wenty-year-old Tom Eliot lives on the family farm in the sleepy coastal town of Marinwood. Marinwood is nestled in the shadow of Nova Olympus, a huge mountain raised in 2030, when San Francisco and much of the rest of the West Coast were destroyed in the cataclysm known as The Uplift. Tom thinks of himself as ordinary, but the gods—a cabal of powerful AIs called the Dominion—have secretly monitored him for years, knowing that he, and he alone, has the power to end their reign. Originally programmed to be mankind's guardians, the AIs of the Dominion have performed that task only too well, seizing control of the planet in The Uplift and murdering millions of humans in order to prevent their charges from doing even worse to themselves.
When Tom trespasses into a forbidden zone, Telemachus, the AI responsible for the western portion of the United States, decides that the time has come to kill him and, just to be thorough, his family. But Tom escapes, helped by an old hermit, Magnus Prufrock, who also knows of Tom's potential. Magnus serves as Tom's guide and mentor on the path of power known as the Prometheus Road.
The Prometheus Road is a mystical pathway running between the lands of the living and the dead, the worlds of the real and the virtual, the past and the future. If Tom can master the mysteries of the Prometheus Road, he will gain the ability to fight the AIs on their own terms, on their own turf: a virtual environment called Stronghold, where the source of Dominion power resides in the Jewel of Dreaming, which is to be found in the Tree of Dreams, whose roots extend from the virtual into the physical world.
Tom and Magnus are hunted by Hermes, the once-human nanoborg servant of Telemachus. Barely staying one step ahead, they flee through the ruins of the world-that-was, meeting new friends along the way, notably Dead Man, a revived corpse claiming to be the repentant creator of the AIs, and Lebowski, a masked musician with prophetic powers. All the while, Tom is desperately trying to master the Prometheus Road. If he fails, he will die. And even if he succeeds, victory is not guaranteed, for Telemachus and the other AIs of the Dominion are waiting for him in Stronghold.
More game than novel
If there is an original concept in Prometheus Road, it is extraordinarily well hidden. This mishmash of The Matrix and assorted other science-fiction staples, pretentiously garnished with sprinklings from cult movies (Dead Man; The Big Lebowski) and the greatest hits of T.S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; "The Hollow Men"), is apparently intended for adults but reads more like the sort of literary junk food 12-year-old boys might scarf down between Xbox sessions. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as a gaming walkthrough that has been fleshed out in a failed attempt to satisfy the minimal requirements of fiction.
Nor is it science fiction. Despite the presence of AIs, nanotechnology, virtual reality, quantum mechanics and a post-holocaust setting, Balfour merely utilizes these elements for the sake of convenience, assuming (correctly) that the concepts involved are familiar enough by now to genre readers that he need not explicate or expand upon them in any way, but may instead rely upon the pop-culture zeitgeist to do his work for him. When a deeper explanation is called for than these cliches can easily provide, such as a rationale for exactly what Tom's powers are and how they work, instead of cracking the cliches open to introduce original concepts of his own, which could be interesting, Balfour jettisons them entirely for the fuzzy consolations of new-agey mysticism. This is both lazy and condescending. Real science fiction is neither. Strip away its pseudo-science-fictional trappings and Prometheus Road is just another derivative fantasy of the prophesized Chosen—one whose magical triumph over the Dark Lord is as inevitable as it is anticlimactic.
Tom Eliot is a particularly bland example of this archetypal hero. His ability to walk the Prometheus Road and access virtual realities is said to be the result of a genotype that sets him apart from his fellow humans to such a degree that his parents must take pains to disguise his difference, like Ma and Pa Kent convincing their Smallville neighbors there's nothing strange about little Clarkie. But Balfour doesn't give readers any evidence of this; indeed, the only unusual thing about Tom is that he seems exceptionally callow and clueless for a 20-year-old. The murder of his family, for instance, barely elicits a perfunctory tear. He blunders along, provided with all the information he needs by helpful secondary characters, and villains almost equally obliging, and somehow always does what is necessary, at the last possible instant, to reach the next level of mastery on the Prometheus Road. But Tom's advances in power are not accompanied by any noticeable change in his character, and, despite all the extraordinary things that happen to him, he ends the novel as clueless and callow as he began. In many computer games, the main character is a cipher: The less personality a gaming character possesses, the more a player can project his or her own personality upon it. Such characters are essentially surrogates embodying player fantasies. This may make for a great game, but it is a recipe for bad fiction.
