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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780446610957
ISBN: 044661095X
Label: Grand Central Publishing
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Studio: Grand Central Publishing

It's 2023, and the Web has almost destroyed the world. While cyberspace's early pioneers promoted the Net as a revolution in human communication, America has instead become a society of desk-bound introverts who believe everything they read. The federal government has been "bought" by a Microsoft-style corporation. Any semblance of central authority has vanished. As the Net infiltrates India and Pakistan, fevered nationalists and terrorists find one more medium through which to spread the word.With Killing Time, Caleb Carr (The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness) manages to create a future that's both frightening and nostalgic. The novel's narrator, Dr. Gideon Wolfe, longs for a world before technology swallowed people's minds and imaginations. Through a series of complex misadventures, beginning with the murder of his best friend, Gideon finds himself joining a ragtag army of scientists and inventors who hope to take it back. Heading up this '60s-style revolutionary cell is a brother-sister team--genetically engineered geniuses with silver hair and shining eyes. Aboard their ultramodern ship, Gideon learns the extent of the damage done. When they dive below the surface of the Atlantic, he looks out the window and sees not an idyllic scene of aquatic wonder such as childhood stories might have led me to expect but rather a horrifying expanse of brown water filled with human and animal waste, all of it endlessly roiled but never cleansed by the steady pulse of the offshore currents.Carr's future is suffused with regret. It's also rife with mystery and suspense; in every chapter the stakes are raised a little higher, the apocalypse hovers a little closer. This author is a master of the cliffhanger, of cryptic warnings that return to haunt our hero later in the text. Occasional flashes of humor relieve the prevailing ominousness, and a beautiful girl with a huge gun appears at regular intervals to keep things humming. Fans of Steve Erickson's end-of-the-world novels will likely enjoy this adventure in the Internet age, where the sheer amount of information has induced not quantitative changes in the human psyche, but qualitative ones. --Ellen Williams

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Disjointed
Review: This is a book with many good points, but they become so mired in confusion, and at times tedium, that they are largely lost. There is a kernel of an excellent book here as Carr has a point he wants to make, but it becomes lost in several threads of plot. With a better bit of editing this might have been an excellent book, but as it is it is probably better left on the shelf for one of Carr's earlier works.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Rabbit food anyone?
Review: I had read "The Alienist" and thought it was O.K. enough to try another of Carr's books.

I will say that I finished "Killing Time" merely because I felt it MUST get better at some point. It never did.

Instead of inflicting it upon others I gave it to my 2 rabbits who use it as a chew toy.

They are enjoying it more than I did.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Condescending and Unoriginal
Review: I feel very fortunate to have borrowed this book from the library vice buying a copy. Reading this book wasted my time. The central idea, that an information society has special vulnerability to propaganda and manipulation by elites, strikes me as counter-factual and condescending. As sermon, this book failed to convince me.

As an adventure story, it failed to convince me. The idea of a secret elite with a high-technology airship manipulating the fate of the world's population lacks originality. (See Verne's Robur the Conqueror at Project Gutenberg.)

The book's ending relies on deus ex machina, and one that lies off-stage. It failed to convince me. In fact, the author relies on the very same mechanism for the ending that he condemns throughout the rest of the book: manipulation by an elite.

I can say only one positive thing about this book. I now know to avoid this author's work.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Wierd foreshadowing
Review: I like the whole disinformation angle. The islamist assasination in the US becomes a pretext to send troops to Afghanistan and then the attack on the afghani terrorist leader had a truly bizare foreshadowing of the caves where "the director" and his minions actually really did fight US troops. This book is mostly whimsy and grim near future. Some plodding dialogue.

This was written post Clinton admin missle strike attacks on Afghani targets, and the threat was identified. Still, the thing about Afghanistan is eery. Caleb Carr later day Nostradamus? : ) I would rather another Alienist type historical fiction novel.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A flaccid attempt at Jules Verne
Review: If you like a flimsy, dim-witted plot and an imbecelic narrator, this one's for you.

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