Life During Wartime

The main hero starts as a regular trooper trying to survive the next attack, then gets recruited into psi-corps, is trained as assassin, learns about the powers that are behind the war and becomes the major player in finishing it. Be warned, this is not an easy read. The mood of the book is dark and pessimistic. The pace is often slow and meditative. It's not your regular heroic sci-fi. Shepard is a great writer and the quality of the prose in this book is absolutely outstanding. This is Literature (yes, with capital L). If you can handle a difficult book and have the time to read it sentence by sentence, then pick it up. If you are looking for entertainment during vacation on a beach - stay away. Just in case, keep this book away from kids - there are pretty graphic descriptions of sex and war violence in a couple of places.

R & R was the story that put Shepard among the great names of SF and forms the chapter of this book. There are several familiar elements for fans of the author, exotic locales, drugs psychic powers that border on magic and secret forces battling it out under cover of 21st century warfare in the jungles of Central America. The book suffers just a tiny bit from being written in the late 80's when heavy involvement by US secret ops gave the impression that a Vietnam type meltdown was about to happen almost on the doorstep of US. Brilliant language and (naturally) hallucinatory imagery are the qualities of the book. Storyline tends to sag in the second half of the book but if you are one of the author's followers you will enjoy this work.

I'm always amazed at Shepard's output. He has a way of making things believable yet allowing you to be surprised at the next turn of events. A unique writer and a book that sneaks some basic truths past you while the reader is still trying to comprehend the new universe Shepard lays out.

I always love Lucius Shepard's work and this is his best novel. It is like "Apocalypse Now" in the future, and has the same kind of impact on the reader as that film did on the viewer.A quote from the opening paragraph: "One of the new Sikorsky gunships... gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone.... To the east of this green zone lay an undesignated band of yellow that corssed the country from the Mexican border to the Caribbean. The Ant Farm was a firebase on the eastern edge of the yellow band, and it was from there that Mingolla -- an artillery specialist not yet twenty-one years old -- lobbed shells into an area that the maps depicted in black-and-white terrain markings. And thus it was that he often thought of himself as engaged in a struggle to keep the world safe for primary colors."

I enjoyed this book and Mr. Shepard's ability to provide a good story with some fantastic elements that are still very believable. I rue the day that I lost my copy and and have missed ever since. The magic realism of the book is more approachable than Marquez, but no less satisfying.