Customer Reviews

Buyout

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Buyout" tells us the story of Martin Kindred, a California man whose white-collar job bores and stifles him. Seemingly out of nowhere, he is offered the opportunity to take charge on a project. Specifically he's asked to become to spokesperson for a new corporate-run program of "buyout". California inmates serving a life sentence without parole are given to chance to give millions of dollars to any person or charity they wish. The trade-off: the inmate must allow the company to execute them (the so-called "Golden Needle") within forty-eight hours. Killing these prisoners saves the company many more millions of dollars (since the average prisoner serving a life sentence serves sixty years behind bars.)

Martin's personality is what drew me into the book. He is not a fearless hero or hyper-intelligent skeptic. Martin is an idealist in heart and forces himself to believe that buyouts are morally justified, even as his friends and family begin to voice their doubts.

Without giving too much away, the book's basic question becomes this: how hard is it to distance yourself from a cause or a belief you've committed yourself to, even when you know that clinging to this belief might ruin you? Additionally, sprinkled through the book are the musings of one Walt Dangerfield, a free-wheeling, off-the-cuff podcaster or sorts who comments on the novel's characters and fleshes out the novel's futuristic world, similar to our own in all the worst ways.

I really recommend this book to any college course or reading group that's interested in exploring issues of morality. Recently, my Ethics class used "Buyout" to examine issues of the sanctity of life and capital punishment.

In 2040 Los Angeles middle management insurance executive Martin Kindred works for Antelope Valley Casualty, a firm seeking to increase profit margin after a fiscally disastrous 2039. The brass comes up with a terrific reengineering solution to cut government costs and obtain revenue by eliminating overcrowding in prisons caused by the increase over the past few decades to 22 crimes leading to automatic life sentences without freeing the incarcerated. The beneficiaries of lifers with no chance for parole will receive millions if the convict opts for immediate death.

Martin is assigned the task of preparing the prisoner-volunteer for execution and subsequently giving the check to their survivors. The once dead pro-life movement resurfaces in a furor over the cold hearted bottom line execution. Martin finds himself caught in the crosshairs, which impact his marriage. However, his neutrality collapses when his brother the cop is murdered.

Using hyperbole to extrapolate America's second greatest growth industry during the Bush Administration, the warehousing zealousness of convicts (military contractors were first), Alexander C. Irvine provides a profound futuristic parable. The story line leaves the audience questioning the prison system especially privatization in which the government pays by the number of prisoners incarcerated. BUYOUT is a well written dark winner using trend analysis exaggerated into the future to provide a solution to America's fondness for prison warehousing

Harriet Klausner

With great characters and a makes-ya-think central idea in a very viable near-future, Alex Irvine has written a book that caught me off guard. I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed this title by an author I'd sadly never heard of. My thanks to Spectra for sending me the book in a giveaway that I won on their Facebook page.

I see Buyout as two types of books at once. First, it's an idea book. In the year 2040, the company Nautilus has pioneered a radical and controversial new way to deal with overcrowded prisons and the high costs of imprisoning those serving life without parole: offer them a buyout. Pay them to take the "Golden Needle" and end their lives. They receive a sum of money based on the expected would-be costs of their life imprisonment, and they get to decide how to distribute this money anyway they wish though they are encouraged to use it as a means to atone for their crimes. Donate it to charity. Give it to the family of your victims. Setup a college fund for needy kids. But opponents to buyouts see this as placing a monetary value on human life. And they're not exactly wrong, in my opinion. See, it's a big idea.

The second type of book I see this as is a character study. With many rules and restrictions that buyouts need to precisely follow, Martin Kindred is the man in charge of choosing viable candidates for buyouts and for making sure that they go by-the-book. And as a by-the-book kinda guy, he's perfect for the job. We get to see Martin go through a lot of hard times. His marriage is crumbling. His position with Nautilus is putting him and his family in the spotlight and not in a good way. We learn that his career decisions have made him a perpetual outsider to his family of career cops. And then someone close to him gets murdered. We also see just how far a person might go, what rules they may break, for the sake of friendship.

Make it a thriller by throwing a mystery in there to tie it all together and you have one really good book. I suppose there could have been a bit more tension and the pace could have been faster (key features of a thriller, right?) but those are the only possible complaints in my opinion. And the strengths FAR outweigh any weaknesses. I'm glad to have lucked my way into this book. I'm looking forward to reading some of Irvine's work that I've already missed and to see what he does in the future.

You might find this a little slow, but this novel offers what SF used to do and should keep doing: a literary treatment of important human issues in relation to mankind's present dilemmas, by extrapolating realistically towards the future. It offers no evasion into fantasy land or implausible space opera, but rather the kind of thing Aldous Huxley, Philip K.Dick or (more recently) Paolo Bacigalupi have been doing. The resolution is a little uncertain, lacks economy and has some other flaws, but the core idea of the buyout is worked out very realistically. Not a literary classic, but as SF goes highly recommended.

After reading the fantastic Unincorporated Man, I got a recommendation from Amazon to try Buyout. Extremely dissapointing book. While the concept seems like it would be a great start for a Phillip K Dick-esque sci-fi thriller, the idea is absolutely wasted. The book is very talky, and not in a way that progresses the plot forward. The main characters discuss ad nauseum the concept of buyouts. It's affect on society, children, death, etc. The first hundred pages or so of the book are literally just people discussing a concept from all imaginable angles. No real plot development occurs until about 130 pages into the book when a murder mystery is introduced. Even then, the author wastes about 20 pages on the main characters discussing the impact of the death on their lives. Death from the perspective of the brother. Now from the perspective of the children. Friends up next. Now let's talk about how the death was different for his co-workers. On and on. The other major problem with this book is that the characters are generally unlikable. Martin, the main character, is detached and ambivalent about his job, wife, kids. His wife is a passive aggressive shrew. His best friend Charlie is somewhat interesting but cliche. There really is no one to latch onto. I could go on, but skip this one.

"The thinking man's page turner," is what a friend called Alex Irvine's newest book, a sci-fi noir crime novel called Buyout.

I think he pretty much hit the nail on the head. The book is exciting and well written, and has a comfortable pace that allows you to read in your leisure time without feeling harassed, but sticks in your mind the rest of the time so you can't wait to get back to it. Aside from good characterization, excellent dialogue, and a gripping plot, Buyout addresses - in true sci-fi style - some major and difficult questions Americans face today (and will face in the future) about the increasing commodification of American life, and, specifically, American lives.

Does human life have a dollar value? This is the Western world, of *course* it does. Critics say this is far-fetched, but we can see it already in our society, where the elderly are left destitute by a corrupt economic system that makes everyone's money imaginary (except for the bankers'), where inflation ensures that minimum wage is not enough to live on, and where you can put a hit out on someone for less than 1000 smackers. Irvine makes this institutional: the plot is, what if the government condoned the immediate execution of a life-term prisoner in exchange for a certain percentage of what it would cost to keep that prisoner alive, in jail, for the rest of his natural life? This is also not far fetched - indeed, though we never think about it, this is the *point* of insurance. No one would have health insurance if the providers thought people would get cancer more than once or twice...

In any case, the real beauty of this book is that it combines a classic sci-fi thriller with a plot that has real depth; these could be the consequences of our flat-screen TVs, our penchant for eating fruit out of season, and our sneaky night-time lawn-watering in periods of drought: a world where everything is assessed in terms of its monetary value, and where a good person can convince himself that a bad thing is good because life in general is so violated and meaningless.

I *highly* recommend this book. It's going to be important on so many levels. I assume I'll have to read it a few more times to find them all. I suspect that Irvine is smarter than I am, and that there is a whole bunch of stuff hiding in this text that the relative structural simplicity of a thriller denies.