Carr, whose Alienist (1994) helped launch the literary-thriller juggernaut, turns from the past to the future with this anti-utopian mix of sf and mystery, set in 2024. It's Blade Runner times 10 in a world ravaged by technology, especially by the rampant misuse of misinformation, spread like a plague by the Internet. Investigating the murder of a video wizard vaporized by an unknown weapon, criminologist Gordon Wolfe soon finds himself in league with a band of cyber-rebels out to expose what technology has wrought: "a world where intelligence is measured by the ability to amass information that has no context or purpose save its own propagation. The plan is to perpetrate frauds--false documents, for example, suggesting that George Washington was assassinated--and then reveal the hoaxes, proving that facts are no longer trustworthy, and information science is utterly corrupt. Unfortunately, nobody will believe the truth when it is finally revealed. Matters come to a head when a terrorist, convinced by misinformation that Stalin was a coconspirator in the Holocaust, sets out to nuke Moscow. Can the cyber-rebels save the world with the same technology that ruined it? Anyone with even an ounce of Luddite blood will love Carr's premise, but unfortunately, the novel doesn't quite live up to its subject matter. Carr spends too much time explaining the premise and detailing all the horrors that have befallen the information-glutted world; consequently, his characters are more mouthpieces than people. Ironically, in a novel that pleads passionately for humanity, the human voice is nearly lost in the rhetoric. Still, this is the kind of story bound to attract attention. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Fun...entertaining." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Mind-blowing...twisted, hilarious, touching...an intimate family drama...from a born storyteller who's invented a new way to write." -- George magazine
"Fast-moving...a high-velocity tour of the year 2023." -- Washington Post Book World
"Startling...a daring step...a book of ideas and an allegorical warning against a future that must be avoided." -- Denver Post
"A non-stop thrill ride...Carr is a master of the cliffhanger." -- USA Today
From the Inside Flap
"It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge."
The year is 2023, a time that bestselling author Caleb Carr paints in fascinating and believable detail. Much of the world enjoys the great wealth generated by the triumph of information technology, but horrifying poverty grips many countries, bitter wars rage over natural resources, and the failure of international regulatory agencies has resulted in an expanding black market in all forms of weapons--including nuclear devices. The staphylococcus plague of 2006 wiped out forty million people, the crash of '07 ruined many national economies, and in America the assassination of President Emily Forrester in 2018 traumatized the nation. The Internet remains the main source of information, bombarding people everywhere with news, rumors, and allegations twenty-four hours a day--and creating enormous possibilities for the manipulation of mankind.
New York psychiatrist, criminal profiler, and historian Dr. Gideon Wolfe becomes enmeshed in this world of deception when the wife of a murdered special-effects wizard brings him a computer disc containing startling evidence that the now-famous visual record of President Forrester's assassination was digitally altered by her husband. Investigating this crime, Wolfe enlists the help of his oldest friend, Max Jenkins, a private detective expert in all forms of information manipulation.
When Max, too, is murdered, a stunned and enraged Wolfe sets out to uncover who is behind the Forrester hoax and the killings, a journey that leads him to a secret group of scientific and military experts who--led by an ailing, mysterious young genius and his beautiful, brilliant sister--have undertaken to demonstrate the astonishing degree to which the public can be deceived and manipulated. Seduced in every way, Wolfe joins the team. But are their methods really as noble as their motives?
Relentlessly suspenseful and packed with brilliantly realized characters and settings, Killing Time reveals a new side of a master novelist
About the Author
Caleb Carr was born in Manhattan and grew up on the Lower East Side, where he still lives. He is the author of the bestsellers The Alienist and The Angel of Darknness, along with several volumes of nonfiction. Carr writes frequently on military and political affairs, and is an editorial advisor to The World Policy Journal and MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
SOMEWHERE IN THE MITUMBA MOUNTAIN RANGE OF CENTRAL AFRICA, SEPTEMBER 2024
We leave at daylight, so I must write quickly. All reports indicate that my pursuers are now very close: the same scouts who for the last two days have reported seeing a phantom airship moving steadily down from the northeast, setting fire to the earth as it goes, now say that they have spotted the vessel near Lake Albert. My host, Chief Dugumbe, has at last given up his insistence that I allow his warriors to help me stand and fight, and instead offers an escort of fifty men to cover my escape. Although I'm grateful, I've told him that so large a group would be too conspicuous. I'll take only my good friend Mutesa, the man who first dragged my exhausted body out of this high jungle, along with two or three others armed with some of the better French and American automatic weapons. We'll make straight for the coast, where I hope to find passage to a place even more remote than these mountains.
It seems years since fate cast me among Dugumbe's tribe, though in reality it's been only nine months; but then reality has ceased to have much meaning for me. It was a desire to get that meaning back that originally made me choose this place to hide, this remote, beautiful corner of Africa that has been forever plagued by tribal wars. At the time the brutality of such conflicts seemed to me secondary to the fact that the ancient grievances fueling them had been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone; I thought this a place where I might be at least marginally sure that the human behavior around me was not being manipulated by the unseen hands of those who, through mastery of the wondrous yet sinister technologies of our "information age," have obliterated the line between truth and fiction, between reality and a terrifying world in which one's eyes, ears, and heart can no longer be trusted.
There are no newspapers here, no televisions, and above all no computers, which means no damned Internet. Dugumbe forbids it all. His explanation for this stance is simple, though no less profound for its simplicity: information, he insists, is not knowledge. The lessons passed on from one's elders, taught by the wisest of them but recorded only in the mind, these, Dugumbe has always said, represent true knowledge. The media I've mentioned can only divert a man from such wisdom and enslave him to what Dugumbe calls the worst of all devils: confusion. There was a time when I—a man of the West, the possessor of not one but two doctorates—would have laughed at and disdained such beliefs; and in truth, during the time I've been here the laws and folklore of these people have come to trouble me deeply. Yet in a world stuffed full of deliberately warped information, of manufactured "truths" that have ignited conflicts far greater than Dugumbe's tribal struggles, I now find myself clinging to the core of the old king's philosophy even more tightly than he does.
There—I've just heard it. Distant but unmistakable: the thunderous rumble that heralds their approach. It'll appear out of the sky soon, that spectral ship; or perhaps it will rise up out of the waters of Lake Albert. And then the burning will begin again, particularly if Dugumbe attempts to forcefully resist the extraordinary brother and sister who command the vessel. Yes, time is running out, and I must write faster—though just what purpose my writing serves is not quite so clear. Is it for the sake of my own sanity, to reassure myself that it all truly happened? Or is it for some larger goal, perhaps the creation of a document that I can feed out over what has become my own devil, the Internet, and thereby fight fire with fire? The latter theory assumes, of course, that someone will believe me. But I can't let such doubts prevent the attempt. Someone must listen, and, even more important, someone must understand . . .
For it is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge.
It is 2023. Malcolm and Larissa Tressalian, the genetically engineered spawn of "The Father of the Internet," attempt to break a gullible public's addiction to the Web through an insidiously designed program of misinformation. Their motives may be noble, but their methods are corrupt. When they attempt to reveal their hoaxes, no one believes them. As most nongenetically engineered children would know, crying wolf leaves one with a lot of dead sheep. While it has an interesting premise, the story's characters are merely cyber versions of talking heads with Victorian sensibilities. Narrator Philip Goodwin makes the most of this material, managing effective dialects and creating excitement whenever possible, but Caleb Carr«s dialogue is preachy, often pedantic, leaving Goodwin little leeway for interpretation. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
