This is a collection of three stories about the man who beat the system. In the future the computers know all about all men, except those who created the computer system and were able to avoid having their data uploaded.
Our hero makes his living solving problems from corporate sabotage to rogue artificial intelligence. He is something of an intellectual, at least in narration style. Perhaps he reflects an era when that sort of thing was more accepted. About a decade ago I was saddened to read a comparison of the kind of questions asked on 1950s TV quiz shows to the inanity of modern fare like "Who Wants to Be A Milloinaire."
A character tells a story of taking his son to the zoo, and being disappointed to find that despite all the exotic animals present the boy was most excited to see a squirrel.
Notable quote by a character: "If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace."
In 2003 a friend pointed out a book on the shelf of a bookstore, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. I bought it, read it, and liked it. It is apparently considered the kind of Great Literature that, had I been educated in England, would have been forced on me in class leading me to hate it. I made a note to myself to try another of his books some day.
Our Man In Havana is set in the Cuba during the revolution. There is no fighting in the streets, but there are rebels in the hills. This is also the era of Cold War paranoia.
The novel is largely a dark comedy about the spy business.
British subject James Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Cuba. He has a daughter with expensive tastes who is being courted by a policeman with a bad reputation. When his country asks him to be "our man in Havana" -- for a substantial fee -- how can he say no?
And if his superiors begin to suspect that his reports may not be up to professional standards of accuracy, how can they admit a mistake in recruiting him?
I liked this. It has the virtue of being entirely different than Brighton Rock or the third Greene work I read, the short story "The End of the Party."
The book is not really a novel, rather a series of vignettes set in a social club in Hell. This is the classical underworld, not Dante's Christian Hell. Club members are famous dead people. Dead men. No women allowed, as was only proper in the late 19th century.
Intended to be amusing, it sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails.
Some of the more amusing parts feature Charles Darwin and Noah of Ark fame. Apparently Noah could not, would not, or forgot to save the various dinosaurs and other great beasts that were becoming well known from fossils in the 19th century. And can you blame him for not letting a giant carnivore eat its way through the inhabitants of the Ark?
Shakespeare suffers eternal needling over the true authorship of his plays. Baron Munchausen tells tall tales to a skeptical audience. And so on.
The concept seems old now. Perhaps it did not a century ago.
The setting is not original but the execution is good except for the ending.
Centuries in the future humanity depends on aliens for interstellar travel, and the aliens place conditions on their help. The conditions are mild, and the most important of them is this: aliens have a monopoly on interstellar travel and their customers may not attempt to discover the secret for themselves. (Zahn has a similar premise for a vastly different series in the style of an early 20th century movie instead of something like postcyberpunk.)
By authorial fiat, true artificial intelligence is not possible. Machines don't run society. Humans do, with the aid of nearly intelligent computers. Implanted devices give "machine-heads" some extra processing power. By the way, hope you remembered to keep your brain's patches up to date.
A human colony has had its lease revoked and forced to share a planet. The two incompatible cultures don't get along any better than in Adam Roberts' Salt.
I was pleased that the alien part of the plot had more to it than I expected.
Unfortunately, in the climax the author falls into a popular trap and tries to explain stuff he doesn't understand and doesn't need to explain if he did. Even granting the author the right to prescribe how magic alien technology works, the consequences simply could not be as described.
Mostly recommended, but beware the ending.