Contraband

As one of the players in this new cyber-thriller from Foy (The Shift) observes, some of its characters could have stepped directly out of The Wizard of Oz. The role of Dorothy belongs to Joe Marak, a mercenary pilot who gets his kicks smuggling contraband in a bureaucratically nationalized future America. The wizard is played by Forrest Hawkley Stanhope, counterculture gadfly and author of The Smuggler's Bible, a samizdat treatise for free-traders that Joe knows by heart. There's even a wicked witch in the Bureau of Nationalizations, an Orwellian regulatory agency that tries to thwart Joe and his rebel band in their quest to find the legendary Hawkley and to learn his tricks for evading high-tech surveillance. Foy is less interested in walking down the yellow brick road, however, than in barreling down the information superhighway and impressing readers with the twisted wreckage that is bound to pile up on it. His depiction of a relentlessly hardwired future controlled by electronic media addicts being treated for TeleDysfunction, and of government hackers who spot subliminal sedition in computer deconstructions of eavesdropped communications patterns, is both comic and chilling. But his dystopian vision runs to excess. It ultimately erects a barrier between the reader and the well-drawn characters, whose search for personal fulfillment in the vast wasteland they inhabit forms the story's smothered soul. Its children's-tale analogue notwithstanding, this is an exhaustingly bleak forecast of future shock. (Apr.)