Customer Reviews

Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you love your future dystopian, then this is the book you want to get and read as this is one of the more interesting dystopian future books since Little Brother. While Brian Francis Slattery who wrote the book could not have foreseen what is happening on the stock market, housing bubble, manufacturing collapse that is happening now when he originally penned the book, it is strangely prophetic with ties deep into what is happening today. The premise of the book is that after a monumental collapse of the American economic system, the USA is divided and controlled by warlords, where everything that can happen happens, including slavery.

The hero of the story is Marco Angelo Oliveira who flees from a prison ship after he has been there five years. The goal of Marco is to return to his old gang and get it going again. When he gets back to New York he finds that members of his old gang have been sold into slavery. He is also surprised by people working for food, and the general economic collapse that has happened while he was in prison. The Warlord of New York though wants no one to interfere with his rule, meaning we are in for an exciting climax between anti-hero and warlord in a frenetic fast-paced conclusion to the story. The conclusion to the story though is amazingly satisfying, and leaves the reader thinking that the story is truly over until the next book comes out.

What is amazing about this story though is that the world is rich enough to provide a playground for other writers to work within. Much like Niven's Known Space, and Harry Turtledove's alternative histories, there is enough detail in Brian's book to provide a fertile playground for other writers and himself to explore the implications of a high technology society that has rushed back into disorder, chaos, and desperation. A bridge book between Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Liberation would be an interesting story to read. There is much here to offer readers, and it is totally worth getting.

A little too close to reality for comfort, Brian Francis Slattery's Liberation depicts events in a post economic meltdown caused by America's over-borrowing. As a result the dollar collapses as does the government. Unfortunately, this dystopian vision kind of makes you tap your fingers nervously as you think about the real crisis.

The ensuing riots and warmongering produce a hellacious world where slavery reappears and the ghosts of the past rise to walk the land. It's an amazing depiction of many cultural wrongs and excesses this country has engaged in.

And the story of the Slick Six is a compelling one that provides just enough to engage you, but not so much as to make you skip ahead. This story really is about America, not so much the Six, which other than Marco, seem to be vehicles for the larger story.

My one beef with the book was more stylistic. I'm not a big fan of long Faulkneresque paragraphs and this book had plenty of them. In addition the tangential movement between stories required an adjustment, but eventually started working for me. All in all, a great read that I highly recommend.

This is a relatively popular and well reviewed book. Several end-of-year lists put it at or near the top for all SF in 2008.

I appear to be one of the few that was less than enamoured by Liberation.

Every one of the characters were too shallowly drawn for my tastes. Each is supposed to be part of the Slick Six: a group of quasi-Robin Hood superhero-ish types that were so talented that they stole hundreds of millions of dollars. No real indication of their talents (other than Marco's ability to kill) is given through the course of the book, leaving the reader with no real understanding of why they were so feared/revered. They all have an aura of superheros -- especially Marco being the protege of "Red Kwon" and the weird Kung Fu type moves that The Assassin knows.

Combine that with the constant presence of The Vibe and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to take the book seriously or not. But the presence of Marco's extreme violence, cannibalism, and slavery harshes my vibe. It is hard to take a dystopian future as light reading but it feels like that's what Slattery was aiming for.

The plot is inconsequential and nonsensical. We are supposed to believe that the Aardvark is the lynchpin of the modern American anarchy -- though he didn't do anything but fill the void created by the collapse of the state -- and removing him will allow America to be "reborn". Or something.

The details of the plot don't make any sense: slavery is legal in the US but certainly not in Japan so why are Zeke et al still "slaves" of the pirate captain when they visit Kimura? Slavery started before the Aardvark got involved -- and it appears to be people entering into it to avoid a worse fate or starving -- so it isn't clear how killing the Aardvark is going to remove slavery from the US. Why do they need the New Sioux to overthrow the Aardvark?

The hippie anti-modernism views are mildly grating. A few sentences early on gloss over the millions dead from starvation. (What happened to the plague and disease from all those bodies?) But paragraph after paragraph waxes lyrical about how great life is (for those still living) now that they aren't Keeping Up With The Joneses or on the Corporate Treadmill. We see communes in LA but no scenes of the 25 million of diabetics suddenly having to do without insulin.

You're not supposed to take this book seriously, not supposed to look into its plots or its premises too clearly because they're a shambles. I guess I failed at that. But maybe if the flavor, the style, the characters of the book were better it would have carried me past those failings. It didn't deliver on that narrow promise either.

It wasn't a BAD book but I wouldn't recommend it to many people, either.

"Liberation" is an interesting book about what life might look like if the United States were ever to suffer a cataclysmic economic collapse. In this work of fiction, Brian Slattery draws an interesting series of threads together to paint a picture of life without many of the essentials Americans take for granted.

The storyline is engaging, yet it is peppered with "60s-esque" stylistic passages. These passages convey a sense of change and revolution, but they often seem forced and inserted somewhat arbitrarily.

Moreover, Slattery pushes many characters and scenes together with rambling musical anecdotes. Slattery expresses an interest in music and "alternative" views of society in this novel.

Despite the "off the beaten path" prose and narrative, this is an enjoyable book to read. Slattery's commentary regarding the economic collapse of the US seems prescient from the vantage point of May 2009.

Liberation is a post-apocalyptic book for our time. It really made me think about what could happen if the economy actually collapsed, and not in the hyperbolic way all of the politicians love to talk about. What happens if the world's confidence on our financial system actually dissolved? If your money in the bank and the stock market and in your wallet suddenly wasn't worth anything? Well, there probably isn't a "super hero" like Marco coming at the end to save you, but at least he provides some entertainment value in an otherwise sobering book.

I won't spend too much time on the plot, as it's been summarized up above. I will say that the book is challenging to read. You have to work your way through narration that is dense and does, at times, feel like a drug trip. There are mystical elements and relationships not fully explained. You have to work as a reader and make some guesses, based on the way characters interact with each other, about what has come before.

On the other hand, I found the characters and situation compelling and morally challenging. You can understand how the villians got to where they are, and you certainly don't agree with everything the heroes do. I enjoyed thinking about what I would do if I were caught in this situation, and the author seemed to anticipate this, as very few courses of action are left unexplored, post-collapse. People were left with a host of bad options as they just tried to survive after the collapse. Do you grab what you can, knowing that it means that others will suffer and die? Do you give up your freedom for survival? Do you band up with others and hope you can defend yourselves and your things? I guess it's not really different than America today, but with the consequences turned up to 11.

Ultimately, for me, this book was worth the work. But, afterwards, I was ready to go back to a little light reading.

This is a good book and one I would be comfortable recommending to people in my circle of sci-fi fans. The main character is an almost super human mercenary who is waging a personal war against a capatalistic drug/slave lord in post-apocalyptic America. So thats all good. Sounds like the set up for a tv show or movie, really. The book is indeed pretty fast paced and smooth. The one sort of quirk here is the writing style, which I quite liked. The author uses a voice that at times is conventional but alternates towards a sort of beat-poet type road book other times. It can be grating for the first 40 or 50 pages till you grab the vibe. Then again its ultimately what differentiates this book from a pure page turner. I think this would be a great book for someone looking for a quick read on vacation or someone who wants to check in on the state of sci-fi/fantasy without committing to a huge series. Definitely check it out.

Slattery really comes into his own in this book. You can tell that his writing style has really grown since Spaceman Blues. It's the type of book that you don't just speed through; you carefully read and decipher every sentence and phrase.

I really like this book. I think if Kill Bill were a novel first, it would read a lot like tihs.

The words on the page were a joy to read and spun my imagination in wonderful directions with it's imagery. It does take a few pages to get into the lyrical flow of the book, but it didn't take me any longer than any other book. I liked the primary and secondary characters and thought the small glimpses into their lives left me wanting more. A lot more.

I'm not sure that the motivations of the characters were explored in enough depth. I'd like to seen have the Slick Six in top form that not only showed their skill, but their ingenuity and group chemistry. At some points it seemed like the only person that really need to show up was the main character.

Despite the lyrical prose, this book is begging to be a movie, and just like a movie, some of the important bits of character development were loped off. This is the 300 page version of a 800 page book.

I thought the book was beautifully written which is the reason for the four stars. For this type of story I think there needed to bits of straight-forward story-telling to be effective.

While many apocalyptic stories have the end of civilization coming by meteors, aliens, zombies or plague, Brian Francis Slattery's novel Liberation offers a more plausible scenario: complete economic collapse. While it is really only the United States that suffers this catastrophe - making it become a Third World nation almost overnight - the whole world is transformed.

Although the catastrophe is chillingly possible, Slattery's story is also a comic book-like superhero story. The crime lord known as the Aardvark has taken over New York City and has his tendrils throughout the shattered country. Opposing him are a group of master thieves known as the Slick Six, though through much of the novel, they are disbanded. It is Marco, the master warrior in the sextet, who is intent on reuniting his ex-team and restore a semblance of law to the U.S.

To do this, Marco will have to cross a blighted continent where slavery is again a reality and the only law is that the strongest can take what they want. To the Aardvark, this is fine, but the Slick Six are a real threat. Before the collapse, they pulled off schemes almost magical in their complexity, combining their individual gifts to steal billions.

Slattery's second novel (I've not read the first) is part science fiction, part caper story and part literary novel, with a mix of both humor and horror. The main gripe I have is his jarring changes of scenes without even the standard section break between paragraphs; instead, you find yourself abruptly following a new character in a completely new location. It's a stylistic element that adds nothing but irritation, but it's really the only flaw. Otherwise, this is a pretty fun read, which probably will appeal the most to those who like superhero adventure stories; though it may be disguised as something more, that's what Liberation is.

Whenever I pick up an old book (Pre 1900) it always takes me a while to wrap my head around the rhythm of the writing. With modern books this rarely happens.

However with Liberation I would say it was actually harder to pick up the rhythm than many of the older books I've read. Slattery has a habit of switching narratives with virtually no indication that he's doing so other than subtly referencing a place or name. He drops in and out of flashbacks regularly and it often takes a re-read of the paragraph (when you're suddenly confused) to work out exactly what he's talking about.

These complains aside the book was an excellent read. I enjoyed the characters and Slattery definitely has some lovely prose. The themes of the book were different to what I was expecting, but this was a good thing and I found myself really enjoying the more mystical element to the book by the end. Some themes that I did enjoy I felt could have been delved into a little deeper and I would have had no issue if the book was about 25% longer to delve into some of these themes.

I certainly felt it could have used a bit of editing to make the thing a bit more readable though.