26. Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Well I cheated and I paid for it.  I am supposed to be strictly reading only books on my on-deck shelf, but I stumbled upon this generically covered 80s paperback and thought that it would be not great, but at least an easy, entertaining read with some crazy action.  I should have been suspicious of this really terrible cover.  I mean the colours are nice, but talk about an utter lack of inspiration, in the name which maybe sort of has something to do with the book but even worse this partial image.  I mean what are we trying to convey here?!  It's amazing how even this limited picture can tell us so much about the sexual mores of the time.

My guess is that Niven and Pournelle were trying to go somewhat mainstream here with a sort of sci-fi techno-thriller along the lines of Robin Cook and Whitley Strieber which were big sellers at the time.  It takes place in the near future where a private company has built a gigantic cubic arcology in the middle of devastated Los Angeles.  I thought it was going to go the distance and involve some giant battle or collapse. Instead, it is more concerned with the social and political ramifications of such a setup, which might have been somewhat interesting if the authors were not such boring consnerdatives.  There are some nuances but not enough to make this go beyond the stupid Death Wish/urban decay themes of Reagan's America. Oh right and with a really nasty anti-60s counterculture cherry on the top (the radical groups against the arcology are basically terrorists rapists with no coherent position).

Not only were the politics simplistic but there is also a bunch of really stupid plot maneuvers that make absolutely no sense.  The plot hinges on an executive who releases toxic gas on what he thought were people trying to blow up the hydrogen lines in the arcology.  It turns out they were rich kids doing a prank (although actually they were a front for the eco-radicals). The executive is arrested and in the LA jail and the other leaders of the arcology decide to break him out of jail.  This involves the most preposterous (but also the only real fun in the book) episode involving a borrowed/stolen tunnel digging machine like the one used to make subway tunnels. It's ridiculous.

Also, they pepper in tons of nerd easter eggs here.  There are references to Cthulu, tabletop RPGs, science fiction conventions, all sort of normalized as if these had moved from a nerdy subculture to the mainstream.  I have to give Niven and Pournelle that they did get that right, but just wish these welcome moments had been in a better book.