mostly quite positive opinions. And those that are negative are mitigated by my very much wanting to see FPP succeed. So as reviews go, this may be a bit of a softball. Which is in no way influenced by knowing that the author and publisher and associated friends are reading this. [Waves] Hi there!
Anyway, to it.
To paraphrase the summary Mr. Strickland gave the audience at last week’s Grand Premier: Looking Glass is the story of “Shroud,” a network engineer in a near-future cyberpunk world where the highest-speed Internet access occurs via neural jacks, sensory-deprivation tanks, and high resolution virtual reality. When a deadly attack on the network leaves Shroud the sole survivor of her team, and the company employing them expresses no interest in pursuing the perpetrator, our heroine responds as would any good intrigue protagonist: she sets out to take the killer down on her own.
To paraphrase the summary my husband gave after burning through the first five chapters Friday night: A fun read, definitely a page-turner, fairly typical plot for the subgenre, but then again not every novel should be expected to break new ground.
Having finished the book this weekend, I partially concur. But I do see something quietly different going on here. While it’s not glaringly evident from those first chapters, there’s an emotional and psychological dynamic to this story that I can’t honestly say I’ve seen in other cyberpunk offerings. From the method that Shroud’s nemesis uses to kill, to the shape her final battle takes, it is human emotion as much as it is human technological ingenuity that informs the plot. It’s a story about how memory defines us, cuts us down, and lifts us up, and while that element is by no means unique to the genre, I think the way it’s employed in Looking Glass is something quietly, entirely different, having more in common with certain anime features than with anything I’ve read.
This book broke my heart several times over. Thanks to the premise summary the author gave us, I knew who was going to die right off the bat. I didn’t know that I’d get to know and love them first. Dammit. And that’s only the first of a series of lifts and crashes and lifts again that pulled into a poetically strong finish and left me all choked up and happy.
I’m of two minds about the not-so-futuristic world Strickland imagines here. In terms of technology, there’s a definite mix of “today plus one” and “today plus miracle” concepts. The Internet is still built around IP addresses, ACK packets, and today’s wireless technology, even if the addresses are in IP6 format and the wi-fi has gone up a version number to 803. But characters can access it via a far-fetched, exciting interface created by drilling a hole in the skull and inserting living neurofibers that map themselves onto the brain’s pathways automagically. To take another example, North American rail travel is much improved such that it takes only four hours to get from Denver to Reno, and the cars are joined electromagnetically so that they can space out and detach at need to allow freight and passenger cars to join or part ways with the caravan without need to stop the whole train. But the name of the train Shroud takes to Reno marks it obvious descendent of Amtrak’s California Zephyr.
(Here’s something odd. The California Zephyr does not normally pass through Wyoming or, for that matter, stop at Reno. The Zephyr in Looking Glass does. However, during May and June 2007 the California Zephyr actually is detouring through Wyoming four days a week in order to bypass a bunch of construction on the Union Pacific tracks. We gotcher SF-as-prophet righ’chere, baby. But anyway…)
On the one hand, I like the way Strickland anchors his future in today’s world, showing how one could logically get from here to there. Looking Glass takes place in 2025, after all, so there’s a need to make the futuretech believable as something that could exist less than 20 years from now. On the other hand, some of the tech could only be achievable in so short a time that it would have to go by way of the old joke, “and then a miracle occurs.” The author’s decision as to which developments are plausible and which are miraculous seems arbitrary. I also sense a little arbitrariness in the political composition of the North American continent, which seems to give a vigorous nod to the red-state/blue-state “Jesusland” jokes that circulated after the 2004 election. (The plausibility of that probably depends on whether one accepts that most U.S. states voted different shades of purple.) So I vacillate between feeling that the world of Looking Glass represents a future that could believably spring from our present, or a fantasy achieved mainly by use of authorial fiat. It’s also possible that I’m reading it wrong, and the world of Looking Glass is a future that springs from a fictional present that followed an alternate past.
In any case, by the time I got to the last page, I didn’t much care about arbitrary authorial fiats. Like I said, it finished strong.
So, that’s my basic reaction to Looking Glass as a story. I could go on, but I’ve already gone on and on and on… and I still want to talk about what this book means in terms of being one of Flying Pen Press’s debut outings. We’ll save that for part two. Stay tuned.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Thanks for the review, Niki. I passed the link on to the rest of the FPP family for their enjoyment.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:49 am
{{Braces self for flying tomatoes}}
After I posted this and John came home and we chatted a bit (he hasn’t finished the book yet, since he so generously allowed me to take it away with me for the weekend), so many other aspects of the book worth discussing came to mind that I felt ashamed of publishing such a slight, shallow post. So, caveat lector: the above is very incomplete and only touches upon the strongest impressions I had after finishing.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Thanks for the review. Thanks for the *nice* review.
I look forward to reading the followup you have planned.
RE: the Zephyr. The Zephyr’s traditional route was through Cheyenne, Wyoming, and as I used to live there, I rode that train a few times (eastbound, to Chicago) when I was a child, before it was rerouted. The train was originally operated by the Western Pacific and Denver and Rio Grande railways, and began service in 1949. I rode it in the early Amtrak years of the 1970s, in the old dome cars and vista lounge cars that had always been part of that train. This, too, appears in the train scenes in Looking Glass.
The Reno stop was a work of fiction, by contrast.
-JRS
May 30th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Hi James, thanks for the lack of tomatoes! Dare I hope to escape as unscathed in the next post…? I get a bit more critical on a nuts-n-bolts level there.
The train content really caught my eye because I was actually riding the California Zephyr back from Chicago at the time I read it. I’ve become a bit of a wistful fanatic about rail travel, as you can see from earlier posts. I was really digging your vision of future improvements to the system. 4 hours into Nevada! If only!
I regret that I didn’t think to include in this review how very impressed and happy I am to know that Looking Glass began life in National Novel Writing Month. I’m a vocal defender of the event, and it tickles me to no end to see a book go from NaNoWriMo draft to commercial publication.