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War Surf
In the 23rd century, Nasir Deepra finds fun by dropping into minor wars. High-tech gear fully protects him, but nothing can protect him from a woman named Sheeba—and her voracious lust for danger.
384 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published August 30, 2005
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131 people want to read
About the author
M.M. Buckner
9 books8 followersMary M. Buckner is a hard science fiction author with an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. Her first novel, Hyperthought was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award, and War Surf won the award in 2005.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 2, 2013
picked up this book because I'd recently been going back and reading the Phillip K Dick winners (the annual award for best Sci-Fi in paperback.) This is the 2006 winner and, having just read such GREAT novels as Vacuum Diagrams, Altered Carbon, and Life, I had high expectations.
120 pages in I was ready to put the book down and move on to something else. The book is a mish-mash of clichés, boring stock characters that I found totally unredeeming, and painfully heavy-handed symbolism. There is a germ of a good idea here that I found, at times, enjoyable but it was not worth reading the entire novel.
Since there is a summary on the website and in other reviews, we already know who Nasir Deepra and Sheeba are. Nasir is vain and in lust with Sheeba. His friends are bored zillionaires who booze and drug themselves for entertainment. Sheeba is naivé and flakey.
Fine.
But their personalities are stock and assembled out of such painfully obvious clichés. None of them are painted in a way that is fresh or interesting. Nasir carries a mirror in his pocket which he is constantly pulling out to check his hair with. Anything Sheeba says to him throughout the course of the novel is GUARANTEED to be misinterpreted (there is never ONCE a moment when he doubts himself for going completely the opposite direction with what she says to him.) He gets jealous whenever anybody talks to her in the same way a six year old might. His friends go on benders for days at a time and approach death as though they were watching a cartoon. Sheeba is a physical therapist and is always spouting new age hippy jargon. I found it hard to believe that any of these people could function in ANY society, let alone live for 200+ years, run trillion dollar companies, and "SURF" wars.
I'm all for anti-heros (see Altered Carbon) but nothing about the way these characters are written was new or fresh or interesting - and since the book takes 100 pages to get going you're forced to spend 2-3 days with these people that you wouldn't want to spend 10 minutes with in real life. I kept waiting for things to get better and for some actual character development to occur. Sheeba (who might have saved the book had it been written from her perspective) experiences an instant and (as such) inexplicable change "off camera." Nasir's friends never change and by page 336 Nasir himself writes "By now you may have asked yourself...why you keep browsing this memoir. The narrator...has no redeeming traits." 336! Thats 39 pages from the END!
Then...he changes. Completely unmotivated. There is no indication as to whether his change is caused by the horrors that he created (to which he'd been completely oblivious to up to that point,) or a (avoiding a spoiler here) third party has caused it. But the change is virtually instant. It occurs in two or three sentences. After spending over 300 pages with these dull idiots I thought, at least, I'd be treated to torturous introspection or grandious revelation. But the pivotal moment was almost arbitrary.
Adding insult to boredom was the symbolism, again heavy handed and obvious. Without being too specific, HEAVEN, BLOOD, IMMORTALITY, THE GARDEN. Ugh.
There were one or two people that I actually liked in here but their page real estate was too small to be any kind of saving grace. Again the book might have been a LOT more fun if it had been written from Sheeba's perspectve. Then again maybe not. If you're interested in reading some really good sci-fi, check out the last five Philip K Dick winners but...you might want to skip this one.
120 pages in I was ready to put the book down and move on to something else. The book is a mish-mash of clichés, boring stock characters that I found totally unredeeming, and painfully heavy-handed symbolism. There is a germ of a good idea here that I found, at times, enjoyable but it was not worth reading the entire novel.
Since there is a summary on the website and in other reviews, we already know who Nasir Deepra and Sheeba are. Nasir is vain and in lust with Sheeba. His friends are bored zillionaires who booze and drug themselves for entertainment. Sheeba is naivé and flakey.
Fine.
But their personalities are stock and assembled out of such painfully obvious clichés. None of them are painted in a way that is fresh or interesting. Nasir carries a mirror in his pocket which he is constantly pulling out to check his hair with. Anything Sheeba says to him throughout the course of the novel is GUARANTEED to be misinterpreted (there is never ONCE a moment when he doubts himself for going completely the opposite direction with what she says to him.) He gets jealous whenever anybody talks to her in the same way a six year old might. His friends go on benders for days at a time and approach death as though they were watching a cartoon. Sheeba is a physical therapist and is always spouting new age hippy jargon. I found it hard to believe that any of these people could function in ANY society, let alone live for 200+ years, run trillion dollar companies, and "SURF" wars.
I'm all for anti-heros (see Altered Carbon) but nothing about the way these characters are written was new or fresh or interesting - and since the book takes 100 pages to get going you're forced to spend 2-3 days with these people that you wouldn't want to spend 10 minutes with in real life. I kept waiting for things to get better and for some actual character development to occur. Sheeba (who might have saved the book had it been written from her perspective) experiences an instant and (as such) inexplicable change "off camera." Nasir's friends never change and by page 336 Nasir himself writes "By now you may have asked yourself...why you keep browsing this memoir. The narrator...has no redeeming traits." 336! Thats 39 pages from the END!
Then...he changes. Completely unmotivated. There is no indication as to whether his change is caused by the horrors that he created (to which he'd been completely oblivious to up to that point,) or a (avoiding a spoiler here) third party has caused it. But the change is virtually instant. It occurs in two or three sentences. After spending over 300 pages with these dull idiots I thought, at least, I'd be treated to torturous introspection or grandious revelation. But the pivotal moment was almost arbitrary.
Adding insult to boredom was the symbolism, again heavy handed and obvious. Without being too specific, HEAVEN, BLOOD, IMMORTALITY, THE GARDEN. Ugh.
There were one or two people that I actually liked in here but their page real estate was too small to be any kind of saving grace. Again the book might have been a LOT more fun if it had been written from Sheeba's perspectve. Then again maybe not. If you're interested in reading some really good sci-fi, check out the last five Philip K Dick winners but...you might want to skip this one.
January 12, 2011
Buckner's new novel is set in the same post-environmental collapse world as her earlier Neurolink, this time among a group of aging executive-class extreme sports enthusiasts. They call themselves the Agonists, and their "extreme sport" is war surfing—taking fast, and thoroughly recorded, runs through the war zones of 23rd-century labor relations. Their leader is Nasir Deepra, two and a half centuries old, old enough that he lived through the collapse as an adult, and remembers an Earth whose surface was still habitable.
Nasir and his aging comrades are at the top of their sport, but they have a weakness they don't recognize yet: Nasir is infatuated with a beautiful physical therapist, Sheeba, who's in her twenties, and too well-adjusted to regard him as anything other than a father figure. Nasir, in his dogged pursuit of Sheeba, will do anything to please or impress her, including strong-arm his buddies into including her on their war surfs. This quickly goes—somewhat humorously—wrong, knocking the Agonists out of first place, and in fact down to fourth place, in the standings but, after some stressful moments melding Sheeba into the team while fatally weakening Nasir's ability to veto a surf he knows will be disastrous, a surf of the orbital factory called Heaven. Nasir is chairman of the board of the company that owns Heaven, and he knows what none of the others do—what the labor dispute is about, and why Provendia is so very determined to hide it. When Nasir's suit malfunctions on the surf, and Nasir and Sheeba find themselves stranded inside Heaven, with its unexpectedly young and naturally suspicious prote ("protected employees", the 23rd century's lower classes) population, Nasir, the protes, and even Sheeba—the most sensible of them all—are in for some shocking and dangerous re-education about how the world really works, and the reader gets an exciting ride.
There are some weaknesses here, and the ending is a bit heavy-handedly sentimental, but this is a fun book, and Nasir, with all his self-deceptions, is another believable, basically decent and likable character.
Nasir and his aging comrades are at the top of their sport, but they have a weakness they don't recognize yet: Nasir is infatuated with a beautiful physical therapist, Sheeba, who's in her twenties, and too well-adjusted to regard him as anything other than a father figure. Nasir, in his dogged pursuit of Sheeba, will do anything to please or impress her, including strong-arm his buddies into including her on their war surfs. This quickly goes—somewhat humorously—wrong, knocking the Agonists out of first place, and in fact down to fourth place, in the standings but, after some stressful moments melding Sheeba into the team while fatally weakening Nasir's ability to veto a surf he knows will be disastrous, a surf of the orbital factory called Heaven. Nasir is chairman of the board of the company that owns Heaven, and he knows what none of the others do—what the labor dispute is about, and why Provendia is so very determined to hide it. When Nasir's suit malfunctions on the surf, and Nasir and Sheeba find themselves stranded inside Heaven, with its unexpectedly young and naturally suspicious prote ("protected employees", the 23rd century's lower classes) population, Nasir, the protes, and even Sheeba—the most sensible of them all—are in for some shocking and dangerous re-education about how the world really works, and the reader gets an exciting ride.
There are some weaknesses here, and the ending is a bit heavy-handedly sentimental, but this is a fun book, and Nasir, with all his self-deceptions, is another believable, basically decent and likable character.
November 18, 2017
I agree mostly with Ian regarding this book. The so-called adults in the novel speak and act like dim-witted teenagers. I thought that this might be the author's point and in some repects the children in the book do act more mature than the adults, but it was just too goofy and painful to read the things these people said and did. I mean food fights, really? The story is just too politically correct and heavy-handed. I wound up skimming pages toward the end just praying to get this over with. I usually don't finish books I don't like, but for some reason, I got through this one. I was always afraid to read this because of the cover, but as someone else indicated, the cover doesn't represent almost anything in the book.
It's hard to find good science fiction without relying on the old classics, so people put their trust in these "Award Winners" which is another roll of the dice. There is good and then there is bad. Sorry, this one was bad.
It's hard to find good science fiction without relying on the old classics, so people put their trust in these "Award Winners" which is another roll of the dice. There is good and then there is bad. Sorry, this one was bad.
November 11, 2007
Beware the cover. This is neither cyberpunk nor military sf. It is a novel of people controlled by their fears and bored by the world they have created in response to their fears. It is a novel of misunderstanding, ignorance and survival.
The first hundred pages are a bit slow and almost misleading in the type of novel this ultimately is. However, the voice of Deepra, a very unreliable narrator, got me through. I enjoyed watching his misinterpretations of what was going on around him.
One aberation I found in the storytelling was the "crystal man" construct. Buckner seems to vascillate on whether Deepra could take full credit for his actions or whether there was another entity making decisions for him. I think the crystal man exists but that leaves Deepra's psychological growth in doubt. On the other hand, this is not a novel of psychological growth so much as a hope for the future tale.
The first hundred pages are a bit slow and almost misleading in the type of novel this ultimately is. However, the voice of Deepra, a very unreliable narrator, got me through. I enjoyed watching his misinterpretations of what was going on around him.
One aberation I found in the storytelling was the "crystal man" construct. Buckner seems to vascillate on whether Deepra could take full credit for his actions or whether there was another entity making decisions for him. I think the crystal man exists but that leaves Deepra's psychological growth in doubt. On the other hand, this is not a novel of psychological growth so much as a hope for the future tale.
July 4, 2014
Pesimo libro de ciencia ficcion. Lo compre solo porque gano un premio Philip K. Dick. El protagonista es un millonario que realiza junto a sus amigos peligrosas incursiones.
Personajes antipaticos, una trama predecible y una prosa plana. Lo lei solo como castigo por haber gastado mi dinero en este bodrio.
Personajes antipaticos, una trama predecible y una prosa plana. Lo lei solo como castigo por haber gastado mi dinero en este bodrio.
December 22, 2018
Ya desde el sumario se ve para dónde va la cosa: un grupo de gente supermultimillonaria, luchando contra el aburrimiento, deciden ir a divertirse a zonas de conflictos sociales y subir su proeza a un sitio particular de gente con su mismo "pasatiempo". No tienen empatía por la gente que lucha para que les traten como algo más que mano de obra esclava y como propiedad de la empresa para la cual se les ha criado. Tienen cientos de años y su hedonismo ciego repugna.
Pero la llegada de una muchacha, poco más que adolescente, les renueva el entusiasmo. Perdieron el primer puesto de surf bélico y deciden ir a recuperarlo en un lugar demasiado peligroso, tanto que nadie lo ha intentado jamás... y por supuesto que las cosas salen mal, y el protagonista y la muchacha terminan siendo atrapados, y deben enfrentarse con la realidad que no querían ver y...
A esta altura dejé de leer, viendo para dónde iba la cosa. Algunos elementos del principio del libro eran interesantes: cómo las protestas de la mano de obra, prácticamente esclava, se ve como un divertimiento o aliciente para los grupos más ricos, por ejemplo. Pero luego viene el "los niños no son malos" y lo describen de forma tal que aburre. Lo que más me molesta es cómo se presenta a los super ricos childfree como malos, en parte, por querer ser childfree apenas pueden decidir sobre sus propios cuerpos. Oh, qué malos. Oh, qué inmorales. No por disfrutar del sufrimiento humano, sino por no querer traer más gente a un mundo hyperpoblado y que no puede soportar siquiera la cantidad de gente que ya está. El protagonista tiene casi dos siglos y medio de edad, pero actúa como un nene caprichoso, ciego y sin nadie que le ponga los puntos sobre las íes. La forma en que está escrito es aburridísima, los "giros" argumentales son obvios, los personajes son bidimensionales a lo más, y esta es otra prueba de cómo el ganar un premio importante no garantiza que la novela sea buena.
Una porquería con todas las letras. No le pongo cero estrellas porque no me lo permite el sitio.
Pero la llegada de una muchacha, poco más que adolescente, les renueva el entusiasmo. Perdieron el primer puesto de surf bélico y deciden ir a recuperarlo en un lugar demasiado peligroso, tanto que nadie lo ha intentado jamás... y por supuesto que las cosas salen mal, y el protagonista y la muchacha terminan siendo atrapados, y deben enfrentarse con la realidad que no querían ver y...
A esta altura dejé de leer, viendo para dónde iba la cosa. Algunos elementos del principio del libro eran interesantes: cómo las protestas de la mano de obra, prácticamente esclava, se ve como un divertimiento o aliciente para los grupos más ricos, por ejemplo. Pero luego viene el "los niños no son malos" y lo describen de forma tal que aburre. Lo que más me molesta es cómo se presenta a los super ricos childfree como malos, en parte, por querer ser childfree apenas pueden decidir sobre sus propios cuerpos. Oh, qué malos. Oh, qué inmorales. No por disfrutar del sufrimiento humano, sino por no querer traer más gente a un mundo hyperpoblado y que no puede soportar siquiera la cantidad de gente que ya está. El protagonista tiene casi dos siglos y medio de edad, pero actúa como un nene caprichoso, ciego y sin nadie que le ponga los puntos sobre las íes. La forma en que está escrito es aburridísima, los "giros" argumentales son obvios, los personajes son bidimensionales a lo más, y esta es otra prueba de cómo el ganar un premio importante no garantiza que la novela sea buena.
Una porquería con todas las letras. No le pongo cero estrellas porque no me lo permite el sitio.
June 30, 2019
I picked this book up off eBid.com as the price was right and I have a soft spot for cyberpunk novels. It had some typical cyberpunk themes (dirty Earth, corporate elite, the dirt poor, and nano- and cybertechnology) but this story is solely from the point of view of one of those corporate elites. It has just enough unique slang and the pace of the novel was swift with hooks on most of the chapters which made you want to keep going rather than put the book down. I won't divulge any spoilers but I will say that I am looking to pick up Buckner's other novels now.
June 14, 2017
at beginning - have problem continuing, but with pages got better and better. Nice ending to the series. I think?
May 10, 2015
Wow. I'm surprised I finished this book. There were more than a few problems with it:
1st - the protagonist could have been the antagonist in another novel and is nothing but a narcissistic 1%-er who's infatuated with a woman around 223 years his junior. Yes, that's right: two hundred and twenty-three. And you'd think a guy who was 248 years old wouldn't act like a 15 year old in the throes of puppy love but you'd be mistaken. (I'm rolling my eyes)
2nd - the first third of this novel is only marginally more interesting than watching a race between a snail and a turtle. Although, now that I think about it, I might actually find the race more interesting. I mean, seriously, which is faster, a snail or a turtle?
3rd - only one of the characters in this novel I found interesting (Juani) and he didn't show up until chapter 9. There is another character named Kaioko who first appears in chapter 8 but doesn't become interesting until chapter 14... and only faintly so. However, she does become much more interesting later on, but by that point she's more of a background character than a secondary character as the narrative tightens up.
And speaking of that, once the narrative does tighten up – about ¾ of the way in! – the book becomes a bit of a page turner. And, indeed, I thought the last handful of chapters were quite good with the protagonist finally becoming likable. And, no, I didn't find the denouement "heavy-handedly sentimental". Likewise, I didn't find the protagonist's change "completely unmotivated", either. I thought it was pretty obvious even if the protagonist refused to admit it to himself.
So, over all, I gave the novel 3 stars. It probably only deserves 2½, though. Had this been a novella with the same ending, I think I'd be inclined to give it 3½ stars... maybe even 4.
Warning for ebook readers: way too many typos with the most common being that the vast majority of words that start or end with "th" were spelled with an "m" instead. For example, "mere" instead of "there" or "bream" instead of "breath".
1st - the protagonist could have been the antagonist in another novel and is nothing but a narcissistic 1%-er who's infatuated with a woman around 223 years his junior. Yes, that's right: two hundred and twenty-three. And you'd think a guy who was 248 years old wouldn't act like a 15 year old in the throes of puppy love but you'd be mistaken. (I'm rolling my eyes)
2nd - the first third of this novel is only marginally more interesting than watching a race between a snail and a turtle. Although, now that I think about it, I might actually find the race more interesting. I mean, seriously, which is faster, a snail or a turtle?
3rd - only one of the characters in this novel I found interesting (Juani) and he didn't show up until chapter 9. There is another character named Kaioko who first appears in chapter 8 but doesn't become interesting until chapter 14... and only faintly so. However, she does become much more interesting later on, but by that point she's more of a background character than a secondary character as the narrative tightens up.
And speaking of that, once the narrative does tighten up – about ¾ of the way in! – the book becomes a bit of a page turner. And, indeed, I thought the last handful of chapters were quite good with the protagonist finally becoming likable. And, no, I didn't find the denouement "heavy-handedly sentimental". Likewise, I didn't find the protagonist's change "completely unmotivated", either. I thought it was pretty obvious even if the protagonist refused to admit it to himself.
So, over all, I gave the novel 3 stars. It probably only deserves 2½, though. Had this been a novella with the same ending, I think I'd be inclined to give it 3½ stars... maybe even 4.
Warning for ebook readers: way too many typos with the most common being that the vast majority of words that start or end with "th" were spelled with an "m" instead. For example, "mere" instead of "there" or "bream" instead of "breath".
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews