Clarke's speculative fiction pleases

It's a good thing to have a Washington insider write a work of speculative fiction. Richard A. Clarke's second novel, Breakpoint, is thankfully in this (my favorite) genre of books.

Check out the comments in this article about the novel. Clarke has put together a powerful combination of very sober near-future circumstances in this book. It's a nice combination of bioengineering and computer advancements (in this case, they hook up to the brain and help engineer "special" children).

Recently, Peter Dingus also pulled together these same elements in his novel Proteus Rising -- but the setting and circumstances were vastly different. This is not surprising. Advances in biotechnology are indeed humming along and we are also constantly barraged with news on the computing front. Even if some big computing announcements are for sluggish operating systems that are mimicking developments that other brands released 2 or 3 years ago.

Regardless of the fact that the story elements can sometimes be redundant, I've found that the stories themselves are typically fresh. I'm glad that Richard A. Clarke has joined the ranks of the speculative fiction writer. He's got a number of insights into our government's experiments with cutting edge technologies. So, it makes his fiction even more interesting knowing that it's grounded in recent research.

Keep up the good work Richard.