Faller by Will McIntosh

Published by Tor Books on October 25, 2016

I suppose a writer who plays with singularities can make up his own rules of physics because where singularities are concerned, nobody knows what the rules are, if any exist. Still, I’ve seen Roadrunner cartoons that are easier to believe than the events that transpire in Faller. I liked the novel, but it isn’t a story that can be taken seriously.

Initially, two storylines, past and present, keep the reader guessing about what’s going on. At about the novel’s midway point, enough clues have been planted to give the reader a sense of how the stories connect.

The story begins at some point after Day One, the day everyone found themselves without a memory. People know only that they are near the edge of the world. The world has a rather small footprint, several thousand paces in each direction. A man who eventually calls himself Faller finds a toy soldier with a parachute in his pocket, something he must have placed there as a clue before the event. Faller turns out to be a prophetic name when he finds himself falling off the edge of the world. In fact, falling is what he does for a few chapters.

The second storyline begins with Faller entering a world that is the same but different from the one he left. It’s a bigger world with more people (a population of maybe 15,000) and conflicts between groups are more complex, but its inhabitants don’t know who they are or how they got there or what the war machines that surround them are supposed to do. Faller isn’t sure what to make of the world and its inhabitants aren’t sure what to make of Faller, although they assume he’s a spy. Like the world from which he fell, this one has an edge.

Alternating with the story of Faller’s predicament are chapters that follow six friends who live in what appears to be a regulation-size Earth. The world is at war. A physicist and a biotech guy have combined to make a quantum cloning machine that duplicates organs without the diseases that afflict them, a potential solution to the bioterrorism epidemics that are ravaging the world. When one of the group gets sick, however, organ replacement won’t help, because brain transplants are beyond medical science. The afflicted woman nevertheless hits upon a “second best” solution that might assure her survival … in a sense.

Faller has significant entertainment value, although it’s the kind of story that demands not just the suspension of disbelief, but the ingestion of mind-altering chemicals to appreciate its daffy nature. Sadly, I didn’t have access to any while I was reading this, but I nevertheless liked the book. Good character development and an unpredictable plot contributed to my enjoyment of a story that I couldn’t even begin to believe.

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Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh

Published by Orbit on June 11, 2013

If Love Minus Eighty has a central theme, it's this: love is complicated. It's particularly complicated if you've fallen in love with a dead woman. Love Minus Eighty explores love in a light-hearted way from a variety of perspectives: characters are in love (both requited and unrequited), or want love, or are faking it, or fear it, or substitute manipulation and drama for actual love. Still, Love Minus Eighty will never be mistaken for a traditional romance novel. It's smart and funny, not trashy.

Love Minus Eighty features one of the best extrapolations of internet technology I've encountered. Will McIntosh mixes social networking with reality TV to create a medium that's both amusing and disturbing -- and utterly believable. In a future New York, the affluent live in High Town (built above the surface of old Manhattan) and wear skin-tight suits that, apart from using sensory filters to block bad smells and ugly sights, allow virtual access to others via screens that materialize in midair. Individuals who can attract enough followers at one time are rewarded with corporate sponsorship (earning money, for instance, by wearing a particular designer's boots). In its conglomeration of Facebook and Twitter and You Tube, Love Minus Eighty makes a telling point about all the people who "take time away from their own pathetic lives to watch [a self-made celebrity] live hers."

A woman named Lorelei manages to gain eight hundred viewers as she humiliates her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend, Rob Mashita. Having just watched Lorelei throw all his possessions out a window, the distracted Rob runs over a woman named Winter West. Winter dies without revivication insurance, but fortunately she's attractive, and her corpse is chosen for the bridesicle program and stored in a dating center at minus eighty. If she's very lucky, some wealthy man will pay to restore her to life, or at least awaken her for a quick chat. Out of guilt, Rob visits her from time to time, but he can't afford to restore her to consciousness for more than five minutes every few months.

Winter's death, and the possibility that she might never be revived -- or worse, that she might be thawed and buried if she proves to be unprofitable -- is at the heart of an engaging story. Although Love Minus Eighty is in essence a romantic comedy, it makes some serious points about the value and the downside of social networking, as well as the corporate tendency to place a monetary value on human life. It also delves into philosophy, asking the timeless question: "What's more real: what you think you are, or what external, objective reality tells you you are?" Just how real is virtual reality?

If you're looking for "hard" science fiction that explains how things work -- how death is cheated, how floating screens manage to pop into existence -- you won't find it here. That didn't bother me because the novel has the sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude that suggests it isn't meant to be taken seriously. The story's focus is on people rather than technology. The characters aren't multifaceted -- there is a clear division between likable and unlikable characters -- but that's forgivable in a comic novel. Love Minus Eighty doesn't require much analytical thinking (overthinking the story would probably destroy it) but the novel encourages empathy for its love-challenged characters, provokes easy laughter, and stimulates discussion about the future of social networking.

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