The Punch Escrow. By Tal M.
Klein. Inkshares. $14.99.
Everyone wants to be the
next William Gibson, write the next Neuromancer,
and start the next cyberpunk craze. Well, maybe not everyone, but plenty of authors do seem to harbor this fantasy. Add
Tal M. Klein to the list. The Punch
Escrow is too clever by half, too sure of its own cleverness, too
self-referential, too futuristic-but-with-nods-to-now, to be fully effective,
but its snarky narration and cinematic pacing are supposed to add up to a book
too gripping to put down. Unfortunately the sum does not tally, but it is fun
watching what works and what doesn’t, riding along the roller coaster for the
ups and downs and ignoring the stretches of straightaway.
Take that title, which is
overly clever by half, or rather by two-thirds (only “The” isn’t pushing it).
Here the word “Punch” refers to 17th-century theologian John Punch
(also known as John Ponce or Johannes Poncius), now remembered primarily for
stating Ockham’s Razor in a form that remains extant today (albeit without
attributing it to William of Ockham). The phrase itself is usually paraphrased
as something along the lines of “simple explanations trump complex ones,” and
that is a lot of freight for a single word of a book’s title to carry. And
there is more: “Escrow” here carries its common (well, reasonably common)
meaning of something held by a third party (that is, in escrow) pending
fulfillment of a particular promise or event. Oh yes, there is a lot in that title.
What is promised in The Punch Escrow is teleportation. But
teleportation is immensely complicated and really, in Klein’s novel, impossible
in the form in which readers typically think of it. Something simpler can
accomplish the same thing; hence the reference to Punch and thus to Ockham.
Simply store a copy of a person (hold it in escrow, see?), and re-create the
person at whatever location he or she wants to visit – using nanobots to
destroy the original (or, more accurately, previous) person. What could
possibly go wrong?
The answer, of course, is
“one heck of a lot.” The book is narrated by Joel Byram, who in the year 2147
has a job teaching AIs to behave in more-human ways. It’s a living, but not an especially
lucrative one – most of the money comes from his wife, Sylvia, a high-ranking
scientist at International Transport, the company that controls teleportation
and is in effect a nation unto itself (one of many unoriginal ideas offered by
Klein as if they are original). Joel and Sylvia have been having a tough time
in their marriage and decide to try to rekindle things with a little
anniversary getaway, but after Sylvia teleports to Costa Rica, a terrorist
attack (another unoriginal notion) stops Joel dead in his tracks. Or at least seems to stop him dead – that is the
linchpin of the novel. Believing Joel gone forever, Sylvia gets his duplicate
out of escrow and re-creates him; but now there are two Joels, and that is never, ever, ever supposed to happen. Soon
Sylvia and Joel are in deep doo-doo, not only with International Transport
(“IT,” get it?) but also with the folks behind the anti-IT terrorism.
Joel-as-narrator is far too
deeply in love with his own cleverness, which he displays through a lengthy
series of footnotes intended to explain his society without bogging down the
chase-and-escape routine in anything as dull as, you know, narrative
exposition. But Klein does not make Joel nearly as clever as he thinks he makes Joel. One reason is the
multiple references to modern (that is, real-world-21st-century)
technology and information security: they are cute for the “in” crowd of
presumed readers but, really, would have been hopelessly outdated by the year
in which The Punch Escrow takes place.
Another reason is that Klein’s version of giving Joel a personality involves
having him dredge up silly 20th-century
pop-culture references, which are real groaners. Stuck in a room at one point,
conversing with the ever-present AI, Joel sees a way out because “the poor app
was so starved for attention, I almost felt bad for it.” So he asks its name
and is duly told it “has not taken on a name yet” but is contemplating choosing
one that starts with the letter T. This is a pathetically obvious plot-device
setup, and Klein uses it in a pathetically obvious way, having Joel think, “I
pity the fool” and then address the room as “Mr. T.” Everyone get that
reference to The A-Team? Anybody find
it funny? Anybody care? Readers had better
care, because this sort of thing is about all the personality development that
Klein provides where Joel is concerned. And it is more than he offers for Sylvia or anyone else.
The speedy pacing and
sarcastic tone of The Punch Escrow
make a lot of it fun to read – and a lot of it tiresome. Readers’ enjoyment of
the book will depend on how much they like the predictable-but-still-exciting
plotting and to what extent they find the genuinely witty moments worth waiting
for (and the non-witty ones worth wading through: this is a book that includes
a dog named Peeve – “pet Peeve,” get it?). Klein’s sort-of-SF, sort-of-thriller
format is not really the harbinger of any new genre: it is a somewhat creaky mashup
of existing ones. There is enough fun in The
Punch Escrow so at least some readers will be glad to read the end-of-book
setup for a sequel, but others will just be glad that it is the end of the book.
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