John M. Ford, The Scholars of Night [Library of Babel]

Kate bought this a while back, and I picked it up a little bit before Boskone, because I wanted to read at least a little of it before the Mike Ford retrospective panel. I was a little disappointed that the panel didn't mention this or his other lesser-known works, but, hey, it got me to read the book...

The Scholars of Night is a Cold War spy novel. A consultant for an American intelligence agency stumbles across some old documents, which reveal a certain individual as a Soviet agent, and he is assassinated. His lover, code named WAGNER, is determined to carry through the last great operation he had planned, and begins tracking down and activating his sleeper agents. The original consultant gets dragged into the plot, because he may be able to provide the key insights needed to locate the agents, whether he knows it or not.

The operation itself involves a sophisticated new bit of communications technology. Its theft will give WAGNER the ability to intercept and control communications among NATO ships, which is obviously of great value to the Soviets. But WAGNER may have another, more sinister goal in mind...

Sounds pretty Tom Clancy, right?

Well, maybe. There are a few points of difference, though, even leaving aside Clancy's utter inability to write recognizably human characters.

For one thing, the consultant who sets the whole thing in motion is Nicholas Hansard, a professor at an American university, and the agent who is exposed by his initial analysis is a close friend and mentor. He's wracked with guilt over the death of his friend and frequent gaming partner, and agrees to take on only one final assignment, which inadvertently involves him in WAGNER's plot.

For another, the real identities and contact information for the sleeper agents are encoded in a recently discovered Christopher Marlowe manuscript. Figuring out who they are requires a detailed understanding of Elizabethan drama, and Hansard just happens to be an expert on Marlowe.

A third major difference is that the plot is very much informed by game play. The COPE LIGHT technology originates in a war games operation in England, and Hansard's actions and understanding are heavily influenced by classic strategy games like Diplomacy and Kingmaker.

So, yeah, there's a slight Tom Clancy air to the plot, but it's unmistakably a John M. Ford book. It's a technothriller in the same way that The Final Reflection is a Star Trek novel-- it has all the requisite elements put together in more or less the usual way, but everything ends up at an odd angle, creating something that is entirely different.

Being a Ford novel, there are also a few bits that are sort of difficult to work out. There's also a really awkward sex subplot or two, and I think I'd probably need to read it a couple more times to really understand the ending.

This book is kind of hard to find, and I think I'd really recommend it only to Ford completists. It's not a transcendently brilliant or transformative book, but it's definitely an interesting read, if only to see what happens when John M. Ford writes a Tom Clancy plot.