BOOK REVIEW

Paranoia

RATINGS Readability Geekness

If you're like me and the rest of the Geek.com staff, when a popular movie has a "high-tech" moment, no matter how good the rest of the movie has been up to that point and no matter how impressed you've been with the special effects, the writing, the characters, or what have you, you always laugh when the protagonist designs the most incredible substance ever known with some flailing typing and random mouse movements (Lt. Cmdr. Scott in Star Trek IV), or learns the mystery of computer programming so completely and so quickly that he's bilking the company for millions in his second week on the job (Richard Pryor in Superman III), or "hacks" into a computer system with a couple of keystrokes (too many films to name).

You also almost certainly shake your head and sadly chuckle "What a joke!" when you read "thriller" novels that fall into the same "We'll give 'em a high-tech section here" trap and launch into a long description of some wonderputer laden with all the buzzwordy, jargon-filled equipment that is so over the top it means nothing (think "quantum computers" in Crichton's Timeline).

Thus, when I got the offer to read Joseph Finder's new novel (just released yesterday), Paranoia, described by one of his press agents as "... set in the high tech world and involves a multitude of 'geek'-like exciting espionage techniques!", I almost turned it down. Plus, the book's rights have already been sold for the inevitable "Yeesh, how could they ruin the book like that?" movie ... But since I'd just given up once again on trying to finish my second read of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, and since Mr. Finder is a fellow Bostonian (meaning maybe I'd recognize some stuff), I figured I'd give it a shot, not expecting much more than the type of nonsense I described above.

I was as wrong as Bill Gates was when he called the Web "just a fad" back in the early '90s.

How wrong was I? You know how little truth there usually is in the reviewer blurbs you see on movie ads, book jackets, etc., right? The Paranoia website had these two quotes that made me snicker knowingly (and cynically, of course) when I first happened upon them.

From Publishers Weekly:

This novel is the real deal: a thriller that actually will keep readers up way past their bedtimes. ... Relentless suspense . ... The most entertaining thriller of 2004.

From The New York Times' Janet Maslin on CBS News Sunday Morning:

For anyone who loves thrillers, here's one little prediction: you just may miss a night's sleep with Joseph Finder's "Paranoia" early in the New Year.

"Riiiight," I thought superiorly to myself, "I'm sure I won't be able to put it down." But I actually stayed up 'til 3:30 A.M. one Saturday night while my wife slept next to me, feverishly finishing off the read I'd started just the evening before, just to see if Mr. Finder would disappoint me with your typical bad writer, destined for Hollywood ending (he didn't, by the way). It's tough to be cynical when you're fulfilling the prophecies of professional book critics ...

I'd love to give you a lot of details about Paranoia and its plot, but it would ruin the book for you, so I'll have to stay light on most of the specifics--I will try to avoid the typical reviewer clichés wherever possible, though.

But you do need some of the plot details, so here's what the website has to say:

Adam Cassidy is twenty-six and a low-level employee at a high-tech corporation who hates his job. When he manipulates the system to do something nice for a friend, he finds himself charged with a crime. Corporate Security gives him a choice: prison--or become a spy in the headquarters of their chief competitor, Trion Systems.

They train him. They feed him inside information. Now, at Trion, he's a star, skyrocketing to the top. He finds he has talents he never knew he possessed. He's rich, drives a Porsche, lives in a fabulous apartment, and works directly for the CEO. He's dating the girl of his dreams.

His life is perfect. And all he has to do to keep it that way is betray everyone he cares about and everything he believes in.

But when he tries to break off from his controllers, he finds he's in way over his head, trapped in a world in which nothing is as it seems and no one can really be trusted.

And then the real nightmare begins. ...

Okay, you're reading that last line and wondering how I got sucked into such crap, and what else I'm trying to peddle to you. It's my sincere hope that the bit above was part of the hype machine, as Mr. Finder's plot description (from his website), is much more sedate, realistic, and indicative of the engaging style that pervades Paranoia:

It's a thriller set in a high-tech corporation; the hero is a 26-year-old slacker who hates his job ... and then, when he manipulates the system to do something nice for a friend, he's given a choice: prison--or become a spy in the headquarters of his company's chief competitor. He's trained, groomed for success, and he finds himself skyrocketing up the corporate ladder. Suddenly he has it all: the money, the Porsche, the perfect pad, and the beautiful girl. It's all going according to plan ... just not his.

Much better. And really, these descriptions are inadequate scrapings of the believable (mostly) characters, realistic dialogue, engaging (and suspenseful) plot, frequently humorous prose, and nice, techy details.

And those techy details aren't just in descriptions of equipment that gets mentioned and never appears again; Paranoia takes a lot of time giving you a sense of life as an employee in a high-tech company (albeit a VERY Microsoft-y, Oracle, Sun Micro, HugeCo in its heyday type of company), from weird (yet erudite) I.T. co-workers to the sweet gym (a.k.a. "fitness center") to the quirky bosses to the fancy cafeteria to the back-stabbing turf-protectors and unnoticed after-hours support staff.

No book can cover everything, but Mr. Finder covers enough ground--and realistically at that--to provide at least one character (and at least two situations) that all geeks worth their salt have experienced. That's the extra ingredient added to Paranoia's excellent plot and characterizations that makes this a book geeks will enjoy. You may or may not identify with our hero, Adam Cassidy (yes, he's got plenty of those character flaws so beloved by the ancient Greek dramatists), but I guarantee you'll recognize a lot of the people he meets along his way.

Mr. Finder clearly spent a lot of time researching his subject matter, getting in-depth into slick fashion and high-style living, the nitty-gritty grind of fast-paced tech work, literature, and the details-whirlwind of consumer tech products ... yet never going overboard. Okay, some examples so I can back up all this praise.

Adam is guided from schlub to stud as part of his espionage prep, and here are some examples of his transformation, fraught with the details that make Paranoia so believable:

You wouldn't have recognized me anymore. I was a changed man. No more Bondomobile: now I drove a silver Audio A6, leased by the company. I had a new wardrobe, too. ... She picked out some suits, shirts, ties, and shoes, and put it all on a company Amex card. She even bought what she called "hose," meaning socks. And this wasn't the Structure crap I usually wore, it was Armani, Ermenegildo Zegna. They had this aura: you could tell they were handstitched by Italian widows listening to Verdi.

And on a lunch meeting with his new boss, Jock Goddard, he gets the guru's summary of how high-tech success can change your life:

"You know, you go from wearing jeans and sneakers to wearing suits and fancy shoes. You become more refined, more socially adept, you've got more polished manners. You change the way you talk. You acquire new friends. You used to drink Budweiser, now you're sipping some first-growth Pauillac. You used to buy Big Macs at the drive-through, now you're ordering the ... salt-crusted sea bass. The way you see things has changed, even the way you think. ... And at a certain point, Adam, you've got to ask yourself: are you the same person or not? Your costume has changed, your trappings have changed, you're driving a fancy car, you're living in a big fancy house, you go to fancy parties, you have fancy friends. ..."

That's not me in any way, and none of that has happened to me (though I do hate Budweiser), but it seems right on, and the dialogue is so well written it's drowning in verisimilitude (in a good way).

When Adam's interviewing for his new job, he sits with "the VP of the Personal Communications Sector business unit," who gives him a great line on working for a fast-paced company:

"I always say Trion's a great place to work--when you're on vacation. You can return e-mails, voicemails, get all kinds of stuff done, but man, you pay a price for taking off time. You come back, your voice mailbox is full, you get crushed like a grape."

I know most of you can identify with that!

That bit is followed up by some of Mr. Finder's subtle humor, which I really enjoyed:

I nodded, smiled conspiratorially. Even marketing guys at high-tech corporations like to talk like engineers, so I gave some back. "Sounds familiar," I said. "You only have so many cycles, you've got to decide what to spend your cycles on."

Love that. :)

Adam does a lot of work as he moves up the ladder, getting in at 5 A.M., working through lunches, looking up from the computer screen or research print-out only to notice it's well past 9 P.M. I know that rings a bell for far too many of us.

Have time for some classic literature references? Here's a partial list of the authors mentioned (some just listed, but never gratuitously--they fit nicely, mostly coming from the mysterious yet tantalizingly wise and omnipresent Noah Mordden, "Distinguished Engineer" at Trion): Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Kafka, Freud, Dante, Milton, Burke, Etienne de la Boetie, Sun Tzu (Lionel Giles' 1910 translation), Domitian (a Roman Emperor, no less), Thich Nhat Nanh, and Plutarch. * whew *

And all the tech you run into (and there's lots of it) isn't just buzzwords ... there's substance behind it. See if you can pick out what wireless tech Mr. Finder is talking about in this passage:

GoldDust, I knew, was the latest big thing in electronic consumer products. It was some engineering industry committee's fancy marketing name for low-power, short-range wireless transmission technology that's supposed to let you connect our Palm or Blackberry or Lucid [the fictitious handheld developed by Adam’s first employer] to a phone or a laptop or a printer, whatever. Anything within twenty feet or so. Your computer can talk to your printer, everything talks to everything else, and no unsightly cables to trip over. It was going to free us all from our chains, from wires and cables and tethers. Of course, what the industry geeks who invented GoldDust didn't figure on was the explosion in WiFi, 802.11 wireless. Hey, even before Wyatt [Adam's first boss and puppet master] put me through the Bataan Death March [a reference to his crash tech education before moving to the second company], I had to know about WiFi. GoldDust I learned about from Wyatt's engineers, who ridiculed it up and down.

Good stuff ... I guess the technology's name had to be changed to protect the weak and innocent (and the publishing company from trademark slander or something).

And here's some more, this time as Adam's giving Goddard, Trion's founder/owner/father figure, a run-down of the company's position in the market (fueled by Wyatt, his first company's CEO's analysis, fed to him the night before). There's a LOT in this passage, so pardon the skipping:

... but you've got most of the pieces in place there for some serious market penetration, especially in IP-based and circuit-switched voice and ethernet data services. Yeah, I know fiber optic's in the toilet right now, but broadband services are the future ...

... Our mobile phones are killer--we rule the market. We've got the marquee name--we're able to charge up to thirty percent more for our products, just because they say Trion on the label ...

... it's crazy that we don't have a real Blackberry-killer. Wireless communications devices should be our playground. Instead, it's like we're just ceding the ground to RIM and Handspring and Palm. We need some serious hip-top wireless devices. ...

... I think it's sort of pathetic that we don't have a serious kid-targeted product line. Look at Sony--their PlayStation game console can make the difference between red ink and black ink some years. ... We're fighting electronics makers in South Korea and Taiwan, we're waging price wars over LCD monitors and digital video decks and cell phones--this is a fact of life. So we should be selling to kids--'cause children don't care about recessions.

Spot on, and that's a nice breadth of topics there.

More tech mentioned throughout the book, again, not just dropped in for effect but neatly inserted in conversations, contents of files, stealthy maneuvering, etc.:

• IP phones and tiny LCD screens
• PDAs of all sorts, some real, some fictitious
• the elusive and messianic optical chip
• flash slots and how they enlarge a handheld's form factor
• PowerPoint and the corporate glorification of minute aesthetic silliness
• keystroke capturers and proximity chip replicators
• pin-compatible ASICs with SOLC-68 pin arrays
• and a wondrously funny but heartbreaking appearance by Apple's Newton, a long-time Geek all-time Hall of Famer.

The main point I'm trying to make with all this quoting is that you don't just get great characters, great dialogue, great details on all subjects, great you'll-never-guess-what's-next plotting, and great human relationships galore (e.g.: sentimentality with Adam's dad; sex and proto-love with the spectacular Alana--Finder has the decency to make Adam feel guilty for manipulating her into bed, though even that doesn't turn out to be as simple as it seems; father figure-worship with Jock Goddard; snap-to/knee-jerk loyalism and pseudo-tough guy Security bullcrap attitude from Meacham, the Wyatt stooge) that aren't cloyingly sappy (at least until Hollywood gets its putrid mitts on this book), you get a bit of everything, and it's all extremely well done.

Want humor? There's a great scene where Adam is infiltrating Trion's HR department ... and can't get a song out of his head: "'Band on the Run', by Paul McCartney in his unfortunate Wings period. A song I really detest, worse even than anything by Celine Dion." Wings is balanced by some Ani DiFranco lyrics later on, though Finder takes a swing at her, too, through Adam's alleged taste differences with Alana.

Want to get some great job interview advice regarding preparation, conduct, approach, even breathing and posture? Want to know how to defeat a motion detector-activated door-locking system? How about how to fool a fingerprint scanner? Need some cool intelligence jargon? (You get a term and a definition at the beginning of each of the book's 9 parts.) Read Paranoia--it's all there, and it's all fun.

And I think that's what it really came down to in the end for me. Paranoia was gripping, geeky, cool ... and fun. To me, the guy you're supposed to hate, Nick Wyatt, is Larry Ellison (I could be wrong), one of my all-time most hated tech icons, so it was fun. And I couldn't figure out where the plot was going, even with what turns out to be lots of embedded clues all along the way. Icing on the cake? The ending, where, unlike almost every other popular book and movie these days, everything about Adam's future does NOT get wrapped up in a pretty little digestible package. Yes, you actually get to make up your own mind on what happens when the last page is finished, something that modern entertainment moguls don't think we're smart enough to handle (though I'm sure Hollywood will kill that part of Paranoia as well when it makes it to the silver screen).

Is this a perfect novel? No. There are parts that don't totally ring true, things happen a little too easily sometimes despite the very plausible back-story and explanations you get at the end, and not every character is completely believable. But Paranoia is the best thriller I've read in years, and it sets the standard in my mind for the way high-tech thrillers should be: Be techy all you like and don't apologize for it!

You will enjoy this book; if not for the same reasons I did, then for reasons of your own. Joseph Finder has put together a really tremendous book, and I liked Paranoia so much I might even go see the movie when it comes out.

Ratings Defense
Paranoia gets the full 5 Geekheads for Readability. Mr. Finder definitely has a gift for putting together smooth, engaging prose. There are great details on many subjects, fun characters, and an excellent plot that honestly makes it difficult to put the book down, especially when you're on the final roller coaster ride to the ending. There are also lots of short chapters, so if you do have to take a nap or finish up that stored procedure for work before the boss starts breathing down your neck, you've got plenty of opportunities.

Paranoia gets another 5 Geekheads for Geekness as well. I've quoted a lot of stuff above to try to give you a sense of the real, believable tech in this book, but it's not something you can truly experience until you read it for yourself. The geeky stuff fits really well, makes total sense, doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, and is interesting ... just like we Geeks like to think of it.

Read some of Chapter 4 online for yourself, then buy Paranoia--it's worth it. A definite Geek.com Pick.

And thanks to Karen Kane for letting me read it pre-release!

Search