From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Mar 27 12:27:05 2000 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!nntp.primenet.com!nntp.gctr.net!europa.netcrusader.net!205.252.116.205!howland.erols.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!dreaderd!not-for-mail Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" Organization: Vancouver Institute for Research into User Subject: REVIEW: "Vengeance in Death", J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts) Reply-To: rslade@sprint.ca Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 26 Mar 2000 18:46:04 -0500 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.4 Lines: 42 NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Trace: dreaderd 954114365 2957 18.85.23.65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2673 Vengeance in Death by J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts) Review Copyright 2000 Robert M. Slade I have no idea why this book is cast as science fiction, or supposedly set sixty years into the future. Aside from the odd mention of androids, robots, and stunners, it proceeds pretty much like any current hard boiled cop story. We are told that aircars and helicopters flit constantly through the canyons of New York (and wouldn't *that* be really likely), but the chases that happen stick almost exclusively to two dimensions. The book also seems to have some pretensions as a romance, but all the tender love scenes appear to occupy a maximum time of thirty seven seconds, with little foreplay aside from some yelling and screaming. This is actually a very masculine romance. There isn't any understanding (or explanation) of the current level of the technology used, let alone where progress might take it. If you try to trace a phone call, the caller can "jam" you from the other end. Digitized video can be altered (surprise!) but apparently nobody has heard of digital watermarking, a technology that is readily available now. Failing to "register" computer equipment with some kind of security agency ensures that no information can be obtained, even when data is transferred to or from the secured location from a public net. Nobody has heard of digital cash, either, although somehow a "transfer" of funds -- which implies a source and a destination -- is untraceable. Fiction this may be, but science it is not. %A J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts) %C 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 %D 1997 %G 0-425-16039-4 %I Ace/Berkley/Boulevard/Charter/Diamond/Jove Books %O www.berkley.com/berkley online@penguin.com service@penguin.ca %P 357 p. %T "Vengeance in Death" ====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer) rslade@vcn.bc.ca rslade@sprint.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca p1@canada.com Profanity: the linguistic crutch of the inarticulate. http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade