Book Review: Blacktop Wasetland by S.A.Cosby

 

Blacktop Wasetland by S.A.Cosby

Hardcover, 285 pages

Published July 14th 2020 by Flatiron Books

This novel has been on my radar for a while. Somewhere along the line author Shawn Cosby and I connected on Facebook. I kept seeing people saying positive things, The blurb from Mystic River author calling Cosby a fresh new voice in Crime had my interest. I know Lee Child is a big deal but I was more impressed by Walter Mosley. As these huge names kept telling how good the book was I just couldn’t resist. So in the time when I was waiting for the book to arrive then we heard from uncle Steve.

There are few seals of approval in the world of publishing like getting love from Stephen King who said of this novel “I loved BLACKTOP WASTELAND, by S.A. Cosby. The epigram tells you all you need to know about this fast-paced, bare-knuckle thriller: “Drive it like you stole it.”
Then as I sat down to read this book I had the nagging thought. How the hell is this book going to live up to the hype. Sometimes I think it is best to push all those thoughts out of your head when you start a book. I never read the cover flap so I went into the novel totally cold on what it was about. I have no idea what I expected.

I can say this is a wonderfully simple and perfect crime noir set in the south that is driven by strong well-developed characters. There is nothing exactly groundbreaking or earth-shattering, but it doesn’t have to be that. It is a fun, exciting, and entertaining noir. The strongest aspect of this novel is the confident and clear voice that Cosby writes with.

Blacktop Wasteland is a novel about Beauregard "Bug" Montage. He is a monster behind the wheel of a car, and used to drive for intense robbery jobs. He has tried to go straight, married with two kids, and is running a garage with his best friend. Money becomes an issue when his mother is set to lose her space in her nursing home, and his oldest daughter needs money for college. So it is imperfect timing when a gig stealing diamonds fall into his lap. The problem is the loser Ronnie who brings him the job is dangerous and his wife Kia is afraid for him.

There are tons of action and violence in this story but the book would not work at all if not for how strong the characters were from top to bottom. Bug is a character who you feel bad for when things get out of control. Thankfully and refreshingly Bug feels the weight of his actions when things go bad, very bad.

Bug is capable, and that makes the action fun to watch. The characters are like objects seconds from impact in a crash. You know it is falling apart but you can’t look away. The attention to detail in the characters is a strength Cosby brings to almost every page, that is what compels the page-turning, not the chases.

Also, I wanted to point to the dialogue for a moment. Crime fiction almost always hinges in serious ways on how the characters interact and talk. The giants of crime know this, Elmore Leonard and Tarantino are obvious examples. Cosby has good dialogue, although oddly the best example of this was the scenes in the nursing home. That shit felt real.

This is a fantastic noir and here is the amazing thing. It is his first novel so as good as it was Cosby still has room to grow. I expect that to happen in tighter dialogue and bigger scope. That said I loved every page of this one and think crime readers would be stoked to be ahead of the curve.
I say that because John Legend bought the film rights and hired the Academy award-nominated screenwriter of Mudbound Virgil Williams to adapt it. Be ahead of the curve and read this now.

Book Review: American War by Omar El Akkad

 

 American War by Omar El Akkad 

Hardcover, 333 pages

Published April 4th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group 

 

Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominee (2018), 

James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominee for Fiction (2018), 

Oregon Book Award for Fiction (2018),

 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis Nominee for Bestes ausländisches Werk (Best Foreign Work) (2018),

 Sunburst Award Nominee for Adult (2018)  

CBC Canada Reads Nominee (2018),

 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Nominee (2017), 

Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2018),  

Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science Fiction & for Debut Goodreads Author (2017), 

Dragon Award Nominee for Best Apocalyptic Novel (2017)

 

American War is a dystopian novel set in the latter half of the 20th century but thanks to the nuttery in the current executive branch the story feels more real than it ever should have. I am having the author Omar El Akkad on my podcast so I will get to discuss these issues with him.  In the meantime I am trying to process this experience the best I can. This novel operates on a few levels and there is a lot to unpack.

While it is important to note that this novel is very much Science Fiction, Dystopian, and Cli-fi for starters.  In that sense it is a fair comparison with novels like The Road, Handmaid’s Tale, and The Sparrow that are clearly genre fiction despite the fact that it is being marketed as literary fiction. I personally think that distinction is bullshit, but nothing I hold against the book itself.  

American War is speculative fiction at its best, it uses the alternate history of this possible future to comment on today. On the flip side, there is an aspect of the novel that makes it more surreal than most dystopias. Certain aspects are ignored in favor of a focus on the analogy at the heart of the novel. The technology of this future is largely ignored, besides a mention of drones, there is no mention of the internet, social media, or future tech.  There is also no mention of southern culture or religion which is a pretty huge aspect of life in the south and I don’t think that is going away.

I could see how that could be seen as a negative for some picky science fiction readers, the point of this book doesn’t need those details. The focus of this novel isn’t so much exploring the idea of an American Civil War like many readers thought it was. While the political divisions and partisanship in America is the most obvious thing on the surface, I can’t help but thinking many are missing the point of this book. Sure, that is there but many reading and reviewing this book are missing the aspect that most interested me.

This novel takes the future stresses of the climate crisis as a set-up for putting America through much of the political-cultural stresses that the middle east nations were going through during the War on Terrorism.  I can see why some American readers would miss this. This novel explores the experience Iraq and the Iraqi people during the war on terrorism by trying to make American’s understand what that conflict would have felt like for us.

This is done through the eyes of the lead Point of view character Sarat who is a climate refugee early in her life. She is radicalized from a series of events and becomes a famous and notorious insurrectionist after she uses a sniper rifle to kill a northern general. In this novel, the north and south are divided by Climate change stresses as well as the use/ banning of fossil fuels.

It is a bit of a spoiler but the thing that makes the analogy for Iraq the most crystal clear in what happens to Sarat in the final act. The point of view shifts in the third act returning to a character we meant in the prologue who was not born for most of the story but if gives this story a passed down historical feel.

The American War is not a success as pure science fiction or dystopian novel, that is one reason I am OK with it not being marketed that way. This novel is a work of political allegory, that is the strength of it. The message is strong and powerful. That is why it should be read, that is why it is important. In the context of Science Fiction’s response to the War of Terrorism, from the voice of an Egyptian-born author on a topic – it is essential.

 

Video of my interview with Omar El-Akkad

 

Apple podcasts link to the Interview 

Book Review: The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

 

The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published September 29th 2020 by Gallery / Saga Press

Over the last couple of years, we have seen a few authors rocketed out of the horror ghetto in various ways. Not everyone can go zero to sixty right out of the gate like Josh Malerman did. Your Paul Tremblay's or Sarah Pinbrough's spent years publishing well-respected work in the genre without mainstream success. Sarah Pinborough after years in the salt mines chipping away found a voice writing thrillers for women in the vein of Gone Girl. I love those books and it appears to be the direction she WANTS to go but it is a little different of a direction for her.

The most exciting thing about the outlandishly amazing reaction to and support of Jeremy Robert Johnson's new novel The Loop is that it feels like a JRJ book. Saga press may have awkwardly marketed this book with a smart but eye-rolling comparison to very successful off the mark stuff but The Loop is a Jeremy Robert Johnson book. Since I was around Jeremy from my time in Portland, I can't NOT sense his fears, his humor, and obsessions in the text. I admit as this book approached, I wondered if the bigger tent would dilute that strange feeling comes off the page of a JRJ book like an airborne virus.

The thing is as weird as Angeldust Apocalypse is Jeremy always had a voice and style that informed by popular authors even when he was writing twinkie and cockroach suited nuclear war survivor novellas. Being a stay-at-home dad is more of a threat to his bizarro nature than a mainstream publisher. The good news is we now get the author exploring multiple themes and let me tell you The future of Dad horror is in good hands no doubt.  

Whatever, I am giving him shit with love because the Loop is great. I couldn't be much happier about a book doing well unless it had my name was on it. Jeremy has dreamed big and worked harder. The Loop has tons of hype and the good news it lives up to it.

That said, "Stranger things meets World War Z?" The Loop has more in common with early Cronenberg films like Rabid and Shivers, but sure Stranger Things. What the fuck do I know about marketing? As it is doing well. Saga is one of the best presses going releasing a lot of the best books, while this book has plenty of coming of age elements but the kids are modern and a bit older. They are going to a cave party not playing D and D. The setting is basically a fictional version of Bend Oregon JRJ's hometown. This provides many of the most subtle but excellent observations.

It takes place in Thunder Falls which is a city that is home to a large biotech hub. This is where the paranoid conspiracy tracks starts, something JRJ did in his underrated novel Skullcrack City. There is a disease, an emergency signal and the infected are horny and violent. Disease, technology, and chaos swirl together in a novel as quickly paced as Tremblay’s Survivor Song earlier in the year. That book had a built-in ticking clock, The Loop gets the propulsion from the chaos and violence.

 That is not to say that we don’t have lighter moments. Johnson creates funny moments as he always has, sometimes in the sheer insanity but mostly in our main character. Lucy is an outsider, her reality as an adopted teenager who was born in Peru to parents she lost in an accident is a wise a crucial choice by the author. It gives the POV a sharper knife for dissecting her town. She was just barely able to function in this town, and now she has to fight past feral crazies?


Gore drenched and cringe-inducing events happen left and right in this story of Science fiction/ monster/ body horror. There is fun stuff with a class division that is more like the Breakfast Club than Stranger Things. Lucy and her fellow adopted friends Bucket has the best most heart-filled relationship in the book. I think these are elements some readers will miss due to the white knuckle pace.

The Loop in most years would be a shoo-in for best horror novel of the year. The thing is this is a year of masterpieces from Silvia Moreno Garcia, Paul Tremblay, and Stephen Graham Jones who is my current leader with The Only Good Indian. I am not sure how the year will shake out but damn this book is a great sign of things to come from Jeremy Robert Johnson.

The Loop is a fun horror novel that might be better thought of as Nick Cutter’s The Troop meets Breakfast Club. This is the kind of super monster that escapes the mad scientist’s lab when the guy in the white coat grew-up reading Stephen King and watching Cronenberg movies far too young and dreamed of having a book on the shelf. Throw in adulthood spent getting out a highlighter to study how Brian Evenson stories work on the brain and you have this book.  It is a must-read for horror fans, as a Philip K Dickian who enjoys mind-fuckery Skullcrack City is a little more up my alley but the good news is we can read both.
 

Book Review: Germany: A Science Fiction by Laurence A. Rickels

 

Germany: A Science Fiction by Laurence A. Rickels

Paperback, 274 pages

Published June 1st 2015 by Anti-Oedipus Press (first published December 1st 2014) 

 

 

 Let me say something about how I came to this book. Editor and publisher D.Harlan Wilson sent me a few books early in the Corona-cation that I have been reading between pressing books that have the three-week library deadline. I knew nothing about this book except for years I had on my list because the title and the cover made me curious. I also trust Professor Wilson with the work he publishes because so far I have enjoyed all of it. An AOP release is one I am going to read.

So here is the thing. I never read the description or back cover. I wanted to go into this book cold. I read the preface and it mentioned lots of classic Science Fiction I am interested in. All I knew about Rickels was that he had written an entire book about Philip K Dick. (who I have devoted two years of doing a podcast to the study of) So I was not entirely surprised that he was interested in PKD but I was shocked that he seemed very interested in PKD’s novel the Simulacra.

After a few pages, I felt really stupid when I realized that this was not a novel but a collection of essays devoted to Science Fiction that came in the wake of WW II. That in itself is an interesting idea as the genre was really just hitting puberty when Hitler marched across Europe. The Hugo Gernsbecks and John W. Campbells of the world that were trying to shape the genre through the pulps and was faced with side effects of having trouble getting paper. At the same time Their stories were also the escape from the horrors of the war and carried in the anti-fascist armies.

It could be argued That the Catherine (CL) Moore, Henry Kuttner and AE Van Vogts of the world were doing the shaping during the war but Rickels is more interested in the aftermath. This message of this book is not spelled out in a 2+2 formula. Rickels is not being definitive and exhaustingly hitting the point through every single example. These are separate essays that follow his muse. He seems to be just flowing with the books he is most interested in and sometimes they hit the theme like a bullseye either way for fans of the critical theory of genre there is so much to chew on.

While he does spend time on important classics like the HG Wells and Day of the Triffids for two examples Rickels is not interested in the canon. The proof of that is the time he devotes to minor work of note in the PKD canon. I’ll duck because I know some Dickheads think it is all-important which is an opinion, we know even Phil didn’t have.

I enjoyed Rickels’s attention to pre-apollo space flight and moon shot novels, which is an era I have really thought about getting into. Much of this is due to early pulp writers being fascinated by the German V-2 rocket that was at the center of many of these stories. Damon Knight also wrote about this in his classic collection of reviews and commentary In Search of Wonder.

Of course, I enjoyed the time he spent on Spinrad’s Iron Dream but I can’t see how with this theme how he could miss it. He points out that the novel in the novel Hitler’s “Lord of the Swastika is a work in denial of Science Fiction,” in the sense of that the novel is about Hitler’s pure wish fulfillment. This is a point we discussed on the Dickheads episode about The Iron Dream but I wish I had this quote to react to.

I am happy with the short but powerful discussion of the Iron Dream a novel that spoofed Toliken so savagely. That said it seems strange to me it didn’t get more time, as it is almost on the nose of the theme. Also, the reason Rickels is invoking PKD’s Simulacra is an aspect we talked about but didn’t go deep into our analysis. That episode featured guest Dickheads Cody Goodfellow and is linked below.

Yeah, I know how that sounds but it is a novel with 54 named characters and almost every chapter adds plotlines like a spreading virus. I mean The Simulacra is odd even in the context Dick’s Career. You have A Russian telekinetic piano player time travel, Robot presidents and actresses cast in the role of the ultra-powerful First lady, hyper packed apartment buildings with class-organized populations, and a Jug-band with a Martian pet with the power of suggestion. Oh, don't for the dudes build and Martian shuttle Jalopies and a political revolution.
All that stuff and that is not the reason Rickels was inspired by it to write this book. In the novel post WW 2 Germany and future California are tied together. The actress playing the first lady wants to change Germany's fate with time travel in exchange for leadership tips. Yeah, that is a weird book and it got Laurence Rickels thinking.

After jumping into the commentary Rickels goes deep into the genre, while I found myself wishing for commentary on the occasional author or editor not mentioned. I am thinking of Leguin, Brunner, or Boucher who basically discovered Dick. That is a nitpick. This book is well researched.

I think the chapters hit me harder were the ones focused on PKD, Lem, and Spinrad. Those are authors I am deeply interested in. When Rickels talks about Gravity’s Rainbow or Jules Verne it is less in my wheelhouse.

I highlighted and dogged eared many pages but I can’t really get into all my thoughts here, except to say these tidbits and knowledge will be helpful in doing the podcast. What more can you ask for in a book about critical theory?

OK, one negative I have to point out, and I am not happy to do this. On page 58 Rickels does a really good job of discussing PKD’s Novel the Man Who Japed. The problem he refers to it as PKD’s first novel which was of course Solar Lottery, Japed was the fourth novel. Rickels makes matters worse saying he followed it up with Time out of Joint the following year. Those novels were years apart. These details are so wrong I wondered if they were intentional although I can’t find any evidence of that. As a Dick scholar, I found that jarring.

I suppose I should not be surprised that no one else has reviewed this book on good reads. You have to be an academic or a deep dive sci-fi theory dork like me. Shit, this is the kinda book you can implant in my brain. I think the best compliment I can give it is it is going on the shelf two books down from Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder. This is a MUST READ for Sci-fi theorists and I am glad I did.

Dickheads episode on The Simulacra featuring Cody Goodfellow 

Dickheads on Iron Dream 

Book Review: Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Octavia E. Butler, Damian Duffy (Adapted by), John Jennings (Illustrations)

 

 

Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Octavia E. Butler, Damian Duffy (Adapted by), John Jennings (Illustrations)

Hardcover, 284 pages

Published January 2020 by Harry N. Abrams

 

Paperback:Expected publication: July 6th 2021 by Abrams ComicArts

I have lots of questions about this book and this wider project. Thankfully I will be interviewing the creators soon for the podcast so stay tuned for that.

 Last year I happened upon a graphic novel adaptation of The Octavia Butler Sci-fi horror classic Kindred at the library.  Now to my great shame as a Sci-fi bibliophile I had never read Kindred before. So I was excited to read it, but I had no ability to compare it to the novel.  The Graphic novel of Kindred was amazing, the story was engrossing and disturbing. The packaging beautiful and it came with a tease for more adaptations of Octavia Butler’s work.

Next up was Parable of the Sower a classic I read probably 15 years ago. This time I could judge the work against the source material. While the book at the heart here was nominated for Locus and Nebula awards is still underrated as a predictive dystopia that launched a trilogy that sadly will never be finished. Butler died while working on the third book.

If you are not familiar with Octavia Butler let’s back up and talk about her.  In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant, which by the way was just given to another African American Woman in the genre N.K. Jemison.  Butler is not the first science fiction author whose genius has been fully realized after their death.  While the genre currently has several black women who are huge successes from Jeninsin to Nnedi Okorafor it was Butler who broke that glass ceiling first.

She was an important voice to the genre not just because of who she was. Her work was groundbreaking and powerful based on the strength of the stories she was telling and the undeniable voice she had.

I don’t know whose idea it was to produce beautiful looking and packaged graphic novels based on her work but thank you, thank you.

Parable of The Sower the novel was written in 1995, and when we see how close to her nightmare we have become it seems more important than ever. I have often compared this first book to King’s The Stand in concept, but the execution in my opinion Sower is a better novel. It has the end of the world mixed with a spiritual calling that is tested by the horrors. It has a group of people walking the wastelands, in this case just California. Sower is shorter, more focused, and clearly comes from a person who grew up with a very different point of view.  

Parable of the Sower is the story of Lauren Olamania who lives in a gated LA Ghetto during America’s economic collapse. The reasons are not fully expressed they don’t need to be. It always felt to me and this might be my bias that the reasons are environmental. None the less America is falling apart and one of the most interesting things is that corporations have bought towns, and indentured servitude has become legal.

After a massive fire burns down their neighborhood Lauren and friends take off up the coast to try and make it to Canada. Along the way they face horrors and Lauren develops the first ideas of religion she calls Earthseed with the vision that God is Change, that the human race needs change and needs to escape into the stars.  These ideas are hinted at here but better explored in the sequel Parable of the Talents.

So how did Duffy and Jennings do adapting this classic? Well, this is an intense book with huge themes that are expressed deftly in minor details. This graphic novel is an excellent translation and important work that will get the story and ideas out there. No matter how well it is done I doubt Jennings and Duffy would think they had created a substitute.  

That said this graphic novel makes up for one of the few negatives of the narrative format. The novel was written as journal entries and at the time it broke some of the suspense.  The creators smartly kept this idea in the text through narrative word bubbles that looked like tiny pastes of notebook paper and styled it has handwritten. So we don’t lose Lauren’s inner monologue. That said because it is a graphic novel we don’t have the story unfolding as “Last night this happened” That is one benefit of the format.

The artwork is powerful and has a painted somewhat abstract feel. The panel and Page design is great, it flows and most importantly as a fan of the novel it felt right to me. Between Lauren’s journals and Earthseed parables, there are more words on the page than some graphic novels. That said it does a great job of telling this unique story.

The book comes with a beautiful hardcover layout, even under the slipcover. The introduction by author Nalo Hopkinson is amazing. The whole package is impressive.  Big Thumbs up.

Book Review: Osama the Gun by Norman Spinrad

 

 

Osama the Gun by Norman Spinrad

Paperback, 288 pages

Published March 2017 by Wildside Press (first published July 2nd 2011)

Even though this book was published stateside in 2017 it is important to keep in mind that Spinrad devised this book in the years that followed 9/11. While the Trump years and the insanity of it may have dulled some memories of the political climate of the Bush years and the War on terror it is important to remember to view the meaning of this book in the context of the pre-May 2nd 2011 world it was written in. In fact, this book was written in 2007 just six years after 9/11 is important.


Osama Bin Laden is dead in the future events of this novel, but it is the idea of Osama as symbols more so than the actual human being that is the issue at the heart of this novel. A character points to the Zapatistas who wisely had a masked leader who thus represented more the ideals than a face or personality. Osama The Gun becomes a hero and a rallying call to radical Islam but unlike Bid Laden, no one is sure who he is.

“I can be killed, I almost was, it was this close,” I told him, holding up my right hand with the thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart, “but had I been killed Osama the Gun would have lived on.”

Indeed we have seen in the wake of Bin Laden’s death the lengths the American government has gone to portray the lack of honor they say the terrorist lived within his final days. They buried him at sea in an attempt to make his death with as little glory as possible. So a science fiction novel light on the sci-fi elements but heavy on an unpopular and radical political position is not exactly the type of book the big science fiction publishers have on their manuscript wish lists.

If you followed the author online a decade ago as I did then the battles to find a home for this novel were quite public. Spinrad was not surprised to have trouble finding a home for this novel that might be because he against odds released The Iron Dream as a paperback. I mean this is a tough sell but so is a spoof of Lord of The Rings being written as a novel as by Hitler. Indeed that was a different time.

The post 9/11 United States had turned Bin Laden into a bogeyman and a Science Fiction novel about a leader in his mold leading a new Caliphate was not an easy sell. In an interview by Cat Rambo on the SFWA website, Spinrad said "Osama the Gun is currently politically, socially, psychologically and spiritually important, for the same reasons that it has been rejected by so many American publishers, which The Iron Dream never was, why one rejection letter, foaming at the mouth, declared that no American publisher would touch it."

The Patriot Act and the quick jump by some on the left to call revenge was strange to watch for those of us political radicals who watched 9/11. America in the wake of the attacks is off-Camera for this novel but the push and pull between these two cultures that are worlds apart is represented in this story.

This is expressed well on page 37 of the Wildside edition "The famous victory of 9/11. A few Jihadis transformed the most admired nation in the world into the most hated, most dangerous model of democracy, arch-enemy of Koranic Islam rule, into what is considered by the world a paranoiac police state, the face of the so-called City on the Hill into that of the Great Satan. Not bad for a single Thunderbolt from the holy warriors of Allah, Osama"

It is clear that this novel is a reaction to the hysteria of the media Bogeyman the War on Terror had turned Bin Laden into. Spinrad imagines a more successful Al- Qaeda that manages to use Pakistan's nuclear weapons to create a caliphate that stretches across a large swath of the middle east and Asia. Our point of view character is Osama one of many young boys in the new Caliphate named for the infamous terrorist. This Osama is sent to France as an agent of his government and becomes famous for a series of attacks around Paris.

His government disavows him but he sneaks back into the country and learns that he has become a folk hero. He goes on to lead a revolution in Nigeria against American forces protecting oil in that country. It is hard to talk about the political nature of the novel without spoilers for the final act. It is not a huge spoiler to say the Caliphate and America end up in another war. Osama the Gun’s response to that war presents an interesting alternative to opposing America’s mighty war machine.


When I interviewed Norman Spinrad for the Dickheads Podcast he said described this book as Sympathy for the Devil. I think it was clear that Spinrad saw that there was a narrative missing. That people were not thinking about the motivations of jihadists. It is impossible to understand that global conflict otherwise. While the speculative elements are light in the way of robotic armies something that has come true in a real sense with drones. We are not to the robot tank level of the novel but none the less. This is light Sci-fi that gets it speculative elements mostly from creating a fictional Caliphate.

Osama the Gun is an important novel, and in that sense underrated. I would go to the level of a masterpiece as there were plenty of points and messages I think were left just beyond the text. While I think the intended message is clear this novel is dated in the sense that it was written before the rise of Isis. I feel there is another story there.

It has been compared a few times to the Iron Dream but I think is just in the jaw-dropping audacity of the subject. Osama The Gun is written to present an unpopular point of view but unlike Iron Dream, it was not conceived to be terrible. When writing as Hitler Spinrad was mocking the sword and sorcery novel thus that book is almost unreadable.

Interestingly enough Spinrad just appeared to early, mainstream publishers have done the War on Terror in Science Fiction since from hardcover releases of Matt Ruff’s The Mirage and Omar El-Akkad’s American War. Israeli author Lave Tidhir also went on to release Osama to wide acclaim. I am working my way through the last two so how this novel fits in the overall Science fiction reaction to the War on Terror remains to be seen.

As a stand-alone, I think it should be read but it is far from my favorite Spinrad. The man has a shelf of masterpieces and unique works of speculative fiction so being down on my list of Spinrad books is far from an insult. Bottomline Spinrad is important, this book is important.