Contraband

Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly

As one of the players in this new cyber-thriller from Foy (The Shift) observes, some of its characters could have stepped directly out of The Wizard of Oz. The role of Dorothy belongs to Joe Marak, a mercenary pilot who gets his kicks smuggling contraband in a bureaucratically nationalized future America. The wizard is played by Forrest Hawkley Stanhope, counterculture gadfly and author of The Smuggler's Bible, a samizdat treatise for free-traders that Joe knows by heart. There's even a wicked witch in the Bureau of Nationalizations, an Orwellian regulatory agency that tries to thwart Joe and his rebel band in their quest to find the legendary Hawkley and to learn his tricks for evading high-tech surveillance. Foy is less interested in walking down the yellow brick road, however, than in barreling down the information superhighway and impressing readers with the twisted wreckage that is bound to pile up on it. His depiction of a relentlessly hardwired future controlled by electronic media addicts being treated for TeleDysfunction, and of government hackers who spot subliminal sedition in computer deconstructions of eavesdropped communications patterns, is both comic and chilling. But his dystopian vision runs to excess. It ultimately erects a barrier between the reader and the well-drawn characters, whose search for personal fulfillment in the vast wasteland they inhabit forms the story's smothered soul. Its children's-tale analogue notwithstanding, this is an exhaustingly bleak forecast of future shock.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As one of the players in this new cyber-thriller from Foy (The Shift) observes, some of its characters could have stepped directly out of The Wizard of Oz. The role of Dorothy belongs to Joe Marak, a mercenary pilot who gets his kicks smuggling contraband in a bureaucratically nationalized future America. The wizard is played by Forrest Hawkley Stanhope, counterculture gadfly and author of The Smuggler's Bible, a samizdat treatise for free-traders that Joe knows by heart. There's even a wicked witch in the Bureau of Nationalizations, an Orwellian regulatory agency that tries to thwart Joe and his rebel band in their quest to find the legendary Hawkley and to learn his tricks for evading high-tech surveillance. Foy is less interested in walking down the yellow brick road, however, than in barreling down the information superhighway and impressing readers with the twisted wreckage that is bound to pile up on it. His depiction of a relentlessly hardwired future controlled by electronic media addicts being treated for TeleDysfunction, and of government hackers who spot subliminal sedition in computer deconstructions of eavesdropped communications patterns, is both comic and chilling. But his dystopian vision runs to excess. It ultimately erects a barrier between the reader and the well-drawn characters, whose search for personal fulfillment in the vast wasteland they inhabit forms the story's smothered soul. Its children's-tale analogue notwithstanding, this is an exhaustingly bleak forecast of future shock. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

A slog through heavy near-future grunge, from the author of the much better The Shift (1996). In Foy's dull scenario, pollution and climatic change have distorted socioeconomic systems worldwide; in America, BON—the Bureau of Nationalizations—has taken over most of active government. Josef Marak, known as "the pilot," is one of a dwindling band of dedicated smugglers whose most important tool, the on-line, updated Smuggler's Bible, is maintained by Forrest Hawkley Stanhope—but nobody knows who, or where, Hawkley is. Recently, smuggling has become all but impossible, thanks to a new detection system run by the mysterious Bokon Taylay. So the pilot and his friends Rocketman and PC, along with his pet rat God, grab Hawkley's daughter Ela in the hope that she can help them find Hawkley. After a long, twisting, difficult journey across Asia, complicated by a suspected mole among them, they catch up with Hawkley, and he duly shows them how to defeat Taylay.

Gritty and sometimes dark-edged; but, with cardboard eccentrics instead of characters and no plot worth mentioning, the story merely sprawls in an indifferent heap.