(photo: pixabay.com)
By Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (narrated by Marc Vietor)–As a huge Neal Stephenson fan, I was delighted to see this political thriller—co-written with J. Frederick George—in a special Audible 2-for-1 sale. Unfortunately, it lacked the very aspects of Stephenson’s other works that I enjoy most—complexity, humor (ok, there was a bit), challenging ideas, although there was some effective skewering of government bureaucracy.
J. Frederick George is the pen name of historian George Jewsbury, a Russia specialist—whose special expertise is little-used in this tale about the first Gulf War—who is also Stephenson’s uncle. This book was originally published under another pen name for the two of them, Stephen Bury. That’s not quite the most complicated aspect of the plot.
The story takes place in Iowa and Washington, D.C., and the title refers to how people in the nation’s intelligence agencies can protect themselves by keeping anyone who might disturb their world so smothered in procedure and paperwork and investigative committees that they lose their ability to actually accomplish anything. Ample evidence since the book’s publication (1996, reissued in 2005) demonstrates how the different pieces of the nation’s security apparatus have worked at cross-purposes and always to their own presumed advantage and protection. Amazon reviewers familiar with Stephenson’s other work gave it lower ratings (“Neal Stephenson lite,” one said), but overall, four stars.
