2023-02-24
In Johnson’s debut SF novel, an experienced investigator looks into several murders in an era in which serious crime is almost nonexistent.
Decades in the future, Ansel Black is the last detective left on the Rim, a sparsely populated windswept region between the urbanized Everything Sector and the uninhabitable Waste. When it comes to solving crimes, he’s not entirely on his own, though: He has an ANI (short for annotated intelligence) program that can predict the likelihood of any suspect’s guilt as a percentage. There aren’t that many Real Crimes anymore, as most people stay at home inside their cubes and act out their destructive urges in an ANI-run virtual reality known as the Stream. The ruminative Ansel is unsatisfied with both his work and his life in general: “Years as a detective have developed in Ansel something of a sixth sense: specifically, an ability to measure the proximity of a truth that is just out of grasp. It is a sense that has guided him…to surprising confessions. He has but to apply it to something greater.” Then he catches five strange murders. The victims were found shot to death in a religious settlement at the edge of the Waste. ANI’s comprehensive observation network somehow missed how all five of them got there, but evidence suggests each of them arrived on their own. Clearly, someone (or several someones) blacked out ANI’s cameras—a feat that Ansel would normally have considered to be an impossibility. To figure out how these people died, he will have to rely on an antiquated solution: good old-fashioned detective work. The ensuing investigation, which involves clues hidden in cryptic paintings of children watched over by a backward moon, soon becomes a personal quest into the true purpose of ANI—and of Ansel himself.
In its themes and content, this novel is reminiscent of the works of Philip K. Dick. In the world of the novel, technology has reached the singularity—the Great Merger, as it’s called—rendering humankind largely obsolete. The slightly old-fashioned Ansel, who fetishizes the pre-Merger “Classic Era” and writes his musings by hand in a diary, makes for a thoughtful foil to the dystopian world in which he lives. Over the course of the novel, Johnson’s tidy prose effectively captures the melancholic weirdness of the desertlike Rim, a place of ruins and abandoned objects: “Ansel leans into the dead Rim atmosphere as the breeze pulls softly towards the Waste. His longjacket ruffles sideways past the splintered framework of some structure that has lost its identity. He scans the rubble with his wrist enhancement and ANI provides her empty synopsis of the area’s history.” As in Dick’s work, the story eschews a tight mystery structure and doesn’t generate a great deal of narrative momentum. Ansel’s philosophical journal entries are frequently excerpted, and his personal struggle for meaning and purpose provides the book’s true narrative arc. Fans of cerebral SF will likely devour this offering and eagerly await Johnson’s future books.
A measured and inquisitive speculative mystery with a lyrical soul.
