But on Earth, various disaffected have-nots, such as the Jaguars of Brazil, are throwing spanners in the works. And about to step onto the world's stage is Autumn Rain, the most reclusive, exclusive, deadly terrorist group of all. So deadly, in fact, that they succeed in destroying the space elevator early on in the novel. And this is merely their first step toward world domination.

Arrayed against or orbiting around these bad actors are four main protagonists. First comes the team of Claire Haskell and Jason Marlowe. Claire is a "razor," someone physiologically wired and trained to jack into the global networks of data known as "zones." Jason is a "mechanic," a battlesuit-clad warrior who protects Claire and facilitates her work. Next is Carson, the Operative, another mech, whose guiding razor is the mysterious Lynx. Lastly comes Lyle Spencer, undercover spy in the USA for the Priam Combine, a Euro-based group.

Jason and Claire will bop around the Earth from one deadly crisis to another while the Operative stages his mission on the moon. Spencer, and a mysterious man named Linehan who knows all about him, will be preoccupied with fleeing the USA to save their skins.

And looming over everyone, as open warfare brews, is the enigma of Autumn Rain, and a secret project code-named "Manilishi."

A well-engineered future history

This debut novel by David J. Williams shows lots of promise, but ultimately falls down on a couple of counts. Let's first take a look at its successes.

Any book that opens with the actual text of an imaginary treaty and closes with an appendix containing an elaborate future-history timeline is bound to have had a lot of world-building put into it, at least along certain axes, and Williams does indeed create a highly plausible geopolitical future. He fills his pages with tasty throwaway tidbits about permanent prairie fires and a drowned India, giving his world the veracity and immediacy of newspaper headlines. Very well done, and an important skill for any SF writer to have.

He takes standard cyberpunk tropes like jacking into cyberspace and cloaks them in new terminology and fresh visual imagery. His version of Heinleinian battlearmor is convincing as well. (Although I remain unconvinced that any kind of stealth technology could permit the wearer of a battlesuit so big as to feature shoulder-mounted cannons and missiles to sneak through a crowded tenement where people live elbow to elbow.) And he can write sparkling and zippy action scenes, whether it's Marlowe trying to separate two linked airplanes or a space elevator breaking up.

Finally, his prose is suitably sturdy and even witty at times: I'm still enjoying "the downlow's been downloaded ..."

But all these merits have a hard time outweighing the demerits.

First and foremost is the utter lack of deep characterization. Consider the first 90 pages of the book, which basically constitute a big real-time set piece of nonstop action on several fronts. At the end of it, we know the protagonists not one whit better than on page 1. There's not a single reason to empathize with any of them: no background, no quirks, no history.

Allied to this is the fact that there is literally no one in this book other than the main actors and the secondary handlers and opponents they interface with. We encounter not one waitress, one street-gang member, one cop, one space-elevator construction guy, one terrorist lackey who appears in a memorable fashion. No random walk-ons to add a sense of living in a fully inhabited world. The book is like a play with only the cast members who have lines given any stage time.

This hollowness extends to the culture as well. It's simply absent. Not a single reference to a pop song, a book, slang, TV show or any other cultural apparatus. So intently did Williams develop his political angles that he forgot all the rest.

And lastly, there's the padding, a failure I've noted in other newer writers. Consider pages 151 to 157. Six pages devoted to Spencer telling his controller that he needs to get out of the country. William Gibson, to whom a blurber compares this book, would've handled that in a two-sentence exchange.

Read this novel for the slam-bang action and realpolitik speculations, but don't expect to inhabit a multiplex creation.