Walter Mosley (Rose Gold) has earned fame with his crime novels, most notably his Easy Rawlins series, which combine uniformly high literary quality with fast-paced noir thrills. He has also carved out a niche as a science-fiction writer. In the latter genre, Inside a Silver Box is a trippy, violent, mind-expanding blend of pulp fiction and New Age cosmology.
Ronnie Bottoms, an angry young black man, and Lorraine Fell meet in a way that is decidedly uncute and are then taken under the wing of "the Silver Box," a fully self-realized artificial-intelligence system that deputizes them in a battle against its nefarious maker, the Laz. The stakes are high: the fate of earth and maybe all creation. As Ronnie and Lorraine battle their personal and our collective fates, it's easy to get swept up in the visionary weirdness of limitlessly powerful aliens and cosmic events.
Mosley always makes for an entertaining read, and his typical mix of social commentary, violence, gender and race consciousness turns this hurtling freight train of a plot into the coolest literary gumbo imaginable. His characters are vivid; the sci-fi ideas are presented in a subtle and cohesive way, and the themes of spiritual and bodily transformation grant the reader a good little creative buzz that is the next best thing to an epiphany. Inside a Silver Box will inspire readers to think about the capacity to change while facing the entropy of everyday existence and contemplating the end of the world. --Donald Powell, freelance writer