Voice of the Whirlwind

Walter Jon Williams gets spookiness, writing a sci-fi espionage thriller that rivals vintage Le Carre. The protagonist, Stewart, is an old insurance policy, a clone with the 15 year old memories of his original, recently murdered on a space station. Last thing he remembers, he’d finished mercenary training with the Icehawks before a mission to Sheol to recover alien artifacts. After that, well, his original was a busy man with a lot of unfinished business.

A little less stylized than Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind tracks Stewart across the solar system and into a deadly game of corporate politics and biological warfare against the alien Powers, an advanced race that holds the key to massive wealth, and possibly an escape from the brutal cycle of corporate Darwin Days and ideological entropy. It’s also not as compelling, but one chapter alternating Stewart making a drug connection in LA with an account of the war on Sheol, is as fine writing as anything in scifi.