Echelon
by Josh Conviser
Published by Del Ray
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Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College
Saying that Echelon contains non-stop action is an understatement. This novel has action layered atop action. By chapter three, Conviser's story has already presented us with at least one world-changing event. So Echelon is never dull, but even better, the action makes sense, given this creatively imagined future, a fast-paced, high-tech society that looks like today's society on amphetamines.
Echelon takes contemporary realities--global warming, the Internet, the growth of corporate and government power, the surveillance capabilities offered by our new technologies--and constructs an engaging picture of the world as it might one day be: a world of "flow-space" (a virtual-reality version of the Internet,),a world unknowingly controlled by Echelon, a super-secret organization with access to all of the world's knowledge and, therefore, the power to manipulate the people; a world where criminals and secret agents live in flooded neighborhoods, where people in different countries interact instantaneously through flow-space, and where making genuine human connections is still difficult.
Conviser's characters are smart, alienated, idealistic, sometimes ruthless, sometimes unhappy, sometimes opportunistic, sometimes amoral, but always recognizably human.
Much of the novel focuses on Ryan Laing, an adrenaline-addicted field agent, and Sarah Peters, his passionately professional control officer, as they try to untangle a web of shadowy rivals for power.
Echelon is a serious and humorous book. One minute its characters are pondering the corrupting influence of absolute power and the tension between freedom and orderly restraints. In the next they're playing for Agamemnon's Mitten, an energetic screamo-poetry band.
Add a host of other memorable characters, including a cowboy-loving Asian street thug/pirate with solid family values, a hermit-prisoner technical genius, and a charismatic software-company CEO, and you have a future that appears utopian or dystopian, depending on your preferences.
The humor, memorable characters, and our own growing uncertainties about the future make reading this book an entertaining and thought-provoking experience.
Armchair Interviews says: Echelon rips us from our rapidly evolving present and throws us into a future that might arrive sooner than we can imagine.