War Surf [Paperback]

M. M. Buckner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 25, 2009

What would you do if you were rich, bright, vigorous, virtually immortal—and nearly bored to death? You’d invent a thrill sport… It's the 23rd century and Nasir Deepra is 248 years old, wealthy, kept young by all-pervasive nanotechnology, a corporate executive and bored with life. To spice things up he has become an Agonist, dipping into war zones--many of them in satellites orbiting the Earth--and filming his daredevil antics. Agonists have a large fan-base who watch them on the Net and they revel in the attention. A war surf goes badly and the Agonists lose their top ranking amongst surfers, so they decide to up the ante and go to Heaven, a class 10 difficulty war zone, the toughest, in order to get back on top. Nasir is reluctant to go since he's on the board of directors that controls Heaven and he knows why it's a class 10. His younger girlfriend, Sheeba, talks him into it and disaster strikes: Nasir and Sheeba are captured by workers who control Heaven. Nasir has to come to terms with the brutal exploitation he has been a part of and avoid the "disease" that runs rampant amongst Heaven's workers. "An Innovative and exciting read. A treat." – C.J. Cherryh "Buckner hits another homerun...action, character, drama, and great science - it's all here in the latest from the hottest author in this or any other star system." – Robert J. Sawyer Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

War surfing is the hobby of senior execs jaded by lives of security and power. They completely rebuilt the world economy, after all, and now there aren't enough thrills around. Nasir Deepra, part of a war-surfer team that broadcasts its escapades on the Net, falls in love with his young physical therapist, Sheeba, and brings her into the group, despite some objections. When the team then fails spectacularly because of her inexperience, and its ratings plummet, it decides to go to Heaven, a satellite rated at the highest level of difficulty for war surfing. Nasir initially objects but is worn down by his old friends--and Sheeba. Corporate secrets that Nasir has been trying to conceal for some time are waiting on Heaven, and he must face up to demons he helped create and the death he has avoided for two centuries as the situation on Heaven deteriorated. Buckner's thrilling, entertaining romp through a corporate-ruled world is also a consideration of immortality, boredom, and the changes necessary for continued vitality. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 382 pages
• Publisher: e-reads.com (June 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0759292493
• ISBN-13: 978-0759292499
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,916,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Buckner Shoots ...And Scores!, January 18, 2006

By 

B. Merritt "filmreviewstew.com" (WWW.FILMREVIEWSTEW.COM, Pacific Grove, California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War Surf (Paperback)

Nasir Deepra, an executive in the 23rd century, is an Agonist, a group of men and women who've outlived their usefulness and are bored with life. So they use their ample wealth to run into war zones-many of them in orbit around the now polluted Earth-and film their daring activities. They have a huge fan-base who watch them on the Net, too, and the Agonists revel in all of the attention.

Nasir (the main character) is also in love with a beautiful physical therapist named Sheeba who hangs out with him because of his "multiplexed soul" and battered body-Nasir is 248 years old, kept young by nanotechnology that permeates every cell in his body.

But when a war surf goes awry and the Agonists lose their first place position amongst other surfers, something drastic has to be done. So they decide to go to Heaven, a class 10 difficulty war zone (1 being easy and 10 being the toughest), in order to get back on top.

Nasir is extremely hesitant to go, as he is on the board of directors that controls Heaven and knows why it's a class 10. But Sheeba helps talk him into going and it is here that everything falls apart ...

Nasir and Sheeba are captured by workers who control Heaven. Nasir has to come to terms with what he and his corporation have been doing to the men, women and children onboard this satellite. Twenty-third century unethical and immoral issues attack Nasir every second: giving blood, helping "workers" (lesser people), and coming to terms with his age and lack of usefulness. A "disease" runs rampant amongst Heaven's workers, and Nasir and Sheeba might very well become infected.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Not having read any of this author's previously hailed works (HYPERTHOUGHT and NEUROLINK), I approached this science fiction work as a Buckner virgin. Being a bit of an SF buff myself, I always approach newly introduced authors to this genre with a grain of salt poised on my tongue. But here, I need not have worried.

Buckner layers WAR SURF with so many ethical, moral and religious undertones that I dare say any reader will find enjoyment on some level within these pages. There's an underlying current dealing with mortality and the need for the rejuvenation of youth. There's advanced biological technology that may or may not be helpful. There's the recycling of humans in great nutrient vats. And, toward the end, there's the obvious "eat and drink of me and you will live forever" religious parallels to the Christian faith.

This might sound a bit heavy-handed, but it's not. Buckner has complete control over the story and never preaches to the reader. WAR SURF unfolds in a first person narrative through the eyes of Nasir, and it is through him that we learn the ways of this time and this Earth. Not once did I feel that the author was forcing information onto me (something that's quite refreshing).

My only beef with the novel would be that Buckner occasionally utilized 20th century terms that took me out of the 23rd century and flung me back into my own time (i.e., jet skis, Chilli Diablo, etc.), but this was pretty seldom.

If you're looking for a wonderful SF read that doesn't get bogged down in details and has great characters and a believable futuristic premise, you couldn't go wrong here.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 23rd century adventure, September 22, 2005

By 

Elisabeth Carey (Lawrence, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War Surf (Paperback)

Buckner's new novel is set in the same post-environmental collapse world as her earlier Neurolink, this time among a group of aging executive-class extreme sports enthusiasts. They call themselves the Agonists, and their "extreme sport" is war surfing-taking fast, and thoroughly recorded, runs through the war zones of 23rd-century labor relations. Their leader is Nasir Deepra, two and a half centuries old, old enough that he lived through the collapse as an adult, and remembers an Earth whose surface was still habitable.

Nasir and his aging comrades are at the top of their sport, but they have a weakness they don't recognize yet: Nasir is infatuated with a beautiful physical therapist, Sheeba, who's in her twenties, and too well-adjusted to regard him as anything other than a father figure. Nasir, in his dogged pursuit of Sheeba, will do anything to please or impress her, including strong-arm his buddies into including her on their war surfs. This quickly goes-somewhat humorously-wrong, knocking the Agonists out of first place, and in fact down to fourth place, in the standings but, after some stressful moments melding Sheeba into the team while fatally weakening Nasir's ability to veto a surf he knows will be disastrous, a surf of the orbital factory called Heaven. Nasir is chairman of the board of the company that owns Heaven, and he knows what none of the others do-what the labor dispute is about, and why Provendia is so very determined to hide it. When Nasir's suit malfunctions on the surf, and Nasir and Sheeba find themselves stranded inside Heaven, with its unexpectedly young and naturally suspicious prote ("protected employees", the 23rd century's lower classes) population, Nasir, the protes, and even Sheeba-the most sensible of them all-are in for some shocking and dangerous re-education about how the world really works, and the reader gets an exciting ride.

There are some weaknesses here, and the ending is a bit heavy-handedly sentimental, but this is a fun book, and Nasir, with all his self-deceptions, is another believable, basically decent and likable character.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What A Mess, June 2, 2006

By 

Ian Martin (Belmont, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War Surf (Paperback)

I picked up this book because I'd recently been going back and reading the Phillip K Dick winners (the annual award for best Sci-Fi in paperback.) This is the 2006 winner and, having just read such GREAT novels as Vacuum Diagrams, Altered Carbon, and Life, I had high expectations.

120 pages in I was ready to put the book down and move on to something else. This book is a mish-mash of clichés, boring stock characters that I found totally unredeeming, and painfully heavy-handed symbolism. There is a germ of a good idea here that I found, at times, enjoyable but it was not worth reading the entire novel.

Since there is a summary on the website and in other reviews, we already know who Nasir Deepra and Sheeba are. Nasir is vain and in lust with Sheeba. His friends are bored zillionaires who booze and drug themselves for entertainment. Sheeba is naivé and flakey.

Fine.

But their personalities are stock and assembled out of such painfully obvious clichés. None of them are painted in a way that is fresh or interesting. Nasir carries a mirror in his pocket which he is constantly pulling out to check his hair with. Anything Sheeba says to him throughout the course of the novel is GUARANTEED to be misinterpreted (there is never ONCE a moment when he doubts himself for going completely the opposite direction with what she says to him.) He gets jealous whenever anybody talks to her in the same way a six year old might. His friends go on benders for days at a time and approach death as though they were watching a cartoon. Sheeba is a physical therapist and is always spouting new age hippy jargon. I found it hard to believe that any of these people could function in ANY society, let alone live for 200+ years, run trillion dollar companies, and "SURF" wars.

I'm all for anti-heros (see Altered Carbon) but nothing about the way these characters are written was new or fresh or interesting - and since the book takes 100 pages to get going you're forced to spend 2-3 days with these people that you wouldn't want to spend 10 minutes with in real life. I kept waiting for things to get better and for some actual character development to occur. Sheeba (who might have saved the book had it been written from her perspective) experiences an instant and (as such) inexplicable change "off camera." Nasir's friends never change and by page 336 Nasir himself writes "By now you may have asked yourself...why you keep browsing this memoir. The narrator...has no redeeming traits." 336! Thats 39 pages from the END!

Then...he changes. Completely unmotivated. There is no indication as to whether his change is caused by the horrors that he created (to which he'd been completely oblivious to up to that point,) or a (avoiding a spoiler here) third party has caused it. But the change is virtually instant. It occurs in two or three sentences. After spending over 300 pages with these dull idiots I thought, at least, I'd be treated to torturous introspection or grandious revelation. But the pivotal moment was almost arbitrary.

Adding insult to boredom was the symbolism, again heavy handed and obvious. Without being too specific, HEAVEN, BLOOD, IMMORTALITY, THE GARDEN. Ugh.

There were one or two people that I actually liked in here but their page real estate was too small to be any kind of saving grace. Again the book might have been a LOT more fun if it had been written from Sheeba's perspectve. Then again maybe not. If you're interested in reading some really good sci-fi, check out the last five Philip K Dick winners but...you might want to skip this one.