My favorite fiction is of the type where the plot can be summed up as "Everything goes to shit. Then it gets worse". John Barnes is a master of this particularly dystopian genre. So, when I heard he had a new novel coming out that would kick off a fresh trilogy, I was very excited.
Having actually read the book, I am still very excited for the next entry in the series, but I'm also a bit confused.
Barnes is probably best known for his two previous series; the near-future "Meme Wars" cycle and its distant, loosely-linked sequel, "The Thousand Cultures". The former tells the tale of an Earth where the KGB goes capitalist and spends a few decades killing anybody smart and competent to make sure all worthwhile inventions stay theirs, against a background of wars nuclear and biological. Oh, and the complete collapse of the environment happens, too. The latter series covers a humanity spread across the stars, each planet living a false version of some weird version of Earth's history, whilst the mother planet is host to billions of people who literally never leave their VR boxes. Oh, and World War IV ended with various large swaths of the planet, such as Japan, Central America and Paris, turned into glass thanks to fusion bombs.
Fun times, eh?
And yet, in Directive 51, Barnes outdoes himself with the Bad Happenings. It's not ruining the plot to tell you that virii capable of destroying everything made of rubber or plastic are released worldwide, and prove to be quite effective. Then, unknown enemies manage to start nibbling away at what's left of the United States via bombs that make the one that erased Hiroshima look like a firecracker.
It's very, very grim.
The story itself centers around disparate groups of people, mostly variants of American good guys with a smattering of bad and a nice handful of "not sure which side they're on" and how they react to the ongoing catastrophes. Set in the near-ish future, the obvious heroes are some members of the US Dept. of the Future, a not-as-dumb-as-it-sounds department created around our time and tasked with doing its best to predict scenarios and reaction plans for those happenings that the government can then quickly act upon as needed. Sort of a Homeland Security in that it coordinates other, existing departments for the most part, but in this sense as a predictive unit, not a reactive one.
Setting the characters in such a department allows Barnes to take some side trips into explaining his real-life day job as a semiotician (look it up or read the book, I ain't even trying to explain it here). He's done this before, particularly in his short stories and essays collection, Apocalypses & Apostrophes, and I always enjoy the digressions.
The action is rollicking, the characters are appropriately either likable or not depending (with a bit too much black and white separation in some of them), the drama and suspense almost unbearable... the plot twists and turns and throws curveballs with regularity, making it a terrible choice to start reading late on a work night.
My complaints are few, but real: for one, given the level of absolute "holy shit, the world as we know it is FUCKED and, honestly, 9 out of 10 people alive today are going to not be in a year" that is the background for the novel, there's a distinct lack of people freaking out. There's a whole lot of rolling with the punches, some regrets, but a distinct lack of the suicidal checking out I would expect in this scenario. It's discordant at times to realize how people are acting in the midst of what might end up being an extinction event for our entire species.
Secondly, some of the plot twists are overused. Not one but two presidential succession emergencies arise, which, given that Directive 51 is an actual US government document covering such an event and therefore very relevant to the book, struck me as a bit "really? Again?", particularly since some key characters seem to have had their personalities stretched in unnatural ways to fit the second crisis. The sheer ongoing repetition of catastrophic events, some of which just on their own would probably ruin all modern society, gets to the point of numbing as well; when billions have already croaked, it's hard to care about a few hundred thousand more (although what Barnes does to my hometown did bring a lump to my throat).
That said, the book is very enjoyable page-turner for those of us who prefer to think about just how bad things can get rather than slap on a smile and futilely dream about ways to avoid it.
