The "Author's Note" irritated me (check out the first and last sentences) and the first paragraph of the book irritated me even more. This goes beyond writing style or inventive wordplay ala Riddley Walker or Feersum Endjinn - Foy seems oblivious to the basic rules of grammar. After reading the first page I flipped through at random and it didn't get any better. This book got thrown across the room, then picked up and put in the bin. However judging by some of the other write-ups it contains some very good ideas. So read the first page - if this doesn't bug the **** out of you maybe you'll enjoy it.

"The Shift" has three immediate strikes against it. First off, the title is wrong, and has little to do with the book (It should have been called "Munn's World.") Second, the cover art is embarrassingly bad, and screams cheap and pandering with every airbrushed inch. It is the kind of cover and title you don't want people to see you holding on your lunch break. Third, the first chapter is so awful that it seems like it was written by a different author. It is cheap and pandering, just like the cover leads you to expect. In short, the very things that are supposed to hook you into a new book, repulse you instead. I can imagine more than one person picking this book up, shaking their head at the cover, then setting it back on the shelf after a glance at the first chapter.

If you can make it past these three considerable barricades, however, you are in for a completely unexpected treat. This is a good book! The writing style is excellent, and the writer does an amazing job of bringing to life two such disparate worlds, that of his cyberpunk pseudo-future and the VR historical world of 1800's New York. Both worlds are fully fleshed out, with a detail that surprises even the characters in the book. The characters are also complete, although Alex Munn tends to be the single loud voice in the book. His supporting characters are equally interesting, and well researched. The punk-obsessed Zeng is accurate, although there are a few minor flaws (Sid Vicious did not sing "God Save the Queen." Johnny Rotten did.) The mysterious villain, The Fishman, is a nice boogie man to chase Munn down his various roads.

Altogether, a book worth the time. Some good ideas and good writing, with an unusually successful blending of science fiction and historical fiction. I would love to see "The Shift" reissued with a different title and cover. Don't give up after the first chapter!

Alex Munn is a sort-of-television producer for X-Corp., a Hong-Kong-financed major player in New York of a few years from now. Through unprecedented computer power, X-Corp. has developed an extremely lifelike virtual reality system, user access to which ranges from ordinary 2D television to immersion of the consumer and wide control of the story's development, depending on how much the consumer wants to spend. Alex considers himself an artist and he hasn't much use for "Real Life," the sappy product he's being paid to develop, but it's hard to give up the money -- though he's already lost his wife, a soap actress on one of his earlier projects. Alex has been working quietly on a much better application of the VR technology: "Munn's World," set in the New York of 1850. Where "Real Life" ignores plot in favor of showing off the technology, "Munn's World" is gritty and involving . . . and almost too real, for a Nativist killer who stalks the old city, butchering the hated Irish, seems to have edged over into the "real" New York. Foy is extremely knowledgeable about his city of the present and the past (or else he's really, really good at faking it), and he has a serious gift for characterization, intricate plotting, and descriptive writing generally -- and a teriffic ear for Nooyawkese. He puts you inside the protagonist, especially, and his take on Riker's Island is terrifying and unforgettable. I don't know how I managed to miss hearing about this when it came out, but I'm glad I found it!

I was a fan of George Foy. But gone is the clever and witty writing from his earlier work. After wallowing through half of the book, I gave up. Little plot, little action, just miserable exposition. Dull and boring. Read Neil Stephenson (anything) for quality writing, if you like this genre.

To all appearances, John Slocum is a success: a high-level executive with mega-corporation XCorp Multimedia, in charge of developing 3-D interactive shows for the Flash, the sense-enveloping virtual reality environment that provides the ubiquitous background for millions of lives. He has all the perks of wealth and privilege, including a gorgeous home and a perfect family. He's also, like so many others of his kind, addicted to Flash, and spends nearly every waking hour with a face-sucker (VR mask) on, viewing 3-D dramas as he goes about the ordinary business of his life.

But Slocum is more self-aware than most of his colleagues, and he has slowly become disgusted with the way the Flash saps his ability to sense and feel apart from the cues of 3-D. In a spasmodic attempt to force a change, he quits his XCorp job and goes to work for the Independent Credit Entity, a ragtag alternative community founded on a philosophy of smallness, interdependence, individuality--the polar opposite of giant Orgs like XCorp, whose size has transformed them into what amounts to independent, self-interested life-forms. But things don't work out with ICE. Slocum's wife leaves him, taking his daughter. Now Slocum lives alone on a sloop whose engine suffers from chronic mechanical failure, berthed in a decaying harbor in a crumbling New England town. He spends his days puttering about his boat and dreaming of escape, a routine broken by futile attempts to see his daughter and by visits to the Sunset Tap, a bar where outsiders like himself gather.

The sloop and its berth are all Slocum has, so when representatives of the town Council tell him he must move to make room for a large ship that's coming into harbor, he refuses. He half-believes the ship doesn't exist; when he wakes one night to find it has already arrived--a vast luxury liner like something out of the past century--it seems more dream than real. It carries, apparently, only a single passenger, a mysterious dark-haired woman. As a hurricane moves inexorably up the coast, and the Council steps up its efforts to make him move, Slocum's growing fascination with the woman and the ship lead him toward a secret that may offer the escape he craves--but at a price that may be too high to pay.

"The Last Harbor" is set in the same near-future world as "The Shift", "Contraband", and "The Memory of Fire". Like the latter two novels, it's concerned with the nodes (alternative communities like the ICE) and their opposition to the Orgs; but its focus is more on those who've fallen out of (or have never chosen to be part of) either sort of community, and live between the cracks--from the regulars at the Sunset Tap to the whores and toughs who hang out at Madame Ling's fortunetelling parlor to the little group of hobos who ride America's vanishing rails. Foy's evocation of the precarious existence of these people, and of the small, defiant sense of community they evolve despite their alienation, is both lyrical and profoundly melancholy, and sharply contrasted to the anomic, overstimulated excesses of Slocum's former colleagues, when he returns briefly to that world.

Though "The Last Harbor" is shaped by its science fictional content--especially Slocum's Flash addiction, which is painstakingly examined--it reads for the most part like a mainstream literary novel, exploring the same territory of physical decline and moral defeat that has been dissected in detail by such non-genre writers as Robert Stone. The bulk of the novel involves Slocum's efforts to understand his failures and pierce his many self-deceptions, and work his way back to something like a responsible life. Much of the action is internal; the external encounters that trigger Slocum's ruminations and propel him, bit by bit, toward transformation aren't particularly suspenseful, despite their deep significance for Slocum, and their often explicit symbolism (such as the unending quest to fix the unfixable sloop). The drama lies in the process of transformation itself, and in the choice Slocum faces at the novel's conclusion--a choice that (depending on how you read it) is either the final step in his struggle to break free, or a catastrophic re-surrender to slavery.

Straight science fiction fans, or those who liked Foy's more conventionally cyberpunkish books, may find this rather dull--and they will certainly be frustrated by the ending, in which a Big Science Fiction Idea, which might have been the center of another book, is put forward and disposed of in a page or two. But for those who appreciate more literary work, "The Last Harbor" offers a feast of imagery and atmosphere, and a compelling portrait of a flawed man coming to grips with his own history.

X-Corp, makers of graphic interactive 3-D "dreams", controls the New England Town. Slocum was a rising yuppie who lost interest in his work, which led to an estrangement with his wife and an inability to see his daughter. He moved onto his broken down sloop with his only companions being the Smuggler's Bible and a cat.

The harbormaster orders Slocum to leave his current mooring because Coggerhill Wharf is THE LAST HARBOR in the area where a big ship can dock. Slocum refuses because he does not believe a big ship will arrive after fifteen plus years without any dockings nor can he leave anyway until the Mechanic fixes his sloop.

To his amazement, the big ship arrives along with rumors that the Syndicate is its owner. Invited to enter the big ship, Slocum meets Melisande. Soon he believes that she is his last harbor to enable him to regain his real dreams, but first he must learn what holds her prisoner on the big ship.

THE LAST HARBOR is the typical George Foy grim and dark look at a 1984-esque future that leaves little hope for an independent person to even survive let alone thrive. The grayness of what is to come is slowly simmered through Slocum and his interactions or lack of with other people. At the same time that readers begin to understand the scope of Slocum's feelings and the environment he resides in, the audience will ask where is the action as the plot slowly evolves. If grit, grime, and gray are what a reader wants in a science fiction tale, then they should stop THE LAST HARBOR.

Harriet Klausner

The concept behind the book is a good one, but it was rather poorly executed. It started off okay, but as it got further, it became more of a chore to read. It didn't seem as if the author's heart was really in it. To see how this concept fares when properly executed, try Walter Jon Williams' *Hardwired*.

Intelligent, stylish and well-realized near-future SF. Foy does well at portraying popular culture and infusing humor. His writing here is often beautiful.

Contraband, the story of a pilot in a world where secret cargo cults do battle with governnment agencies, follows one of the cargo cult philosophies: the journey is the destination. The plot is circular, and not especially strong. Still, the reasonably appealing characters, the original worldbuilding, and the strength of Foy's language carry the reader along.

Contraband is set in an extremely believable very-near-future in which multinational corporations dictate international law and second-generation biohazard mutants staff the toxic-waste dumps which were formerly known as wetlands. The Bureau of Nationalizations, or BON, is an international entity set up to interdict and dispose of smugglers like the pilot, who transports goods and people across international economic boundaries. The BON is a servant of the multinationals, whose economic interests are threatened by free trade. The BON regularly uses deadly force against smugglers; because of the economic challenge they provide to the multinationals, smugglers are considered equivalent to terrorists under US and international law.

Typical of Foy's work, Contraband is much too complex to summarize in a couple of paragraphs. The main character is the pilot, Joe "Skid" Marak, a good guy and professional smuggler who likes any mode of transportation that goes extremely fast and has a pet rat named God. BON has a programmer who has recently developed algorithms that allow BON to substantially increase their smuggler interdiction rate. Interdiction leads to immediate death or to sentencing without trial to a commercially-managed interrogation facility from which no one has ever been released. The increase in the interdiction ratio - which has resulted in the capture and sentencing of one of the pilot's best friends, the death of another, and a couple of very serious near misses on his own part - leads Marak on an international quest for the near-mythical Hawkley, who publishes the well-respected Smuggler's Bible and who reputedly knows what the new BON algorithm is and thus how to work around it.

Plus, there's lots of Foy's characteristically highly insightful treatment of human relationships, both romantic and otherwise. He also reinforces themes introduced in The Shift, such as people developing severe personality disorders which derive from a need for constant A/V stimulation and others perpetually confusing VR-delivered programming with real life. And in one nice and very subtle little twist, in one chapter intro Foy quotes one Mr. William Gates as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Committee (a tool of the BON, of course) as stating "... these people actually think they have the right to trade freely... without any regulation or permission from the government...".

George Foy is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. I couldn't put Contraband down.

So it's about 50 years from now, and everybody's amusing themselves to death, except in the nodes or "cruces" where the fun crowd likes to stay. So: the no fun crowd blows up accordianist Soledad McCrae's "cruce" in Latin America with her lover and all her fun crowd friends and the next thing you know she's in the Bay Area mutely hanging with another fun crowd (and oh oh, tossing her cookies in the morning, uhuh, uhuh) and the no fun crowd is after _them_ too, and the flashbacks are told in the present sense and the present-time events are told in the past tense and Soledad is so _not_ fun herself that you really want to slap her, and there are a lot of Spanish words and so every tenth word is in italics and there's all this arcane musicology stuff.

But this is cyberpunk, so there are also lots of product references and the fun crowd are all heroes and the no fun crowd are fascists, and there's this performance art machine that keeps smashing the carcass of a dead horse against the wall and Doris Lessing likes it and on the back cover compares Foy to Conrad (you cannot make this stuff up) and another blurb mentions Hemingway.

So I guess this is for graduate students in English or American studies who want to deconstruct science fiction. I.e., paraphrasing what Dr. Samuel Johnson once said about a popular drama of his day: "this is a book not to read, but to have read."

Whatever.

I like the writing of George Foy enough to buy every one of his books that appears. I thoroughly relished "The Shift", found "Contraband" less pleasing and more difficult, and find "The Memory of Fire" to be even more so.

The characterization is excellent, as is Foy's wonderful use of language and his ability to evoke vivid and realistic scenes in which to place his action. I enjoyed getting to know a great deal about Soledad MacRae; her personal experiences, her inner life as a musician, her relationships with Jorge and Stix and the other characters that crossed her path. Foy made life in the Cruces very real in my mind, and I liked "being there".

In spite of its intriguing exotic atmosphere, I found the novel wanting. It moves very slowly, but jumps erratically between the time frames and places from which Soledad is escaping. Even though the story gradually heats up to a violent action packed conclusion, I felt that I was getting ever more bogged down and plodding through it. I wasn't carried along by its final energy.

I suggest passing on this one, and keeping an eye on whatever comes next from Foy. I love his writing and hope that his next effort has more than atmosphere.

If you, like one of the reviewers here on Amazon.com, thought that Foy's previous book, "Contraband", was similar in style to James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", then this is "Ulysses".

Nothing much actually happens in this book, it is mostly a stream of thoughts by the main character Soledad MacRae. The setting picks up on the idea in the quote to chapter 21 in "Contraband". In this quote, BON talks about Hawkley-ites establishing communities called "nodes" that behave like sovereign states and trade freely.

"The Memory of Fire" starts with the destruction of Soledad's node and continues in two main streams. One stream is her memory of the events that led up to the destruction of the node, from her moving from the "normal" city to the node, falling - perhaps - in love, and discovering herself as a woman. The other stream talks about her flight to the American node, the fight for its survival, and Soledad's further self-disovery.

It is a difficult read - much more so than Foy's previous books - but it pays off reasonably well for the patient reader. If you liked the previous works then be aware that this story is quite different: much more thought stream and much less "cyperpunk". And almost no Hawkley quotes! Depending on your tastes, this may be a better or worse starting point. "Contraband" is certainly an easier read. If you don't enjoy the "cyber" elements then you might prefer this volume.

A good effort by George Foy.