Follows is what I wrote to a friend (keep in mind that the context is genre fiction, not great literature. Though, perhaps, Barton may grow beyond genre fiction. He has something to say.):
Another book by William Barton, a science-fiction writer that has astonished me before. I think I mentioned that a previous book was strangely really good but with a taint of pulp sex stuff. This was was sexual and sensual, but more, um, adult or restrained. Which is good, because the story went more smoothly. He still seems like he doesn't quite know how to transcend writing pulpy stuff. BUT. But, the thing is, each of the three books I've read have a way of being simultaneously four things a) not bad character studies (not good, though, he specializes in characters that themselves don't know who they are, and so...); b) some quite original, reasonable postulated future societies; c) there is satire in there somewhere, he's straddling a line, I think, and that's why there's a pulpy feel to his work; and finally, most importantly to me; d) you, the reader are stunned by the casual way in which he describes (and the protagonist does not recognize) the horror and amorailty of this world that is, really, in some scary way, not so different from our own (morally), and then when you've maybe given up on all hope of feeling justice being done, you share in the protagonist's epiphany, the awakening of moral conscience (the first and acclaimed book he wrote was "Acts of Conscience"), in what you've now experienced, from the inside, as a complex, easy to-go-along-with abhorrent cultural norm. This book, as in AoC, speculates a future where corporations are completely unrestrained by any idea of morality or justice -- just legality. And profit. Is our world so different, you might ask?
