This chilling debut novel imagines a World War III underwritten by corporate entities that wish to not only control the Earth, but also the galactic space surrounding it.
Fourteen-year-old Tom Raines always thought that Neil, his hard-drinking, gambler father, was just paranoid when he suggested that Elliot Ramirez, the spokesman for the Indo-American forces, wasn't real ("Look how he blinks every fifteen seconds on the dot," his father says). When General Terry Marsh appears in a gaming room to recruit Tom for the military, Tom asks his father to sign the release forms, and Neil is crushed. As he gets deeper into Pentagonal Spire, Tom is amazed to learn that Neil was not so far off base. Dominion Agra has a monopoly on the food supply, and Harbinger controls the water. The cold, calculating war waged by these corporations depends upon teens whose brains have been enhanced by neural processors--computers.
Kincaid likens war in this realm to gaming. Rather than engaging in hand-to-hand combat, the neurally outfitted teens control battles in space. Tom becomes obsessed with Medusa, the Russo-Chinese Combatants' star warrior--so much so that he breeches security to contact Medusa for private simulations. Meanwhile, Tom's mother's sleazy boyfriend, a Dominion employee, uses his position to hijack Tom's neural processor. Kincaid paints a terrifying near future in which America has 33% unemployment. The author leavens the proceedings with Tom's friendships and the pranks they pull, but raises provocative questions about the downside of a global economy when greed runs rampant. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness