The Alejandra Variations, by Paul Cook
A fairly typical batshit 80s sf novel by a dude, ie, virtual reality, nuclear war, dream states, drugs, and luscious women throwing themselves at the hero. And then at the end it does something amazingly and hilariously not typical of 80s sf (thank God) though now that I’ve read two of Cook’s books I suspect that it is typical for him.
This book was fairly terrible and incoherent, not to mention incredibly male-gazey, and the plot was dumb. However, it had some very compelling/eerie individual images and scenes, plus some pretty cool conceits, which kept me reading.
Nicholas Tejada is mildly psychic and employed by a government agency as precognitive. They plug him into a massive computer and feed him data, and he enters an incredibly vivid virtual reality hallucination which combines the data and his precognitive talent to construct a scenario foreseeing terrorist attacks.
The scenario also, unavoidably, includes his own personal preoccupations. He typically dreams that the danger is a nuclear bomb because he’s afraid of them, even if the actual incident he’s foreseeing is a sniper attack. This works out because he just needs to be close enough to point other resources in the right direction. For instance, in one vivid, unsettling scenario he dreams of a nuclear bomb walking out of the sea in Bombay; the idea of “attack from the sea” is sufficient for others to find the actual plot, which is a dirty bomb on a boat.
He also constantly dreams of his beloved ex, Rhoanna. She is beautiful and beloved and his ex, and that is literally all we ever learn about her as a person. This is pretty typical of the depiction of women in the book, though to be fair the men aren’t fleshed out much either.
Cut for plot spoilers. ( Read more... )
Commitment to premise: Very solid. It promises a dude tripping through various dystopian futures, and it delivers.
Cook is or was a Baba-lover, but I never met him. He wrote eight novels, one of which was unpublished until the advent of e-publishing, when he put it out himself. It’s called Karma Kommandos, which after reading two of his books somehow did not surprise me.
The Alejandra Variations[image error]
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This book was fairly terrible and incoherent, not to mention incredibly male-gazey, and the plot was dumb. However, it had some very compelling/eerie individual images and scenes, plus some pretty cool conceits, which kept me reading.
Nicholas Tejada is mildly psychic and employed by a government agency as precognitive. They plug him into a massive computer and feed him data, and he enters an incredibly vivid virtual reality hallucination which combines the data and his precognitive talent to construct a scenario foreseeing terrorist attacks.
The scenario also, unavoidably, includes his own personal preoccupations. He typically dreams that the danger is a nuclear bomb because he’s afraid of them, even if the actual incident he’s foreseeing is a sniper attack. This works out because he just needs to be close enough to point other resources in the right direction. For instance, in one vivid, unsettling scenario he dreams of a nuclear bomb walking out of the sea in Bombay; the idea of “attack from the sea” is sufficient for others to find the actual plot, which is a dirty bomb on a boat.
He also constantly dreams of his beloved ex, Rhoanna. She is beautiful and beloved and his ex, and that is literally all we ever learn about her as a person. This is pretty typical of the depiction of women in the book, though to be fair the men aren’t fleshed out much either.
Cut for plot spoilers. ( Read more... )
Commitment to premise: Very solid. It promises a dude tripping through various dystopian futures, and it delivers.
Cook is or was a Baba-lover, but I never met him. He wrote eight novels, one of which was unpublished until the advent of e-publishing, when he put it out himself. It’s called Karma Kommandos, which after reading two of his books somehow did not surprise me.
The Alejandra Variations[image error]
[image error] [image error]
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