The Last Harbor

To all appearances, John Slocum is a success: a high-level executive with mega-corporation XCorp Multimedia, in charge of developing 3-D interactive shows for the Flash, the sense-enveloping virtual reality environment that provides the ubiquitous background for millions of lives. He has all the perks of wealth and privilege, including a gorgeous home and a perfect family. He's also, like so many others of his kind, addicted to Flash, and spends nearly every waking hour with a face-sucker (VR mask) on, viewing 3-D dramas as he goes about the ordinary business of his life. But Slocum is more self-aware than most of his colleagues, and he has slowly become disgusted with the way the Flash saps his ability to sense and feel apart from the cues of 3-D. In a spasmodic attempt to force a change, he quits his XCorp job and goes to work for the Independent Credit Entity, a ragtag alternative community founded on a philosophy of smallness, interdependence, individuality--the polar opposite of giant Orgs like XCorp, whose size has transformed them into what amounts to independent, self-interested life-forms. But things don't work out with ICE. Slocum's wife leaves him, taking his daughter. Now Slocum lives alone on a sloop whose engine suffers from chronic mechanical failure, berthed in a decaying harbor in a crumbling New England town. He spends his days puttering about his boat and dreaming of escape, a routine broken by futile attempts to see his daughter and by visits to the Sunset Tap, a bar where outsiders like himself gather. The sloop and its berth are all Slocum has, so when representatives of the town Council tell him he must move to make room for a large ship that's coming into harbor, he refuses. He half-believes the ship doesn't exist; when he wakes one night to find it has already arrived--a vast luxury liner like something out of the past century--it seems more dream than real. It carries, apparently, only a single passenger, a mysterious dark-haired woman. As a hurricane moves inexorably up the coast, and the Council steps up its efforts to make him move, Slocum's growing fascination with the woman and the ship lead him toward a secret that may offer the escape he craves--but at a price that may be too high to pay."The Last Harbor" is set in the same near-future world as "The Shift", "Contraband", and "The Memory of Fire". Like the latter two novels, it's concerned with the nodes (alternative communities like the ICE) and their opposition to the Orgs; but its focus is more on those who've fallen out of (or have never chosen to be part of) either sort of community, and live between the cracks--from the regulars at the Sunset Tap to the whores and toughs who hang out at Madame Ling's fortunetelling parlor to the little group of hobos who ride America's vanishing rails. Foy's evocation of the precarious existence of these people, and of the small, defiant sense of community they evolve despite their alienation, is both lyrical and profoundly m

X-Corp, makers of graphic interactive 3-D "dreams", controls the New England Town. Slocum was a rising yuppie who lost interest in his work, which led to an estrangement with his wife and an inability to see his daughter. He moved onto his broken down sloop with his only companions being the Smuggler's Bible and a cat. The harbormaster orders Slocum to leave his current mooring because Coggerhill Wharf is THE LAST HARBOR in the area where a big ship can dock. Slocum refuses because he does not believe a big ship will arrive after fifteen plus years without any dockings nor can he leave anyway until the Mechanic fixes his sloop. To his amazement, the big ship arrives along with rumors that the Syndicate is its owner. Invited to enter the big ship, Slocum meets Melisande. Soon he believes that she is his last harbor to enable him to regain his real dreams, but first he must learn what holds her prisoner on the big ship. THE LAST HARBOR is the typical George Foy grim and dark look at a 1984-esque future that leaves little hope for an independent person to even survive let alone thrive. The grayness of what is to come is slowly simmered through Slocum and his interactions or lack of with other people. At the same time that readers begin to understand the scope of Slocum's feelings and the environment he resides in, the audience will ask where is the action as the plot slowly evolves. If grit, grime, and gray are what a reader wants in a science fiction tale, then they should stop THE LAST HARBOR.Harriet Klausner