Alex Irvine

At some point in the future the AIs not only got the upper hand against humanity but exploited it - everyone alive lives because they are let to and when the AI gets bored, it just dissolves them and makes them a part of whatever the AI is doing next - the ultimate wrong place, wrong time case. As everything is mixed up, folklore, literature and reality had collapsed into each other, reshuffled and spit out as history - with the AI's ability to create any person anytime anywhere.

In the middle of this madness, 6 young people receive a golden ticket (and if you miss that reference, Irvine will spell it out at one point). And while we follow the 6 of them first getting the tickets and then embarking on a journey to get to where the tickets lead, we see the America of the times - from the 6 places they each started from to the rest of the country (mostly in passing but not only).

The text is full of literary and historical references - some are spelled out, some are just hinted at. You can spend the novel just trying to recognize all of them (Irvine seems to have dropped most of the current cultural references he wanted to use into a mixer and started the thing on high). Even some real people show up (Mark Twain shows up twice even).

At the end the novel ends up being more about the world than the people or the quest - if one expects a resolution for our 6 lucky winners, they may be disappointed. It is not that kind of novel. It is really a novel about taking a risk by doing something new, about the path taken when you don't think any choices and about consciousness - because after all it is a tale about an AI trying to grasp with humanity - and not by just killing us all.… (mais)

Meh. Noir-style things are often a hard sell for me despite my wanting to like them because there's frequently a lot of misogyny and other such things in the genre. For example, I liked the character of Eliza and I liked Matt falling hard for her--it felt fast, but I was sold on it--until the revelation that she was a "psychopath." I didn't mind the twist of her being the Bull's-Eye Killer, but making the reason why she does what she does be "because she's crazy!" doesn't sit well with me. It's a harmful stereotype against people with mental illness and poor writing.

Also I feel like there should be a way to do noir-style art that doesn't leave me guessing which character I'm looking at in each panel based on context clues. Between two-thirds of every character being in shadows and the other third being stylized noir-grit, good luck recognizing anyone except Daredevil. Even Matt himself was difficult to recognize outside of his red Daredevil costume.

Also, and I realize this is a somewhat minor nitpick, but I feel like Matt being Foggy's employee is a characterization misstep. Nelson and Murdock are partners, and them having an inherently unequal relationship sat wrong with me.

So, like with most noir-type things, I wanted to like this more than I did.

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Re-read this a second time, and I'm upping the rating from 2 stars to 4 stars. Know what to expect, I think, helped make this a more coherent read for me and thus a more effective one. I very much enjoyed this the second time around.… (mais)