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A review by mburnamfink
Going Dark by Linda Nagata
3.0
Going Dark closes out The Red trilogy in an unsatisfying manner. Lt. Shelley has gone off the grid entirely, now handling Existential Threat Management for The Red. Whenever the enigmatic AI detects a threat to its existence or to world security, Shelley and a squad of soldiers who have been marked officially dead in the databases, and survive in the cracks of the classified world with forged orders, show up and trouble-shoot with extreme prejudice.
The story opens with an assault on a arctic oil rig that's being used to house a potential biowarfare lab, but the mission goes tits up. There's a shootout with mercenaries, the lab turns out to be doing secret pharmaceutical work, the extraction is late, and eventually when Shelley and ETM Squad-7 get back to their secret lair, hidden in plain sight on an Army base in Texas, they get blown by their intel contractor and turned back over to the US Army, who needs them to do one last mission to save the world.
There's plenty of action, and Nagata still has a fine eye for shoot-outs, but little of the character moments or social criticism that made the prior books exceptional fiction. Shelley is officially dead, estranged from the world, and working for a rogue AI, but it's treated as shockingly normal. There's little tension within the unit over the weirdness of their situation, and for all the blather about 'non-linear warfare' and unlikely allies, a jovial Russian arms dealer stereotype seems pretty likely in this world. Dragons (in-setting term for the super-rich), the fragile state of American democracy in a world traumatized by nuclear terrorism, and even the desires of The Red, are treated in a mostly pro-forma way. I thought there was some cool potential with the idea that The Red had grown out of an advertising algorithm and wanted to make happy endings for people, whatever that might mean, but it acts mostly as a literal deus ex machina.
I think there's room for sequels, and it's a decent enough book on a sentence to sentence level, but the later seasons of Person of Interest handled these topics way better.
The story opens with an assault on a arctic oil rig that's being used to house a potential biowarfare lab, but the mission goes tits up. There's a shootout with mercenaries, the lab turns out to be doing secret pharmaceutical work, the extraction is late, and eventually when Shelley and ETM Squad-7 get back to their secret lair, hidden in plain sight on an Army base in Texas, they get blown by their intel contractor and turned back over to the US Army, who needs them to do one last mission to save the world.
There's plenty of action, and Nagata still has a fine eye for shoot-outs, but little of the character moments or social criticism that made the prior books exceptional fiction. Shelley is officially dead, estranged from the world, and working for a rogue AI, but it's treated as shockingly normal. There's little tension within the unit over the weirdness of their situation, and for all the blather about 'non-linear warfare' and unlikely allies, a jovial Russian arms dealer stereotype seems pretty likely in this world. Dragons (in-setting term for the super-rich), the fragile state of American democracy in a world traumatized by nuclear terrorism, and even the desires of The Red, are treated in a mostly pro-forma way. I thought there was some cool potential with the idea that The Red had grown out of an advertising algorithm and wanted to make happy endings for people, whatever that might mean, but it acts mostly as a literal deus ex machina.
I think there's room for sequels, and it's a decent enough book on a sentence to sentence level, but the later seasons of Person of Interest handled these topics way better.