Customer Reviews

The Manuscript (Macmillan New Writing)

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

 

 

I love sleeping. I'm usually an out-cold-in-30-seconds guy, and very little comes between me and my pillow. After reading a good chunk of The Manuscript one day, I found I couldn't fall asleep. I actually *got out of bed* and snuck out of the bedroom to read a few more chapters. It's that good.

If you're an action fan who enjoys an occasional discussion about the meaning of life, or a philosopher who enjoys a good shootout now and then, you will Love. This. Book. Buy it now... and rest up before it arrives.

This excellent story revolves around the online search for a manuscript purported to have been written by the adventurer/traveller/all-round Renaissance man Sir Richard Burton which contains the secrets to life, the universe, and everything.

The two main protagonists are a sysadmin (who has a penchant for handguns) and his grad student friend at a college in Virginia. The immense cast of well-developed characters expands early and rapidly to encompass a security expert, an undercover cop, an underground team of well-trained self-appointed cyber-vigilantes known as the Angry Young Taoists, a BOFH/drug kingpin, and many, many more.

I won't give away any more of the plot.

Anyway, the action builds up early in the story, and then relentlessly ploughs on for a very long time, with many twists and turns and loads of gun battles, Mexican standoffs, and geekspeak. And is very very cool.

If Tarantino ever got a techie streak and decided to start writing novels, he would come up with something awfully close to this. The style is very cinematic, but unlike a film, the action gives you more than just two hours of entertainment.

I look forward to future work from Mr. Fuchs...Good stuff.

The Manuscript is a really fast-moving, exciting mystery novel. Anyone that likes a great chase, an intriguing story, and a good dose of techno-jargon, you will get a kick out of this book.

This is a GREAT book - high octane thrills, a cast of bizarre characters a la "Pulp Fiction" and excellent use of the McGuffin - the use of the (almost obligatory) frenzied search for a lost and extremely valuable historical artifact as a vehicle for a plot is becoming a bit stale, but MSF keeps this book fresh and engaging to the very end. Superb!!

While the cover of the book may make it appear so, The Manuscript is not your typical 'high-speed, action-packed thriller'. It is indeed 'high-speed', and incredibly 'action-packed', but it is smarter, funnier, more intricate, and surprisingly more inspiring than one might expect of the genre. Relating the race to recover a document that is storied to contain the final answers to The Big Questions about life, the universe, and everything, The Manuscript seamlessly incorporates ruminations on the nature of human existence into a plot filled with good guy versus bad guy, narrow escapes, technological tampering, and plenty of gunplay. One could compare it to the Da Vinci Code in its account of a modern-day perilous quest for a mystical artefact, except that the writing is more skilful, it doesn't incorporate any bad science, and it doesn't insult any world religions (well, at least not directly).

Fuchs creates an impressively large cast of diverse and well-conceived characters, whose divergent story-lines come together at a measured, but absorbing, pace. This novel is not about 'wham, bham, thank-you mam' action, but rather offers little 'tastes' of action as it builds up to its climax slowly, enjoying 'the ungentle ride' along the way, like a literary version of tantric sex.

While the snappy dialogue, profusion of hip, youthful characters, and in-depth descriptions of the ins and outs of the internet may appear to appeal only to a younger crowd, the novel's intelligent handling of everything from the history of philosophy to the rules of how to win a gunfight should appeal to anyone who enjoys what is, simply, a good read. The novel is certainly not for technophobes, but its savvy explanations of the inner workings of the internet do not require one to be a card-carrying computer geek to understand and enjoy the novel's technologically-embedded plot. And one cannot underestimate the enjoyment engendered by shameless philosophical and religious speculation. I read The Manuscript cover to cover, not being able to put it down throughout the long and unpleasant flight for which it was my chosen entertainment. Not only was I well-entertained, but also may have been, at least a little bit, enlightened.

Quite simply one of the most simply satisfying books I have read in a long time. Growing up in fiction with the likes of Douglas Coupland and Neale Stephenson, this book met a void between modern fiction and cyberpunk unfilled in quite a while. And the individual, vivid moments resonate in the mind.

Good read. Lots of raucous fun and suspense. Don't wait for the movie... Read the book!

High-energy, amusing, genial techno-thriller, informed by a real insider's knowledge, yet it will also involve the reader with many cutting-edge scientific ideas.

The meaning of life is out there, a Usenet rumor has it, hidden on the web at an unregistered IP address, on a protocol no one uses, waiting for some genius hacker to stumble on it. Such, at least, is the purport of Michael Stephen Fuchs's interesting but uneven technothriller, The Manuscript. The text that gives the book its title was purportedly written by 19th-century explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton after he stumbled on the answers to life's riddles in the mountains of Argentina. It's being sought in the present century by a host of people, most of them heavily-armed baddies, most of them more interested in profit than enlightenment. Among those hunting for the manuscript are Fuchs's protagonists, a quartet of twenty-somethings who are vaguely dissatisfied with the trajectory of their lives: Dana Steckler, a graduate student in medical ethics at Thomas Jefferson College; her friend Miles Darken, a sysadmin with his own Bersa .380; Miles's cyber-acquaintaince, intelligence agent Celeste Browning; and chemistry student turned high-tech drug dealer FreeBSD, the genius hacker who manages, after all, to find that hidden IP address.

Fuchs's book starts well. It's set in a decidedly wired world and peopled by intelligent technogeeks, and the author is adept at getting his characters' jargon and the feel of their world down on paper. He is also able to make technical information interesting and intelligible, maybe even sexy, as in this passage in which he writes about IP packets:

"If you could follow a whole burst of IP packets, a group of IP packets, that cohered on reassembly into something like an e-mail message...But you can't, because not cohering is what IP packets do. On their way from--to pick a couple of spots entirely at random--Hookeville, Virginia, to New York City, New York, basically the job of these data packets, as dictated by the odd magic of the Internet Protocol, is to swarm across the internet willy-nilly, each trying to find a good route to, not even their final destination, but just a next destination that might get them, not even necessarily closer to, but just still moving on toward, their final destination. Still, it's possible, probably not even uncommon, for all the packets that make up an e-mail message to traverse the same route, all side by side in formation, like sea horses riding into battle."

I love the way the author sometimes pauses his narrative with these highly technical bits of explication--on IP packets or tunnel vision or the tactical considerations of the various parties to a Mexican stand-off. Some of these passages really shine. Here's the conclusion to Fuchs's discussion of IP packets:

"So, if you could follow a burst of IP packets, say from Hookeville, Virginia, to New York, New York--if you were to piggyback on one of those hundreds of little blips, firing staccato out the back of a machine, tumbling through a local hub and router, sluicing onto some optical fiber strung hill over dale, zipping swarms of oscillating light, splaying outward in pulses much too fast to consider, broken apart and reassembled a dozen times while tumbling through a dozen more routers, darting stealthily through the wall of a nondescript office building in midtown Manhattan, reassembled a last time, all the parts accounted for and in just the right place, turned into magnetism on the shiny copper plate of a hard drive, where to wait faithfully and patiently all the night through to be read by just one person, to be turned into a file, and into pixels, and into light, and into optical pulses, and into ideas, and into someone else's mind...is this what genuine and meaningful contact between two human beings might look like?

"Is this what falling in love might look like?

"Probably."

In case you didn't notice--and I bet you didn't--that whole first paragraph is a single sentence.

But there are problems with the book. It's hard to keep track of Fuchs's numerous secondary characters or to understand the motivations of a good many of them; a character who seems to be important at the start of the book (Paulina) soon drops out of the story, never to be heard from again; and our protagonists, whatever their dissatisfaction with the status quo in the early chapters, seem too prepared to upend their lives, and too prepared to finance their new lives with ill-gotten gain--a decision which you'd think would at least give them some pause. (Knowledge of the meaning of life seems to have little practical effect and does not preclude profiting from the sale of drugs.) Most importantly, there isn't much of a plot here. The story, so promising at first, devolves into a series of confusing gun battles. These go on too long, until finally the book comes to an unsatifsfying conclusion.

I don't want to end on a negative note, however, because Fuchs's writing style really is unusual and interesting and intelligent. I hope he writes more, and that he wraps his gorgeous techno-prose around a stronger story next time.

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

While the story was engaging and sometimes exhilarating (though it's multiple characters and groups of characters were a bit hard to keep track of), and it has that rare quality of describing the world of computers in a way that matches actual reality, it's ultimately a bit of a tease.

When the manuscript is discovered, we never do get to read all of it, which for me at least, was the whole point of picking up this novel. If you're just interested in cyber intrigue and gun fights, you might enjoy this book. But if you're holding out to see the manuscript of the title, don't bother - it isn't here.