Equations of Life-Simon Morden

Equations of Life
Simon Morden
Orbit, Apr 1 2011, $7.99
ISBN 9780316125185

In the future, globally the world has radically changed, but not for the better. Japan no longer exists and Britain might as well not exist. Most other places are not better off. For instance America the land of the free has turned its back on the Founding Fathers’ First Amendment by becoming a theocracy and much of Russia was nuked.

Ph.D. candidate Samuil Petrovitch lives in the rotting London Metrozone. Though the Russian knows better than to get involved as the only known survivor of the St. Petersburg nuking, he intervenes in an abduction attempt preventing the kidnapping of woman who thanks him saying she is Sonja; daughter of a dangerous person. Alongside of police officer Harry Chain and Madeleine the violent nun, Samuil soon learns what happens to Good Samaritans when he is caught in the crosshairs of a lethal street war between Russian gangsters, an even deadlier business tycoon Yakuza and a new even more lethal Jihad. He muses his problems came about because he broke the first rule of survival of the fittest: don’t get involved.

This is an exciting futuristic science fiction starring an antihero who knows the Equations of Life logically mean stay out of everyone else’s life; yet he begins emotionally to comprehend that may be life bit that is not living. Samuil and the cast make for wonderfully dark future although some of the escapades seem a bit over the top of Big Ben, still ticking after all these bombs. Readers will enjoy what happens to the logical man who makes his first illogical decision since before he survived the annihilation of St. Petersburg.

Harriet Klausner