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Just finished Simon Morden’s Petrovich/Machine Jihad trilogy starting with the about to be released and very excellent Equations of Life. As donkey says, that was fun. let’s do it again (fortunately, there are two more books ready to be released, so we can). Nuns, guns, nuclear weapons, AIs, a Japanese empire rising from ruined London, the CIA doing the bidding of an American Theocracy, the Inquisition (bet you didn’t see that coming) and  a Russian ex-pat physicist with a good heart, just not the one in his chest, though it takes a while for him to accept it. And lots of educational russo-invective!

Hero-wise, Samuil Petrovitch, isn’t what you’d expect. He looks like “just another immigrant, not worth rolling” as he moves through the London Metrozone. What he is is a survivor, adept at camouflaging himself into invisibility, which suits him fine. As he says to the courier who meets up with him at his favorite coffee shop/drop point, “I’ve got trust issues, so I don’t do the people stuff very well.”  Actually, maybe he’s not so different from other dystopian SF loners we know, except for being ex-Russian (St. Petersburg is radioactive now). He does, in fact, remind me a bit of Gibson’s Case, (You are too much the artiste…the artiste of the slightly funny deal) in “Neuromancer,” only here Petrovitch lives in post-apocalyptic London, instead of a matching Chiba, the colorful barkeep is an eccentric Chinese cafe owner, and the sky is tuned to a leaden gray, not the color of a dead TV channel.

Like Case, Petrovitch has been hiding out from life, and like Case, life comes for him. In this case though, it’s not the sullen anti-hero who gets bribed with a path back to the world that threw him out, but the survivor that can’t quite keep himself from stopping a kidnapping, putting himself between a young woman and the all too professional muscle that is determined to stuff her into a car and be away from the crowded London street. Neither wise, nor healthy, and certainly not what a survivor does.

But knowing the smart thing to do is one thing, and ignoring what you really are is another.

[amazon_link id=”0316125180″ target=”_blank” ]
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Publisher: Hachette Books Group
Imprint: Orbit
Pub Date: 04/01/2011
ISBN: 9780316125185