Raphael Carter Note: Raphael Carter has her own Web page
Click on a book's image or title to order from Amazon.com The Fortunate Fall Reviewed February 1997 The Fortunate Fall is another book about the "wired world" in the future, but unlike some of the other such books I've read recently this one takes place almost entirely in the physical world, and only briefly in "cyberspace". Since this effectively forces the novel to focus on how people use the technology, rather than the nature of the technology itself, I found this made the novel more viscerally enjoyable. Maya Andreyeva is a woman who's been wired as a "Camera"; she can transmit images and sensations she experiences over the network, and she's employed to this end for a news network. She lives in 23rd century Russia, a vaguely totalitarian regime (though the actual ruling authority is not really identified) rife with behavior-police, both on and off the net. This future Russia's development was strongly influenced by its occupation a generation earlier by the fascist-seeming Guardians (who are strongly hinted as being the US-led Western powers), and its subsequent liberation by the Unanimous Army, a worldwide phenomenon which was essentially a computer virus which took over the minds of various wired individuals and forced them to set out to surgically bring other individuals under the Army's control. (The Army is reminiscent of Star Trek 's Borg, and the Comprise from Michael Swanwick's | |
|
