Customer Reviews

The Mocking Program

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

 

 

The best way to approach this novel is not as a science fiction story but as a police procedural. Alan Dean Foster, one of the unappreciated lights in the SF pantheon, has crafted a cop drama with the distinguishing characteristic of being set about a century in the future. Technology has advanced, borders have changed, demands on individuals are different â€" but human nature, including criminal nature, is the same as it ever was.

Readers should also be aware that this book appears to be the beginning of a series. Two characters are introduced with obvious intent for a later payoff that doesn't come in this novel. The point plainly is to have our hero, Inspector Angel Cardenas, owing favors to somebody in a future book. Even the characters of Cardenas and his partner, Rudy Hyaki, are plainly meant to be repeatable in the best Sherlock Holmes style.

The book is peppered with future slang so thick that there's a glossary at the back. In some books this is distracting, but because most of the slang has its roots in words we're familiar with, it only serves in this case to deepen the realism of the setting. Don't be flustered by jargon; if you need to look it up, do so, but remember, it's all part of the story.

Not everyone will like this title. There are a number of gun battles, which are likely to alienate some people who are opposed to violence, and which are painted in rather broad strokes. The ending isn't completely unsatisfying, as though Foster wasn't sure what to do with all the plot points he wound up, but it does tie up this one novel well while leaving the possibility (probability) of sequels available. Still, there is more good about this novel then bad, and curious or adventurous readers will be well rewarded.

A good read for fans of both genres, a possible benchmark for the hybrid of two genres, this book is a worthy purchase. Foster is a strong writer, and this is a strong book

For Police Inspector Angel Cardenas another murdered body along the Montezuma Strip is the norm as an area as industrialized as what was once the Mexican-American border always has crime. However, this time the corpse contains a few problems that are abnormal as the remains contains few organs beyond the worthless heart and the victim's DNA matches the identifications of a local executive and a Texas businessman.

Angel visits the reported home of the victim only to barely escape a bomb blast. The two female occupants, an alleged wife and daughter, are missing. Other more unsavory types also seek the adult female and the preadolescent child as they turn out to be the ex-wife and twelve-year-old daughter of a crime lord. Using classic police techniques aided by telepathic intuit abilities, Angel investigates the homicide while searching for the two vanished individuals that he believes may be the next victims.

Alan Dean Foster is the modern day Renaissance writer, as his abilities seem to have no genre boundaries. His latest tale is a tremendous futuristic police procedural science fiction novel that grips the audience from the beginning when Angel looks at the corpse until the very final twist. The story line is loaded with action, contains interwoven elements that insure the audience knows the plot occurs in a future decade, but never loses sight of the who-done-it investigation. Angel is a great protagonist, who hopefully will star in a sequel, as THE MOCKING PROGRAM is a triumph that speculative fiction and mystery fans will fully appreciate.

Harriet Klausner

It takes a very mature author to be able to turn out a bit of work as well polished as this one is, while at the same time mixing such different ideas.

"Angel" is a detective, a civil servant, who seems like he was transported out of some Spillane type detective novel or maybe even a Gothic. But he exists in a future world, at home with the technological gadgets and hip speech of that age. And Foster creates a whole new language for this fictional era, and it all hangs together. Like Burgess' Clockwork Orange but not that mean. Most of the time you don't have to refer to the glossary to figure out what is meant because the context is so well crafted.

There's a murder mystery here that is not too hard to figure out, but twisty enough to keep the story interesting. If I had been totally surprised at the end I would have given it one more star. As it is, this is a great book to take to the beach or on an airplane flight.

Just to qualify my POV, I love scifi/fantasy novels that have a mystery. Sometimes, the mystery doesn't have to be all that difficult, I just enjoy following the characters to the solution.

I thoroughly enjoyed following Angel Cardenas through a dystopian US Southwest/Mexican/Central American milieu. I guess "The Mocking Progam" could almost be more of a scifil police procedural than a mystery (a la "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"). Perhaps not quite as dark as Dick's treatment of Los Angeles, "The Mocking Program" still extends many of today's issues and trends into a not quite desirable future, while at the same time telling a compelling story.

I have enjoyed this book immensely, not finding the Spanglish jargon to be a problem. I think it would help many readers to first pick up Foster's "Montezuma Strip", in which the character of Angel Cardenas is introduced in a collection of short stories. Everything makes more sense as the short stories sort of bring you up to speed on the setting and the language and flesh out the characters a little more. The Mocking Program can be read alone, I suppose, but not for a completist such as myself.

About the best I can say for this book is that it isn't really BAD. It starts out pretty interesting, but then its energy seems to slowly drip out of it until the ending feels like merely a dotting of "i"s and a crossing of "t"s. Also, at about the midpoint, the book takes on a bit of a sappy tone which increases throughout the remainder of the story. I also have problems with the amount of future slang used. I understand that Foster is using it to set the tone, but even the main character uses it constantly: it just gets too tiresome trying to parse it into real English so you can figure out what he's saying. There also seems to be some kind of problem with the editor: I counted five uses of the non-word "irregardless" in this book. I can't understand how anyone who's written as much as Alan Dean Foster could use that "word" instead of the proper "regardless." I sure can't understand why his editors didn't catch it. There are also several scenes where someone didn't catch contextual problems. For instance, at one point, the protagonist has been disarmed, has escaped, and has incapacitated one of his assailants. He then goes about his merry business without taking the captured, unconcious assailant into custody for questining and without picking up his weapon (and people are trying to kill him). In another case, he tells someone that a certain event has happened to her father. Suddenly, that person seems to have full knowledge of the event. Specifically, she knows when it happened even though no one has told her that. There are also several characters introduced into the book who don't seem to have any purpose. They're just there for a page or two and then they're gone: flavor, I guess. In general, there also seem to be a lot of cases where important things happen and no one does anything to track them down and figure out why, who or how. They're just like magical events which conviently appear to push the plot along. If you've got some time to kill, reading this book might be worth a shot. But, otherwise, despite it's promising beginning, it's not really worth the effort.

The author has a very creative plot here but unfortunately it is waylaid by three distractions: editing problems (e.g. using "irregardless" instead of "regardless"), an overabundance of futuristic, invented jargon, and finally being set too far in the future.

Some sentences, especially at the beginning of the book, are nearly impossible to understand. This is frustrating and gets in the way of enjoying the story. An example: (p.14)

The ganglet of ninlocos arrived before the food did. They swaggered in past the protesting door, the lanky chieflado in the lead spizzing it with a spinner whose ident was torqued to reflect instead of inform. Behind the chingaroon ambulated a group of negs and poses, though which was who and who was witch [sic] was hard to say at first glance.

In fact, he includes a glossary at the end of the book. I didn't realize it was even there until I finished the book, but even had I known, it would have been too cumbersome to flip to the back every time I read a made-up term.

I also wondered why the story delves into futuristic ideas that aren't relevant to the plot. Perhaps this appeals to devoted sci-fi readers (I'm not one of them) but I couldn't see why he set the story so far in the future when the key technology could believably exist sooner. This would have saved quite a bit of explanations of inventions, concepts, gadgetry, etc.

I also found the ending to be pretty weak...I won't explain why since that would ruin it for others, but I thought the original and creative storyline deserved better.

Great idea for a story, and very unique plot twists. May be worth a quick read if you can look past (or enjoy) the jargon.

I usually judge books like this by how much I think about them while I'm doing other things, like working, and how much I look forward to picking them back up. This one passed the test. I immediately liked and cared about Cardenas and Hyaki. The plot wasn't inscrutable but a few things kept me guessing. I loved the genetically altered primates and the imaginative technology. The "Spanglish" was slightly offputting at first, but being a romance language speaker (not Spanish, though), I enjoyed trying to figure out the futuristic argot.

This was a quick, enjoyable read. I am amazed at the range of topics that Mr. Foster writes about. His books are almost always satisfying and "The Mocking Program" is no exception.

This book keeps the pace moving. The plot keeps you guessing (though one of your guesses will likely be right). The author isn't afraid to take you into very imaginative territory. There are the wugs. Insect like AI that never harm anyone, but form a very interesting element in the plot. A teenage Jenny Mneumonic with an abusive father. A jungle of semi intelligent genetically engineered primates that are exploring their humanity (good and bad). This author isn't afraid to take you anywhere.

You also get the feel that the author is teaching a little Spanish on the way (i.e. he'll use a phrase and then when it is repeated or used in some reflexive way, he'll switch in the Spanish term instead).

The book leaves you a bit in the sky wondering if the ending has really landed. True, the immediate problems are solved, but there remains a mystery. I imagine a sequel to this would be very facinating. You have a teenage girl who not only has to deal with the standard wiles of fading adolescence, but whose parents were killed, has a mneumonic computer for brains, and may still be hunted by her father (who supposedly died, and may not even be real in the conventional sense). You have a inspector who has intuition better than any psychic 900 number. You have an evoloving AI network that spans nations with an unknown and unsuspected agenda. .... A lot can still happen. Read some of the pages and find out for yourself.

THE MOCKING PROGRAM by Alan Dean Foster
ASPECT, Warner Books, August 2002

It's just another corpse--murdered, stripped of valuable organs and blood, and left to rot. Except Inspector Angel Cardenas suspects something more. The corpse is too well dressed for his neighborhood. When a deep scan reveals the impossible--multiple identities, Cardenas sets off on a hunt for a murderer who has amassed a criminal empire in a near-future North America. As assassins close in on the wife and daughter of a gangster leader, Cardenas wrestles with keeping them alive--and to get a grip on why anyone would want to kill them so desperately.

Classic S.F. author Alan Dean Foster delivers a taunt near-future mystery. The politics, economics, slang, and science in THE MOCKING PROGRAM are logical extensions from today's world grounding the novel and making it approachable. Cardenas is both sympathetic and heroic, his empathic abilities adding rather than detracting from his essential humanity.

Foster's writing engages the reader, keeps the pages turning, and asks questions about the nature of life and probes the nature of the relationship between man and machine.

Very nice.