As humanity succumbs to a vast mind-control conspiracy, Jake Travissi suspects that reality may no longer be on his side in the finale of Davison’s (State of Union, 2102, etc.) God Head Trilogy.

This third installment doesn’t hold back, opening with nothing less than the nuclear destruction of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Islamic fundamentalists are practically the last holdouts against the Consortium, a mid-21st-century conspiracy of techno-elites out to implant civilization with Internet-linked computer chips. The Chip enhances physiology and perception and instantly connects people with the rest of mankind—but it also means that the Consortium can “hack” them and turn them into mindless slaves, exile them to a sham reality (à la The Matrix) or even order them to die. Jake, an LA lawman with a strong sense of right and wrong, relentlessly battles the Consortium to the point of allying with religious terrorists. The villains find him a source of fascination because he alone managed to resist and override his Chip programming early on. Now, a nanotech-based virus is seeding Chips worldwide into people and animals. Jake, along with a few fellow resistance fighters, flees to the only untainted realm left: the independent colonies on the moon. There, he aims to fully activate his Chip for a last stand against the Consortium’s ultimate cyberweapon—a ruthless, sadistic artificial intelligence named Constantine, who controls billions of human minds simultaneously. As our hero survives one narrow-escape cliffhanger after another, he begins to wonder if can he trust his reality at all—or if his experiences are creations of Consortium puppet masters. A story that began as a cyberpunk police thriller has, across three volumes, zoomed out to become a mind blower of Olaf Stapledon–esque dimensions, ruminating on robot ethics, futurism, and what it means to be human and have free will. (Davison even manages to express the Consortium’s point of view in a disquietingly attractive manner.) Action fans, meanwhile, will find a body count in the billions. As long as readers don’t mind this final installment’s deus-ex-machina conclusion (in a very literal sense), they’ll certainly appreciate its uncommonly forceful grand-canvas sci-fi storytelling.

A high-density wrap-up of a diverting cyber-sci-fi trilogy.

As a synthetic plague causes more and more humans to be implanted—“immunized”—with mind-control chips, ex-cop Jake “Jackhammer” Travissi, who survived his own digital zombification, fights the global conspiracy with his dwindling allies.

The middle volume in author Davison’s cyberpunk God Head trilogy, after State of Mind (2011), sees LA cop Jake Travissi returning to a fearfully warped civilization in 2035 after having taken a sabbatical when he was reluctantly implanted with a neurological Chip that gave him enhanced crime-fighting mojo, information access and altered perceptions. The Chip also made him and fellow lawmen susceptible to a conspiracy of “God Head” hackers, turning them into mind-controlled assassins. Through superhuman willpower, Jake cut his own Chip from his head in the last book, but he was still powerless to prevent the murders of those closest to him. Now, vacationing on the resort-continent Antarctica with his fiancee, Jake is plunged back into violence and techno-intrigues by the worldwide unleashing of a deadly, genetically modified virus called MaxWell. The only alleged defense against it is mandatory Chip implantation—rushed into practice by assorted world governments and the elite Consortium puppet masters behind them—that threatens to turn everyone into mindless “Pin Heads.” Vocal Christian and Muslim religious sects oppose the Chipping of humanity, yet evidence suggests that they may be heavily involved in terror plots against Travissi’s newfound allies, husband-and-wife Indian researchers seeking a MaxWell cure despite betrayals and impossible odds. Davison, also a screenwriter, writes on a broad canvas, with action hopping across hemispheres, corpses piling up in the millions and even nuclear weapons in play. Yet the Jackhammer (and his wonder dog, Lakshmi) stays as invulnerable as a Tom Cruise action hero, complete with six-pack abs—though there’s a potentially sinister explanation for his survival floated near the denouement. Amid the apocalyptic future-shock vibe of a desperate world engulfed by corrupt, out-of-control technological advances, Davison’s knack for crackerjack storytelling and dialogue holds the mayhem and melodrama together.

Though slightly programmed around action-blockbuster tropes, this harrowing cyber–pulp fiction brings the thrills.

A Los Angeles cyberpunk saga about the fusion of mind, machine and the federal government.

Opening on a semihallucinatory Santa Monica morning, Davison’s tale quickly changes from pleasing beach scene to an unexplained nightmare of lost innocence, lost love and a distillation of apocalyptic anxiety. The apparent, but ambiguous, loss of hero Jake Travissi’s family hangs over much of the book while Travissi attempts to stay in L.A. and think positively. Travissi, known to his compatriots in the police department as “Jackhammer,” has recently been ousted for having used excessive force on a governor’s son. But like all down-on-their-luck ex-cops, he has a second chance; if he’s willing to have the unfortunately named P-chip installed in his brain, he can work for the Department of Homeland Security. The novel’s premise is a keen extrapolation based on the utopian visions of futurists like Ray Kurzweil and the disturbing inevitabilities of Moore’s law. The P-chip creates harmonious prisons, impossibly fit and happy citizens, instant communication and, for Travissi, a slippery grasp on his will and thoughts. His chip has been compromised by a group of tyrannical hackers known as Godheads and they control key people in key positions to render the citizenry into a compliant stupor so that 21st-century elites can irrevocably enhance their power. The novel utilizes disconnected flashbacks and this buttresses the general themes of memory and its existential problems, but this is often done with little respect to enhancing tension and so the excuse for using this structure seems less convincing when the reader is begging for a little exposition. However, the intelligence and cleverness with which the novel has been written is obvious on every page. At times Davison can be a bit too purple, as when he describes L.A.’s heat locking down the city like a “lethargic” straightjacket. It’s a perfect metaphor brought down by going a word too far. The prose, though, is nonetheless the novel’s strength, and Davison always errs on the side of abundance rather than the faux hardboiled-ness that inflicts so many mystery thrillers on the market. Though the themes are familiar and the territory well-trodden, the book has wit and heart to spare.

A thoughtfully composed piece of cyberpunk that will please readers of both science fiction and noir.