Customer Reviews

War Surf

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

 

 

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.
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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.

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.

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.

I am going to do something unusual here and review a book I did not finish, purely as a warning to other potential readers. I do not wish to trash this book or the author; I did not finish the novel so perhaps if I had kept going it may have gotten better. I do wish to warn people thinking of purchasing the book of my impression of the first part so they can make an informed decision on whether this is something they wish to embark upon. Others readers have written reviews here on the entire reading and so this review should help balance the overall picture. So those who felt they had a better experience and believe the book is wonderful, please bear with me while I explain both why I did not finish this book and the flaw I saw which led to me to cast it aside.

I had really hoped for a great sci-fi read here, brimming with new ideas and great action sequences. I have never read this author before but the book looked like it may be a winner online. I couldn't stomach the first thirty pages though and have tossed the book aside. There were two problems with this book initially. The first was that the characters involved were self-absorbed, shallow, loathsome egoists with no redeeming qualities. I hated them, did not care about them or their lives, and didn't wish to learn anything more of them. I thought at first that the girlfriend of the protagonist would be used as a foil to turn the character from an anti-hero to an interesting, complex character with a conscience but she turned out to be a vacuous teenager no more interesting than a screen image on MTV. With no empathy for any of the characters, in fact harboring an active dislike, I went thirty pages looking for something worthwhile or interesting in the form of character development. It didn't show up. Perhaps it did later but thirty pages with no hint of it put me off my feed. Thirty pages of super-rich MTV brats in space without the slightest regard for the fellow humans was all I could take before looking for a character with more character.

My second problem is that there wasn't a single idea in the first thirty pages. Science fiction is supposed to have some science in it. Really good science fiction brings in new ideas and technologies and shows how humanity and their societies are changed, influenced or formed by ideas, science and technologies. I didn't see one idea here that said "sci-fi" to me. There is some awesome sci-fi out there right now, chock-full of ideas on every page, brimming with action, and containing interesting, complex characters. I suggest Neal Asher (especially for action), Richard K. Morgan, Peter F. Hamilton, and Alastair Reynolds for starters. These guys write books that make you wish you could give them six stars.

So my advice is to pass on this book. I could be wrong and maybe this develops into a good book, but the first thirty pages are so off-putting I feel the odds are against that. Good authors and good stories don't make you suffer from the first page. Even if this novel does get better, why suffer through the first part at all when there are so many other great sci-fi books that grab you by the jugular from the first page and give you a non-stop thrill ride while also stimulating your mind?

Buckner's third attempt surpasses her first but doesn't quite live up to the second. If you have read the second book, Neurolink, you may find a lot of the same plot elements in War Surf.

This book is about characters that surf "wars", semi-violent litigations between execs and protes, for the adrenaline rush. Two of the characters get stranded on a satalite and have to befriend protes to survive. Life lessons are learned and the protes end up teaching the execs.

My major problem was with the pacing. The story is told in flashback from a dying exec on the satalite. The author then takes too long in getting the characters too the satalite. There is a lot of debate on whether or not they should go when you already know they will. It just kind of drug on at that point. Once the characters get on the satalite the pace picks up and the story is fairly entertaining.

My only other problem was with the main characters characterization. He doesn't seem realistic in his actions or thoughts. It was a more appropriate characterization for a spoiled teenager than a 200+ man.

Not the authors fault, but the cover doesn't really represent the book or the world in which the book lies, but that is nitpicking.

I would recommend this book to sci fi fans. Due to sexual content, not graphic, 16 up.

In 2253, after almost two and a half centuries of living, Nasir Deepra is bored. The wealthy exec knows all the NEM treatments and replacement parts make him almost immortal, but nothing helps with the tedium until recently. For a couple of centuries he and fellow Agonists (Verinne, Kat, Winston, and Grunze) took pleasure jumping into the middle of the small wars between the workers and the Corporatists that they broadcasted live on the Net, but even with side wagers that has become dull. The exception occurred five years ago when he met physical therapist Sheeba Zee. He obsessively needs her though he hides his feeling from his Agonist teammates.

Nasir and Grunze interfere in another battle, but this time the former calls Sheeba to make an appointment to see her in the midst of the action. When the scenario turns dangerous, he forgets to shut down the communication device so that Sheeba hears everything. As Sheeba learns her best client's darkest secrets, she seduces him to come with her to Heaven; though he goes with her over the objection of his four partners, Nasir knows this stop might prove his hell if he lives long enough to talk about it.

M.M. Buckner's fabulous futuristic tale focuses on an intriguing "young" man who has found extended life exceedingly boring instead of addicting. The story line is character driven though the action is powerful and vivid. Readers will understand the subtle differences between the two century plus old quintet in comparison to twenty-something Sheeba. Fans will appreciate the other side of near immortality as the Paul Revere and the Raiders words "kicks keep getting harder to find" seem apropos.

Harriet Klausner

I love War Surf. The "head pictures" you'll get while reading this book are amazing. Great story and just the right amount of emotion. Wonderful, character-driven science fiction.

This novel atrracted my attention from the get-go. Nice cover artwork. Good title. The writer seems to have a solid grasp of sci-fi writing.

But after over halfway thru the bloody thing, wheres all the war!? Almost no action here. Needs a lot more bloody action and war-mongering happening here if you are going to title it War Surf.

The story is a good idea. The characters are different and quite interesting, changing somewhat as the book goes along. But unfortunately, after awhile, my interest starting waning. After reading a Richard K. Morgan novel, it is kinda hard to slog thru this type of sci-fi novel that doesn't deliver a more hard-edged tone.

Really need to do that, M. M. Buckner.