Customer Reviews

Imago (Alan Rodgers Books)

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

 

 

In the future of this 2002 work, the vast corporate giant DisLex, provider of entertainment and utilities and some government services, and its psychopathic CEO, Harman Jacques, not only round up victims of the Human Mutational Virus (HMV) and put them in de facto work camps but have also developed a vast, miniaturized simulacra of the world. In this PerfectTown, duplicated living and historical personages, the imagoes of the title, exist including Harman and his secret assistant, a little side project in complex personality simulation - one Richard M. Nixon, Harman's personal hero.

I feared, initially, that we were in the world of implausibly rationalized fable and another tired tract on the evils of the white man and his power structure. After all, HMV is a biologically improbable disease which renders most of its victims human-animal chimeras or, in rare cases, clown-like figures complete with huge noses. Also, Casil is not the most consistent in the prophylactic measures needed to prevent infections. These "freaks" are seemingly not only inspired by early fears of AIDS victims but are stand-ins for all kinds of social outsiders. And they are oppressed by white, powerful Harman. And Harman has a bizarre, creepy plan to infect his new assistant, Julie Curtez, with the disease. Her and hubsand Frank, who, as a district attorney, is trying to nail DisLex on drug trafficking charges, look suited to be our non-white heroes.

And the fantastic trappings aren't that new either. Communities simulated for nefarious ends go back to at least Frederik Pohl's "Tunnel Under the World" and Andrew D. Weiner's "The News from D Street". Simulacra of historical personalities go back to at least Philip K. Dick's We Can Build You and were popular in the 1980s with Robert Silverberg's shared world Time Gate. And the logic of how these characters interact with their cyber environment is even shakier than that series. The nature of the struggle between the characters that mainly takes place in PerfectTown in the book's final third reminded me of one of those dream worlds where people symbolically fight in some person's unconsciousness.

Yet, the book has one great strength, the only thing that kept me reading besides a mild curiosity about Julie's fate: Richard Nixon. Casil spends so much time with him, seamlessly drops in so many details about his life, gives us so much of the thoughts of this flawed but, if not truly decent, not hopelessly flawed man, that his fate, his journey kept me reading. Like the above Time Gate series or some of Harry Turtledove's alternate histories, I got the sense of coming into contact with some version of a real, historical person.

The constantly shifting viewpoint characters with their detailed thoughts reminded me, as did the presence of an Abraham Lincoln simulacra (a character in We Can Build You), of Dick. But the similarities are more stylistic than thematic and, frankly, this novel is plotted better than a lot of Dick's novels were.

In short, read this for Casil's style and her great achievement in Nixon, not for the technological trappings or story novelty.

It should also be noted that this is the third and final installment in the story of Gyla, a wolf-woman victim of HMV.

[Review based on copy provided by author.]

It was an interesting concept, but a bit overwritten. There were sections that were filled with either exposition or abstract language, which ground the story's progression to a near standstill. Reading it on my Kindle, I couldn't believe that when the story arc seemed over, I still had about 25% of the book left to read.

The most interesting character (to me) was the antagonist, Harmon Jacques, but he was mostly faded out in favor of Richard Nixon in sequences which bordered on bizarre.

I can't say I enjoyed the book enough to justify suggesting it to anyone. I read it in a little over a day, but I was driven as much by just wanting to finish it as the slim hope that it would improve at some point.

Most of all, I was disappointed by the relative lack of depth portrayed for what seemed like an interesting concept in the form of the "Imagoes." In the end, it seemed like a fairly superficial title for a way that a dead character can interact with the living.

Imago by Amy Sterling Casil is a fascinating and incredible story set in a futuristic world, where Disney ("DisLex") not only provides entertainment but also provides most of the US's infrastructure and vital services like communications, power, and credit. This world has been infected by the Human Mutational Virus (HMV), which causes people to be disfigured and take on animal-like attributes. The infected "freaks" are feared and despised, with the uninfected running the country, lead by the CEO of DisLex, Harman Jacques. Harman is a complicated, damaged man who reviles, experiments upon, and segregates the infected; his fear is based upon the fact that he himself is secretly infected. Fascinated with imperfection, he creates a model "PerfectTown", populated with virtual constructs of real people, based upon personality, personal history, and memories; these virtual people are called "Imagoes" and assume lives of their own.

Into this crazy world stumbles innocent & naive Julie Curtez, newly appointed assistant for Harman. Julie fears the "freaks," but slowly comes to understand that not everything is as presented by DisLex. With the help of her district attorney husband Frank and Imago Tricky Dicky (Richard Nixon), she embarks on a journey to learn the truth.

This all sounds a bit too far-fetched and crazy, but it works, primarily because the characters are so well done. In particular, Richard Nixon is incredibly fascinating, realistic, and complicatedly human and it is a treat to get know him and all his contradictions. Imago gives him a chance to redeem himself, and this is perhaps the best part of the book, though the entire world with the "freak" sub-cultures is intriguing and well-done. I would like to read more about this world.

All in all, Imago by Amy Sterling Casil is a unique story, completely different from anything which I have ever read before. Initially, I found it difficult to understand the setting, because Ms Casil plunges you directly into the world without explanation, and it is so completely foreign and strange, almost cartoonish (being Disney-based). However, I am glad I persevered through the first chapter, because it is a fascinating and incredible setting which quickly made perfect sense and raised thought-provoking questions about honor, redemption, prejudice, and life. Well worth reading.

Imago

When I got this book to review, I was really excited by the premise of a virtual place called PerfectTown and a wealthy businessman who is trying to exploit the world. The first chapter started out interesting, with a family falsely earning the tickets to preview PerfectTown and things go horribly wrong. Unfortunately, the story veered away from this premise and went in another direction.

The characters of this book, Harman Jacques, Julie Curtez and her husband Frank, and those people referred to as freaks who have contracted a virus known as HMV which turns them into animal/people hybrids are all very one-dimensional and uninteresting. There is no background to give us insight into why Harman Jacques, the evil wealthy businessman, is the way he is. He is obsessed with Julie Curtez, to the point of secretly videotaping her for years. Why was he obsessed with her? That was not explained. She wasn't a particularly likeable character. Her husband, Frank, was the most interesting of all. He was the most developed and I found myself rooting for him.

The author didn't go into why the HMV came into existence and how it changes people into animal/human hybrids.

There are so many interesting ideas in this story that I wish the author would have brought out and developed more. A whole novel just on the workings of PerfectTown would be fasinating. Or the story about the HMV evolved and how it changes people and how society handles this new "breed" of human.

Although I didn't particularly like this book, I do look forward to reading some of the author's other works. She definitely has good ideas and I hope that I will be able to get more involved with some of her other characters.

After reading Amy Casil's "Without Absolution" (a passable first novel, if a bit rough) I had expected "Imago" to be a more polished work. Sadly, "Imago" just doesn't deliver the goods. The main character, Harman Jacques, just isn't very believable, and that seriously cripples the overall novel. And though the idea of PerfectTown was the best part of the book, in the hands of a more skillful writer it could have been much more cleverly done. Still, "Imago" tries hard, and the reincarnation of Richard Nixon was a neat idea. No cigars for this effort, so two shiny stars will just have to do.

This is a novel of many voices, and underneath it all, a subtle deep layer of empathy and humanity by Nebula Award Finalist and gifted storyteller Amy Sterling Casil.

In a near future world, DisLex is a monstrous corporation holding all lines of communication and controlling most of the amusements and public utilities in a semi-automated society which expects many channels of often mindless entertainment and disdains outward ugliness. At the head of this corporation is Harmon Jacques, a Dorian-Gray-type madman secretly infected with the incurable HMV, the so-called "freak" virus, and sexually and emotionally obsessed with a beautiful Latino woman Julie Curtez who works for him. Harmon has her under secret 24-hour surveilance, watches her every move, her nudity, her quiet moments, her innocence, her pain, and has accumulated years worth of tapes that constitute a record of her life and loves -- tapes that in their sum total can recreate a virtual person, an imago.

But Julie is not Harmon's only obsession. There are other imagos, virtual people -- growing more real and complex with each passing moment -- populating PerfectTown, a virtual construct in the brain of a supercomputer at the heart of DisLex. One of these is the imago persona of Richard Nixon, an amazing character who is at the heart of the book, for Richard is Harmon's idol, dream, teacher, psychological "parent," and eventually conscience.

The plot is deceptive -- on the surface, an engrossing hi-tech thriller, concerning an expose of Harmon Jacques and the horrifying DisLex corporation, and the liberation of the freaks who are the result of the Human Mutational Virus, and who are also Harmon's pet obsession, since deep inside he is one of them. The real plot happens in the minds of the humans, the freaks, and the imagos, for lines of difference, of prejudice, of the real and unreal, become blurred, and underneath it all, the human greatest strength is that of empathic love.

Oscar Wilde's theme of external beauty covering a soul's ugliness and vice versa, runs throughout the novel, and indeed it comes down to another of Wilde's lines: "Yet each man kills the thing he loves," because some of the choices that the characters are faced with are the destruction of that what is dark in one's own soul, personal sacrifice and the notion of doing the right thing.

The imago Richard Nixon is a fascinating study in "what if" -- an alternate meta-history, a man given a second chance to do the right thing with a great yet different power once again at his disposal. Political nuances and real historical detail are at play with an imaginary world of possibilities, and Amy Sterling Casil shows her ever-increasing mastery as a writer of the human psyche at integrating and extrapolating from our own reality into a meta-reality. IMAGO becomes a projection of wishful thinking, a correction of history's faults, and at the same time a gentle admission that "you cannot change the world that is, you have to let it be."

And yet, change is inevitable, we are shown, because the freaks themselves, the mutants that figure prominently in the novel, the beings that Harmon strives to destroy in his pain and self-hatred, serve to remind us that ultimately we are all only human, and we are all caught up in the great world around us, whether it is imaginary construct PerfectTown or the imaginary construct that lies within our own dreams.

IMAGO is truly a feast for thought.