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eBook Contraband epub

by George Foy

eBook Contraband epub
  • ISBN: 0553575481
  • Author: George Foy
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Subcategory: Science Fiction
  • Language: English
  • Publisher: Spectra; Reprint edition (January 5, 1999)
  • ePUB size: 1385 kb
  • FB2 size 1997 kb
  • Formats mobi lrf azw lit
George Foy Science Fiction English

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George Michelsen Foy (also known as Georges Foy and . Michelsen) is a French-American novelist, essayist, and magazine journalist, and professor of creative writing.

George Michelsen Foy (also known as Georges Foy and . Born in New England in 1962, he has published a dozen novels since the late 1980s, half under his own name and several more under the nom de plume . Until February 2010, the author kept secret the Michelsen persona's real identity.

One of today's most distinguished science fiction writers, George Foy is the author of five acclaimed thrillers and two well-received literary novels. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for 1994-95. Библиографические данные. Contraband A Bantam spectra book.

Foy does well at portraying popular culture and infusing humor. His writing here is often beautiful. 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.

Contraband by George Foy - book cover, description, publication history.

George Foy. Joe "Skid" Marak, aka the Pilot, is a compulsive smuggler. He lives with his pet rat in the abandoned spire of Manhattan's Transcom Building. His friends are outcasts from a city fallen into decay and a draconian bureaucracy. But the Pilot knows his days are numbered. The free-traders of the world are dying, victims of a mysterious new force known only as "Bokon Taylay. On his ECM pak - a laptop mishmash of scramblers, radar sensors, ham radios,.

Publisher of New Modernist Writing. 7 Aralık 2018, 12:57 ·. Herkese Açık.

Find nearly any book by George Fo. George Foy (Foy, George). used books, rare books and new books. Find signed collectible books: 'Contraband (Bantam spectra)'.

Find nearly any book by George Foy. Get the best deal by comparing prices from over 100,000 booksellers. Find all books by 'George Foy' and compare prices Find signed collectible books by 'George Foy'. Contraband (Bantam Spectra Book).

At the same time, however, community values discountenanced the smuggling of alcohol and guns, for such trafficking attracted organized crime.

At first glance, everything looked the same. Something evil had taken possession of the town. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. PC, Rocketman, the pilot, God, and the Hegel bird drove to Indianapolis in fifteen hours straight, motorvating linear down the interstate, doing exactly the speed limit in the old Chevy the pilot had bought in Bayou Noir

The most dangerous commodity of all...Joe "Skid" Marak, aka the pilot, is a compulsive smuggler.  For him, borders are an outrage to freedom.  He lives with his pet rat in the abandoned spire of Manhattan's TransCom Building.  His friends are outcasts in a world ripped by plague and repression.  The pilot knows his days are numbered.  On his ECM-pak, he watches helplessly as his freetrading comrades vanish from the screen: victims of a mysterious force known only as "Bokon Taylay."The brother of his Rollerblading, go-go-dancing girlfriend is Taylay's latest victim.  All that is left behind is a smuggled message telling the pilot he must locate the one man who can break Taylay's code, the legendary author of the Smuggler's Bible--a man who may not even exist.  It's a risk worth taking.  Because to the pilot, there's only one contraband more valuable than life--freedom.
Comments: (7)
Dolid
Contraband is set in the distopian near future, where the world is run by an increasingly repressive government that monitors all of its citizens activities and movements. The main charater is a smuggler living outside the law.
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.
Skyway
Contraband is set in an extremely believable very-near-future in which multinational corporations dictate international law and second-generation biohazard mutants staff the toxic-waste dumps which were formerly known as wetlands. The Bureau of Nationalizations, or BON, is an international entity set up to interdict and dispose of smugglers like the pilot, who transports goods and people across international economic boundaries. The BON is a servant of the multinationals, whose economic interests are threatened by free trade. The BON regularly uses deadly force against smugglers; because of the economic challenge they provide to the multinationals, smugglers are considered equivalent to terrorists under US and international law.
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.
Der Bat
A friend loaned me Contraband to read last week, while I was in the hospital. I was taking strong narcotic pain killers, and the book made perfect sense. That says something about Foy's writing, and the SF genre.

The plot and characters in all fiction are a collection of loose ends; and even more so in SF, where they may be real; surreal; and/or fantastic. The test of an author is whether he can make the elements he selects internally plausible and consistent, the book entertaining, and its conclusion satisfying to the reader.

On first reading, I thought the conclusion was abrupt, and didn't tie up all the loose ends. Contraband is a collage of elements from Foy's experience and imagination; and it left me at last, with the feeling that he strung them together, page by page, until he had enough pages to publish a book.

Foy's theme is an old one: that in a harsh, dictatorial society, the only free people are the misfits, the insane, and criminals like the Pilot. Some elements are hard to accept. The notion that the mysterious author of the Smuggler's Bible could publish regularly online, in such a controlled society - and always be one jump ahead of the authorities - is ridiculous. And it's notable that at least in name, this Hawkley is reminiscent of Augustus Stanley Owsley - maker of LSD for the San Francisco Bay Area hippies in the '60s.

But that's not to say that Contraband is a bad book. Foy writes well; and those who are willing to overlook its weaknesses should find it a good read.

Even without the painkillers.
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