Customer Reviews

The Fortunate Fall

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is really, really, good. Set in the 23rd century, the Russian narrator (Maya) is a telepresence "camera": she "witnesses" news events, or anything which could be a story, and her total impressions (sensorium, plus memories: the latter including implanted memories of research on the subject) are transmitted over the net to her audience, although the output is "screened" by another individual (a "screener") who is totally linked with the camera, and who apparently filters sensitive or personal material, and makes sure that the sensorium output comes through OK (red looks red, stuff like that). We slowly learn that Maya has a "past" which she cannot remember, because memories of it have been suppressed, and that that past is related to her love life. We also learn that her world has emerged in recent decades from the domination of a group called the Guardians, and that it is now bifurcated into the technologically advanced, but isolated, African continent, and to something called the Fusion of Historical Nations, which seems to be a shaky reestablishment of roughly 20th century political boundaries.

Maya's latest story is about some of the key events in the liberation of Russia from the Guardians. As she begins her story, her old screener quits and she gets a new one. This new screener is revealed to have quite remarkable abilities, and also seems to quickly fall in love with Maya, which is difficult for Maya to handle because her sexual emotions are suppressed. Maya and Keishi (the new screener) begin to investigate some details of the defeat of the Guardians, details which are for some reason potentially embarrassing to the "new world order". Staying one step ahead of the law, Maya travels across Russia and through the net in search of an interview with a man who has some secrets about the Guardians, their successors, and the nature of the world and the net.

Carter pulls off a number of exciting, brilliant things. The nature of this new world and its history are carefully and slowly revealed, along with Maya's own past, and the resolution is well integrated, the tragic ending is both a surprise and not a surprise, and is "earned".

The technological and social details of life in the FHN are wonderfully well realized. In many ways, this book is reminiscent of Bruce Sterling in the way future tech and future society are densely integrated with the narrative, and seem so possible. The terminology (Postcops, Weavers, greyspace, etc.) is intriguing, and is introduced in such a way as to seem natural (there are very few lectures), but also be part of the mysteries which are slowly revealed. The realization of the how "mindlink" technology might really affect the world, and also the images of cyberspace, are believable and original.

The prose is very good, mostly clean and elegant, not showy, but occasionally erupting in apt and memorable images. In addition, the story has true momentum: it makes you want to keep reading. This is a gift that not all good writers have, and it's a great plus.

The book falls slightly short in a couple of areas (mere quibbles, really). Much of the second half of the book is a long narrative by the interview subject, and this method of telling the story seemed to me to create a bit of disconnectness. The story really has two protagonists, Maya and Voskrosenye (the interviewee), and their stories are well integrated, but still there is a slight slackening in that the two stories (Maya's personal one, and the story of the nature of Maya's world, which is mostly told through Voskrosenye) don't quite end in synch. Also, the Guardians are a bit stock as villains (though to be sure they are not the only villains). And I thought Maya's original crime was, well, not likely to be such a crime in the 23rd century. But I could be wrong about that.

This book really provokes thought. One virtue is that much is implied and never told, and we have a sense of a whole fascinating underpinning to this world (such as what the African culture is really like) which is hinted at but not explained. Also, the main themes of guilt and personal responsibility are well handled, and there is some very good stuff about the nature of love, and the nature of love on the net, or in Cyberspace, or whatever.

"The Fortunate Fall" is good, vintage cyberpunk. Its gritty and noir. However, for all the good elements of the story, the author introduced others that left me cold.

The main character of the story is a human "camera" in a near future Russia. She is a journalist with implants allowing her to broadcast directly onto the net what she sees. While she is researching a historical story on a computer virus that infected humans with cybernetic implants she comes into contact with an information terrorist. This contact leads her to a much bigger story and confrontation with her society's "Big Brother-like" computer police.

The story is great cyberpunk. I particularly liked the heroine's concern about sterilizing a public usage jack to connect to the net in a train station. What really impressed me was the idea of a verbal computer programming language to make up for the lack of precision in natural language. I loved it, glottal click and all.

What left me cold was the whale. The cover jacket provides a mild whale spoiler. Some cliche's I can handle, but not whales. The book also smacked of what I call "Sam E. Delaney-ism". That is, a book beyond the depth of its audience. It may be it was just to deep for me. It may be it was just plain confusing.

I'm ambivilent about this novel. Read it for the tech and and the story, but skim over the parts bemoaning the fallen state of mankind.

Raphael Carter shows incredible potential in his debut novel, published in 1996, but where is the sequel or prequel!

An enormous dark world springs into life on the pages of "The Fortunate Fall", leaving this reader wanting much more, I first read this book (not much more then a novellete) 3 - 4 years ago, and like all great sci-fi does, it stuck with me, but after re-reading, and finding it just as good (I think the third time) as the 1st, I was much disappointed to find that there is no follow up work.

I too felt that the geekness of this dark and forbidding place was much better technically then Gibson, but then again Gibson himself has stated often that he was not much into tech when wrote his seminal work Neourmancer. I especiallly like the plugs and sockets described in this book, and you need no go further then recent headlines news (May, 2002) describing how rats brains have been hardwired (cabled!) in experiments aimed at creating remote "camera's" how prophetic can you be?

I love grand epics, like Julian Mays classic series, but this was is a great little book.

The Fortunate Fall is almost, but not quite, cyberpunk. It's got the nifty technologies, sure; but in place of cyberpunk's shallow, tragically hip veneer, Fall gives us three dimensional characters and emotional depth. The setting is a near future that is both plausible and startlingly different than anything I've seen before; the characters are superbly well-drawn; and the plot is unpredictable and engaging. The Fortunate Fall is an excellent debut novel, and I look forward to Carter's future output.

For you William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, & Neil Stephenson fans, I have a book to recommend. I know, I know: you've seen this and that book touted as the next Gibson or the next Stephenson, yadda yadda. Well, it's not the next anything, but his own work, and he's damned good. The book is The Fortunate Fall, by Raphael Carter, and it will hack your backbrain the way the Neuromancer trilogy, Virtual Light, or Snow Crash did. I've been trying to get through Gibson's 'Virtual Light' for more than 6 months now and keep setting it aside out of boredom and frustration. 'The Fortunate Fall' took me two days and that's only because I forced myself to slow down and savor it. You might say 'Fortunate Fall' is the book 'Virtual Light' would like to be. In any case, if you enjoy post-cyber-fi that makes you think about the world in new ways, snag a copy of 'The Fortunate Fall.'

I don't think I've seen a first novel written with this sort of authority in the past 10 years. Mr. Carter seems to have mastered the art of wrapping hypothetical technology into storytelling without ever having done it before.

Still, it's not a perfect book. The price is obscene for a paperback. The writer has perhaps too much confidence in himself, and in the reader's willingness to trust him for some tens of pages while very little happens, although that very little happens very entertainingly.

I foresee too possible pals for Mr. Carter: either he will be one of the most promising writers to emerge from the last decade, or he will listen to hard to the plaudits of the letter writing who do not care whether a story is told as long as it is told with the sort of sentence-by sentence-artistry that Mr. Carter appears to have been born having mastered.

I really think that Carter outdoes even William Gibson in_The Fortunate Fall_. That may be heresy, but it's true--not only is there technological detail abound, but there's a close, familiar human quality that draws me in even more. Cyberpunk has fast become a hardboiled subgenre, but I may be forced to rethink that opinion--Carter opens doors that most cyberpunk authors never thought about searching for. This book is well-worth reading.

Maybe this is what "cyberpunk" should have been, if it hadn't succumbed to its own hype. _The Fortunate Fall_ is a real story about characters I came to care about, facing real problems, in a real world. Not all that nice a world, but a believable one.

This would be a noteworthy work from a well-established author in the field. As a first novel, it's astounding.

Carter's work has a tendency to ramble on a bit, but its a good read. The Fortunate Fall has an interesting 1984-ish feel to it while still managing to add a human side to the often hardboiled stereotypes of the cyberpunk genre.

The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.


Okay, so The Fortunate Fall doesn't have quite as impressive an opening sentence as Gibson's genre defining work, but once I'd read Maya's reasons for writing the story down I was utterly hooked.



Read it, you won't regret it.