Contraband [Mass Market Paperback]

When the government creates a new system for catching smugglers, based on intercepted communications traffic and predictive modeling, the Pilot's world falls apart. He is shot down and nearly killed. His former girlfriend ends up in Bellevue when her brother, also a smuggler is presumed killed. The smuggler then goes off with a rag tag band the search for the creater of the smuggler's bible.

The book started off as a bit of a slog. At this point about two hundred pages in, the book started to pick up. Unfortunately, it didn't really last.

From here on the plot became progressively stranger and began to have some rather gaping holes. When told to go east, the pilot heads directly to a god forsaken spot in Asia with access soon to be cut off by the winter snows. We never find out why he went to this particular place.

The characters have a series of increasingly strange adventures, culminating their return to NY no closer to their objective of shutting down the government's new system. The characters clear up their personal growth issues and the book just ends with them deciding to go their separate ways. The story is never actually resolved, leaving me disappointed.

While the quality of the writing is excellent and the characters are well developed, if a bit odd, the plot is full of holes you could drive a semi through. And, the book was difficult reading. It only grabbed me briefly. Most of the time, I was just reading it because of my compulsion to finish the books I start and my hope that it would improve.

If science fiction set in the dismal future is your thing, you may enjoy this more than I did. I mostly found it depressing and not very interesting.

Contraband, the story of a pilot in a world where secret cargo cults do battle with governnment agencies, follows one of the cargo cult philosophies: the journey is the destination. The plot is circular, and not especially strong. Still, the reasonably appealing characters, the original worldbuilding, and the strength of Foy's language carry the reader along.

Typical of Foy's work, Contraband is much too complex to summarize in a couple of paragraphs. The main character is the pilot, Joe "Skid" Marak, a good guy and professional smuggler who likes any mode of transportation that goes extremely fast and has a pet rat named God. BON has a programmer who has recently developed algorithms that allow BON to substantially increase their smuggler interdiction rate. Interdiction leads to immediate death or to sentencing without trial to a commercially-managed interrogation facility from which no one has ever been released. The increase in the interdiction ratio - which has resulted in the capture and sentencing of one of the pilot's best friends, the death of another, and a couple of very serious near misses on his own part - leads Marak on an international quest for the near-mythical Hawkley, who publishes the well-respected Smuggler's Bible and who reputedly knows what the new BON algorithm is and thus how to work around it.

Plus, there's lots of Foy's characteristically highly insightful treatment of human relationships, both romantic and otherwise. He also reinforces themes introduced in The Shift, such as people developing severe personality disorders which derive from a need for constant A/V stimulation and others perpetually confusing VR-delivered programming with real life. And in one nice and very subtle little twist, in one chapter intro Foy quotes one Mr. William Gates as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Committee (a tool of the BON, of course) as stating "... these people actually think they have the right to trade freely... without any regulation or permission from the government...".

George Foy is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. I couldn't put Contraband down.