Just Finished Reading: The Mocking Program by Alan Dean Foster

On the mean streets of late 21st Century America, Detective Inspector Angel Cardenas is investigating a grisly murder. Unfortunately things become complicated from the very start when the corpse appears to have multiple identities one of which is linked to a crime lord and his missing wife. As Cardenas digs deeper into a tangled web of futuristic crime he is assailed by hired assassins and machines with murder in mind. Slowly, as he figures out the reasons behind a series of crimes he begins to realise that everything revolves around the contents of an 11 year olds brain. In it she holds to secrets of a criminal empire which some are determined to hold or destroy at any cost in lives and collateral damage.

With the combination of the Cyberpunk genre and the name of Alan Dean Foster (who is one of my favourite authors) I really did think I was on to a sure-fire winner here. Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that Foster had ‘phoned in’ the authorship of this book whilst seemingly half awake. The plot was frankly ridiculous and fragmented, the characters deeply unimpressive and the set-pieces often simply ludicrous. This was deeply disappointing coming from an author of Fosters calibre and I barely had the energy to finish it. With few redeeming features this was a train wreck of a novel which, quite frankly, should never have been published.

I think I really need to improve my game at this point before I give up reading SF all together. Maybe I need to operate, at least occasional, a bit more outside my comfort zone? I’ll have to see what I can come up with. Definitely new authors and new genres I think. Maybe I’ll even surprise myself?