Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Very disappointing. The story started out strong but slowly devolved. There is some hip prose that is fun to read but the characters are underdeveloped and the plot unbelievable. If it is a set up for future installments I will not buy the next book. I am perplexed by the literary critics' positive reviews. I feel as though they read a completely different book.

Interesting read, but I'm not sure what happened at the end. One of the main characters was on his way to face the enemy, had just boarded a raft that was being piloted remotely. He looked back at where he had been, and that was it. No real ending. All loose strings. Major characters unaccounted for. This has got to be one of the worst endings of any book I have ever read. I wouldn't read a menu by this author.

Great book with great characters. Deep truths in the big sense of how the world is evolving ( a bit like a less dark, more human version of William Gibson) and also in the smaller details of life and the characters. How people live, behave, think. The end does get a little weaker, or perhaps more hurried as it becomes more of a thriller and less keenly observed, but still 5 stars. Some say the end leaves you hanging - but I think it's not that hard to figure out what happens if you think about it - and it does not matter that much.

Awesome book. A delight to read because it's beautifully written and completely consuming. Interesting characters, and the character development is terrific. I keep recommending this to people and of course, they ask "what's it about?" It' s not easy to sum up in 20 words or less, and the fact I keep coming back to is: it doesn't even matter what it's about. It's that well written, and can be read for that alone. But make no mistake! It is a great story.

In the early eighties when Al Gore was funding the expansion of the ARPAnet into the internet we all can't live without today, science fiction writers like William Gibson and his cyberpunk cohort were predicting the development of a Matrix-like immersive Virtual Reality and disembodied software-based Artificial Intelligence. They were wrong. Thirty years later, immersive VR and software AI seem not just unachievable but theoretically impossible. Actual technology progressed along a different path, progress cyberpunks failed to detect even as it was happening. (Apologists may link Gibson's cyberspace to the internet, but a close reading reveals the former to be an artificial environment and not a physical network.)

I believe this predictive failure crippled science fiction as a genre. Just two generations earlier, writers like Arthur C. Clarke were predicting communication satellites and international space stations, and those actually happened. But cyberpunk shortcircuited the genre's power to project the future of current technology. Cyberpunk correctly prophecied the geopolitical shift to Asia, the imminent irrelevance of the Soviet Union, the rise of the multinational corporation, a new multicultural disaffection and malaise, but it was wrong about the science, a fatal flaw in something called SCIENCE fiction.

I believe readers noticed this failure and turned away from branded science fiction to quasi-science fiction "thriller" writers like Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, and Preston/Child, who use science fiction tropes as props for shoot-em-ups, and the stale baked-goods of fantasy and now YA. Science fiction as a genre largely backed away from the near-future, reviving space-opera and championing the science-romance, a wholly literary form that borrows and builds on established science fiction ideas but leaves behind the nuts and bolts. (The wonderful Connie Willis, the most awarded writer ever in the field, is a practitioner of the form.)

"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" revives the near-future predictive science fiction novel. It's not labeled as science fiction, nor should it be, since the label doesn't mean what it used to. It offers a thrilling, eclectic, wholly believable adventure based in concrete and plausible speculation. It cloaks all that hard, dazzling rigor in a cool and knowing attitude, sharp, comic writing, and vivid, flawed, sympathetic characters.

It steals everything that cyberpunk got right but leaves behind its unrealized dreams and nightmares. This novel is not dys- or utopian. Its dangers are here and now. It takes place a moment from now. It speculates about the next (and possibly current) developments in internet technology and how they will affect not artificial but human intelligence and connectivity. It builds on ideas explored in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" and Geoff Ryman's "Air" and simultaneously satirizes and improves upon the thriller conventions of Crichton and Dan Brown.

Finally, one more word about the characters: schlubs, shmoes, clueless failures caught up in a reality-altering spy plot. I trace them straight to the works of Phillip K. Dick, the science fiction author who wrote about regular people with messed-up minds that glimpsed a truer reality. Many of Dick's novels told stories of spying and subterfuge, for example, "The Man in the High Castle," "A Scanner Darkly." "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" reads like a collaboration between 60s Dick and 90s Stephenson with a little bit of Richard Linklatter and "Portlandia."

I think it's terrific.

An unusual premise, kinda scary to think about but perhaps possible in the future. The male characters had flaws, and were awfully hard to love. I was intrigued with the sci fi, but just when the action was going to start, the book ended...I prefer my endings tied up in a neat package.

Shafer is a savant. Measured, clipping prose get turned up like your favorite drum break. The author effortlessly slips from learned techno-babble to Nabokovian invention to adroit comedic flares. Everything here is carefully constructed for pure pleasure reading without sacrificing intelligent writing or purposeful thematic backdrops. Order it, burn through it, read it again and give it to your friend to read.

Shafer is a savant. Measured, clipping prose get turned up like your favorite drum break. The author effortlessly slips from learned techno-babble to Nabokovian invention to adroit comedic flares. Everything here is carefully constructed for pure pleasure reading without sacrificing intelligent writing or purposeful thematic backdrops. Order it, burn through it, read it again and give it to your friend to read.

Loved this book, it takes awhile to tie together the characters since you are introduced to each separately. Slowly the connections are made and the story progresses in a compelling manner. A futuristic espionage tale with a moral.

Interesting premise, with some well-realized characters, but overall completely over-hyped. Like "The Circle" (which I also found largely disappointing), this book does try to anticipate the social, cultural and ethical implications of new technologies, and I appreciate that, but like The Circle it also does so incredibly simplistically. The oligarch villains practically twirl their mustaches as they gloat over their plans to take over the world with big data, and the plucky rebels who oppose them have literally stumbled onto fantastic, completely unexplained powers -- consciousness-altering "eye-tests" and pot plants that are really quantum-organic computers (seriously) -- that would be more at home in an Artemis Fowl book than a quasi-techno-thriller.

Maybe most importantly, as many others have pointed out, this is really just the first half of what's blatantly meant to be a two-book series. (Or Shafer simply couldn't figure out a decent ending, and gave up). The entire last third of the book -- as it should -- builds towards a very clearly delineated action climax...and then abruptly just _ends_. One of the main characters is literally racing to accomplish an incredibly important, life-threatening task, gets most of the way there, and then..."The author would like to thank..."

Honestly, I was ready to give up on this book about 2/3 of the way through, but having read the breathless, glowing NYT review [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/books/book-review-whiskey-tango-foxtrot-may-be-the-novel-of-the-summer.html], I figured I may as well find out how it ends. The fact that I slogged through the whole thing and it _didn't_ end is just deeply annoying. It just feels like a ploy end up getting people to pay twice the price that the store's willing to charge for a complete Kindle book.

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I really kind of feel like the title is maybe some kind of snarky insult to the reader. Maybe it was meant as an inside joke, or maybe it was just a Freudian lapse, but I think "WTF?" is really going to be most readers' response to that ending. (And for anyone who wants to suggest that it's some kind of post-modern gesture to defy a bourgeois need for closure...this would have had to be a _much_ better book to live up to that claim.)

You meet three distinct characters in separate opening chapters and know them well by the time their connection to each other and the story is established. Really well done! I didn't want this book to end. Loved it!

The preview chapter was well done and very promising, but after I bought the book and read the rest it just didn't deliver. The first chapter proved to be irrelevant to the story line and I came away feeling I had been deceived by the preview. If you're tempted by this one I'd suggest waiting until it hits the remainder bins at your local bookstore.

Just finished this book! Sooo disappointed. It started off a little slow - but you then bought in the characters etc...and were invested in the story and a conclusion. Now perhaps the author is looking to start a series out of this - but even if he is - there is usually some conclusion of sorts at the ending of a 380 - 400 + page book. But this book literally ends just as you are completely invested in finding out the next step. The author also seems to like including every word or rather every clever word he had ever come across throughout the book!

I also bought this book based on the NYT review - the power of a good PR...! I do read a lot and generally understand what the author is trying to achieve. However, I really do not think I have EVER read a book that finished so abruptly - and if in fact that there is another book in the series - despite wanting to know what happened to the characters - I am really not sure I can invest the time to find out, given the disrespect this author has showed to his readers in this outing!

The hook is an interesting set of characters that quickly lose interest as it becomes apparent they are in a story with out substance. The premise is clear from the start and never progresses beyond that point. The narrative is excruciatingly boring as it fills with long winded excursions into irrelevant material. Then the "to be continued" non-ending is the final straw, the book basically goes no where and ends no where. If you are looking for an entertaining page turner look elsewhere.

Book gets off to a great start. Hard working heroine discovers a possibly secret installation deep in the jungle and is immediately set upon by "them" who are planning to take over the world. Not to worry, however. "they" are being opposed by "us," the good guys who have themselves formed a top secret world wide organization to fight for freedom. The reader is faced with plot twists ranging from rogue computer networks through magical "eye tests." Good guys suddenly become evil cohorts and minor characters reappear as (wait for it) secret agents.

Ending is trite and clearly s a lead in for a sequel.

The single high point of the book is that it was on Kindle. At least it will not pollute the land fill.

This book is an oddball. The writer is clever and observant and his prose is sharp, his characters vivid and inventively drawn. But the plot is preposterous, the structure embarrassing, and the ending is cheesy — because there isn't one, you're being primed for a sequel. Which makes the whole book feel like a sales pitch and you've been had.

Most of book is spent on broody 30-somethings pondering why their life is so difficult even as they actively engage in further self-destructive behavior (particularly 2 male characters). Thriller/conspiracy elements are minimal but very engaging.