Synopsis
Busby, in the classic mode of Robert A. Heinlein (who was a friend and fan of Busby's work), tells a rich, fast-paced and cleverly plotted tale of the day after tomorrow in The Singularity Project. Mitch Banning is a free-lance engineer in Seattle, who hires onto a secret high-tech project financed by industrialist George Detweiler that will change the world...if it works. And Mitch doesn't believe it will, since the people creating the hush-hush demonstration of the world's first matter transmitter include an elderly con-man, an addict-physicist, and a tough South American Indian with a knife. But Mitch doesn't care. He'll do his job, keep his nose clean, get paid, and have the satisfaction of seeing Detweiler, a bully since he and Mitch were school kids, delude himself with power fantasies.
Then things get complicated. There are threats, someone is murdered. And perhaps the matter transmitter is real, a stolen invention, not a fake. It's hard to tell the businessmen from the con men, the scientists from the industrial spies...even for the killer in their midst.
The Singularity Project is F M. Busby at his finest; complex, witty, sophisticated science fiction. It's vivid, plausible and intense and it's Busby's best novel yet.
Reviews
The author of The Breeds of Men stretches a short story plot to the breaking point in this well-written but transparently thin futuristic novel starring Mitch Banning, a freelance telecommunications expert and part-time science writer. Banning falls in with a con artist who has talked an eccentric millionaire into funding the development of a teleportation device. Then someone calling himself the Green Hornet begins killing people associated with the project and threatening others in an extortion attempt. Although the teleportation process seems to work at first, Banning figures out the con, which, in a double flip, may succeed after all. As always, Busby's uniquely gritty prose style is a pleasure, his characters real and individual and his near-future completely convincing. But the stretching devices are painful: obstacles are thrown in the paths of characters merely to drag out the story, and the last third of the book is an overextended epilogue.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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