Michael Martineck

Michael is a friend of many years, around two decades in fact, although we only met for the first time in person at the Worldcon in Helsinki this August. And it’s just as well I know Michael as The Milkman posits a horrible corporatised world and does so with a completely straight face. But I know Michael does not believe the politics the book presents… because they really are quite nasty. The story is told from several viewpoints. A young woman is murdered outside a bar, but there are no clues to the crime. The corporate police officer tasked with solving the crime – assuming it can be done economically – finds himself hitting a brick wall. A film-maker is paid to make a documentary about the Milkman, a mysterious figure who analyses milk from corporate dairy farms and posts his results on an anonymous website. And then there’s the Milkman himself, who’s a low-level bureaucrat who, with his network of co-conspirators, tests milk as a hobby. The Milkman does a good job of presenting a world in which everything is owned by one of three corporations, and manages to use it effectively in a mystery/thriller plot. Personally, I’d have liked more commentary on the world – I mean, it’s a horrible place to be, and presenting arguments from the characters that it’s preferable to the “old world” made the novel sound approving. It’s a political novel, and when it comes to political novels the author needs to wear their politics on their sleeve. You can’t let the reader draw their own conclusions, because they might well draw the wrong ones. There’s enough right-wing sf out there – the entire genre is essentially right-wing – and commentary against it is sorely needed in science fiction. Much as I enjoyed The Milkman, it felt too ambivalent toward its world – despite the final scenes set among those who had opted out – and I’d liked it to have been a little more overt in its politics.… (mais)

The world of The Milkman is intriguing: Government has gone by the wayside, replaced and displaced by three global corporations. Every adult is an employee of one of these three corporations, and their place in society depends on their pay grade--the lower the better.

Our story begins with the stabbing death of a young woman marketing researcher, and the investigation of this "act of insubordination" by Ambyr System Security (ASS) operative Ed McCallum. Though not immediately evident, this incident gets wrapped up with an independent website reporting on the quality of dairy products in upstate New York (excuse me, Niagara Falls Catchment). "The Milkman" is, in turn, to become the subject of a would-be blockbuster documentary by Sylvia Cho.

The story is told through the perspectives of McCallum, Cho, and Emory Leveski, "the Milkman." Michael Martineck explores aspects of this world, asking the Big Question of "What does a world run exclusively by an oligopoly look like?

Another not-exactly Big Question explored by The Milkman is timely: When everything we know about the world sits in a device the size of a blood-pressure cuff wrapped around our forearm, what do you really know? There are two scenes where one character asks another to "make a call" for them, and the respondent had never done such a thing!

Of course, at least as important about that cuff is that it contains everything your employer knows about you. For this reason, some folks go offline to live outside society. These "ollies" play a role too.

The Milkman is an interesting story, with insights on criminal justice, corporate control, and the logistics of the movie business. Worth checking out.… (mais)

I received this book as a part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I've tried to pick it up several times now, and I haven't been able to get through more than the first 50 pages or so. The world that The Milkman is set in is trying too hard to be clever and make a statement, and the characters fall flat on the page. Maybe one day I'll come back to this, but I just could not get into it.

The review copy from the publisher was also an uncorrected proof in PDF format. It was poorly laid out and difficult to read on my e-reader. When I attempt this book again I will have to read it on my laptop screen, which is a sub-optimal reading experience as well. I think the provided format contributed to my inability to get through this book.… (mais)