Black Clouds Over Albany

On August 10th I will have lived in Albany for a decade.

My grandparents had these two huge weeping willow trees on their property. One was right behind the house and another a few feet back from the “the shop,” a large garage where my family worked on the race car. I can’t think of a scene in my childhood without them being somewhere in the picture, I was practically raised under them. They were also enormous, visible from my front yard.

On my lunch break today I took a walk and then ate in a small park. I couldn’t help but think of those weeping willows swaying in a soft breeze. It would have been a really nice day to sit under one. Listening to the irrigation motors hum as they pumped gallons of water into the fields, the faint grinding of an old tractor engine holding up traffic on Sound Ave., or the buzz of the crop dusting helicopter with its giant glass bubble cockpit. These were all sounds of my childhood. The sky back then seemed to never end, expanding over the long and flat sand bar that I grew up on.

I’m not necessarily pining for Long Island; I just miss quiet days without car alarms and booming systems. I would like to raise a child somewhere you can go to the store without someone hitting you up for change. A neighborhood where there aren’t abandoned buildings, and feral cats on every block. I would like to be unnerved by gunshots in the middle of the night again, and not to sleep through sirens.

I’ve grown so use to living in urban blight anything else seems impossible. This past Easter I went home to see my family, and then a few weeks later I went back on family business. It seemed so foreign that people live their entire lives in safety; it makes me wonder if I have PDS.

For the Nerds, Sci Fi Author Review: Jeff Somers

"Avery Cates is pissed. Because everyone around him has just started to die - in a particularly gruesome way. With every moment bringing the human race closer to extinction, Cates finds himself in the role of both executioner and savior of the entire world. "

I was in the middle of an in service training of our teen ambassadors (pages), when I left the room so that they could work as a group. I gave them 15 minutes to come up with an idea without me being there to prod them along, and used that time to scan the sci fi shelf at the main library for something to read. I saw The Digital Plague and thought it was an interesting title, then I read the back of the book and knew I was walking out the door with it. I have to say I am very excited about the author Jeff Somers.

The main character, Avery Gates, is a gun for higher in a dystopian future unified by a single world government. He is a combination of some of the sci fi genre’s most beloved antihero’s; the humanity of Philp K. Dick's Deckard (yes, pun intended), the bad ass swagger of Stephen King’s Gunslinger (although Gates’ will admit the swagger is fake), and the cynical attitude of George Lucas’ Han Solo (Yes, I picture Gates as a young Harrison Ford). Gates is a character I can identify with in a world I wouldn’t want to live in. He survives on limited skills; a slightly above average intelligence, a dry wit that keeps him cool under pressure, decent aim with an automatic pistol, and a ton of luck. He’s also a rarity for his time; a man with standards in a world where having any moral fiber will get you murdered. This gives Gates a type of folk hero status in his world, that and the fact he has killed “system pigs” while living to tell about it.

Both The Electric Church and Digital Plague take place in a crumbling urban landscape where only the very rich and very poor exist. Most real work is done by robots, the wealthy take jobs out of boredom, and the poor are kept alive via charity and limited social services. Cities have expanded for miles and are extremely over populated. Large swaths of land are completely empty, left in ruins by riots and neglect.

Several characters in the book live in a criminal caste society that ranges from petty thieves to crime bosses. Somers does a wonderful job of developing sub characters, and gives the reader a real understanding of how this fictional society works. A brutal law enforcement class (which has its own social complexities) keeps order while the world is run by a multi level bureaucracy at war with itself, headed by a group that is quite literally sleeping for eternity.

In the first book, The Electric Church, Gates is hired by a government agent to stop a cult which transfers it followers’ brains from human to robotic bodies. He soon discovers conversion to the church is not by choice, the church plans to replace humanity, and that Gates is actually just a pawn in a bizarre power struggle.

In The Digital Plague, Gates’ home of Old New York (New York City is most of the Eastern Seaboard) has been infected by a virus based on nano technology. Gates is patient zero and won't die until he infects enough of the world, all part of a revenge scheme for things that went on in the first book. There are several plot twists, giving the depth to this story that The Electric Church was lacking. I couldn’t put this book down, even at the demands of my wife.

One could classify the Avery Gates series as cyber punk, but don’t let that scare you. There is enough futurist talk to keep the tech nerds happy, and enough of a post apocalyptic back story to keep dystopians like myself interested, but what makes this book so great is the ample collection flying ships, robots, paranormal activity, and action to keep regular sci fi fans entertained.

Jeff Somers’ writing is a bit rough around the edges in his debut (well second book, first in this series), but he builds a great story and has a talent for character development. By the time he gets to the second instalment of the series his output is more refined. Both titles are an equally entertaining read, The Digital Plague is just better written. Get both of them out of the library at the same time because you’ll want to do them back to back.

Somers also does a zine, a blog, and a messageboard.

His next book comes out in July.

Chargin' Charlie on the Information Super Highway

It never ceases to amaze me how my father, well his racing career, pops up online. A week ago a childhood friend sent me a message via facebook. She wanted to let me know that there was a facebook group devoted to my dad. I joined it and now get notices and updates. Today there was a link to a racing message board that had posted a bunch of pictures of my dad and his cars. Many of these photos I had never seen before.

It's strange how his racing career ended years before anyone had ever heard of the internet, or the idea of social networking was even a possibility, but there he is on Facebook.