All Clear by Connie Willis

 

I felt forced to read this overlong sequel to Black Out since I’d read Black Out to its cliffhanger ending. Willis has done fine work, but her WWII series isn’t it. Although her characters are all likeable, they’re also simple and not all that interesting. She keeps the readers reading by dragging out the resolutions to the various protags’ various problems. She throws hints about what happens next, only it never really seems to happen.

 

Characters are interrupted at every turn so no one hears what anyone else is saying. Consequently, no one finds out what they need to know. You want to yell at the protags “For God’s sake, tell that asshole to shut up and let you finish telling him that a bomb is going to hit the train station.”  Instead, Willis’ characters sputter “Oh dear, but you don’t understand…”  “But, sir…” Next thing, the asshole runs off to the train station and the bomb hits. If I hadn’t paid for the book, I’d have been far too frustrated to finish it.

 

As an aside, I knew All Clear would likely be frustrating because Black Out was. Only there, it was the fact the story took place in a future world where historians used time machines for research but, oddly, didn’t have mobile phones. They kept missing each other in the various research labs. One guy only got his message through when he found a standard telephone on some secretary’s desk.

 

Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh

This book sends a ray of daylight into the dark, dusty room where hordes of vampire and zombie books are piled. It’s the sort of book that’s been missing from the science Fiction aisle for a long time. It’s science fiction at its most amazing—science fiction that challenges our thinking and gives us a peak at what the future just might hold. Yet it’s also a horror story. And it’s a love story.

 

A young man in a socially connected America must leave a wealthy city neighborhood and return to the impoverished suburbs after a very public break up with his girlfriend. Driving angry and drunk, he runs over and kills a young woman. The man has to sell the body suit that connected him to the entire world, allowed him to see or follow anyone anywhere, to mask the unpleasant things in his environment and anything unattractive about himself. The woman wakes briefly from death, at least her mind does, in a cryogenic prison where beautiful women can be saved if rich men buy them.

 

Love Minus Eighty is about all this, but also about undying hopeless-seeming love and where the heart leads. All I can say is read it!