The Jericho Iteration by Allen Steele

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a bad book and a big departure from Steele’s normal space adventures. This one revolves around Gerry Rosen, a reporter for a St. Louis alternative newspaper in a post-quake city disaster. It has been a good 10 months since the quake hit, but the Emergency Relief Authority (ERA) refuses to leave. They are the Gestapo in this story, and yet they’re spoiled rich prep kids in uniform, trying to avoid normal military service. That was odd. When Gerry’s best friend and fellow reporter ends up dead while investigating something mysterious involving the Tiptree Corporation and its recently released satellite, which is circling the earth in order to spy on American citizens and possibly engage in military action, Rosen retrieves his friend’s notes and becomes a target of assassins himself.

While I enjoyed the book, it takes place in 2013, not too far off from the 1994 publication date of the book. Yet it’s amazing how much Steele got wrong about future technology. He got palm computing right, I’ll admit, but you’ve still got modems, floppy discs, etc., etc., and the artificial intelligence that he writes about toward the end of the book has probably already been duplicated 20 times over by now. I think he even used DOS. Pretty funny.

So, Steele’s not a future teller, like Philip K Dick was, but he still tells a good story and it is pretty riveting, and while it’s not a five star book, I do heartily recommend it for all.

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