Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

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Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

by Brian Francis Slattery (Goodreads Author)

3.63 of 5 stars 3.63 · rating details · 408 ratings · 104 reviews

From the author of the literary pulp phenomenon Spaceman Blues comes a future history cautionary tale, a heist movie in the style of a hippie novel.

Liberation is a speculation on life in near-future America after the country suffers an economic cataclysm that leads to the resurgence of ghosts of its past such as the human slave trade. Our heroes are the Slick Six, a group...more

Paperback, 299 pages

Published October 14th 2008 by Tor Books (first published 2008)

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Oct 24, 2010 Ben Babcock rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: via-io9, own, 2010-read, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, postcolonial, utopia-dystopia

When confronted by the uncertain future, we look to our past. We look to it for answers, for enlightenment, for inspiration. Mostly we look to it because we have nowhere else to look. This is natural, but it's also dangerous, for we have a tendency to romanticize the past: everything was better before we had electricity, urbanization, automation; life was simpler, slower, satisfying. Sometimes we get caught up in that idyllic illusion of a pastoral existence and forget about the disease, the inj...more

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Nov 22, 2008 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

This hippie Vonnegut Mad Max tale, reminded me of Tim Robbins writing about a Manhattan transformed like Romero's Pittsburgh in Land of the Dead, after an economic apocalypse much like the current crisis. The dollar dies. The government dissolves, and the action of the story takes place five years later, when the losers have lost their lives and the remaining are struggling to hold on to their own. Slattery's exposition is superb in a conversational manner, as if he's sitting the reader down and...more This hippie Vonnegut Mad Max tale, reminded me of Tim Robbins writing about a Manhattan transformed like Romero's Pittsburgh in Land of the Dead, after an economic apocalypse much like the current crisis. The dollar dies. The government dissolves, and the action of the story takes place five years later, when the losers have lost their lives and the remaining are struggling to hold on to their own. Slattery's exposition is superb in a conversational manner, as if he's sitting the reader down and verbally telling them a history of the end days of America. The dialogue and action, the real meat of good fiction, fall a little short. His characters are often Ocean's Eleven cookies pushed through a hip sci-fi sensibility.

The Aardvark's tower, with its revolving spotlight, at different points in the book reminds me of Sauron's evil eye. That's how big of a nerd I am. I can't let go of the Tolkien. However, the Aardvark himself, a bit of a lame mystery like Doctor Claw, with his sexy Dutch lawyer chick always at hand. The Americoids, a traveling hippie troupe, like the Merry Pranksters doubly on acid, push this communal message of Slattery's a little too hard. It's as if Hunter S. Thompson's high water mark was just a dam that only broke the dollar did and flooded New York. Marco's origin in Bolivia shrouded in crime and slavery are especially vivid. The assassin, a lame ninja, is dispatched as abruptly as he deserved to be. Johanna, an east coast Patty Hearst type, champions a free state in, off all places, North Carolina. Texas, as desolate as ever, sweats grime and slavery. The African American reaction to this new post-apocalyptic development is dealt with briefly when Dayneesha watches a black man sold on an auction block. But aren't these the things that deserve more attention? Real slavery and real dire fanaticism? Slattery fails to get at the real human elements of this type of situation. The violence and the music and the imagery are all enthralling, but this type of story works best when it surprises us with brutal realities about how we'll act when every second our life lies in the balance. Slattery's America goes on bartering and trading and driving trucks only five years after society as we know has been flushed away. Okay. You eat it? We fry it.

Marco liberates everyone with a few well placed punches and bullets. Tyrone Fly, a minor character, shows some deep American magic when he beheads Myra Jong the slave master with the scythe from Kentucky, sprinkled with whiskey from the still of his dead brother. "You shall free them all." Here Slattery has created grace notes more interesting than his core melody. What makes the Slick Six any better than the Aardvark? Aren't all of these characters just opportunistic criminals who exploit weaknesses? I snickered at Slattery's Burning Man style freedom festival in the desert. Come on, man. Slavery is treated as a mortgage, something we buy into but can never buy out of again. The Vibe is corny. The Kansas scenes are like Cormac McCarthy. At this point in the book I really lost interest in what was going on in Asia. Cyclone Cal and his circus are crusty denizens of Thunderdome. Tyrone Fly turns out to be a sort of Tom Cullen savior, from The Stand, only he gets a personalized happy ending.

Slattery's style, conversational at times, quite fluid and lyrical throughout, saves this book. Hopefully he'll eschew some of the hippie nonsense for his next novel.(less)

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Oct 24, 2008 vladimir rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, the New Weird

I unabashedly love this book!

Sure, it's about apocalypse (in this case socio-economic), and the story is spun around the reuniting of a group of master criminals, but at its core "Liberation" is about people, about the myth of America, and how normal people deal with calamity and find unexpected reserves of courage and goodness in the midst of it all.

Slattery, using the guise of an entity called the Vibe[edit], explores a splintered American landscape--horrors and private victories in equal mea...more

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Dec 16, 2008 Chadwick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf, utopian-anarchist

Buh-buh-buh-bitchin'. A cracking good adventure story with beguilingly poetic prose. Slattery weaves an entrancing magpie future America out of the myth and ephemera of the one we live in, and inhabits it with a cast of characters that are drawn half from superhero comics and James Bond movies and half from heroic epic. Which half is which I'm not sure.

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Sep 25, 2011 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: multiple-readings

this book is pretty much awesome. it is kind of like oceans eleven teams up with wolverine. and then there is the economic collapse in the united states which leads to a state of bedlam.

the rest of the world ticks on. and this is one of the reasons i liked this book so much - because the rest of the world ticked on. generally, as i recall, dystopian or post-apocalyptic books set in the u.s. dont ever give a real clear picture of whats happening in the rest of the world and the reader just has t...more

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Feb 27, 2009 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars

From pg. 51:

The building and all its books are still intact, she knows; the employees of the library madea spontaneous pact to defend it as soon as the police force stopped working, and now they just live in the building. They hauled beds into the offices and corners of the huge reading rooms, put plaid couches against the marble walls. An army of cats patrols the halls, has litters on the stairs. She imagines that some of the librarians are fulfilling a long cherished fantasy. It’s just them an...more

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Feb 18, 2009 Alan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone who wondered what Burning Man would be like as a full-time way of life.

Recommended to Alan by: BoingBoing or io9 - not sure which, now.

I really hope Slattery's late Bush-era vision isn't prescient. Beneath the frantic activity, funny names and prolix chapter headings, Liberation harbors deep sadness and considerable desperation - it's McCarthy's The Road with a clown mask on, both manic and frightening.

The scenario certainly seems all too plausible. The Apocalypse this time is economic. The American dollar collapses abruptly and drags down most of the world's economy with it. The rule of law is ended. In a few short years the f...more I really hope Slattery's late Bush-era vision isn't prescient. Beneath the frantic activity, funny names and prolix chapter headings, Liberation harbors deep sadness and considerable desperation - it's McCarthy's The Road with a clown mask on, both manic and frightening.

The scenario certainly seems all too plausible. The Apocalypse this time is economic. The American dollar collapses abruptly and drags down most of the world's economy with it. The rule of law is ended. In a few short years the formerly United States have fragmented. Millions of refugees flee its shores; millions more are unable even to make it that far. And - due largely to the efforts of a former crime boss ("former" only because without law, there are no criminals - right?) squatting in a ramshackle tower in Manhattan - human slavery is once more an open institution. Slattery lingers vividly (and, perhaps, overmuch) on scenes of post-apocalyptic devastation, from sea to formerly-shining sea.

And in opposition to this rising tide of anarchy? A tiny band of colorful rebels with superhuman abilities, a troupe known to the masses as the Slick Six. The Six are led by Marco, who starts out the novel incarcerated on a roving prison ship although this is apparently by his own choice, as he could escape pretty much any time he wants. The rest of the Six are scattered across the continent, but even the ones who are currently slaves seem to be just doing it for fun, hanging around a redwood-cutting slave camp in California only until they can spark a slave rebellion and rejoin the rest.

I hate to say it, but Liberation could probably have benefited from a little more realism. The Slick Six get out of their scrapes altogether too easily, it seems to me. They possess knowledge and powers well beyond those with which we mere humans must address our very real economic and social problems.

Sure, we don't have to deal (at least, not yet) with the collapse of the dollar and the resurgence of slavery, but we also don't have the so-called "Vibe" whispering in our ears whenever things are going south, nor can we teleport ourselves (or as good as) away from prisons or slavers the way the Dirty Half-Dozen appear to be able to. To have Slattery mix such things with an all-too-realistic scenario of economic collapse seems facile and, often, annoying; the ending smacks more than a little of deus ex machina.

*

It sounds as if I didn't like this book, but that's not strictly true. It's certainly vividly written, and it's received a lot of flattering publicity. In many ways, it's a rollicking good adventure. I just wanted to like it much more than I did.(less)

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Nov 20, 2008 Patrick marked it as to-read

saw this on boing boing

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Apr 05, 2009 Brendan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, book-club, fiction, scifi

Slattery writes of an anarchic United States after the dollar has collapsed and the country has ripped itself apart. Slavery has returned as an organized venture (people on the verge of starving to death sell themselves into slavery, and slavers capture refugees from war torn areas), and the Slick Six, a gang of master criminals, has to figure out how to navigate the wasteland.

The characters and story throb with a wealth of detail: Slattery imagines a variety of social and societal structures em...more

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May 23, 2012 Julie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: dmla

Yet again, I started reading a Slattery book only to glance up and realise that I was 100 pages in; yet again, I steamrolled through it in one week. In Liberation, he takes his stylistic traits and motifs from Spaceman Blues and amplifies them even more: lyrical, frenetic prose; a POV shifting seamlessly between past, present, and future; an even larger cast with sprawling, coincidental overlaps; strange locales; pulpy, comic book-esque action; music, food, and parties. This time, he even hops b...more

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Mar 06, 2011 Tim Giauque rated it 3 of 5 stars

"There are no more Monday mornings. This is what you get."

Liberation is a story of an America struggling to forget its past as it moves forward into an uncertain future. America's government and society have collapsed - not due to nuclear war, or supervirus pandemic, but under the weight of its crushing foreign debts. Given the state of current affairs in the world, this outcome doesn't seem all that far-fetched, and it helps ground the book and make it seem more immediate and disturbing.

As soci...more "There are no more Monday mornings. This is what you get."

Liberation is a story of an America struggling to forget its past as it moves forward into an uncertain future. America's government and society have collapsed - not due to nuclear war, or supervirus pandemic, but under the weight of its crushing foreign debts. Given the state of current affairs in the world, this outcome doesn't seem all that far-fetched, and it helps ground the book and make it seem more immediate and disturbing.

As society and its laws have receded from the American continent, in its place is an every-man-for-himself mentality, with slavery making an unwelcome return. The story focuses on The Aardvark, a crime lord and slaveholder who becomes the most powerful man in post-society America, and the Slick Six, a group of criminals who set out to overthrow him.

And...that's pretty much it. Slattery's prose is very good, and he spends a lot of time world-building here. He likes to describe what happened to, say, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, or Asheville, NC, but I almost felt like telling a story was a nuisance for him. The storytelling flow is frequently interrupted: we might have a few pages to tell us where Marco is going next, and then he'll go, "oh, but I didn't tell you about what happened to Denver, did I, so let's do that now," and four pages later, he finally gets around to saying what happened to Marco.

It's a neat premise, and I was impressed that he managed to destroy society in a fairly innovative, fresh way - one that seems plausible, even. But I just couldn't get into the book easily, and I wanted to like it more than I did. Very few of the characters are fleshed out or distinguishable from each other at all - I honestly had trouble keeping Carolyn, Jeanette, and Johanna separate from one another until almost the end of the book, even though they are all off doing different things the whole time. At only 300 pages, there's not much room for an intricate plot, but the plot in Liberation is as thin as they get. I liked Slattery's vision, but this book needed more meat on its bones to really be exceptional.(less)

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Jul 20, 2009 Greg Pettit rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: library, science-fiction

I don't remember where I read that this was one of the better science fiction books of last year. If that's truly the case, then I feel sorry for anyone who read the others. This was awful.

The story revolves around a group of high-end con-artist/thieves as they try to "get the band back together." This takes place in a future America that has been completely changed by the devaluation of the dollar. Apparently, the dollar is declared to have zero value. This results in the complete economic coll...more

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Jul 20, 2012 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-own, science-fiction, dystopian-fiction

A Riveting Near Future Economic Dystopian United States Courtesy of Brian Francis Slattery

Some say that the world will end in fire; some say in ice. And there are some who contend that our downfall will be due to an alien invasion (H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" or John Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids" as among the most notable examples) or by a drastic change in our planet's rotation (Karen Thompson Walker's "The Age of Miracles"). But Brian Francis Slattery says it will end in the eco...more A Riveting Near Future Economic Dystopian United States Courtesy of Brian Francis Slattery

Some say that the world will end in fire; some say in ice. And there are some who contend that our downfall will be due to an alien invasion (H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" or John Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids" as among the most notable examples) or by a drastic change in our planet's rotation (Karen Thompson Walker's "The Age of Miracles"). But Brian Francis Slattery says it will end in the economic collapse of the United States; a collapse so suddenly swift and merciless, that it will leave the United States not only as financially destitute as any Third World country, but one in which slavery and starvation reign. In "Liberation: Being The Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America", Slattery offers his hallucinogenic Pynchonesque vision of an economic dystopian near future United States; a dark vision all the more plausible due to the current economic woes confronting the United States and the rest of the world. While his is a vision that has more in common with the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges than with more realistic recent fiction by William Gibson ("Pattern Recognition", "Spook Country", "Zero History") and Bruce Sterling ("Distraction", "Zeitgeist") , it remains among the most credible and compelling dystopian fiction I have read recently, with far more realism than I have seen in the work of such highly touted authors as Ernest Cline ("Ready Player One"), Colson Whitehead ("Zone One") and Karen Thompson Walker, told in a Pynchonesque literary style that is far more compelling and memorable than any of theirs. Though I regard his literary debut "Spaceman Blues" as a substantially more satisfying work of literary dystopian science fiction, Slattery demonstrates again that he remains one of the most fascinating prose stylists not only in modern American science fiction, but in all of contemporary Anglo-American fiction, and certainly among the most memorable writers of his generation. (less)

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Jan 05, 2010 Armand rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: genre-sci-fi-fantasy, read-2009

Bold and imperfect vision of a future America in which our currency has collapsed and slavery is once again legal.

Part sci-fi/crime thriller, part history lesson, part meditation of what it means to be an American, part tribute to music from the 60's and 70's, this oddball novel covers a lot of ground in the story of six super-criminals (but mostly just one, a hitman named Marco) who are out to stop slavery by defeating a New York mob boss who is funding the peculiar institution.

The novel is fil...more

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Jun 02, 2011 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lyrical, spiraling, swirling book that is an action-packed adventure, a love story, a cautionary tale of American folly and a love letter to its landscapes. At times the lyricism is earth-shatteringly beautiful, at others it tends to go on too long--yes, the earth is rising up underneath us, we will fight until our bones are shattering into dust. I find myself searching for the plot, how it's moved forward by an enormous cast of characters, each with their own histories and personalities, someho...more

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Dec 12, 2009 Wendy rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was a fantastic play of morality and judgment in a world where black and white are simply paid lip-service and righteousness comes in shades like technicolor. Disjointed and chaotic, but the path which the narrative takes can still be followed. The author references unexplained phenomena throughout the book and the way in which he does so actually drove me to hope that there would be no explanation- no solid resolution. This is a book given just enough framework to allow the reader's i...more

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Apr 20, 2009 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: that-shit-was-epic-bro

EPIC! Post apocalyptic distopian at it's best. Without borrowing too much from the classics: We, Hand Maid's Tale, 1984 and Brave New World, it gives a nod to it's predecessors and wisely explores and expands the genre.

If you liked Spaceman Blues, his first book, you find this one especially enjoyable, as it shows a growth in the writer, but maintains the quality/style that made his first book so good.

Bigs ups to Corey D of Boingboing for promoting this book.

One thing that sucks hard is that the...more

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Apr 21, 2009 Mattzog rated it 2 of 5 stars

Author was trying too hard to be Pynchon. No consistent internal logic. Some parts would be neat, but then there would be something TERRIBLY STUPID. If they can fly DJs into Vegas from Europe for a party, THEN WHY CAN'T THEY FLY SOMEONE IN TO FIX THE DAWN?!?

Rarely do I throw a book down in disgust, but I did on 3 occassions with Liberation. But I kept reading and finished it. So it's a mixed reaction.

I'll read something new from Brian Slattery. It feels like he's got potential. But Liberation a...more

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Sep 30, 2010 Steev Hise rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: after-the-fall, fun, novels, own-it

This is a fun book, a page-turner, but also very thought-provoking about the end of the industrial and political United States.

Anyone who is thinking about possible ways things could go after industrial collapse would do well to read this. It doesn't provide a wholly realistic vision, but it provides a lot of little scenarios, different characters and communities that react to the collapse and survive (or don't) in various ways.

The big flaw of the story is the premise that the rest of the world...more

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Jun 21, 2012 Bryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I know what you're wondering. What would it have been like had Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon wrote mashed up novelizations of Escape From New York and Ocean's 11? Wonder no more. Brian Francis Slattery has you covered.

Slattery's novel figures an elite crew of criminals trying to find their place in a lawless approximation of the American landscape following a catastrophic economic crash that renders the dollar worthless, the Federal Government powerless and an ad hoc economy that involves the...more I know what you're wondering. What would it have been like had Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon wrote mashed up novelizations of Escape From New York and Ocean's 11? Wonder no more. Brian Francis Slattery has you covered.

Slattery's novel figures an elite crew of criminals trying to find their place in a lawless approximation of the American landscape following a catastrophic economic crash that renders the dollar worthless, the Federal Government powerless and an ad hoc economy that involves the free trade of human slaves. The criminals, The Slick Six, once staged daring heists around the world, thwarting the equally criminal advances of the mastermind known as The Aardvark, who in this improvised post-economy, finds himself in the administrative controls of New York City and just as lost as the Six are without a rigid system of law to rail against. Naturally, these two forces are destined to clash one last time in a most unexpected way.

Liberation, often glosses over character development, namedrops a catalog of musicians and genres that would make an indie record store employee feel substantially inadequate, imbues certain characters with a deliberately mystical quality that allows them to cheat death and deal it out in ridiculous measure and romanticizes social collapse in such a way that makes the end American culture sound like a gigantic orgy of sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's uneven and sometimes frustrating to such a degree that the novel feels like several short stories stitched together into a single disjointed narrative.

In spite of its sometimes glaring flaws, it is appropriately gonzo and chaotic bringing to mind the madcap adventure of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in a single tear. Slattery has a mastery of language that's fun to read so that even when the gaping holes in the plot leap to the fore, the way he fails to explain his characters in full detail is at least fascinating to see written on the page.

There is plenty of dreary post-apocalypse fiction out there to read but it's a summary bummer to take in. The actual end of order and economy in the United States doesn't feel all that far off these days, so it's nice to read a work of pure fantasy that gives that potential reality a soft landing where pockets of disorder are mostly contained by a mutually inclusive civilization that returns to simple American folk tradition. Liberation is psychedelic to an authentic note and ultraviolent to a satisfying degree. At it's core, it's a heist novel but surrounding it are layers of nonsense and weirdness that are a lot of fun to read and not often found in other books.(less)

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May 02, 2011 Elijah Kinch Spector rated it 4 of 5 stars

First of all, it should be pointed out that Slattery's authorial voice, on a sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word basis is dense and captivating. There is so much going on in every line of this book, so many beautifully-described details and inferences and ideas, that I often found myself re-reading paragraphs one or two times to make sure I really understood what was in them. Usually that would be a complaint, coming from me, but somehow Liberation managed to be dense and difficult and compulsive...more First of all, it should be pointed out that Slattery's authorial voice, on a sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word basis is dense and captivating. There is so much going on in every line of this book, so many beautifully-described details and inferences and ideas, that I often found myself re-reading paragraphs one or two times to make sure I really understood what was in them. Usually that would be a complaint, coming from me, but somehow Liberation managed to be dense and difficult and compulsively readable at the same time, for me.

Liberation, (strangely like The Lies of Locke Lamora and Mistborn: The Final Empire) is a "let's pull off a big heist as sci-fi/fantasy catalyst" story, but it's wrapped up in a fascinatingly diverse semi-post-apocalyptic version of America that feels as though it wants to do for our country what Midnight's Children does for India -- to, through fantastical elements and bizarre detail, define a nation, even while only scratching the surface.

This examination of the United States particularly comes through in the ways that the book deals unflinchingly with all the terrible things that built this country, all the oppression that made it run, and so on. At times it almost feels like too much, such as when slavery becomes a fact of American life almost immediately after the country's collapse, but in the end it mostly works because the book deals in such a strange, heightened reality anyway. I would have liked to see Slattery engage a bit with the kinds of racism that continued (and continue) to be instrumental in our country long after things like genocide and slavery were all over the place, to acknowledge systematic bigotry further on down the line, but it's only a 300-page book, and I suppose he couldn't hit everything.

But despite all the metaphor and examination of history's machinations and America's stained place in the world, Liberation is also, again, something of an adventure narrative. You've got someone getting the old gang back together for one last big job, and you've got factions and criminals and an extremely bad-ass assassin guy. It moves in satisfying fits and starts, and makes itself labyrinthine enough in small ways that one seldom realizes just how simple the plot actually is -- not that a plot should specifically be complicated anyway.

At times, however, the story does get sacrificed: less for the symbolism and themes, and more for the quirky details, really. It largely comes down to Marco, the closest thing the novel gets to a focal point, often a blur of violence who can kill just about anyone. The problem with Marco is that the book gets so into giving us fun weird details and making its characters larger than life, in certain ways, that Marco is an unkillable and unlimited murder machine who never once appears to be in any danger, or even seems likely to be unable to save the people he cares about. Many of the veiled descriptions of Marco's violent prowess are extremely entertaining in their own right -- especially in the first third when we're not attached enough to care about what happens so much -- but they drain the suspense right out of the proceedings. By the time he's fighting an entire lunatic-robot-circus thing that's about as ridiculous as he is, single-handedly cutting them to ribbons, it's just difficult to get wrapped up in anything about the action other than the pretty pretty sentences. At the very end the climax ends up feeling awfully anticlimactic, which is really too bad.

Now, as you've probably figured out, none of that really hamstrings the book too terribly, because most of the time plot and action are incidental. The book sometimes feels more like long-form poetry, evoking moods and images and sensations. It swept me from melancholy to angry to scared very quickly at times, and was capable of affecting me in ways that other novels, ones I consider to be empirically better in most ways, could not. It's short, dense, entertaining, and very much worth a read.(less)

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Jul 12, 2012 Justine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mind-bendingly fresh, unique, eerie, opinionated, macabre, and touching -- what a parable about slavery and revolution would be like if America withered under economic collapse, you threw in Ocean's 11, hints of the Odyssey, a serious love for music, and a whopping hit of acid.

I read about 70% of this book in one sitting and got so lost in it I felt like I needed to come up for air. Slattery's characters, references, and lexicon are memorable, unique, and entirely consistent with his freaky, ps...more Mind-bendingly fresh, unique, eerie, opinionated, macabre, and touching -- what a parable about slavery and revolution would be like if America withered under economic collapse, you threw in Ocean's 11, hints of the Odyssey, a serious love for music, and a whopping hit of acid.

I read about 70% of this book in one sitting and got so lost in it I felt like I needed to come up for air. Slattery's characters, references, and lexicon are memorable, unique, and entirely consistent with his freaky, psychedelic*, dream-fugue of a universe. As I do with all books like this, I OD'd and then had to wait for a few months and start over because I wanted so badly to do it all over again.

Language aside, what is most memorable about Liberation is its visceral depiction of desperation and resilience and its probing, relentless description of things falling apart piece by piece and then being built back up again.

Excerpts below:

"In the days after the collapse, when the lights blinked out and the alarms went off, and police cars slept on their sides in the street, there was blood on the walls of their towns, men with rifles walking from house to house, whistling come on, come on, we won't hurt you, while the brewer and his neighbors crouched in a ditch, water up to their shoulders, hands over their children's mouths. They watched small wars break out and die, a man killing his boss with a chisel for sleeping with his sister, two families sharpshooting at each other through the windows of their houses over the unsettled lay of a property line. Two women knifed to death in the pink booth of a family restaurant; nobody every knew why. A chain of exploding barns; machinery gutted and dismembered; the tension that law enforcement stifled, released at last, scraping across the country, peeling of years of progress. They slept in shifts, remembered to duck, taught their kids algebra, told each other to hang on. Now the wars are over and the apples are tart and sweet, the wells filled with clear water, and they shoot deer with arrows from the roof of their garage, hand the animals from their porches and invite fifteen people to share the meat. They throw parties in the winter that last for five days, hours of firewood and dancing, windows fogging with steam and smoke, a band doing their best James Brown with the accordion and guitar, motor parts, an old trombone, and everyone shouting about getting on up, clapping their hands on the two and four until the rain stops and dawn comes. They ride horses home, cars rigged to run on batteries; they walk long the quite, cracking highways with groggy children on their shoulders, tugging their hair, and thing, this is what they survived for."

"She walks to the brass telescope mounted on a table, angles it and gazes down the row of derelict office buildings on Madison Avenue, fastens onto the corner of the public library, the outside of which is being cleaned by volunteers. The building and all of its books are still intact, she knows; the employees of the library made a spontaneous pact to defend it as soon as the police force stopped working, and now they just live in the building. They hauled beds into the offices and corners of the huge reading rooms, put plaid couches against the marble walls. An army of cats patrols the halls, has litters on the stairs. She imagines that some of the librarians are fulfilling a long-cherished fantasy. It's just them and the books now, the stamped serifs, the margins smudged with fingerprints. You can still go to the library, to the yards of windows casting long stripes of light across the stone floor, the long tables, the wood paneling, the paintings on the walls. You can still go and read the books. Except for the large firearms that the librarians carry, it's like nothing happened, as if every noon, businessmen are still eating their lunches under the lions."

*in my memory this is the only time I've ever been compelled to use this word, let alone in a positive way

(less)

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Jun 27, 2010 Travis rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's all but impossible to read a book about the collapse of the United States without looking out the window and wondering, what if? How would we manage? Where would we go, or would we stay right here? What would we be willing to do to survive? Has the relative ease of our current lives ruined us for survival in such a world? Just how bad would things get?

My suspicion is things would get pretty bad. We don't exactly have the most just society in the world, so if the old rules were to all of a...more It's all but impossible to read a book about the collapse of the United States without looking out the window and wondering, what if? How would we manage? Where would we go, or would we stay right here? What would we be willing to do to survive? Has the relative ease of our current lives ruined us for survival in such a world? Just how bad would things get?

My suspicion is things would get pretty bad. We don't exactly have the most just society in the world, so if the old rules were to all of a sudden lose their teeth, if the prisoners were set free and the wardens were locked up, if money suddenly became nothing more than green-tinted pictures of dead presidents, then it's not hard to imagine that chaos would ensue as people scrambled to get their hands on what they needed to take care of their own.

Which is basically what happens in this book. When the country falls, it falls hard, landing flat on its back in a muddy bloody puddle of its own history, soaked to the bone with every act ever committed to make the nation what it is, or was, be it good, bad, or indifferent. "History folding in on itself" is a phrase that appears throughout. I think Slattery's biggest accomplishment here is that he makes that happen.

One of the cleverest things about this book is that it is told from the point of view of a gang of high-end criminals, the Slick Six mentioned in the title. They're experts at making a killing by playing the system off of itself. They're incredibly smart talented people who produce nothing, give nothing, offer nothing to the world; they simply use and take. So when society falls, so do the cracks in which they played their little games. The story essentially becomes criminal against criminal, hustler vs. hustler, with one side trying to liberate the hustled, to do right by the past. Every character is forced to take a look at who they were before the collapse and who they are now and try to make sense of how they got there. History folding in.

It's a fast read that manages to be both fun and thought-provoking. Pick it up. Dig it. (less)

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Dec 03, 2009 Anthony rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book that needs to be read by lots more people.

Brian Francis Slattery turns what could have been a run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic adventure into a great and varied tapestry of events that never loses contact with the ground. The stories are plausible, the mythology tight, and the characters as wide-ranging as the United States itself.

The story starts five years after an apocalyptic meltdown of the US financial system. Brian Slattery has a day job as an economist, so his acc...more

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Nov 06, 2011 Logan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dystopian-fiction, scifi-fantasy

Ever since stumbling across this book's title on a year's best list compiled by Cory Doctorow I have been excited to read it. I mean, look at that title! Who wouldn't be intrigued by this? It sounds like exactly the rollicking yarn that I crave from my post-apocalyptic fiction. As such, when the time came to choose a few books for a long plane ride, this jumped to the top of the stack.

It did not disappoint. An exceptionally quick read written in a slapdash fashion that would work well for sittin...more Ever since stumbling across this book's title on a year's best list compiled by Cory Doctorow I have been excited to read it. I mean, look at that title! Who wouldn't be intrigued by this? It sounds like exactly the rollicking yarn that I crave from my post-apocalyptic fiction. As such, when the time came to choose a few books for a long plane ride, this jumped to the top of the stack.

It did not disappoint. An exceptionally quick read written in a slapdash fashion that would work well for sitting around a campfire and swapping yarns, this was indeed a rollicking good yarn. Marco is one of the Slick Six, a gang of con artists, thieves and mercenaries who pulled off some of the most legendary crimes the world had ever seen in the fiddling days before America's final collapse. After being betrayed and imprisoned on a ship for several years, riding out the global collapse in relative comfort, he steers the ship back to New York to see what the old gang has been up to.

The America he returns to, though, bares little resemblance to the one he once rode roughshod over. Slavery has made a resurgence, with former city-dwellers willingly selling themselves into feudal serfdoms for the promise of a bit of food and a roof over their heads. The plains are ruled over by bands of roving Sioux, who have left their reservations and reclaimed their warrior heritage. Las Vegas has morphed into a solar-powered non-stop Burning Man. Ruling over all of them is Marco's former nemesis, the Aardvark, a classic villain who rules over his slave empire from a rooftop penthouse in midtown Manhattan.

Finally free after his years at see, Marco begins getting the old gang back to together for one last great score- taking down the Aardvark once and for all. What follows is a fast-paced cliche of a story, one that never pauses to take itself too seriously or to let the reader realize the sheer ridiculousness of what they're accepting at face value. While Slattery's post-fall America is a vivid depiction of one possible future, a well-rendered world that I would be interested in seeing described in deeper detail, the events that sweep up his characters (if such two-dimensional constructs can be called so) are on a "buying magic beans" level of unbelievable. I'm not exactly the most skeptical of readers, but this story pulled me up short. Still it was a wild ride of excitement and one I was glad I read. (less)

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Mar 13, 2009 Scott Radtke rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: humor, sci-fi

I didn't know much about this book except it was recommended by boingboing. Let me be the first to say I find a bit of Cory Doctorow's taste to be quite different from my - I think I'm less of a fanboy. That said, this was one of the good ones. It was reading a book premised on the collapse of America (it's right there in the title) as we watch our economy collapse and can see the writing on the wall that our empire is at an end. And thank god. Liberation is in many ways a sobering look, humorou...more

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Mar 21, 2009 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

An imagining of the US after a complete spontaneous economic breakdown. The topic might be a little *too* relevant to the present time for some.

What does this bankrupt American wasteland look like? Starvation and violence has killed the majority of the population. A drug lord rules Manhattan. Slavery is back with a vengenance. But there are signs of hope--people are eeking out an existence, and perhaps the country could return to some level of normalcy, if only there were a group of six intrepi...more

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Apr 07, 2010 Drake rated it 2 of 5 stars

After amazon.com gave ‘Liberation’ its best sci-fi book of the year some time back, I decided that I had to read it. As with most highly praised sci-fi books, it did not live up to the hype. It was completely style over plotting, characters, and the story. And worse, the style was an obvious stoner rip-off of the 1960s, or what has become the mythicized 1960s. Perhaps, there was a time when I actually might have bought into this, but now, older and cynical, it just comes off as terrible storytel...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Bryan Dunn rated it 3 of 5 stars

I liked this. I really wanted to love it, but there's too much 'writer' going on. When Slattery's words connect, they make for some wonderfully descriptive passages, but when they don't, it's easy to glaze over paragraphs and not realize you're back in the story for a couple of sentences. There's a definite voice here, but it's a little too enamored with itself right now. I look forward to reading some of his later books to see if that becomes less of an issue for me.

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Jul 26, 2009 Ricardo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

The writing is amazing. That can't be said enough. But the plot does go all over the place and seems to have no direction. The highlight of the narrative has to be the descriptions of this future collapse and the results of no government or infrastructure. This is basically a road trip through a failed state and while what happens at the end isn't an ultimate solution, the endings for these characters are perfectly poignant. You could read far, far worse novels this year.

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“Marco smiles, they shake hands, and Robert Blackfeather Sherman sees it again, as he did when Marco knelt before him just a few minutes ago: The light warps around Marco Angelo Oliveira; the colors of the trees and sky stretch and smear, as if Marco is an empty place in the shape of a man and the earth and air around him are screaming to fill it.” — 1 person liked it

“He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.” — 1 person liked it

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title link	preview: Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America
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Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

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