Caleb Carr - Killing Time

I read The Alienist a few years back, and enjoyed it at the time, so I was interested to come across Killing Time in the library and note that it seemed to be an entry in the sci-fi genre - not quite what I'd gathered Carr's metier to be. As it turns out, Killing Time doesn't, despite its portentous major theme - "information is not knowledge"/"mundus vult decipi" ("the world wants to be deceived") - really engage with those ideas, and it's neither a 'hard' sci-fi novel nor a particularly deft or original spin on the cyberpunk thing. Rather, it's an entertaining, engagingly-written, basically popular audience-oriented bit of futuristic writing - it's comprised of short chapters punctuated by constant action and several set pieces which just scream 'Hollywood', while its characters are, if not quite stereotypes, then at least very archetypal - which happens to have a bit to say about (dis)information, mediation and society in contemporary, internet-connected society. Not a bad read, but not, I didn't think, a particularly good book.