![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Currently Reading -19-Jun-2015
Jun. 19th, 2015 12:42 pmTin Men, Christopher Golden
I pre-ordered this after seeing a tweet from the author noting that he had written the lead female character so as to try and make it difficult for any movie version to change her character to white. On following that up I found she was also disabled and a soldier in a near future technothriller, at which point I was hooked (I'm making a conscious effort to seek out portrayals of disabled people in SFF and related genres). Anyway, it turned up on Tuesday so I spent Tuesday night and a large chunk of Wednesday reading it. The setting is the near future, and the current tendencies towards 'policing' by drone have been followed through to their logical extreme, with the US having boots on the ground in troublespots worldwide, but those 'boots' are actually robot infantrymen tele-operated 24/7 by soldiers based in 'the Hump', a deep bunker under Wiesbaden Army Airfield, a US base in Germany. And any ideas of policing by consent have gone out of the window, if the US doesn't like the way a country is being run, it steps in, removes the government and installs the robot infantry, the tin men, to police things while it sets up an administration to operate in a way it approves of. Resistance to this still includes jihadis, but is now primarily anarchist.
The actual story opens with Private Danny Kelso ditching his current girlfriend (while she's asleep) and heading into work, in the Hump, where he's part of the day shift charged with running the tin men platoon in Damacus. As he heads down into the hole he meets up with Corporal Kate Wade, the character who drew me into this. Kate's a double amputee who is finding the transition to prosthetics difficult, so mostly uses a wheelchair, when she isn't being a tin man, she's also someone who Kelso has a distinct crush on. Other characters in the platoon include the traditional grizzled sergeant and less than effective lieutenant, Hawkins who is something of a thug, Mavrides the requisite punk kid, Travaglini the veteran and so on. There's a good mix of female characters who aren't tokens, such as Birnbaum, one of the two techs in the platoon. We also get to meet Aimee Bell,one of the techs who run the Hump, and one of the few people who actually understands the technology. And whoosh everyone's in Damascus and it's too quiet. (Technical criticism here, no tactical handoff between night-shift and incoming day-shift, they've positioned themselves so no one is left uncovered while it happens, but there's no real intelligence exchange, the whole thing is done in seconds).
Other viewpoint characters we're introduced to around about now include 17yo Alexa Day, just flying into Damascus to spend some time with her semi-estranged father, the Ambassador; Professor Felix Wade, the US president's economics advisor (and no the surname isn't a coincidence, he's Kate's dad), in Athens with the president for the G20 meeting, and Hanif Khan, one time pro-US Afghani warlord, and now head of a team of Bot Killers, anarchist mercenaries who hunt the Tin Men, intent on revenge on the two Tin Men who killed his little brother, who just happen to be Kate and Danny. And we also find out that the President is about to announce to the G20 he's effectively placing Europe under martial law, enforced by Tin Men, and with mandatory extreme austerity measures (more on this later).
And then the anarchist plot initiates. Multiple EMP devices explode in orbit and all non-hardened electronics stop working (technical criticism, the book portrays this as everything but the Tin Men, but the military should have considerably more hardened gear and anything within a shielded room - such as, say, the CIA station in the embassy - should be at least semi-protected). Basically civilization just died, which only a very few people realise initially. And that's when Hanif Khan launches his assault, and the Bot Killers have a new rocket able to kill any Tin Man it hits (Hanif Khan is more traditional, you can take down a Tin Man if you're a good enough sniper to put 3 rounds on the same 1cm2 vulnerability in their armour, and he's that good).
In the aftermath of the ambush the survivors realise they've been lied to. Their coms are down, they can't reach the Hump, so how are they still controlling the bots, and did having your robot killed just become being killed for real? And with that comes the realisation that if they want to get back into their bodies, they're going to have to physically get themselves back to the Hump. But only Kate thinks it through enough to realise the scale of the conspiracy, and its logical conclusion, that the Tin Men aren't the primary target, the anarchists will also be after the G20 leaders, and they need to get to Athens. Meanwhile,back in the Hump, Aimee is beginning to realise that there are saboteurs at work
After that it's pretty much one long, sustained firefight.
It's as near as dammit to unputdownable, if you like that kind of thing, but I still have some major criticisms.
Internal logic.I've already mentioned that there should be more military hardware working post-EMP, but there's a related problem as well. There's an anarchist attack on the Hump, but Golden appears to have forgotten there are something like 8500 off-duty robot infantry in the vicinity of the airfield. They may not live on base, they may not have weapons, but they're all experienced combat infantry and when the world stops working you head for base. There's also the scale of the plot, which has literally thousands of troops on the ground, including at least two sites in Western Europe - the Intelligence fail makes Pearl Harbour look trivial by comparison.
Kate. For all Golden claims he tried to make her difficult to portray her as anything other than Afro-American I simply don't see it. It would be trivial to whitewash her (she's described precisely once). More worrying though, about halfway through Kate declares she doesn't ever want to go back to her own body, because of her disability (with the specific point being that she loves to run - so maybe put more time into mastering your prosthetics then, or realise how fast you can go in a chair?). She backs away from this later, realising she can't cry in the bot, but that leaves us with the logic chain: Being Human is better than being a robot, because feelz, but being a robot is still better than being disabled. It would have been trivial to kick her in the arse over her attitude to disability, but no, that's not what happens.
The President's Plan. Felix Wade dreamt up the plan, but an extreme example of the range of possible responses, not as something to actively implement. The President is noted as an interventionist, not the man who invented policing by Tin Men, but the man who made it the core of his policies. The book makes clear his next step is effectively putting Europe, in fact the entire G20, under martial law, with the Tin Men to enforce ultra-austerity, no matter what their elected governments think. And no one ever really calls him on it, the closest we get is Wade Senior saying 'I wish you wouldn't do this". In effect the novel makes exactly the mistake it gives Hanif Khan space to talk about the Americans making.
Very readable, but very, very problematic.
I pre-ordered this after seeing a tweet from the author noting that he had written the lead female character so as to try and make it difficult for any movie version to change her character to white. On following that up I found she was also disabled and a soldier in a near future technothriller, at which point I was hooked (I'm making a conscious effort to seek out portrayals of disabled people in SFF and related genres). Anyway, it turned up on Tuesday so I spent Tuesday night and a large chunk of Wednesday reading it. The setting is the near future, and the current tendencies towards 'policing' by drone have been followed through to their logical extreme, with the US having boots on the ground in troublespots worldwide, but those 'boots' are actually robot infantrymen tele-operated 24/7 by soldiers based in 'the Hump', a deep bunker under Wiesbaden Army Airfield, a US base in Germany. And any ideas of policing by consent have gone out of the window, if the US doesn't like the way a country is being run, it steps in, removes the government and installs the robot infantry, the tin men, to police things while it sets up an administration to operate in a way it approves of. Resistance to this still includes jihadis, but is now primarily anarchist.
The actual story opens with Private Danny Kelso ditching his current girlfriend (while she's asleep) and heading into work, in the Hump, where he's part of the day shift charged with running the tin men platoon in Damacus. As he heads down into the hole he meets up with Corporal Kate Wade, the character who drew me into this. Kate's a double amputee who is finding the transition to prosthetics difficult, so mostly uses a wheelchair, when she isn't being a tin man, she's also someone who Kelso has a distinct crush on. Other characters in the platoon include the traditional grizzled sergeant and less than effective lieutenant, Hawkins who is something of a thug, Mavrides the requisite punk kid, Travaglini the veteran and so on. There's a good mix of female characters who aren't tokens, such as Birnbaum, one of the two techs in the platoon. We also get to meet Aimee Bell,one of the techs who run the Hump, and one of the few people who actually understands the technology. And whoosh everyone's in Damascus and it's too quiet. (Technical criticism here, no tactical handoff between night-shift and incoming day-shift, they've positioned themselves so no one is left uncovered while it happens, but there's no real intelligence exchange, the whole thing is done in seconds).
Other viewpoint characters we're introduced to around about now include 17yo Alexa Day, just flying into Damascus to spend some time with her semi-estranged father, the Ambassador; Professor Felix Wade, the US president's economics advisor (and no the surname isn't a coincidence, he's Kate's dad), in Athens with the president for the G20 meeting, and Hanif Khan, one time pro-US Afghani warlord, and now head of a team of Bot Killers, anarchist mercenaries who hunt the Tin Men, intent on revenge on the two Tin Men who killed his little brother, who just happen to be Kate and Danny. And we also find out that the President is about to announce to the G20 he's effectively placing Europe under martial law, enforced by Tin Men, and with mandatory extreme austerity measures (more on this later).
And then the anarchist plot initiates. Multiple EMP devices explode in orbit and all non-hardened electronics stop working (technical criticism, the book portrays this as everything but the Tin Men, but the military should have considerably more hardened gear and anything within a shielded room - such as, say, the CIA station in the embassy - should be at least semi-protected). Basically civilization just died, which only a very few people realise initially. And that's when Hanif Khan launches his assault, and the Bot Killers have a new rocket able to kill any Tin Man it hits (Hanif Khan is more traditional, you can take down a Tin Man if you're a good enough sniper to put 3 rounds on the same 1cm2 vulnerability in their armour, and he's that good).
In the aftermath of the ambush the survivors realise they've been lied to. Their coms are down, they can't reach the Hump, so how are they still controlling the bots, and did having your robot killed just become being killed for real? And with that comes the realisation that if they want to get back into their bodies, they're going to have to physically get themselves back to the Hump. But only Kate thinks it through enough to realise the scale of the conspiracy, and its logical conclusion, that the Tin Men aren't the primary target, the anarchists will also be after the G20 leaders, and they need to get to Athens. Meanwhile,back in the Hump, Aimee is beginning to realise that there are saboteurs at work
After that it's pretty much one long, sustained firefight.
It's as near as dammit to unputdownable, if you like that kind of thing, but I still have some major criticisms.
Internal logic.I've already mentioned that there should be more military hardware working post-EMP, but there's a related problem as well. There's an anarchist attack on the Hump, but Golden appears to have forgotten there are something like 8500 off-duty robot infantry in the vicinity of the airfield. They may not live on base, they may not have weapons, but they're all experienced combat infantry and when the world stops working you head for base. There's also the scale of the plot, which has literally thousands of troops on the ground, including at least two sites in Western Europe - the Intelligence fail makes Pearl Harbour look trivial by comparison.
Kate. For all Golden claims he tried to make her difficult to portray her as anything other than Afro-American I simply don't see it. It would be trivial to whitewash her (she's described precisely once). More worrying though, about halfway through Kate declares she doesn't ever want to go back to her own body, because of her disability (with the specific point being that she loves to run - so maybe put more time into mastering your prosthetics then, or realise how fast you can go in a chair?). She backs away from this later, realising she can't cry in the bot, but that leaves us with the logic chain: Being Human is better than being a robot, because feelz, but being a robot is still better than being disabled. It would have been trivial to kick her in the arse over her attitude to disability, but no, that's not what happens.
The President's Plan. Felix Wade dreamt up the plan, but an extreme example of the range of possible responses, not as something to actively implement. The President is noted as an interventionist, not the man who invented policing by Tin Men, but the man who made it the core of his policies. The book makes clear his next step is effectively putting Europe, in fact the entire G20, under martial law, with the Tin Men to enforce ultra-austerity, no matter what their elected governments think. And no one ever really calls him on it, the closest we get is Wade Senior saying 'I wish you wouldn't do this". In effect the novel makes exactly the mistake it gives Hanif Khan space to talk about the Americans making.
Very readable, but very, very problematic.
