ARA Review by CaseyDorman of World, Incorporated

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CaseyDorman
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ARA Review by CaseyDorman of World, Incorporated

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[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, World, Incorporated.]
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4 out of 5 stars
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John Sliver, known throughout most of the book only as “Agent Sliver,” is a fearsome assassin, firmly in the hire of World, Inc., one of the five supercorporations that control not just the world’s economy, but the lives of most of its inhabitants. The plot of World Incorporated is set in the 2050’s after most nations have failed, and large corporations have taken over most of the world, both profiting from and providing for the world’s citizens. Sliver’s family was broken apart by one of those corporations when he was young, and he was taken prisoner, victimized as a guinea-pig in biological experiments designed to test drugs and hormones that would make participants slaves to their desire to purchase products. At some point in the process, he was freed by World Inc. and put through even more training, of which he has only a dim memory, to become a physically enhanced assassin, unfortunately addicted to a mysterious drug known as the “Serum.”

Agent Sliver kills with skill and impunity. His normal human feelings have been dulled to almost nothing. His only companion is a talking computer he names “Franklin,” who controls his aircraft, the Chrome Wind, which takes him on his missions. The missions are mostly to assassinate renegades who challenge the system. When he kills two aging counterculture hippies who are plotting to blow up malls and institutions, he discovers that they have a young adult daughter, Kelly, who, despite his better judgment, he saves instead of killing. Kelly has awakened some of his dormant humanity.

As the book progresses we follow Agent Sliver as he tackles several missions, all of which clearly should give him pause, because his victims are innocent crusaders for truth, and he finds himself questioning what he is doing. The human side of Sliver is being awakened by the presence of Kelly, whom he has virtually kidnapped and taken with him as a passenger in the Chrome Wind. But even as he questions what he does, Sliver is compelled to continue doing it. First of all, he is addicted to the Serum, which is controlled by the CEO of World Inc., and second, he hates the CEO of the company that first separated him from his parents and experimented on him, and he is committed to assassinating him.

The plot of World Incorporated is not a simple one. Each assassination provides a dilemma for Agent Sliver, and his growing humanity makes it harder and harder for him to carry out his assignments. On top of that, one of the corporations has developed a cyborg—part human and part machine—assassin whose assignment is to kill Sliver, who is only saved by the assistance of a group of computer hackers who he saved from death years earlier and who alter the cyborg’s programming.

I won’t go into the final scenes of the novel, which are hair-raising with tension and action. What I found most intriguing were the moral dilemmas faced by Sliver and the psychological aspects of Sliver, of Kelly, his female captive, and even of Rex, the cyborg assassin. None of these are cookie-cutter, stock characters or caricatures of people. Their inner conflicts seem real. The novel also has a political side to it related to the conflict between a big-government approach to solving people’s problems and a capitalistic one. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches are explored, if not in depth, at least fairly even-handedly. A long historico-political section of the book tries to provide a background to these latter issues through news stories and government press releases over a period of years, which I didn’t find effective and is the only reason for giving the book 4 out of 5 stars. All in all, I found it an exciting, thought-provoking book, which I would highly recommend to fans of futuristic dystopian novels.

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