Review - The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

Short review: Sunday and the rest of the crew of the Eriophora are organizing a revolt against the A.I. that runs the ship. The only problem is that each crew member is only awake for a few days out of every millenia and the A.I. literally controls aspect of their starship.

Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Haiku
Asleep and adrift
Through millenia in space
Now they must revolt

Full review: Sunday is a member of the starship Eriophora, and has been for millions upon millions of years. Traveling at relativistic speeds, spending most of her time in suspended animation, Sunday and her fellow crew members are called upon by the ship's AI., nicknamed "the Chimp", whenever it faces a problem that requires human creativity to solve. Despite being "the Chimp", the ship's computer essentially runs everything on Eiophora, so when it turns out that it is an an amoral and inhuman overseer that regards the human crew as nothing more than mission assets to be discarded when their cost outweighs their utility, fomenting a revolt proves to be somewhat difficult.

The story of The Freeze-Frame Revolution starts off by establishing the "normal" that Sunday lives within. The Eriophora is a massive ship carved from rock surrounding a black hole that has been flung around the Milky Way on a mission to build gates, presumably to pave the way for other travelers to follow. The ship is mostly run by an A.i. dubbed the Chimp, which pilots the ship and builds gates on its own most of the time, but once in a while it confronts a problem that its extensive programming is ill-equipped to handle. For such situations, the Eriophora has a crew, who spend years on end in suspended animation and are thawed out once in a great while to troubleshoot. The exact number of crew is never stated, but they clearly number in the thousands, with only a handful being active at any given point in time, brought out of hibernation in groups that are determined at the whim of the Chimp. When the novel opens, the Eriophora has been traveling for the equivalent of sixty-six million years (although given relativistic effects, there is a serious question about what that actually means), and has made at least one complete circuit of the Milky Way.

On the surface, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is about a revolt, or more accurately, a conspiracy to stage a revolt. Sunday and her friend Lian are frequent work partners and occasional sex partners, so when Lian starts expressing doubts about their mission in general and the Chimp specifically, Sunday is forced to examine her own thoughts on the matter. When Lian dies in what is written off as an accident and Sunday makes a rather horrifying discovery concerning roughly three thousand crew members who were "deprecated" by the Chim, Sunday finds herself drawn into a long and secretive conspiracy in which crew members communicate with one another across thousands of years by hiding messages in songs, artwork, and other secret communiques. The trouble the conspirators face is that not only does the Chimp have cameras and monitoring devices throughout the Eriophora, it can literally look through their eyes using implants that all of the crew members carry within themselves. Thus, the conspirators must not only communicate secretly, they must do so in a manner that hides their communications even when they are reading them.

The difficulties the conspirators face are further compounded by the fact that the Chimp essentially resides throughout the entire ship, and can move itself from place to place at a whim. This means that not only do they have to figure out a way to topple a nigh-omnipresent A.I., they have to find a way to do this when it is vulnerable and more quickly than it can react. This, as one might expect, proves to be a difficult prospect. The story runs through some twists and turns, but the real depth of the book comes from the oddities and unanswered questions. The Chimp is an inhuman creature, without emotion or feeling, and in some cases without memory or even an understanding of what it has done in the past or what it is doing in the present. For all of the characterization that it is presented with in the story, and all of the emotion that Sunday invests it with from her end, time and again the story reminds the reader that the Chimp is merely an A.I. and only as good (or as evil) as its long-dead programmers made it.

Much of the book is framed as a conflict between humans on the one hand, and an inhuman A.I. on the other, but Watts' includes background details that call that assessment into question. The crew are ostensibly human, but as the details of their childhood and training come to light, one starts to question that categorization. Though never explicitly stated, the details that are peppered throughout the story suggest that the crew members were specially selected for the mission, and were quite possibly engineered specifically for it. There are strong hints that they were trained, conditioned, and physically modified in ways that seem to have stripped at least some of their humanity away. The end result is that one has to wonder if they can fairly be characterized as human any more, or if they are, as the Chimp views them, merely components of the Eriophora to be evaluated solely on the basis of their usefulness to the mission.

But questions about the humanity of the crew only serve to raise questions about the continuing humanity of those who were left behind. At the time the story opens, the Eriophora has been travelling for sixty-six million "Earth" years, enough time for the Tyrannosaurus Rex to evolve into a chicken and longer than the time it took for humans to evolve from shrew-like creatures. Given that length of time, and the fact that the Chimp apparently hasn't heard from "Mission Control" for millions of subjective years, one has to question whether there is anyone left "back home" to benefit from the mission. Further, in light of this realization, the infrequent mysterious "monsters" that burst from freshly completed gates take on a potentially different character: Could they be the descendants of humanity desperately trying to communicate with the Eriophora and trying to get the ship to stop its now counterproductive mission?

The fact that the Eriophora has lost contact with humanity gives the entire story a kind of unmoored, dream-like quality, and also serves as a metaphor for the lack of humanity that seems to run through both sides of the conflict in the book. What makes The Freeze-Frame Revolution so good, like so much other good science fiction, is that the story is filled with questions that eat at the reader long after they have finished the book. For example, one is left wondering what the crew of the Eriophora plan to do once they throw off the yoke of the Chimp - even if they could get off the ship, which seems unlikely, they seem to have no skills other than those needed to aid the ship in its mission. Will they simply continue to travel the galaxy building gates until they die, just without the Chimp being around? It is fairly apparent that keeping all (or even a substantial part) of the crew awake all the time would rapidly deplete the ship's resources, so who gets to decide who is awake and who sleeps, and how the crew is rotated (if they are rotated at all). The ship has a vast archive of stored information, and finding space for this enormous volume of data is a significant plot point in the story, but one is left wondering what the point of keeping the archive is. The archive can't be sent "back" for anyone to use, and no one aboard the ship seems to use it for anything in particular. One crew member hopes that the mission will last long enough that he can watch the ongoing heat death of the Universe, but he seems to be motivated by nothing but idle curiosity. It seems that the ultimate point of The Freeze-Frame Revolution is that there is no point to human life. That idle curiosity is all that we have to motivate us, and that may have to be enough. That the only purpose human life has is to make one's own choices and there is no further goal than that. Watts seems resolutely determined not to offer any easy answers, and that is part of what makes this book brilliant.

In the final analysis, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a multilayered story that has a set-up that seems to be little more than a conspiracy to revolt set in a hard science setting, but which reveals deeper questions about the nature of the characters that inhabit the story and the nature of humanity in general. Watts presents a dystopia that, even if the protagonists succeed, will only be slightly less dystopian, and forces the reader to confront the ways in which this dystopian vision so closely mirrors the world we currently live in. This is a book that is full of big ideas, intricate conspiracies, and countless thorny questions that will stick with you long after you have turned the last page.

2019 Nominees for the John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel

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Review - American Craftsmen by Tom Doyle

Short review: Dale Morton is an American craftsman, magically gifted and in the service of the U.S. Army. Then a mission assigned by the precognitive Sphinx goes bad and he ends up out of the service and on the run from the corruption within the heart of the Pentagon while trying to protect the Iranian woman he has fallen in love with.

Haiku
A secret mission
Goes quite badly and reveals
Corrupt conspiracy

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Dale Morton is a man with problems. As a magically inclined soldier in service of the United States, he follows a long-standing family tradition. Unfortunately, part of his family history is somewhat checkered, and includes the "left-hand Mortons", a family branch that delved into dark magic in an effort to achieve immortality, and so no one trusts him or any of his relatives any more. More problematically, Dale is no longer able to completely control his own magic due to a dying curse placed on him by an Iranian sorcerer. Now, Morton is out of the Army trying to figure out who set him up on his final mission so he can exact revenge.

Tom Doyle's debut novel, American Craftsmen imagines a world that is similar to our own in most ways except that magic is real and "craftsmen", as the members of a handful of magically-inclined families are called, can manipulate its power. In the United States, these families are supposed to have made a bargain with George Washington to provide their services to the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and have served the U.S. armed services ever since with their existence kept a secret from the general public. Craftsmen are given credit for raising the fog that helped Washington's army escape from Brooklyn Heights, and with panicking Confederate troops into accidentally fatally shooting Stonewall Jackson. And, we are told, in the United States craftsmen are prohibited from practicing their craft on their own: They are required to serve the government or forego the use of their sorcerous powers.

Through the pages of the book we are introduced to the scions of several magical families in addition to the Mortons, most notably Endicotts, and the Gideons, as well as the Hutchinsons, and the Attuckses. Each family has its own tradition and array of powers. The Endicotts are austere New Englanders, steeped in Puritanism and gifted with the power of command. The Gideons are magical trackers, employed to locate and hunt down rogue craftsmen. In a clever twist, Doyle asserts that the Gideon bibles found in nearly every hotel room in the United States are actually the components of a magical monitoring system connected to the Gideon family. And then there are the "wild cards" - individuals who manifest magical powers but whose background is shrouded in mystery, perhaps intentionally. Among these is the Appalachian, a figure who inhabits and guards the sanctuary where the soul of America is kept. And then there are the "Sphinx", used by the Central Intelligence Agency to predict future possibilities, and "Chimera", used by the Department of Defense for much the same purpose.

It is in this world that Dale Morton's travails take place. After he is essentially forced out of service and barred from practicing his craft again, Morton retreats to his family home in Rhode Island. There, comforted by the ghost of his grandfather and the spirit of the house itself, Morton tries to figure out who is responsible for the disastrous mission that cursed him and caused him to be forcibly retired from Army service. Along the way, he runs into Scherie Rezvani, an Iranian immigrant, who then seeks his assistance so that she may acquire the skills that will allow her to return to her birth nation and fight against its oppressive regime. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Scherie is much more than she originally appeared to be, and her serendipitous appearance in Dale's life seems just a little too much of a lucky coincidence to be believable. But in the world of American Craftsmen magic is described as being the ability to affect probabilities so that the improbable becomes inevitable, which makes the unlikely seeming connection between Morton and Rezvani an example of the power contained in the the collection of countervailing nudges from Sphinx and Chimera.

Morton's efforts, of course, are not unopposed, and as the layers of intrigue are revealed one by one, the nature of the opposition shifts and changes. The most obvious foil for Dale are the Endicotts, as both the politically powerful General Oliver Endicott, and his son Major Michael Endicott harbor a deep mistrust of the Morton family. Both Endicotts (somewhat justifiably) believe that all Mortons are one step away from taking the "left-hand" way and indulging in unspeakable acts of depravity. But General Morton goes one step further: He's convinced (at least in part by communications from Chimera) that Dale has given in to the "left-hand" already, and that the Morton line must be ended. In the Endicotts Doyle has created a pair of characters of a type that are generally difficult for authors to pull off well - misguided but well-intentioned antagonists. Both General and Major Endicott start the book feeling that their distrust of Dale is entirely justified, and their efforts to work against him are the right thing to do. But in Doyle's hands, these two characters are believable and interesting "good" antagonists, although Major Endicott's character arc is, ultimately, much more interesting than Oliver's.

Though the plot is somewhat convoluted, with multiple twists and turns, apparent betrayals that turn out to be cunning stratagems, and actual betrayals from unexpected places, it flows fairly well, and in a manner that both feels plausible and unpredictable at the same time. Morton and Revzani wend their way through the double-crosses and double-double-crosses, unraveling the threads of the conspiracy they find themselves hunted by, until at the very end they peel back what they believe to be the final layers and emerge apparently triumphant. But even then, while they relax in their victory, the seeds of the next conflict are sown in the final pages of the book. Along the way, Doyle shows the reader glimpses and snippets of the magical world hidden within the real one, pulling back just enough of the curtain veiling the secrets of the craftsmen and their disjointed and heavily regimented society to make the story hang together, but still preserving enough mystery to leave the reader wanting more.

Although the novel is quite satisfying, there are some elements that are mildly bothersome, or at the very least unsettling. One plot hole that runs through the novel involves the contents of the Morton family house's basement. While the basement is the afterlife prison of the "left-hand" Mortons, it turns out that some rather critical members of that line are not present, although everyone, including Dale, his father's ghost, and his grandfather's ghost, are all certain that they are. This seems somewhat unlikely, since all of the Mortons are very concerned about the whereabouts of their nefarious ancestors, and are also very certain that they are safely tucked away in the nether regions of their family dwelling. The fact that they simply aren't there and no one noticed seems almost entirely implausible.

The second issue isn't really a plot hole, but is an unsettling aspect of the world described in the novel: The almost unquestioned complete government control over the lives of the members of the magically-inclined "fighting families". Subjected to mandatory government service, denied the use of their natural abilities in any other form of employment, threatened with arrest and secret trial for treason if they contravene these rules, and so on, the craftsmen live their entire lives beholden to the whims of government. And those whims are carried out behind closed doors, entirely out of the public eye, allowing individuals like General Endicott to make almost arbitrary decisions to assassinate another craftsman heavily colored by his personal dislike of the target. Not only that, but the members of the families are intentionally kept separate from one another, making them vulnerable to being picked off one by one, and allowing distance to permit old feuds to fester. This pervasive secret government control, to me, is more disturbing than the idea that there are people who can magically control the weather. A system that hides from public view is almost certainly a corrupt system, and the system that controls the "fighting families" is rotten to the core. And this goes almost entirely unremarked upon. There is a passing mention that this might not be such a good idea near the end of the book, but the comment is aimed at the policy of keeping the "fighting families" separate from one another, not the all-encompassing influence the government exerts over the craftsmen.

These quibbles aside, American Craftsmen is quite a good urban fantasy story. Set in an engaging world and populated by likable heroes, cantankerous allies, and villains that range from misguided to vile, the book is, all puns aside, a well-crafted tale of intrigue and adventure. It also appears to be the first in a series, which, given the strong nature of this volume, is excellent news. Anyone who likes their fantasy set in the "real" world and mixed with decent helping of military adventure will almost certainly enjoy this book.

Subsequent book in the series: The Left-Hand Way

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Review - Requiem of the Human Soul by Jeremy Lent

Short review: "Primal" humanity is up for extinction by its genetically altered descendants in a world that seems to have forgotten the distinction between negligence and intentional harm, so the only thing that can save us is the nebulous mushiness of the human soul.

Haiku
In the near future
Science is the enemy
For no real reason

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Requiem of the Human Soul is the first science fiction book I have read in which science is the villain. When I say "science is the villain", I don't mean science gone awry (as the case with so many Crichton novels), or even that there is a mad scientists using his super science powers to create mutants. Rather, I mean that according to the book the portion of the human brain that allows for the rational thought process that results in science is the problem. Science, and the resulting modern world, is apparently killing the human soul.

The plot of the book is fairly simple. Genetically engineered humans (designer humans, or d-humans) have become the dominant majority in the world, with unmodified humans (primals) making up a significant minority and forming a permanent underclass. The UN, which is a meaningful force in the fictitious future of the story, has exclusive authority to deal with the "primals" (via the UN agency known as UNAPS, or the UN Authority for the Primal Species). The viewpoint character of the story is Eusebio, a primal who is abducted by UN investigators to participate in the proposal for extinction of primal species (PEPS) hearings with Naomi, a "d-3 human" and primal rights activist serving as his counsel, while Harry Shields, another d-3 human, serves as prosecutor. After brushing through some fairly concrete objections to PEPS, the hearings get to The Point of the Book, which is that destroying the primal species will be a massive crime because doing so will run the risk of extinguishing the human soul. This seems like an awful thin thread to hang the fate of humanity on, so the author introduces an alternative, the Rejectionist activist Yusef, who offers Eusebio the option of destroying New York to strike a blow for primal rights. The book meanders along for most of its length until the very end, when a couple of plot twists effectively invalidate everything that happened in the book, and leave the reader wondering why the UN went through the entire charade.

I believe there is a tendency among writers who have not dealt with science fiction (and fantasy for that matter) before to think that science fiction is easy. In fact, I think writing good science fiction is much more difficult than writing "straight" fiction because the author, in addition to providing interesting characters and a good story, must also establish the fictitious backdrop of the story. This usually requires what is known in science fiction circles as the "infodump", and mastering the art of the infodump is one of the key elements of making a science fiction writer good. A true master will establish elements without making it a big deal (for example, Heinlein's famous line "the door dilated"), which others use more clumsy methods (the "as you know Bob" form of exposition). Unfortunately, a lot of the background in Requiem for the Human Soul is given as clumsy infodumps. The characters of Naomi and Yusef exist in large part to dump information on Eusebio, and by doing so, dump it on the reader. One annoying way this is done is by bringing up a topic Eusebio (who has lived a sheltered life outside the mass media of the larger world) knows nothing about, and then telling him about it. But the typical method of conveying the information is not for Eusebio to have a conversation with the infodumper, but rather for Eusebio to report what he was told, for example:

"GALT, Yusef explained, had presented a zero-sum game to the world: On the one hand you could have continual war and human suffering; on the other hand, you could have global peace only by giving up the spiritual existence of life - the most important aspect of mankind's existence. But the Rejectionists believed genetic engineering could optimize the spiritual aspects of human beings, and in doing so, tolerance and love for others would naturally follow."

So, we don't get the conversation in which this information is imparted, instead we get a very didactic and heavy-handed retelling of what was said. This crops up several times in the book, we are told what a conversation was about without the messy bother of the actual conversation. In my opinion, this is a very weak way to convey information. (As a side note, why do I think it is not an accident that the "Global Arms Limitation Treaty" acronym "GALT" reminds one of an Ayn Rand protagonist).

The second major way that infodumps are done in the book is via "interludes" in which the narrative is set aside for a bit in order to jump back in time to characters from the past, such as the founders of the Humanists (primals who reject genetic engineering on the basis that it is damaging to the human soul), or newspaper articles on important historical events. The featured characters from the past share the same conversational foibles as the ones in the up-to-date story line do, but the newspaper articles come off as a the equivalent to a feature piece in a newspaper today describing how the internet works. While reading them, one wonders why the details of trips to offshore genetic engineering clinics would include the description of what (by the time the article is supposed to have been published) would have been the equivalent of describing how a telephone works today.

One other annoying thing about the book is that it seems like the author, to a certain extent, is simply not playing fair with the narrative. By this I mean that it is clear that he wants Eusebio to be left with no defense against the PEPS proposal save a defense of the human soul, and in the rush to get there, he brushes aside some fairly rational arguments against it. The author uses the crimes of primal humanity against nature: The destruction of natural habitat and over-hunting and so on, leading to the extinction of species as evidence that the primals are only being hypocritical when they argue against the PEPS proposal. But this logic train has enormous holes in it that any competent lawyer could drive trucks though. Naomi, for a superior, genetically engineered d-human, seems to be a fairly incompetent counsel since she never once points out that this argument argues for a moral and legal equivalence between mere negligence and intentional extermination. One also wonders why she never points out that the d-humans, who argue that they are by reason of their genetics, morally superior, rely upon an argument that places them in an equivalent position to the supposedly morally inferior primals they propose to eliminate (not that they are equivalent, as they propose to do with intent what primals did via negligence). Never mind that the d-humans in the story don't seem to show much in the way of superior moral behavior, they assert that they do, and yet the entire argument in favor of PEPS rests on an equivalence with the very group they claim is morally inferior. In the hearing, Eusebio sits in a neurographic chair that monitors his brain for truthfulness, and yet neither the prosecutor or the defense counsel do. One wonders why Eusebio didn't object to this: If he is required to tell the truth and they will monitor him to ensure that he does, why is the prosecutor free to lie if he wants to? It is shown that the downtrodden nature of the primals is, in large part, due to the policies enforced by UNAPS and GALT, and said downtrodden nature is used to help justify PEPS. The stunning hypocrisy of this stance is never brought into the hearing, merely commented upon by Eusebio outside the hearing. Once again, Naomi seems to be quite incompetent. Finally, given that there are supposed to be 7 billion d-humans and 3 billion primals at the time of the story, one presumes that the bulk of the habitable area of the Earth is occupied by d-humans, that same area that was the native habitat the primals are accused of destroying. Yet the argument that d-human society is hypocritical in that it reaps the benefits of the ecological devastation they lay at the primals' feet while at the same time decrying it is brushed aside in a perfunctory manner. I understand that Lent wanted to get to The Point of the story and talk about the human soul, but not bothering to deal with what should have been some very substantial issues in anything but the most perfunctory manner simply makes the book less effective than it could have been.

Further, a lot of the science elements of the story are simply unconvincing, leaving the reader with huge questions. The PEPS proposal is to be implemented by disbursing "Isotope 909" which will make primals partially sterile. The question that occurs to the scientifically inclined reader is "isotope of what?", since an isotope is an atom of the same chemical element that has a different atomic mass. Which chemical element makes up "Isotope 909" (or the other one mentioned in the story, "Isotope 919")? Is it Vanadium? Yttrium? Some other element? Which element would have an isotope with an atomic mass of 909 (or 919) anyway? That's about 615 grams per mole more than the mass of Ununoctium, which is pretty unlikely, and all of the elements with that high of an atomic number are horrendously toxic to everyone, not just pregnant women, so the whole "isotope" business just makes no sense. I figure that what Lent must mean is something like "Compound 909", which is what would make sense in the story, but when an author of a science fiction story gets basic science terminology wrong, it seriously damages the rest of the story by pulling the reader out of the narrative flow.

Another critical element to the story is the cancer related death of Eusebio's wife, which could have been cured, but it is explained, doing so would have been too expensive. Her form of cancer is rare in the modern world, and hence the special machines that could have synthesized a protein that would eat the cancerous cells (something I'm not even sure that a protein could plausibly do) are rare and must be imported at prohibitive expense. But that doesn't make much sense. A protein is merely a collection of amino acids in a particular sequence. Any process by which one could create one protein could probably pretty easily be modified to create a different one, which makes the whole subplot less than scientifically plausible. Again, this pulls one out of the narrative and damages the science credibility of the story.

Another question that arises in the story is that the societal fall out from rampant global warming forms a critical element of the back story of the setting (driving the handover of military power to the UN, and the creation of GALT), but the d-human society shown consumes massive quantities of energy, even to the point of running a huge project to revive (and control in minute detail) the African savanna. Where does this massive volume of energy come from? How is it generated without creating a huge amount of global warming? This question, like many others, is simply unaddressed.

One important science element that seemed quite odd was the distinction between "d-humans" and primals, which is elevated in the book to the level of speciation. Much is made of the fact that primals share 99.4% of their DNA with chimpanzees, while only 99.3% of their DNA with d-humans (given that there are d-1, d-2, d-3 and soon to be d-4 humans, one wonders how such a specific percentage is arrived at). However, given that most of the d-human changes were originally driven by taking some superlative primal and copying their genetic code (there is a long digression about this), one wonders how this is even possible. The d-process, as described in the book, is about modifying existing genes, not about creating, removing, or adding genes, and one wonders if the d-humans could in fact, vary from primal humans by the 15 million or so base pairs required to exist in d-humans but not primals to make the d-humans genetically that different. One comes away from this comparison wondering just how much research on genetic engineering was done in the background for the book.

This DNA difference is used in the book by d-humans to assert that primals are a different species. One unanswered question is whether d-humans are unable to interbreed with primals (the classic definition of speciation), since, of course, humans cannot interbreed with chimpanzees. Once again, this is a glaring, and unanswered question. And, one question raised by the possibility of speciation and completely ignored is: What duty does one sentient species owe to another? Apparently the d-humans are convinced that the primals are a different species (many call them "chimps"), and the mandatory moral modifications that are supposed to make d-humans less doctrinal and less aggressive don't seem to prevent them from adopting a clannish, bigoted, and racist attitude towards primals. Nor do the modifications seem to prevent the d-humans from blasting away at primals quite violently. I'm not sure if we are supposed to conclude that the moral modifications are in fact a sham and the d-humans are hypocrites on this score, or that the author simply didn't think through the implications of his own setting. Either way, it is another plot element that just doesn't hold up.

But, one might say, these are just a stylistic quibbles. What about the great story? What about the struggle to save the human soul? After all, this is The Point of the book. Well, even here there are problems, and they stem from some flawed ideas about science. The whole idea of the human soul in the book revolves around something called the "Schumacher Smudge", named after two time Nobel Prize winning scientist Julius Schumacher. When doing neurographic imaging of the human brain, Schumacher noticed a "smudge" on the images. This "smudge" is identified by him as evidence of the soul (based on almost nothing). After some personal tragedy, Schumacher bums around the third world living a primitive utopian existence and then returns to write his "masterpiece" On Being Human in which he explains that the smudge is the human soul, and that the prefrontal cortex and the style of thinking that is driven by that part of the brain has suppressed the more primitive parts of the brain and the "spiritual thinking". Further, the d-humans he had imaged didn't seem to have the smudge, and thus genetic engineering should be discontinued to avoid possible damage to the human soul. The story says that there was a huge negative reaction to his book from religious authorities and the scientific community, which seems to be intended to demonstrate the narrow-mindedness of both communities. However, I can not only understand the negative reaction of the scientific community, I would expect it, since as described the book appears to be nothing more than random speculation. Schumacher's idea that the smudge is the human soul appears to be based on nothing at all. Effectively, Schumacher supposedly thought that his status as a two time Nobel Prize winner would carry the day. But argument by authority doesn't work in the scientific community, and Schumacher would be expected to know that. In point of fact, those who attempt to make scientific arguments from authority are usually roundly (and rightly) ridiculed. Rather than making him out to be a genius, Schumacher's story makes him out to be something of a dimwit. The evidence supplied for the thesis of On Being Human seems as insubstantial as the evidence linking themerisol with autism, making Schumacher seem to be the Jenny McCarthy of his day.

In any event, Schumacher is killed for his ideas, and his close associates get together and found the Humanist movement dedicated to avoiding genetic engineering in order to prevent possible damage to the human soul. The odd thing is that they don't appear to spend any time working with neurographic engineering and studying the smudge to figure out if it is actually the human soul. Nor do they study primal humans and d-humans to determine why one has the smudge and the other apparently does not. Instead, the Humanist community descends into what seems to be an endless round of mystical mumbo-jumbo as they seek to get in touch with their primitive roots. The Humanist communities also, for some reason, cut themselves off from each other, and contact with the outside world, exclusively studying things like Australian Aboriginal dream time experiences and Native American ghost dance ceremonies and the like. It is all very "New Age" quasi-philosophy, seeking the "ancient wisdom" rather than actually studying the evidence of the human soul. Rather than sympathizing with the primal Humanists, one ends up holding them in contempt for not bothering to follow up and actually figure out if the claims of their spiritual founder actually held water.

The book makes a few stabs at substantiating what it means by the human soul, including scenes in which Eusebio experiences his "vision quest" and forms a connection with his totem tree and a "connection of souls" during sex between Eusebio and the love of his life Sarah. But as interesting as these spiritual experiences are, can they really serve as evidence of a special soul? Accepting them at face value doesn't help, as Sam Harris has pointed out, it is quite possible to experience spiritually uplifting moments without resorting to explaining them by means of  some sort of transcendent spirit or soul. One question that has to be asked (since a theme of the book is that modern life and Western culture is destroying the human soul) is how is it that people living in modern societies seem to have these sorts of spiritual experiences all the time?

More saliently, one has to seriously question the idea that primitive societies lived in harmony with nature. The Australian Aborigines are referenced several times, as are the Native Americans, but the evidence available concerning Australian and North/South American prehistory is that when humans reached those continents they immediately hunted all the large animals to extinction. Mayan civilization is thought to have fallen apart due to ecological disaster following overuse of the land. Tribal society in Indonesia seems to be brutally violent and destructive (see the description of this society in Guns, Germs, and Steel). These pieces of evidence seem somewhat at odds with the idea that primitive societies are based upon harmony with the world, and offer a calming spiritual alternative to the modern world. Even if it were true, giving up the benefits of modern society seems like an awfully large sacrifice for the alleged benefits of the spiritual primitive societies.

And one wonders how the idea that d-humans have no soul even works. The d-humans are by and large humans who have been modified to resemble and have the attributes of famous and talented people. I kept wondering if the point of the book was that top NFL players don't have souls? Or that Bill Gates has no soul? Or Scarlett Johanssen? That they are closer to having no soul than, say me, or you? It just doesn't seem to make any sense at all. The d-human PEPS prosecutor also goes on at length about how the primals themselves helped destroy the human soul when Western civilization (apparently dominated by the tyranny of the prefrontal cortex) trampled upon the culture of more primitive indigenous peoples like the Australian Aborigines and Native Americans. What goes unremarked upon is that if the Schumacher smudge is actually evidence of the human soul, such trampling didn't actually destroy it.

As a side note, one of the fictitious articles about d-babies talks about the "top NFL player's genetic array" as an option. How is this determined? Is the top football player a running back? A quarterback? A lineman? A safety? All have different skill sets and presumably different genetic arrays. Which one is the "top player", can this be determined? Does everyone want a rifle arm? Or giant behemoth who can knock people off the line? What genetic traits are actually universally desirable? It is this sort of bald statement that makes one pause. Statements are made that just don't seem to hold up and then expected to do so without any backing at all. One thing that seems to be universally useful would be the disease screening (which the Humanists reject, making them the future equivalent of people who refuse to vaccinate their children), and it is this sort of thing that, to me, makes the d-human society one so very attractive. On the one hand we have the Humanist obsession with the vague implications of a smudge that is claimed to be a soul (but never proven to be as far as I can tell), and on the other the elimination of diseases like cancer and the extension of the human lifespan through genetic manipulation. I know which society I find more attractive, and it isn't the one that thinks smoking in a wigwam is spiritually uplifting enough to turn its back on modern medicine. Even before the twist ending (see below), I found myself unsympathetic to the Humanists and their stance that amounts, in my view, to something akin to child abuse.

Despite the build up, the Yusef subplot ends up amounting to not much. One wonders to begin with how blowing up New York would advance the cause of the primals, rather than simply causing the immediate destruction of the primals as a threat. (For that matter, one wonders why the destruction of Columbus caused the U.S. to kowtow to the CARGI legal proceedings, given that the book was written after 9/11, it seems unreasonable to think that a terrorist attack would provoke much of anything but the attacked power lashing out in response). The Rejectionists are too insubstantial a movement in the story to make their claims particularly interesting: Eusebio due to his self-imposed isolation from the modern world knows nothing about them, and we get very little other than propaganda from either side. In the end, the nuclear bomb subplot seems tacked on, a sort of false attempt to add some action to a story that didn't really need it.

But that's a minor problem. The major problem is that the PEPS hearing is a sham, as is all the moaning about the human soul. The PEPS hearing was merely a ruse in order to get Eusebio into the neurographic chair, not to monitor his truthfulness, but to get an image of the human soul. The PEPS proposal is going to be implemented regardless, and both Naomi and Harry had concocted this hearing in order to preserve a record of the human soul so that future generations of d-humans could have it genetically implanted in their DNA. The problem with this is that it is a stupid way to get an image of a primal human soul. It is also needlessly cruel (remember, d-humans are supposed to be superior morally). Eusebio is removed from his home with no notice, and none of his friends, family, or neighbors know where he is, and because he knows about the PEPS proposal, he will never be allowed to communicate with them again. One has to think that if all Naomi and Harry wanted was a neurographic image of the human soul they simply could have asked for a couple of primal test subjects without the rigamarole of the hearing process and without having to abruptly and permanently separate them from their entire family. Maybe this is supposed to be a commentary on how humans treat test animals, but if so, it is very subtle. The PEPS hearing sham also ends up giving them exactly one example of a human soul, which seems fairly short-sighted to me, whereas some sort of research project would have given them dozens if not hundreds of examples to work with.

An even bigger problem is that, in the very last pages of the book, it is revealed that there is a "prefrontal cortex" soul called the "infinite soul". Once again, this is the author not really playing fair with the reader, as in the old saying: If you have a gun in the first act, it must be used in the third; but the converse is true as well, if a gun is used in the third act, it should show up in the first. The "infinite soul" is simply lobbed into the narrative from left field, with no real foundation at all. The Schumacher smudge is defined as the "earthly soul", and humans share this with all animals. The infinite soul is shared by primals and d-humans. In other words, what makes humans uniquely human is not the Schumacher smudge at all, but rather something that they share with d-humans. This seems to invalidate the entire premise of the book - the primitive soul isn't what makes a human a human. And it isn't threatened by the genetic engineering of humanity, or the rise of the d-humans. What makes a human a human, as opposed to any other animal, is exactly what Lent spent the entire 300 prior pages saying was destroying humanity: The tyranny of the prefrontal cortex. And Lent closes his story by going back and having Eusebio wax poetic about Chief Joseph and how the human soul will be lost and reborn as a result of the neurographic imaging. Whether this is simply Eusebio missing the obvious conclusion to be drawn from this bit of information, or Lent simply ignoring the implications of his own setting again is unclear. In any event, one ends up not feeling very sympathetic towards Naomi or Eusebio (for different reasons), and not really lamenting the impending doom of the primals (which I think is not the reaction Lent was hoping to evoke).

This could have been a much better book, but the lack of willingness of the author to work through the implications of his own setting hampers it significantly. The apparent lack of scientific knowledge also hurts the story, since in what reads like a hard science fiction story, especially a near future science fiction story, you have to at least get the science kind of in the ballpark of plausible. Not even the future history seems particularly compelling, as it is more or less a laundry list of scary shibboleths: Global warming will cause massive wars over water, third world countries will sue the first world for compensation for imperialism, the government will begin monitoring everyone with implanted microchips, and so on and so forth. In the end though, what unravels the story is the twist ending that throws in random elements from left field, exposes the supposedly smart d-humans as idiots, and invalidates everything about the story that went before.

Jeremy Lent     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Food for the Gods by Karen Dudley

Short review: After Pelops is resurrected from the stew his father cooked him in, he moves to Athens to become a celebrity chef and discovers that having the Gods think they owe you is something of a mixed blessing.

Haiku
Brought back from a soup
Then off to Athens to cook
And solve a murder

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: When one thinks of mythic Greece, the first thing that comes to mind is not the travails of a once-cooked, previously dead, celebrity chef who must solve a murder mystery to save his business. One also doesn't think of melding tales involving the Greek gods and heroes with the somewhat crass commercial reality of Athenian history, ranging from the social climbing infighting between politicians and business men right down to dildos made from bread. But in Food for the Gods Karen Dudley manages to take this somewhat off-kilter set of premises and turn out not only a very entertaining story, but one that is also both hilariously funny and tragically sad at the same time.

The foundation of the story is the myth of Tantalus and Pelops. In the mythic story, Tantalus invited the gods to dinner and discovered that he didn't have enough food on hand to serve everyone, so he chopped up Pelops and placed him in the stew pot before serving him up to his guests. This didn't go over very well with the Olympians, and they banished Tantalus to Tartarus for eternal punishment and arranged to have Pelops resurrected, although he needed a replacement shoulder made from ivory as Demeter had absent-mindedly eaten some of the Pelops-stew. The mythic version of Pelops goes on to have other, somewhat unfortunate adventures, but in Dudley's hands, he takes what appears to be a side trek through Athens, where he becomes a celebrity chef, cooking for the dinner parties of the wealthy and powerful.

Although the myth of Tantalus and Pelops took place in a mythic period of Greece that can more or less best be described as "a long time before recorded Greek history", Dudley takes the story, and apparently all of the rest of Greek mythology, and inserts it into our real world history, contrasting the myths of the Greek gods and heroes with the reality of Athenian commercial culture. An off-hand remark about Pericles and the ongoing war with Sparta places the events of the book some time between 429 and 404 B.C., although I kind of suspect that the book (and any possible sequels) is set in "Xena-time", a meld of myth and history that grabs elements from wherever source needed to make a good story. But it is exactly this mixture of mythology, with its capricious and often childish gods, and pieces drawn from Athenian history, with its mixture of public piety, crass commercialism, and social and political status seeking, that makes Food for the Gods such an interesting novel.

The story starts with Pelops dealing with the consequences of having enthusiastic gods provide well-meaning but somewhat less than helpful assistance, driving the guests at a dinner party he is catering somewhat mad so that during their revelry they throw everything in the host's house out of the second floor window. Including Pelop's rented dishes. This is the high point of the book for Pelops, as the gods continue to meddle in his life and even though most of the time their meddling is either intended to be beneficent, or they are merely indifferent to Pelops' situation. And when the gods meddle in one's life, however well-intentioned they are, that always spells trouble. And Pelops winds up with plenty of trouble, most of which resolves in humorous ways.

The events of the novel take place during the Panathenaea, which is the high point of the Athenian social calendar, and the event during which Pelops hopes to cement his reputation as the top celebrity chef in the city. But he is beset by an angry crockery dealer, an arrogant and underhanded rival chef, a god who seems determined to get rid of all of his precious olive oil, and, most ominously, a mysterious client with rather specific and difficult demands and who seems to have the influence to get prominent Athenians to cancel their bookings with Pelops. As if that were not enough, Pelops lands right in the middle of a murder mystery that taints him by association and causes his embryonic catering business to crash to the ground, albeit with a little help from an insufferable rival spreading malicious rumors. More out of desperation than anything else, Pelops becomes an amateur sleuth, attempting to ferret out the guilty party in an effort to clear his own reputation and stop the nightly attacks of the Kindly Ones upon the populace of the city.

But Pelops' slightly humorous misfortunes, and the unfolding murder mystery are only part of what makes this book so good. The city of Athens of the 5th century B.C. serves not only as a backdrop for the story, but is almost a character itself. By highlighting the rapacious commercialism coupled with the inherently unjust nature of the city's laws and customs, Dudley gives her story an alien atmosphere that even overshadows the oddness of having gods, satyrs, and winged furies throughout the narrative. This element also allows Dudley to flex her classical knowledge and give the reader a view into the very different world of classical Athenian civilization, which, even though it was technically a democracy, it was one that not only tolerated but celebrated the practice of hiring prostitutes as entertainers at high-class dinner parties, the institutionalized discrimination against foreigners, and widespread slavery. By combining the tawdry reality of Athens, where purging the taint of a murder within one's house would be done by first feeding and then beating a homeless bystander until they fled the city limits, with the mythical version of Greek religion, in which a collection of winged demons would show up and randomly wreck havoc upon the populace of the city in retaliation for a murder while the gods stood by and neither knew nor cared to know who the actual guilty party was, Dudley manages to paint a picture of how very different the world was much more vividly than she could have if she had drawn upon only one or the other.

These multiple layers are what make Food for the Gods work so well as a novel. The character of the novel is best illustrated by the humorous advertisements that appear in between each chapter, promoting serious issues as how to correctly perform ritual purification and where to purchase devotional statues to glorify the gods, as well as more mundane concerns such as ribbonfish recipes and the availability of bread dildoes. But even when these poster or handbill style advertisements deal with the most serious of concerns, they are made humorous to our eyes by the juxtaposition of even the most sacred subjects with an aggressive form of marketing that seems alien to modern sensibilities. But this combination serves two purposes, allowing Dudley to keep her book feeling light and humorous even though it is about the business misfortunes of the protagonist and the murder of a young woman, while also bringing the historical reality of the era to the forefront of the story.

Food for the Gods is, quite simply, an excellent book in every possible way. Combining an interesting setting with an affable lead character who manages to be both favored by the gods and downtrodden at the same time while struggling to keep his catering business above water (literally having to defy Poseidon to do so) all centered on an intriguing murder mystery drawn partially from Greek mythology. If this seems like an eclectic stew of ingredients, rest assured that it is. But it is a stew that tastes delicious, just like Pelops' fig and cheese appetizers. Or, without using awkward metaphors, it is a delightful book that I predict would be enjoyed by almost anyone who picked it up.

Karen Dudley     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Nu Logic: Rise of the Neos by Bill Gourgey

Short review: Dr. Janot wants to take over the world using the online game of Neology. The only ones who can stop him are a man lost in time, his leaderless followers, and a teenage girl.

Haiku
Maddy's haunted dreams
Are the key to save the world
From Doctor Janot

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Set in a cyperpunk world with espionage, nanotechnology, time travel, and hints of space travel, Nu Logic: Rise of the Neos is an eclectic and interesting science fiction novel. A sequel to the novel Glide (which I have not read, although there is enough background information provided in this volume to piece together the events of the previous one), the novel picks up some time after its predecessor left off and continues the story with the return of most of the same characters and and a rekindling of their conflicts.

The story takes place in a world recovering from a dystopian future in which the Academy, under the control of the Prophet, wrecked havoc on the world in the name of order, and was stopped, or at least diverted, by the efforts of the brilliant Doctor Magigate, a kind of supergenius inventor who seems to have developed most of the technology that undergirds the post Academy world. Complicating this simple narrative is the fact that Magigate seems to have been in love with the Prophet, and that the Prophet may not have been such an awful person to begin with. But all of this is in the distant past when Rise of the Neos takes place, although since Magigate seems to have discovered an odd way of traveling through time, the past is more or less being played out in the present as well.

The primary villain of the book is Doctor Janot, who also goes by the names Janeuf and Diogenes, an expert in creating viruses that can spread through both organic and inorganic systems, who has a convoluted plan to take over the world. He's already accomplished the first step, which is to get a large chunk of the world's population hooked on his online role-playing game "Neology", which seems like a fairly roundabout way to start. To be perfectly honest, this was one part of the book that seemed extraordinarily improbable to me, as I couldn't see why anyone would want to start playing Neology other than perhaps that tiny handful of people who enjoy Eve Online, except that Neology seems like it would be less fun to play. For the most part, descriptions of Neology seemed like Second Life with the addition of the fun of trying to avoid becoming infected with computer viruses and a player base that seem to have little to do other than kill new players to pass the time. Granted, some people enjoy that sort of thing, but it seems unlikely that a third or the world's population would. But taking the fictional reality presented at face value and going with it, we have to accept that this is the basis of Janot's plan.

Much of the rest of the book is filled with the convoluted intersecting story lines of the various players as they try to either advance Janot's plans, or like the knights and Dr. Longe, try to foil them. In the middle, more or less oblivious to the dangers, is the heroine of Glide, a girl named Maddy who is the only person alive who contracted (and has been cured of) the "Rust", a viral plague that jumped from human to network and back that had been manufactured by Janot during his first attempt to dominate the world. Interspersed in the story are interludes of events from the past, which, given the somewhat elusive time travel element may be events happening in the present as well, and which feature Magigate, Janot, and the Prophet. The book is sprinkled with classical references, mostly to Greek mythology and philosophy: Janot calls himself Diogenes and quotes both Greek cynic philosophy and Sun Tzu. Magigate names his inventions after Greek mythological figures such as Epimetheus and Ariadne. The resistance group that morphed into Magigate's followers dub themselves the Knights of Los Acres. Their implanted enhancements that give the knights their edge are all prefixed with "Magi-", both a reference to Magigate who created them, and magical powers, which the enhancements almost seem to bestow upon the knights. One knight even explicitly interprets her magi- enhanced healing powers as a manifestation of the spirits of the Santeria faith. And so on. These elements don't make the story fantasy or myth, but they do put a mythic patina on the cyberpunk reality.

The story rotates between several different story lines, jumping from person to person to tell the increasingly interwoven threads that all come together in the final portion of the book as everything comes to a head. The only problem I had with the style of story telling is that it means that the book leads off by throwing a cavalcade of characters at you, all involved in different, as yet seemingly unrelated scenes with minimal overarching context. Had I read the first book in the series before tackling this one, this may not have been so disorienting, as I would have already been somewhat familiar with the characters and the world they live in, but coming into the story cold as I did, it made the early chapters of the book tough sledding. But if a neophyte to the series perseveres through the first hundred or so pages, the book does begin to coalesce nicely, and before too long the confusingly fine brushstrokes of the initial pages resolve into a cohesive whole. Throughout the novel, Gourgey employs tension extraordinarily well, ratcheting up the suspense from beginning to end, so that when the final confrontation takes place, it is a cathartic explosion of pent up nerves.

I really only have two quibbles with Nu Logic, and they are relatively small. The first is that in the early chapters, there are several points in which a term or a piece of technology is explained via a footnote. In my case, these notes only served to break up and slow down what was already the slowest and most difficult portion of the book to get through. While the information contained in them was clearly presented by means of this device, they were little more than bland infodumps and did little save to jar me out of the fictional reality I was immersed in. In most cases, it would have been clear from the context in which the term was used what it meant or what it was, and in the others, I can only think there had to be a more artful means of delivering the information to the reader. The second quibble is that in the scenes set in the past, there were several points in which the book was conveying material that was supposedly drawn from Dr. Magigate's written journal, and in those sequences the font was switched to a small handwriting-like font that made those sections more difficult to read. Switching fonts during a book rarely improves it, and this book was no exception.

Those minor quibbles aside, Nu Logic: Rise of the Neos is a very good (and possibly the only) cyberpunk time-travel story featuring the valiant attempts of a small band of committed individuals to stave off a dystopian nightmare. Most of the characters are very well written, with motivations that make their actions for good or ill make sense. Even though the story is convoluted, with many twists and turns throughout, none of the intricacies of the plot are superfluous. If it is a mark of success for a book is that it makes you want to read more from the series, then for me this book is definitely a success.

Bill Gourgey     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Everygnome's Guide to Paratechnology by Joseph J. Bailey

Short review: A humorous book giving farcical tips on how to be a better gnomish paratechnologist and avoid blowing yourself up. Or blow yourself up with style.

Haiku
An essential guide
To paratechnology
A bit silly too

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Everygnome's Guide to Paratechnology is an incredibly silly book. This isn't a pejorative statement. Featuring discussions about how not to blow yourself up while experimenting, how to select what incredibly esoteric branch of inquiry to follow, including the development of hovering tool boxes, lintless shirts, anti-plaque dental force fields, and polymorphic, polychromatic, self-applying tattoos, as well as tips on proper beard and mustache care, Everygnome's Guide to Paratechnology is clearly meant to be a completely, gloriously, unreservedly silly book. And this book hits directly on the funny bone, resulting in an always absurd and frequently hilarious work.

The book is very similar in subject matter, tone, and format to Bailey's other book Mulogo's Treatise on Wizardry, consisting of a series of short, pithy pieces of advice for gnomish paratechnologists, who might best be described as diminutive mad scientists with access to magic, on topics ranging from "Making the Perfect Laboratory" to "Shiny Is Better" to the "Proper Disposition of Minions". Each mini-chapter is one or two pages long and written in a staccato style with short, punchy sentences laying out snippets of somewhat misguided advice, complete with frequent footnotes that serve to make the twisted advice even more twisted, and funnier.

Everygnome's Guide to Paratechnology is somewhat longer than Mulogo's Guide to Wizardry, and that is somewhat unfortunate because that means that the jokes wear thin before the end of the volume. There are only so many ways one can warn the reader against lab mishaps and give advice concerning odd beard grooming habits and devices before what were once funny lines become just a little repetitive. The book also suffers somewhat because the fictional author "Spreesprocket Goldulley" is not nearly as well drawn as the cowardly and somewhat duplicitous wizard Mulogo. Further, there is no equivalent to the character of Mulogo's assistant Ludaceous, whose somewhat contentious relationship with the egotistical Mulogo drove a large chunk of the humor found in the footnotes of the book. Without these two personalities to focus on, the book feels directionless at times.

Even so, this is a delightfully absurd book filled with piles of hilariously insane suggestions and comically obsessive interest in bizarre and probably completely impractical inventions. The final section of the book turns slightly away from this humorous tone and provides a glossary that outlines what appears to be an interesting fantasy setting, suitable for use as the backdrop for some interesting fantasy novels or for use in a role-playing campaign, making the book more interesting than it would have been if it were just a collection of farcical advice.

The final product is a book that aims to be funny that is, in fact, consistently funny that also packages some interesting world-building on the side. Excepting the minor caveat that the book runs just a little bit longer than the jokes stay fresh, this is a delightfully silly and enjoyable look into the comical side of a fantasy world.

Joseph J. Bailey     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Gemini Rising: Ethereal Fury by Jessia O'Gorek

Short review: Mother Earth uses the spirits of humans who damaged her during their lifetimes to attempt to exterminate humanity. Humanity is defended by unpleasant and obnoxious priests. In the middle of this conflict, a spirit falls in love with a teenage girl.

Haiku
Angry Mother Earth
Sends spirits to avenge her
Exterminate us

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Gemini Rising: Ethereal Fury is something of a love story between a magical being called Onyx and a sixteen year old human girl named Violette. The book is set against a backdrop in which the spirit of the Earth itself has turned against humanity for despoiling her surface, sending disembodied spirits called "Gemini" who have been charged with a single purpose: To destroy the human race. Somewhat clumsily opposing them are the men of the cloth, using a combination of church rituals and medical science to foil, trap, and they hope, destroy, the inimical foes that they barely understand.

The first chapter of the book gives a series of vignettes of the life of petroleum engineer and later oil executive Oliver Weldon as he figures out how to cheaply export oil extracted from the Niger River delta, resulting in large volumes of ecological damage. Because pointing out the fact that Weldon has presided over decades of oil spills and fires in Nigeria isn't enough to show the reader he is a villain, we are also told that he is a philandering husband for no real apparent reason. After a lifetime spent doing evil, Weldon has a heart attack and dies, at which point the Earth selects his spirit as a candidate to be resurrected as one of her minions bent on destroying humanity. Weldon is given the new name Onyx and essentially forgets everything about his former life, making selecting Weldon in particular for this purpose somewhat pointless. If the newly minted Gemini are going to have their memories wiped, why pick one dead human's spirit over another? It seems clear that choosing such humans to fill these roles is intended as a form of poetic punishment, but given the complete lack of understanding on the part of those serving and the utter irrelevance of their previous knowledge to their assigned mission, there just doesn't seem to be any purpose. In a sense, this element is like shooting an already dead body because you didn't like the person when they were alive. It is pointless and futile at best, and because one would assume they would work at cross-purposes to Earth's goals if they did become aware of their pasts, counterproductive at worst.

Arrayed against the Earth's disembodied assassins are the clergy, specifically in the case of this story, the clergy of the Catholic church who run a small school for orphaned children in Virginia. One of these children is the waifish and extraordinarily beautiful seventeen year old Violette, who naturally has purple eyes. Also living at the school is the slightly older Slate, who the priest Father Darius considers to be his protégé, and who Violette seems to have something of a crush on. The anti-Gemini organization in the area appears to be run by Bishop Phillips, who turns out to be a fairly unpleasant man. In fact, all of the clergy who show up in the book are fairly unpleasant. And this creates one of the more interesting conflicts in the book: does the reader root for the murderous Gemini who want to exterminate humanity, or does one root for the vain, petty, and vicious clergymen who have secretly undertaken the task of defending humanity against the Gemini? Other than Violette, whose main character trait appears to be that she is naive and innocent, and Slate, who is a moderately nice but mostly passive guy, there are no characters in the book who one wants to side with. Were it not for Violette, one might be tempted to simply say to hell with humanity and hope that the Gemini eliminate us all quickly.

As an aside, I have no idea why the chosen spiritual avengers of the Earth are called the "Gemini". In mythology the Gemini were the twins Castor and Pollux, and the name has become associated with twins ever since. But the Gemini in the book seem to bear no relationship to this meaning, as they certainly don't seem to be twins, and are only siblings in the loosest sense of the word. Perhaps the name is intended to signify that these chosen spirits are now brothers (or sisters) with the Earth, but if so, that wasn't particularly clear from the text. In the end, I am left wondering if there is any reason why they call themselves Gemini other than O'Gorek thought it seemed like an interesting name.

The book focuses on Onyx's assignment to infiltrate Violette and Slate's small religious community and destroy it by murdering every inhabitant, which is merely the next step in a campaign of wanton destruction that the Gemini have been waging against the religious strongholds of the United States. Perhaps it is a measure of the isolation of the inhabitants of the orphanage, but the extent of this campaign comes as a complete surprise to Slate when Bishop Phillips and Father Darius reveal it to him, even though widespread and unexplained murder and arson on the scale described would likely have resulted in screaming headlines plastered across all of the news outlets of the country. The twist in the story is that Onyx is distracted from his mission of vicarious vengeance when he becomes infatuated with Violette for what appear to be fairly weak reasons: She has a pretty singing voice, and she is pretty and innocent looking.

The ensuing creepy and odd romance, which is clearly intended to be the core of the book, was, for me, by far the weakest part of the book. O'Gorek sets up a strange love triangle involving Violette, Onyx, and Slate, made unusual by the fact that the only way Onyx can really interact with Violette as anything other than a disembodied smoky apparition is to possess Slate. Consequently, for much of the "courtship" between Violette and Onyx, she thinks that he is actually Slate expressing interest and falling in love with her. The romantic story line isn't particularly helped by the fact that there appears to be almost no reason for Onyx to become infatuated with Violette. She's pretty, and plays with her hair a lot, and we are told she is able to sing beautifully. And that seems to be about all that she is. She's fairly shallow, and doesn't seem to have much personality, which isn't particularly surprising given that she's a teenage girl who has been raised in what amounts to a cloistered environment. But even though her blandness is explainable, it doesn't leave any particularly compelling reason for Onyx to fall for her. One might say that her innocence and vulnerability would make Onyx want to protect her, but one could say the same thing of numerous characters that Onyx is dead-set on killing.

It is probably a sign indicating how good a paranormal romance novel is that one can be unconvinced by and uninterested in the flagship romance in the book and still find it enjoyable to read. And that's where Gemini Rising sits for me. The problem with the book boils down to the undeveloped character of Violette which made Onyx's risky infatuation with her simply inexplicable. I could understand why Slate would be interested in Violette - for him she was more or less the only available girl around - but for Onyx it just seemed implausible. If Violette had some content to her character more substantial than a singing voice attached to long hair and purple eyes then Onyx becoming smitten with her would have rung true. She could have been committed to living in harmony with the Earth, or shown some inherent good trait of humanity, or some other attribute that challenged Onyx's accepted truth that humanity is a plague that needs to be destroyed. But she isn't. She's just a pretty face attached to an empty brain that turned Onyx's head and nothing more. And that is simply disappointing.

But what makes the book interesting is not the romance between a teenager and the disembodied spirit of a middle-aged oil tycoon reincarnated as an angel of death. The real meat of the book is in the questions that it raises: Can humanity find a way to prevent the Gemini from killing the entire race? Can the Earth just keep creating new Gemini to replace the ones imprisoned or destroyed making human resistance pointless? Can a nonviolent resolution to the conflict be found? Is there a particular reason why all of humanity's defenders seem to be bullies and jerks? Why does the Earth like fish but hate humans? And so on. But the book doesn't resolve any of these questions, or even the high school romance that it focuses on, choosing instead to end more or less in media res. What story there is in Gemini Rising is good, but the plot lines all just stop mid-stream, leaving this book feeling not so much like a complete story, but rather like little more than a well-written prologue to the real story which will come in later books in the series.

Jessica O'Gorek     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Progenitor: Palak and the Sky Gods by Patrick T. German

Short review: Two technologically advanced races battle in the Contest to decide disputes between them. Palak lives on a primitive planet ignorant of the forces around him, until one day he is pulled into the conflict.

Haiku
After the contest
Time to strip mine Medias
Let's get to fighting!

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Progenitor: Palak and the Sky Gods is a science fiction novel that has everything except for individually differentiated characters. Set on the primitive planet Medias that coveted by the technologically advanced Sucobers and Plamanics (albeit for different reasons), the story follows several native Median creatures as they deal with the changes to their world. The story is vast in scope, as the Sucobers and Plamanics both have galaxy-spanning interests, and at the same time extremely intimate in flavor, as Palak struggles to deal with the difficulties of feeding and defending his stone age extended family. Mixed in with these stories are interludes involving the genetically altered fauna of Medias, and frequent incidents of bloody, bone crushing violence.

The basic framework of the story is simple. Both the Plamanics and the Sucobers have star-spanning societies but very different ideas about how to use the resources of the galaxy. Rather than engaging in mutually destructive interstellar warfare to resolve disputes, the two races have agreed to settle their differences by means of trials by combat. To this end, they use one particular small featureless moon to deposit their chosen champions who have to fight to the death in unarmed hand to hand combat. The selection of the featureless moon, we are told, was in part to prevent any particular combatant from gaining an advantage in the ensuing combat, but as anyone who is reasonably astute will note, this merely results in the combat conditions giving in an advantage to combatants who thrive in a situation in which there are no obstacles, nowhere to hide, and no strategy other than punch harder and faster than your opponent.

Given that the Plamanics are half the size of the Sucobers, they cleverly inserted a provision into the agreement to mediate disputes via trial by combat that allowed the two races to select members of other species to represent them in these battles. Unfortunately, the Sucobers seem to have done a better job at recruiting and have won all of the recent combats on the strength of a creature named "the Captain". In the opening pages of the book, the Captain secures yet another win for the Sucobers giving them control of the planet Medias which the Sucobers want so they can strip mine it into oblivion and use the resulting resources to prop up their ravenous society. They turn the planet over to Lozerick, an individual who is apparently considered rapacious and unsavory even by Sucober standards, and for no real apparent reason give him the Captain and a collection of clones to help out.

The story then shifts to Medias where it introduces us to a collection of its inhabitants, including a tribe of "brunts", which are more or less like the neanderthals of our past, and interestingly, a collection of animals, including the bear-like brogar, the wolf-like hunz, and the lion-like linex. And this is the point where the novel seems to fall down just a little bit, because as the viewpoint shifts between this collection of diverse creatures, they all seem to think alike, and in most ways, behave alike. Being able to write characters each with their own voice is one of the more difficult things a writer has to do - some authors aren't even able to find their own voice when they write - but it is one of the most important. If the reader can't differentiate between the characters on the page, then there aren't really individual characters in the book. And once the various characters in Progenitor start making their appearances, the reader notices that not only do Lozerick and the Captain seem to think in exactly the same way, all of the inhabitants of Medias think almost the same way, and reason, evaluate, and react in more of less the same way too. They think about different things, because they are confronted with different situations, but they all seem to think about the things they encounter in the same way.

As the reader gets deeper in the book, and Euphenix the Plamanic shows up, the similarity in reasoning displayed by the featured inhabitants of Medias becomes explicable to a certain extent, but to the extent they have such similarities one would think the Euphenix's goal would be foiled. Euphenix, it turns out, had secretly visited Medias many years before and made changes to certain inhabitants in a effort to determine if any could be still further modified into a capable champion for the Plamanic race in the periodic trials by combat against the Sucobers. But Euphenix's program of modifying all of the various species that he has adjusted in more or less the same way seems to be kind of self-defeating, because what he ends up with are a collection of creatures that all seem to think in very similar ways, and are differentiated only by their anatomical characteristics (although all share similar looking eyes). But after making these changes, Euphenix had left them on Medias, subject to the vagaries of its untamed wilds, and of course, the possibility that his chosen incubator would be assigned to a Sucober mining operation that would strip mine the planet's core until the entire world was destroyed.

But both Lozerick's operation and Euphenix's experiments seem oddly slapdash. Lozerick, for his part, plays the role of god to overawe the Leeni tribe on Medias and get them to assist in his operation. But this seems like a poor choice, since he brought along fifty presumably much more technologically proficient clones to help him run his mine, and further, the mining work, to the extent the reader sees it, seems to be more or less completely automated. Why Lozerick needs the assistance of primitive tribesmen is unclear throughout the book. Lozerick also seems to go out of his way to needlessly waste the resources he brought, jettisoning all of the clones into space to make more space for cargo. One would think that he would have been better off using the clones on the planet for whatever he needed the Leeni for, and then abandoning them there when the planet inevitably broke up from the stress of having so much of its core extracted. Instead, Lozerick goes through a complicated charade with the Leeni, annoys "the Captain" for no apparent reason, and then kills off the crew he brought across the light years.

For his part, Euphenix's attempts to find a potential Plamanic champion seem to be haphazard at best. Given that he's already monkeyed with the genetics of the various creatures, one wonders why Euphenix simply leaves these presumably valuable test subjects on an uncharted and dangerous planet. Presumably the idea is to let the hazards of the wilderness challenge the chosen creatures, but one would think that the project would be far more successful (and far less politically dangerous) if Euphenix simply took the chosen subjects to a controlled environment and proceeded to test various options on them. Euphenix's testing process becomes especially perplexing when one realizes that the only true challenges for the genetically altered test subjects are the other genetically altered test subjects, calling into question the utility of leaving the subjects to be hardened by exposure to the harsh wilds of Medias.

In a certain sense, all of these elements: character, setting, and plot, are just a framework designed to support a collection of hand-to-hand combats. Every couple of pages, the plot stops so a couple of creatures can square off against one another in almost every conceivable combination, confrontations that are described in extended and lovingly bloody detail. Palak runs about bashing animals on the head while hunting. The brogar grabs animals and people for lunch. The hunz asserts his dominance over a pack of other unmodified hunz. The linex kills in pursuit of females to mate with, an effort that goes spectacularly awry. Eventually the creatures come into contact with each other and with the Captain. The brogar fights the Captain. The Captain fights Palak's unmodified adoptive father Urlak. The brogar fights the linex. Palak fights the brogar. And finally, Palak fights the Captain. If you are looking for a book that has a collection of people and animals clawing, bashing, and biting one another then this book will deliver exactly what you want contained within just enough plot to make the fights not entirely gratuitous.

In many ways Progenitor is a book that is smarter than it aspires to be. The focus of the book is clearly the bone crunching skinned-knuckles action that permeates the entire story. On the other hand, there are a collection of plot points that, if explored, would have presented interesting issues. One has to wonder why a valuable individual like the Captain was sent on an expedition with a fairly obviously untrustworthy individual like Lozerick. The Sucober method of mining planets, which is horribly destructive for story purposes, raises several questions, including the question of why mine planets like Medias at all given that it would be much easier to loot the needed resources from asteroids and other locations that would be easier to access than deep inside of a gravity well. But these questions are skimmed over in favor of creatures clubbing one another over the head. There is potentially more to the story than that, but to the extent this is true, it is not well-developed in this volume. Simply put, if you are looking for a collection of cage match style combats on a primitive world with somewhat interested technologically advanced observers, then this book is exactly what you have been waiting for.

Patrick T. German     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Prophets of the Ghost Ants by Clark Thomas Carlton

Short review: In the future humans have shrunk to the size of insects and tamed the ants. But they still have bloody wars over religion, wealth, and power.

Haiku
From the lowest caste
To warlord and then ruler
Still the size of ants

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: In the far future, humans have shrunk to the size of insects and now live a parasitical existence dependent upon the ants, roaches, and termites that are now comparatively the size of draft animals. All of the larger creatures have disappeared, leaving the planet to the insects and the now diminutive humans who coexist with them, but the same lust for power and wealth familiar to those living in the current world remains. Against this backdrop, Clark Thomas Carlton has crafted a story of love, betrayal, oppression, religious strife, and war that remains epic despite taking place in an area that is likely no bigger than a football field.

In the miniaturized future world Anand lives as a member of the midden caste, the lowest caste of the leaf cutter people in Mound Cajoria on the Holy Slope, enduring a life of hard labor and privation while the nobility and priesthood live in opulent comfort. It turns out that not only is Anand a member of the lowest caste, he is a half-breed, the child of a leaf cutter man and a woman of the roach people, who the leaf cutters find both fascinating and revolting, and as such he is the most despised member of the most despised social group on the mound. And from there Anand embarks on a journey that takes him from the lowest of the low to the height of power, although not in a manner or with the results that one might expect.

Early in the book, Anand is taken to meet his mother's people, where he discovers that his birth was not an accident, and the Roach people, or Britasytes as they call themselves, want him to serve as a bridge between their people and the Slopeites of Mound Cajoria. After Anand has been feasted and feted, he falls in love with a Britasyte girl named Daveena and pledges to marry her, but then he has to return to his life of drudgery and oppression in Mound Cajoria. He finds himself setting out for unknown territory with half of the mound dwellers when the colony splits, gets captured by a hitherto unknown group that call themselves the Dranverians, learns a new way of life that rejects the castes and the gods whose priesthoods enforce them, and then returns to Cajoria to liberate his people with the teachings of the Dranverites, only to find that war has come upon the Slopeites in the form of a new threat from the ghost ant-allied servants of the termite god Hulkro.

Through the story, Anand learns and grows, eventually ending up as the innovative war-leader of a movement of disaffected workers from the slope, collections of roach allied people, and the ally of the reluctant noble classes of the various Slopeite mounds as they confront the shared menace of the servants of Hulkro. In the end, victory on the battlefield coupled with the foolishness of his enemies and a political marriage brings Anand to a position he could have only dreamed of at the outset of the book. And yet everything does not finish with a fairy tale wedding. Yes, he marries the princess, but she despises him. Yes, he reforms his kingdom, but at the cost of thousands of lives. Yes, he implements some of the egalitarian reforms espoused by the Dranverites, but his means of accomplishing them causes the Dranverites themselves to reject him. Triumph, it turns out, is a mixed bag.

To a certain extent, the story of power politics and religious intolerance is only half of the point of the book. Slopeite society is unjust, but it seems that a large part of its unjust nature is driven by the symbiotic relationship humans have with the ants they live with. The ants have a rigidly structured society, and so the humans that live with them wind up with one as well, a pattern replicated throughout the various insect allied societies that show up in the game. Human society has become a reflection of insect society, and it should surprise no one that the strictures that insects live under seem ill-suited to humans. And humanity seems to have almost no other choice because humans have not so much domesticated the insects in their lives as they have simply fooled them into not noticing that they live among them by bathing themselves in the insect recognition scent.

Even after Anand has conquered and married the vain Princess Trellana to secure his political position, the stark fact remains that humanity is entirely dependent upon the insects they live among. Everything the humans eat comes from the insects they live with. The dwellings the humans live within are carved out of the nests of the insects they live with. The insects serve as beasts of burden and weapons of war for the humans. When wild insects show up to prey upon the humans, they need their insect allies to help fend off the predators. And so on. And each of the microscopic societies that make up the patchwork quilt of humanity seen in the book is markedly different, and the cause of this seems mostly to be that they have conformed their human lives to accommodate living among their insect companions. And even still the characters remain very human. The nobility exploits the lower classes. The priesthood lies to royalty. Wars take place over religious differences. And so on.

But despite the attention to detail in so many places in the book, there are other areas where physics and biology simply hand waved away. At the tiny scale the story takes place at liquids work work very differently from the way we are used to due to the fact that surface tension would become a significant issue, and yet this never seems to be accounted for in the book. Rain would be something of a natural disaster, causing what would be comparatively torrential flooding with even a summer shower amounting to a deluge that would submerge entire nations. The physics of the very small would fundamentally change the way that tiny humans interact with their environment. The reduced amount of mass for humans would mean that they could tall from a comparatively great height without fear of injury. One human punching another human in the face would be completely ineffective at that size, as their tiny muscles would be unable to generate enough force to cause damage.

The humans in the book seem unaffected by their small size other than the fact that they are now tiny, a development that seems more than moderately implausible. There isn't a direct correlation between brain size and intelligence - after all, some animals such as whales and elephants have larger brains than humans - but there does seem to be a minimum brain size below which one cannot go and expect intelligence, and the humans in Prophets of the Ghost Ants clearly have brains well below this size, and yet seem to be just as intelligent as full-size humans. Everything about the humans in the book other than their size seems to have been unaffected by this radical scale change. Despite the story being presumably millions of years in the future, humans still come in a variety of skin tones, and darker skinned humans are still discriminated against. For a portion of the book it seems like some humans have become enormously more fecund than humans are at present, but then it is revealed that this is simply a byproduct of the diet that they eat. Similarly, for a time it seems that some humans have developed an ability to prevent the spread of fungus through any mounts using their urine, but this too is revealed as a side effect of their diet.

The lack of attention paid to these details seems out of place in the book, because Carlton clearly spent so much time making sure that so many other elements made sense. The human interactions with the insects around them are controlled by using the insects' instinctive reactions to various pheromone scents. Carlton clearly understands how difficult it would be to harness the use of fire on this small scale, and how dangerous it would be as well. Though set in the far future, human technology has regressed to a primitive state in many areas, and this seems to be in large part because of the difficulties that would be inherent in using heat to generate electricity to power technology at such a tiny scale. The result is a fictional setting in which it seems that a fair amount of care has been taken to consider the ramifications of some of the conditions the characters find themselves in, but in which others seem to be simply hand-waved away without much thought.

These issues aside, Prophets of the Ghost Ants remains an engaging piece of fiction built upon an imaginative idea. Even though everything takes place on a very small scale, the scope of the conflict remains epic and the nature of the conflict remains quintessentially human. The book has so much packed into it - from an exploration of class divisions, to the religious hypocrisy of the ruling and priestly classes, to the causes of religiously driven wars, to a coming-of-age story for Anand - that any reader will almost certainly find multiple levels of material in it to interest them.

Clark Thomas Carlton     Book Reviews A-Z     Home