Customer Reviews

Proxies

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

 

 

Proxies extends the ideas Mixon presented in her earlier novel, Glass Houses. Both books show characters manipulating robots remotely through a computer interface, but in Proxies, the characters come out of the gutter, the traditional home of cyberpunk, and go into secret back hallways of governmental intrigue. Proxies not only gives a rich, wonderfully detailed depiction of the future, it also includes a great murder mystery and a politcal thriller. Add to that a touch of romance, a bit of multiple-personality dissorder, and the usual cyberpunk street scenes, and you have this fabulous novel. Although parts of this book are somewhat confusing to read because of the way Mixon chooses to represent certain characters' thoughts, the fabulous conclusion is definately worth the effort. I highly recommend this novel and recommend that people who enjoy it try Pat Cadigan's TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP, Melissa Scott's THE SHAPES OF THEIR HEARTS, or N. Lee Wood's LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI. Together these four texts point the way towards the future of cyberpunk fiction.

But the wine sparkles. Mixon takes a classic pulp-fiction mad scientist plot, adds to it a neat political thriller riff, and some cyberpunkiana, and then tarts it up with some perceptive, sometimes tongue-in-cheek speculation on what the world might look like in the mid 21st century (a MacDonalds on an orbital space station is my favorite), makes sure her characters are sexually and ethnically diverse, and serves up a potent brew indeed.

Carli D'Auber is the intrepid heroine who everybody's after, and not always in their own bodies, either (hence the title); the mad scientist and her team are hideously kinky, while Carli's friends are seriously flaky. The multiple point of view plot will leave you dizzy (I doubt even Mixon could have explained it the day she turned it in to her publisher, let alone today), and grasping at loose ends. But no matter. You'll be entertained all the way.

The ideas presented in this book are interesting and engaging; it's the first science fiction book I've read in a while that didn't feel like a transcribed version of a cheesy space action movie. The focus is not on needless action or fancy gadgets, but rather how society is transformed by technology.

The setup is as follows: two key technologies, a device that can transmit data instantaneously and a brain-computer interface combine to create robots that human beings remotely pilot as if they where in their bodies. The continued advancement of this technology begins to tear basic social fabrics as the line between physical and virtual blurs.

Summary:
Set in a near-future Southwest U.S. where global warming and international wars have taken their toll on both people and the environment, Proxies is a fast-paced cyber-thriller full of political intrigue, fascinating technology and complex interpersonal relationships. It is told from the point of view of three very different people: Pablo, Daniel and Carli.

Both Pablo and Daniel are "proxy" pilots. Proxies are robotic waldo bodies that look like humans but are enhanced (super strong, super fast and indestructible). Proxy pilots are humans who are able to "link" their consciousness to their waldo bodies through complicated software and an implanted jack in their skulls. Pablo and Daniel are very, very different, though: Pablo has spent nearly all his life in various proxies and is never "in corpus", whereas Daniel has trained for piloting since becoming an adult, and is used to going back and forth between his own flesh and his proxy. Though both of them work for secret government projects that are experimenting with waldo technology, they are in different groups and have very different approaches to reality and relationships. As the book begins, Pablo is playing secret spy for "Mother", the head of his project, and Daniel is attempting to track down a "renegade" proxy. I won't say too much more so as not to spoil the plot, but I will say that we soon discover that Pablo is more than he appears at first, and though he and Daniel do cross paths, Daniel never really knows it.

Carli is the character at the heart of the novel, a bridge of sorts between Pablo and Daniel. She is a brilliant, recently divorced professor and scientist who early in her career discovered an instantaneous communication technology. But that communication technology was stolen from her and appropriated by a giant corporation, and due to their legal gag order, she has never been able to go any farther with her work. She is also the daughter of a powerful, wealthy senator, who is involved in the secret government waldo technology projects. As the book begins, Carli is packing up her university office and moving her things to her new office downtown, where she and a colleague have created a new research company. But things start to unravel when she meets Daniel, who has been sent to watch over her in case the renegade tries to harm her. Daniel is forced to tell her about the renegade; Carli doesn't believe him and threatens him at gunpoint to leave her alone.

The plot thickens as Daniel continues to shadow Carli and we learn more about the renegade, not to mention the grandiose secret plan that Pablo's "Mother" has for hijacking a spaceship. Then Carli gets kidnapped and the stakes get higher and the action more exciting right up until the end of the book, where Carli has to make an important decision about her own destiny.

What I liked:
For the most part, all the characters in this book were real and nuanced, and it was easy to be sympathetic to their widely varying motives. I especially liked Carli, and really identified with her motives and choices. The near-future world that Mixon imagined was fascinating, and definitely provided that "goshasensawunda" that good SF or Fantasy should. I especially liked the way she imagined the ways that human civilization, especially in an already hot and dry place like the U.S. Southwest, would have to change and adapt due to global warming aftereffects. The politics of the time and the alternate history (e.g. the global wars over Antarctica) that she touched on lightly here and there felt real to me also. Though most of the actual science and technology parts went right over my head and I sort of skim-read whenever things got too detailed (disclaimer: I'm not one of those who reads SF for the actual science, but rather for the overall "goshasensawunda" stuff), the science and technology bits certainly had the feel of authenticity and were consistently presented. The idea of "proxies" and how they affected the people who piloted them was an interesting one to me, and I liked how Mixon explored those issues throughout the story. I would have liked even more exploration of those bits.

There were some great, page-turner climactic action sequences involving the hijacking of the spaceship and the attempted rescue of Carli towards the end of the book that I won't spoil but I will say were really well done. '

What didn't work for me:
My main difficulty with this book was that it was one of those spec fic reads that thrusts the reader immediately into a very different world, multiple points-of-view, and a whole lot of intrigue and action, and it took me probably the first 100 pages or so before I really felt like I'd sorted out what was happening, whom to care about, and what all these strange new words and technologies referred to. Luckily, there was enough general "ooo shiny" ideas and interesting people/action to keep me going, but it was a tough slog at first, and my brain felt very stretched trying to comprehend it all at once. Some people really like that total immersion and having to puzzle out what's going on, and they may see this book as an enjoyable challenge and fun mystery to unravel, so I'm not necessarily saying this wasn't well done, just that it was a little bit more than I wanted. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

There were a lot of secondary characters in this book, and it took awhile for me to figure out each of their places in the book as a whole, and how much I needed to remember or care about each of them. Though all of them were interestingly drawn (Mixon has a gift for characterization), I think what was already a fairly complex and initially difficult-to-get-into book could have been considerably simplified for the reader with the subtraction of a few unnecessary characters/conflicts (e.g. Carli's nephew Paint's ex-girlfriend Tania, or Carli's mom's spiritual advisor, or Daniel's co-workers Scott James and Leanne, or some of the scientists that worked with Pablo and Mother).

I also think (and remember my disclaimer above, so YMMV) that it would have been a simpler, more enticing and memorable read for me if Mixon hadn't put quite so much exploration of various kinds of futuristic technology and science ideas in the book, but rather restrained herself to those that were germane to the plot. For example, at one point Carli was "floating" (experiencing by proxy) a probe mission to the sun, and that was certainly interesting and cool, but wound up having relatively little to do with the overall plot.

Overall reaction:
This was a book I had to really work at in the beginning, but eventually I got into it and I was invested in finding out what happened, and when I finished I wanted to read it again because I finally understood it and I wanted to pick up the nuances I'd missed while I was struggling with immersion into the world and characters.

If you like near-future, technologically and scientifically imaginative, "hard" SF that also has well-drawn, complex characters and human relations, you'll like this book.

There is an excellent guide on Amazon.com for writing science fiction. One of the points made in that guide is to *know* the science and not make mistakes. Laura Mixon messes up badly in several places in this book (and I'm not even halfway through yet). For starters, let's look at one of the key "new science effects" in her book, which provides instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. OK, no problem so far, it's a new effect. But she has one character admit that the invention needs to be used near a planet-sized mass, and the object is used on a spaceship. She tries to patch this up with the fact that the spaceship is accelerating to relativistic speeds, and at "anything over 18 percent of light speed, the spaceship will be massive enough for the effect to work". This is utter nonsense. Anybody with a decent grounding in physics knows that the relativistic effects are highly nonlinear, and you have to be going well over 90% of lightspeed for any significant effect to occur.

In another section, one of her "proxy" androids scans an area for "magnetic fields from capacitance sensors". Huh? For one thing, capacitance sensors won't give off a magnetic field, for another, magnetic fields fall off quite rapidly and cannot be sensed from much of a distance without rather complicated sensors. The fact that the book is mid-21st century doesn't remove her obligation to at least describe how the science might work.

These mistakes alone wouldn't merit a 2-star review, but the plot of the book is an utter mess. Sure, you can confuse the reader for the first few pages, if things start to clear up after that. But her use of "proxy jargon" and attempts to rehash events from viewpoints of various proxies really makes no sense at all. And it isn't just proxy jargon, she even has characters using chat slang such as "imho" (In My Humble Opinion" in speech. This is going to confuse a LOT of people. The characters simply don't make up for the plot mess, either, they are utterly 2-dimensional actors, reciting lines to try to help out the story, and not much else.

I normally have no problem suspending disbelief while reading science fiction, but this book just reads like a high school creative writing project, nothing more.

If you want to read a lengthy and tedious novel, this one is for you. Set in the mid 21st century, it begins with a group that is striving to take over control of the first intersteller probe with their own people, and it continues in it's own muddling way from there for hundreds of pages. There is a device that permits instantaneous communications between points light years apart, and also technology with the ability to allow one to control human-like proxies at various locations away from ones physical location, their consciousness being projected there, sort of like an advanced version of telepresence. I found the plot very flat, not interesting at all really, and much of the writing, it seemed to me, was just filler. A lot of the time, particularly in the first half of the novel, I found it hard to follow which groups were doing what, very confusing. In my spare time I read a lot of science fiction, this novel is one of the poorer ones that I have read, not recommended at all.