Linda Nagata
The Red: The First Light

This science fiction novel by Linda Nagata, a writer born in 1960 in San Diego but residing in Hawaii, is one of the best works in the genre I have read recently. Specializing in ‘nanopunk’ (stories and novels based on nanotechnology), Linda won the Nebula Award in 2011 with the novella ‘Goddesses’. In 2013, with this novel titled ‘Red’ aka ‘The Red: The First Light’, initially self-published, she unexpectedly but deservedly inaugurated a hugely successful trilogy.

The novel revolves around the theme of war, already addressed in the genre's history by great authors like Robert A. Heinlein and Joe Haldeman (not to mention H.G. Wells), which in this specific case is intertwined fundamentally for conceptual purposes and for the contents of the work, with the most modern and futuristic advancements in the scientific and technological fields and with the interests of large defense industries and corporations.

The hero of the events recounted in the novel is the young Lieutenant James Shelley. He could apparently be defined as a hero by chance, as a convinced anti-militarist, he was forced by circumstances to embark on this career, but certain events throughout the narrative will inevitably lead him to question himself and his choices: including his enlistment and his gradual mental adaptation to the dimension of soldier and man of action.

Shelley can be considered the representative of a new generation of war soldiers, a post-modern war machine, if not even the prototype of a sort of advancement of the human race. After losing the use of his legs while trying to save his comrades during an attack by two enemy fighters at Fort Dassari base in the Sahel, he undergoes, on the condition of continuing as part of the army, an exclusive surgical operation after which his lower limbs are replaced by highly advanced titanium human-integrated devices that he can directly control with a bioelectric interface connected to his ‘overlay’, a modern cybernetic device linked to his neuronal cells and of which he has developed a kind of addiction to the point of feeling completely lost without it.

Recovered after the incident and having learned how to manage his artificial legs, Shelley is immediately called back by the army and takes part in what is undoubtedly the most dramatic page in the history of the United States of America, when a series of nuclear devices is dropped on some of the country's major cities and for the first time, war is brought onto American soil. A new civil war (I highlight the 1997 film 'The Second Civil War' directed by Joe Dante), this time seemingly triggered by Texas. But again, as we will see, the responsibilities will be precisely due to specific decisions (as is the case with any other war) of weapon market corporations and industrialists. An economic force with such great political power that it avoids any condemnation and trial despite the evident implication in a massacre of enormous dimensions and moreover on American soil.

At this point, Shelley and a group of selected soldiers will have no choice but to act independently to stop the greatest plot ever devised against the United States of America.

But there are also other relevant contents in this work to consider. The war broadcasted on television in the form of a Reality Show in which soldiers are unconsciously protagonists beyond their will. And then there's the Red. Which will probably be the foundational theme of the entire trilogy: a virus that has contaminated the entire network to which the entire population of the United States of America is connected through devices like the overlay, conditioning every choice they make according to a program that remains a mystery even at the end of the events (to know more, I guess we'll have to wait to read the other two chapters of the trilogy) and that apparently drives each of them to make radical choices regarding their existence, as if wanting to push every one of their aptitudes to the maximum. For this reason, it is unclear how much of Shelley’s incredible insights, nicknamed ‘King David’ by his comrades, are the result of his intuition and how much he is actually guided by the Red, which at a certain point will appear to him as his main ally, when in decisive moments he will have to make choices he might otherwise never have been able to make.

Compelling, written and argued almost as if Linda Nagata were a sort of battlefield reporter, ‘Red’ tells a completely original and mysterious, even frightening story in its contents regarding technological aspects that constitute sci-fi themes only because they have not in some cases (yet) happened. Because here the line between science fiction and real science is very thin and seemingly only a matter of time.