Brain Thief (Sci Fi Essential Books) [Hardcover]

Alexander Jablokov (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sci Fi Essential Books | Publication Date: January 5, 2010

Bernal Haydon-Rumi, executive assistant to a funder of eccentric projects, drops by his boss’s house on the way home from a business trip. By the next morning, he’s been knocked out, his wealthy socialite boss Muriel has stolen a car and vanished, and the AI designed for planetary exploration that she’s been funding turns out to be odder than it should be. In figuring out what’s going on, Bernal has to deal with an anti-AI activist toting a handmade electronic arsenal, a local serial killer, a drug dealer with a business problem, a cryonic therapist stalked by past mistakes—and someone who specifically wants Bernal dead.

Brain Thief is a fun, literate speculative fiction adventure, sort of New England cyberpunk noir, set a year or ten from now, somewhere between the Berkshires and Boston, and includes, at no extra charge, a 30-foot-tall fiberglass cowgirl.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Bernal Haydon-Rumi stops by to check on his boss, Muriel, and gets a particularly enigmatic message from her—in a cowboy boot. Before the night is out, he has chased shadowy figures, interrupted an antique heist, been clocked with a cast-iron borzoi, and had his car stolen. In any case, his boss has disappeared and is sending him increasingly cryptic messages, leading him to a wildly divergent series of places: a deserted AI lab, a diner with a 30-foot fiberglass cowgirl on the roof, a junkyard that’s a cover for a fascinating variety of extralegal activities. Muriel discovered something about the AI she’d been funding, a repurposed planetary exploration probe, and an alarming connection to a now-defunct cryostorage facility. Bernal follows Muriel’s messages into a mess of murder and mayhem in a fun thriller-mystery and a nicely realized bit of nearish-future speculation. Jablokov’s first novel in 10 years is a good one. --Regina Schroeder

Review

Praise for Alexander Jablokov:

“With an array of quirky characters and a tornado of a plot that doesn’t stop twisting until the last page, here is the science fiction page turner of 2010.… At once hilarious and scary, this is the Alexander Jablokov novel we have been waiting for!”

--James Patrick Kelly, Hugo and Nebula Award–winner, on Brain Thief

 

“The influences on this fine first novel range from Alfred Bester to Umberto Eco, but Mr. Jablokov has his own way with words.”

--The New York Times Book Review on Carve the Sky

 

“A writer with a style and substance all his own.”

--The Minneapolis Star Tribune on The Breath of Suspension

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (January 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765322005
• ISBN-13: 978-0765322005
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alexander Jablokov writes science fiction for readers who won't give up literate writing or vivid characters to get the thrills they demand. He is a natural transition for non-SF readers interested in taking a stroll with a dangerous AI or a neurosurgeon/jazz musician turned detective, while still giving hardcore SF fans speculative flash, incomprehensible aliens, and kitchen appliances with insect wing cases.

From his well-regarded first novel, Carve the Sky, an interplanetary espionage novel set in a culturally complex 25th century, through the obscenely articulate dolphins with military modifications of a Deeper Sea, the hardboiled post-cyberpunk of Nimbus, the subterranean Martian repression of River of Dust, and the perverse space opera of Deepdrive, he has come to Brain Thief, a contemporary high-tech thriller with a class clown attitude.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars a matter of taste, March 19, 2011

By 

J. S. Banks (Mountain View, California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brain Thief (Sci Fi Essential Books) (Hardcover)

Give Brain Thief 50-60 pages and you will know if it is to your taste.

There is a dreamy and cluttered quality to this work. Nothing happens clearly or quickly, and characters are "cute" in a way that some may enjoy. The author often cannot walk his characters through a room without a description of the interior more appropriate to a set-designer's inventory than any real usefulness in propelling the story. Our protagonist has no particular "oomph" to him. The writing is clear and sometimes clever. The ideas are seductive. The pace is slow and the content rich. Not to my taste; give me clean syntax, fast action, and an author who is not teasing out the details. So... a negative for me, but maybe not you. What do you like?

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A mystery story with the elements of science fiction, January 28, 2010

By 

MelHay (Adamsburg, PA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Brain Thief (Sci Fi Essential Books) (Hardcover)

The mystery starts right away when Bernal is just coming home from a business trip stopping by to see his boss. He gets the feeling something's not right. You start to see, as well, something is askew. Chasing his boss as she runs away and steals a car to get away. What is going on? Muriel, Bernals boss, leaves hints and messages to help steer him on the right path to help him with the mystery of Hesketh. Hesketh is an artificial intelligence that is on a sample run through the hillsides before it is actually sent into space.

I have to say I understood what was going on at the beginning of the book. Then there were a lot of strange things mentioned in which I got confused on. There was talk of Hesketh, Hess Corp - who worked on Hesketh before Madeline and Muriel took on the project with Muriels money, and Long Voyage - a cryobank for people wanting to wake up in the future. The confusion was not that I didn't completely understand what I was reading but mostly that I didn't believe what I was reading. I couldn't figure out if I was reading and comprehending it properly. (This being part of the mystery stuff.) I started to tally all the information I was getting separately in my head then piecing it together to see where the book was going. I was just a little ahead of the author, as just as I was doing this he then started to do it in the book. At around 150 pages into the book Bernal started to piece the puzzle together as well. Which when I hit this point I was so proud of myself as I was coming right up at the same lines as the main character. Hurray for me to understand and put it together! Then there was new information added nicely from this point to include in solving the mystery.

The best part of the book that kept me going was wondering who was leaving the messages and who was dead or alive, who was the serial killer, and what was going on with Hesketh (if it really worked). In the end I got the answers I was looking for. The mystery element was what kept me going in the book.

The characters unfold nicely as the book goes. There are a few characters you really don't truly meet and follow through but they feel as they are main characters by the way they are talked about, described, and messages passed on. I liked this angle as I really felt I got to know these characters and they really came through. In the end I really enjoyed most of the characters.

There were just a few minor unfavored points: There were a few spots that when things were brought up or thought, it almost felt like it didn't really flow or blend with what was going on. Almost like the information was needed and had to be told somewhere, but there were only a small few of these. Then there was the main character Bernal. I felt like I really didn't get to know him as well as the other characters. I mean I did get to know him but for some reason I didn't feel the connection as much with him as all the other characters. I liked him but that was all. He did do a great job of solving the mystery at hand and sticking to his guns on his ideas.

This has been a wonderful mystery with the science fiction element added in. Many of the characters have parallel characteristics which could point to them as the possible killer behind all of this. But there is one that fits all the pieces very well. Can you figure it out?

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unconventional; not for everyone, January 21, 2010

By 

Jules Mazarin (Richardson, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brain Thief (Sci Fi Essential Books) (Hardcover)

This is a difficult book for me to review--mainly because I'm not sure how I feel about it. When I finished Brain Thief, my initial reaction was more or less the mental equivalent of a shrug. OK, it's done, now I can read something else. As you might guess, I hadn't exactly found it to be a page-turner; I didn't have any trouble putting it down and going to sleep. In fact, it put me to sleep a couple of times. (But the dreams...)

This book is so different from my usual recreational fare of science fiction and fantasy that I didn't really know what to make of it. In a way, it's a murder mystery--but that doesn't become clear until well past the middle of the book, when the first body turns up. Most of the "action" consists of the hapless "hero"--Bernal--trying to track down his missing employer, Muriel, who has a penchant for leaving cryptic messages that serve mostly to frustrate poor Bernal. Alas, Bernal is fated to suffer worse adversity than mere frustration as he pursues his feckless quest; the accumulation of damage begins with a blow to the head from a cast-iron dog (a doorstop) wielded by a burglar who just HAS to borrow a car RIGHT NOW. The burglar needs the car because Muriel (whom Bernal has just glimpsed running out of her house in a pink nightie) has just stolen the burglar's (already stolen) car while said burglar was engaged in the pursuit of his trade in a neighbor's house. This appears to be a principled sort of burglar, as Bernal's car is promptly returned with an apologetic note.

As Bernal continues to play detective (a role for which he is emphatically unqualified), he encounters a diverse set of bizarre characters. The majority of these are unusually large and muscular women that may (or may not) have eccentric obsessions and relationships, sometimes even with other humans. Some of these individuals add to Bernal's collection of bruises, scratches, and abrasions, as do the occasional explosions of uncertain origin. You might think that all this sounds both exciting and funny; however I found it to be neither. Jablokov's style is described as "deadpan" on the cover blurb; maybe that's apt, but you could also call it "flat". None of the characters was likable enough to identify with, and the events were narrated in such a disconnected and cryptic manner that my dominant reaction was one of perpetual confusion.

Particularly frustrating (to me, not Bernal) is that several key characters never actually come on stage during the book. For example, the engineer who designs the artificial intelligence for a sort of planetary explorer vehicle that was originally meant to be landed on some alien planet (before the government canceled the project) is allegedly at the center of whatever is going on. We hear about her often, but she has no "speaking part" in the novel. Muriel, too, is notable by her persistent absence.

All this, and the fact that the entire plot makes very little sense kept me from being engaged by this book. I was thinking I'd probably give it two or three stars if I got around to writing a review of it at all.

That changed when I started to tell a friend about Brain Thief. I had meant to give him a quick synopsis; oddly, I found myself unable to stop talking. This was, I eventually realized, because there were so many interesting things to talk about in this book. The rich repertoire of weird characters, motivations, events, and odd facts in Brain Thief make it a book that cannot be lightly disregarded. I just wish I had the capacity to enjoy it more.