reviews of future media
Vix, Melinor. Authority Control. HarprCollns. Apr. 2048. c.369p. ISBN 481-5-16234-222-8. $74.95. SF
Can a outlaw pair of librarians travel back in time to prevent the sentient robot library overlord MARC from disambiguating and “weeding” the memories, personalities and dreams of “all possible users” with lethal pulse-frequency authority control? In an age when people are born into social networks and intelligent software “recommend” their entire lives, massive multi-player immersive 3D books check out users, holding them virtual hostages for weeks — or sometimes years. As a now-outlawed librarian, Annika Forrest is checked into Robinson Crusoe –likely never to be “returned”– while simultaneously facing the reality that she helped implement the very system that now imprisons her. Help arrives in the unlikely form of a goat (actually another librarian, Daniel Foede, who is hacking the book). Annika and Daniel make a startling discovery that allows them to travel back in time but they must elude MARC’s pernicious spybots as well as the formidable hazards of the book itself. Vix is a master at staking the territory between reality and unreality and revealing the inner worlds of her characters—talents she honed in her previous novel Welcome to the Second Hand Church of the Fourth Dimensional Retribution. If Vix dwells too much on Annika’s apologies for empowering MARC, she makes up for it with a thrilling if dizzying ending. Highly recommended.
