Title: Directive 51
Author: John Barnes
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: Warty!
This started out in the usual manner for a novel of this nature: ten gazillion things happening to different people in different places and they're all going to get tied up as the story progresses. So we believe. I've never read any John Barnes before, so this is a new experience, which you would think is a good thing. Unfortunately, after reading almost 200 pages of this I could not find any reason to go on reading!
The writing isn't bad per se, but reading this is like watching a two hour movie which was edited by the same people who edit the movie preview. Yeah, it's like that! It chops from one thing to another at a super-rapid pace never leaving you with any connection to the people who are acting in these snippets. Why should I care about them? I know nothing about any of them after 200 pages. I don't know their histories, their likes or dislikes, their pains or pleasures, their loves and hates. I know nothing about them after two hundred pages and therefore I really don't care what happens to them.
The novel is supposed to be about crowd-sourced terrorism, whereby a bunch of different people of all religions and poltical complexions and all walks of life somehow come together on one day to destroy everything which makes modern society work, but which seems focused primarily on electronics and the oil economy. I don't buy that premise but I was hoping Barnes could find a way to sell it to me. He failed. Time to move on to more lush pastures.
