Customer Reviews

Demon 4

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It's hard to know what to make of this book. It it great? No. But somehow it made an impression on me.

It's the near future of a world that might have come into being if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed. In the aftermath of WWIII things are falling apart but it's not the dark ages just quite yet. There is a rogue undersea robotic fortress that is threatening to seal off a large chunk of the oceans of the southern hemisphere and with resources tight that would be a bad thing. Though just a computer (and it never talks) the fortress has somehow become a lot more canny and nasty than anyone expected. It trashes conventional naval forces with appalling ease, and nuking it would have very bad consequences indeed.

So into this mix we have a small team of technicians living on an iceberg, all of them damaged by the war in some way, and they are given a new weapon system: a miniature cyborged submarine, tiny but in the ocean where to emit noise is to die it is the ultimate in stealth, packed with enough weapons to take out an old-style naval battlefleet with change left over, and able to 'see' in the blackest depths of the ocean from sound reflected from distant sources the same way that we can see using light from the sun or moon...

Your mileage may vary, but I found this novel oddly hypnotic. The battle scenes are more compelling than most of Tom Clancy's work, and I found myself imagining living in a shipping container in some ungodly cold nowhere a thousand miles from any other living human being, and hoping to get sent home, but knowing that your wishes are the last thing the military dictatorship would ever care about.... I got a sense of the vastness and coldness of the great southern oceans surrounding Antarctica, a world in many ways more hostile and alien than those envisaged in many space operas.

`Demon 4' was first published in Britain in 1984; this Ace paperback (184 pp) was released in 1986 and features a cover painting by John Berkey.

The novel is a mixture of technothriller and SF and could be considered a European take on the near-future warfare theme worked so successfully by Tom Clancy in the early 80s.

`Demon 4' takes place in the immediate aftermath of a war between the Eastern Bloc and NATO. Nuclear weapons have been used by each side and most of Europe is destroyed, along with select cities in the US and Russia. The scope of the destruction and the loss of much of their forces have compelled the combatants to enter into an uneasy truce. With the major powers exhausted, formerly modest states such as Argentina are muscling into position for a ruling place in the new world order.

A massive robotic fortress, called Krak-1 (`Kraken - 1'), lies on the ocean floor north of Antarctica. Built and emplaced by the US, Krak-1 bristles with torpedoes and missiles and is designed to halt the flow of enemy sea and air traffic in much of the southern hemisphere. Unfortunately, after being activated for World War Three, Krak-1 refuses to shut down; it now sees all forces as a threat, not just those of the Warsaw Pact. It is critical that the fortress be destroyed in order to remove its threat to the shipping lanes.

Demon-4 is a midget submarine designed using the latest in stealth technology and computer architecture. It even has a cyborg `pilot': in a little pod within the sub, slices of a man's brain (!) are sitting in a jug of nutrient fluid and interfaced by fine cables to the ship's command and control systems.

Under joint guidance of its lone human passenger and the cyborg AI, Demon-4 is the last hope to remove Krak-1 and bring economic stability back to the depleted polities of the West. But the route to the fortress is remarkably hazardous, and Krak-1 has no intention of giving up without a fight....

As with his subsequent novel `Firelance', Britisher Mace takes a very downbeat and cynical point of view towards the military-industrial complex and the waging of modern war. The landscape of the Southern Ocean is unrelenting bleak, and the actions of the weary and depressed mission team devoid of the upbeat patriotism that underpins the Clancy novels. There is no guarantee that Demon-4's mission will be successful, or that if it does succeed, the ruling powers will voluntarily cede control of their domain, however tattered it may be.

Unfortunately, for me, whatever suspense the narrative generated was regularly undercut by the author's use of an overly figurative prose style. In my opinion a technothriller requires clean, unadorned prose to be successful, but that's not the case with `Demon-4'. Too many sentences are overloaded with metaphors and similes and the syntax suffers quite a bit of warping in order to accommodate these metaphors. For example, a weapons pod attached to the submarine is described as `....a black toy, a sea creature child a mere ten metres long.'

Readers interested in an 80s nautical technothriller with a decidedly different approach from a Clancy novel may want to give `Demon-4' a look, but they should be prepared to wade through some difficult prose.

(note: an expanded version of this review was originally posted at the `PorPor Books Blog' in February 2010).