Charisma

by Steven Barnes

It began well - an experiment in techniques to teach high-risk children - poor, minority, children - the life-strategies that will allow them to succeed in life. And not just succeed, but overcome the odds and become wildly successful. They chose as their model a man who had done it all - Alexander Marcus; a black man who raised himself up from poverty to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in America.

The imprinting is effective. The children are focused, driven. They are inventive, intelligent, and love learning. But there is a mysterious darkness to them - a ruthlessness that is surprising.

Renny Sand first met the children as a journalist covering the sensational trial of a preschool operator. There were terrible charges of sex abuse, but the thing that stayed with Renny was the strange poise and power of a group of eight year old children. That, and the face of the mother of one of them, Vivian Emory.

Now the children are thirteen years old, and one of them has been killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident. Renny Sands sees the possibility of big story, a human interest story, a story that might jump-start his flagging career. He'll do a follow-up on the preschool scandal; and he might get a chance to restart his love life as well - Vivian Emory has divorced her husband in the five years since he met her.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thriller, Science Fiction Fantasy

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Steven Barnes (born March 1, 1952, Los Angeles, California) is an African American science fiction writer, lecturer, creative consultant, and human performance technician. He has written several episodes of The Outer Limits and Baywatch, as well as the Stargate SG-1 episode "Brief Candle" and the Andromeda episode "The Sum of its Parts". Barnes' first published piece of fiction, the novelette The Locusts (1979), written with Larry Niven, and was a Hugo Award nominee.

Reviews

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this after Blood Brothers which was suggested to me. This is a great story and it's hard to describe without giving some of the story away. I thought this would make a great TV movie or mini-series.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was wandering the sf section just browsing when I turned this one up. I've picked up Barnes only books before and not found one I wanted to read but this when had something to it. And yet I put off reading it for three months.

First of all it's on that line between thriller and horror, but with a vaguely The Boys from Brazil vibe. And the author has this uncanny way of selling you a character and then killing them. And the ideas, which were there and good, just weren't served up quite the way I wanted them to be. In one bit there was a couple of pages of straight info-dumping.

That said, it was a good strong read and definitely creepifying. Not sure if it was worth reading but definitely not a waste of time. 3.5 of 5.

[Sue Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Experiment with goal of giving inner city kids a better chance by giving them conditioning to make them like a civil rights leader who was also a serial killer. Then attempt to kill all the kids. Bad writing.

[Ade Oluyemisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this interesting to look at what really affects/effects nature and nurture has on us. To me it was an example of what happens with programming. Perhaps it is just my mistrust that say this is very possibly happening. Love the way he tells a story and weaves the conflicts.

[Jon]

I've always enjoyed Steven Barnes' work, since his early days with Streetlethal. I picked up a copy of Charisma at the library, and enjoyed reading it, too. I wonder, however, why in the world it's classified under science fiction. Have they just gotten into the habit of classifying an author in a certain category, and anything else he/she writes just gets thrown in, as well? The only thing remotely science fictional is the underlying idea in the plot - a group of at-risk preschoolers is exposed (via hypnosis?) to the brain patterns of a very successful black soldier/businessman/statesman, Marcus Alexander. Over the years, they are monitored to see if this imprinting increases their success in school and life. Everything else about this story is pretty mundane. I mean, it could have been about a ritalin replacement drug for hyperactive kids, and the rest of the story would have worked fine with a few minor mods.


That said, it was a pretty good book. I got engaged quite quickly with the main characters, a boy who is part of the experimental group named Patrick, and Renny Sand, a reporter who begins to uncover the true story behind his idol, again, Marcus Alexander. If you read the synopsis in the book jacket, you know more about what's going on behind the scenes in the novel than any of the characters, and sometimes wonder how they could be so dense as not to suspect anything about the sinister forces opposing them.

Barnes always seems to have a pretty heavy martial arts emphasis in his stories somewhere, and this one has a lot of philosophy from Musashi's Five Rings. There's some good stuff in here, albeit brief, about sharpshooting competitions. Barnes tells a good tale, with interesting heroes and villains throughout, only using a few stereotypes for his disposable bad guys.

[Dale Brown]

Arguably too long for a scifi book of this subject and nature. Reads more like the great American novel, with a lot of additional prose, site setting and introspection not needed for this story. It's good, but could be 100 pages shorter. The significant and to be honest unnecessary long gaps between action or meaningful sections really wasn't needed. I'd argue the editor did a poor job here. This should have been a tighter story. I think that is the only thing that takes away from it. The story otherwise is sound. There were 2 pts in the book that made no sense; but not the science behind the story, that was sound. Arguably Barnes has a greater grasp on the science than human nature and fears.

SPOILERS

Midway, the main child's mother accusing him of killing someone; what mother would...and this was dropped as quickly as it was raised
At the end, the main character pursuing a woman whose son he knows is programmed to be a serial killer.... who would?
The idea a serial killer could hide their personality, absolutely esp. if you read studies around sociopaths in boardrooms.

[Juan Sanmiguel]

Alexander Marcus was a very successful African American business man who died in a plane crash. Several children in Seattle connected with daycare center involved in sex abuse scandal are showing great intelligence and initiative. Someone is trying to kill some of these children. Reporter Randy Sands, an employee of Marcus Communications decides to look look into Marcus' past. Sands finds something disturbing. Can Sands figure it out in time before more children are killed? Kids are believable. So are the adults. The book makes an interesting statement about what can make someone go bad. The only thing that bugs me is at the end the government decides to hide the information of what happened. Sands is right the truth will do more damage than good. Still it is disturbing when the government hiding something from the people for their own good.

[Benno · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really a standard pulp-fiction sci-fi/thriller. One that I basically ended up reading in two nights, and now I'm left without a book to read.

I found the best part of this book was trying to work out wtf was going on, and was really glad that I only read the back-cover summary afterward I finished the book (a habit of mine), because it would have spoiled the whole atmosphere of the book.

At the end of the day, this is pretty much thriller and the sci-fi side is pretty weak.

Hmm, it sure is hard to write a review without even talking about the whole central premise. And there ends my first review! Huzzah!

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating, slow burn thriller. At 450 pages maybe a little too slow (it took me a while to finish), but the story of engineering low income youth tapped into a lot of intriguing and timely themes.

[SFReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a...

[Zefyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A study of the ways of warriors, and how they can be utilized. I remember enjoying this a lot despite some places where the plot struggled some.