Amazon Revew - What rough beast slouches to the Singularity?

The Terminal State (Avery Cates) [Kindle Edition] Jeff Somers, March 16, 2012

As always, "helpful" votes are much appreciated.

The singularity is coming, and it's not living up to its reputation.

When we first met Avery Cates, he was a cocky "gunner" - thug/enforcer/murderer for hire - in a future where all nation states had been forcibly incorporated into the "System of Federated Nations." He was on top of his game and about to step up from being a purely local nuisance into the big time. After taking on the "electric church" and destroying that weird cult of cyborg monks at the behest of the System Police's mysterious chief, Dick Marin, Cates looks set for the good life as the head of a criminal gang in New York City.

Unfortunately for him, as a bit of blow-back for his efforts in taking down the "electric church," Cates was infected with the "digital plague" - a nano-virus that effectively destroyed the human infrastructure of the System and reduced large portions of the Earth to involuntary human extinction. That kicked off the war between the police of the System and a newly formed System army, and Cates was scooped up with a lot of Very Important People and sent to the infamously, inescapable "eternal prison" , where he met up with a mysterious little Irish man, who double-crossed him in his prison escape. While there, he learns something important and chilling; it seems that the minds of everyone is being digitized onto bricks, the human meatware no longer being important enough for the trouble it causes.

Cates isn't one to be stymied, however, and he has the survival instincts of a cockroach. So, he escapes the prison.

He's lying low at the beginning of the "Eternal State," trying to get by with the low-lifes with whom he began his story. He's in bad shape. He's not young any more. He is semi-crippled. He hurts. But he is still a major bad-ass.

Unfortunately, Cates gets swept up by the System Army which is still fighting its war with the System police, and apparently killing lots of civilians along the way. The good news is that the Army implants augments into him - which makes him stronger and fitter than he's been in years. The bad news is that the augments can be used to control or kill him. Then, he's sold off to someone from his past, who intends to use his cockroach like survival abilities and general bad-attitude to steal something called the "God Augment" - more dehumanizing cyber technology - from someone hiding out in Hong Kong.

The world is in a very bad way. It seems like everyone is dying. Everyone who is not dying is being transformed into a cyborg or a digitized replica of a human being. Cities are virtually abandoned; it seems that Hong Kong has only 3,000 inhabitants.

Where is this leading?

Is this the great Singularity - where everyone transcends their human limitations?

If so, it is not what has been promised.

On the other hand, it seems more realistic than the Singularity fetishists - with their peace and harmony fantasies - could ever imagine.

The Cates stories are crisp and well-plotted. Cates is something of a sociopath, but is more to him than that; he seems to be playing out the hand that he's been dealt and with the luxury of more options, we might hope that he'd be more human than the cyborgs and avatars he is literally surrounded by.

As I noted in my review of The Digital Plague, the Cates' stories are more than noir science fiction, in that even from the second book in the series, Somers seemed to have a plotline that asked the question, what happens to humanity when machines can do everything? Cates is a stock noir science fiction/fantasy protagonist with a bad attitude and the willingness to trade off of his "bad ass" reputation with his quips and generally snotty attitude. What sets these books apart from other stories with leading characters with bad ass reputations and snotty attitudes is that Cates' world is evolving into something very new.

In some ways, this book is less interesting from the sociological standpoint than his earlier books, in that the rich underworld ecology of criminal New York is gone, along with all of its inhabitants, and the world is divided between the Army, the Police and the few civilians that remain. Nonetheless, I'm interested in seeing where this evolution is leading, and how Somers wraps up his series.