Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (12 page)

Fountain Society

by Wes Craven

Simon & Schuster, 350 pages, hardback, 1999

Despite the pseudo-holographic jacket – it's always a warning when vast extra sums have been spent on the covers of "celebrity" novels – the notion of a first novel by movie director Wes Craven holds a certain appeal to the curiosity.

As always with "celebrity" novels, the first question in the reader's mind is: "Who actually wrote this?" Well, there are just enough examples of writing amateurishness – nothing too offensive in this regard (you'll find more in a David Baldacci thriller) – to persuade us that, unusually in such cases, Craven did indeed write this book himself.

The next question is: "OK, so he wrote it himself. What sort of fist will a movie director make of writing a novel?" This is an especially germane question in the instance of Craven, who over the years has produced a string of the most imaginative horror movies around. You might not
like
a movie such as
Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984), but it – as well as, most especially, the last in that series,
Wes Craven's New Nightmare
(1994) – is packed with extremely interesting and imaginative fantastications, so that the obligatory gore and mayhem are reduced to little more than irritating distractions.

That fertile imagination, alas, is not particularly evident in
Fountain Society
.

The plot is yet another rehash of fellow movie-director Curt Siodmak's
Donovan's Brain
(1943). Peter is a weapons scientist and Beatrice, his wife, is a neurobiologist; both are engaged in hush-hush work for the US Government. Beatrice is one of a team, headed by evil genius Freddy (oh yes?), that is questing for the secret of immortality. Years ago, Freddy experimented with human cloning, inserting the DNA of his volunteer colleagues into the ova of women who came to him for fertility treatments. Peter and Beatrice were among those volunteers.

Peter is dying of cancer. Freddy, in league with stereotyped brute-headed fascist military officer Henderson, sends agents halfway round the globe to snatch Peter's clone, professional shit Hans. Peter's brain is loaded into Hans's body, and the operation seems to be a complete success.

However, Hans had a much younger mistress, gorgeous model Elizabeth. She begins to be plagued by quasi-memories of Vieques, the Caribbean island/naval base where all this hush-hush stuff has been going on; a pseudonymous e-mail lures her there. Peter, meanwhile, has been having wet dreams about a woman he has no conscious memory of ever having known. Elizabeth and Peter/Hans meet on a deserted Vieques beach and, predictably, make the earth move a few times. Elizabeth is baffled as to how formerly selfish lover Hans has become an exquisitely considerate master of the sensual arts.

What has happened, of course, is that the two bodies involved – Elizabeth's and Hans's – are experiencing our old pal cellular memory. It's spoiling no surprises to tell you that Elizabeth proves to be Beatrice's clone: no
wonder
she and Hans were mysteriously attracted to each other on first sight, as if they'd known each other forever ...! And it's not really a surprise that evil Freddy and murderous Henderson will do anything, killing included, to stop our trio from revealing all to the world. But they do not reckon with the fact that the cellular memory inherent in Hans's body means Peter can function as an expert pilot, a boxer with lightning-fast reflexes, and all that stuff.

As a chase thriller,
Fountain Society
is quite fun; it's certainly a far more enjoyable read than Siodmak's original(s) – we must not forget the latter's own rehash
Hauser's Memory
(1968). As an sf or fantasy novel it has, obviously, nothing new to add; and it's certainly, perhaps unexpectedly, not a horror novel. There are some oddities of science:

• Peter had proved that atoms were not merely protons and electrons whirling around a nucleus ...

• With the body temperatures of each men [
sic
] at 23 degrees Centigrade, 7 degrees below normal ...

(To save US readers time with their pocket calculators, 23 deg C = 73.4 deg F, 7 C deg = 12.6 F deg, so "normal" body temperature would work out at 86 deg F. Eh?)

•
We're
two billion years of evolution, you sap! It's the Entropic Principle, Peter – the laws of nature exist because our brains can imagine them.

And then there are oddities of expression, such as the afternoon sunshine making everything "gilded with gold".

All in all, while there are plenty of far worse novels not just published but attaining the bestseller lists, your best idea to satisfy your curiosity about this one is by means of a trip to the library rather than, your hard-earned $25 in hand, a trip to the bookstore.

—Infinity Plus

Prey

by Michael Crichton

HarperCollins, 367 pages, hardback, 2002

It is almost impossible to doubt that the bestselling sf novel of 2002 will be Michael Crichton's
Prey
; it is only marginally less certain that, when lists are compiled by the book trade of bestsellers published in that year in various categories, and of the relative financial performances of one category against another, that
Prey
will be conspicuous by its absence from most if not all of the sf rolls.

Why? Because, despite the fact that it is a fiction set in the near future whose plot depends on an extrapolation from current science, it's not really, you see, a science-fiction novel at all. It's in a different category altogether.

That category is called "Bestsellers".

Now, just before you dismiss this as a trivial point, be aware that the name of the category is somewhat misleading. "Bestsellers" is a marketing term, and by no means all of the books in this category actually sell well. Rather, they are works which the book trade decides in advance of publication have the potential to bestsell, and to which the trade therefore devotes a hugely disproportionate amount of money to be expended upon a marketing campaign designed to persuade readers that this book is among the very best current products of the publishing industry. Such a judgement is based not on any bookseller actually reading the damn' thing – perish the thought! – but simply on a combination of publisher's hype, author's sales track record, cover design, blurb (although even this may not be read), a certain amount of (legal) corruption, and so forth.

Which is not to say that all bestsellers do not deserve their status; simply to explain what the marketing category "Bestsellers" is.

After that preliminary digression, what of this specific example?

In this reviewer's experience, Michael Crichton's novels have a bad habit of reading as if they were movie novelizations written before the fact. Almost all of them have indeed been filmed, and some of those movies have been among the cinema industry's great blockbusters of the past few decades:
The Andromeda Strain
and
Jurassic Park
(and its sequels) are the most notable examples, but others like
Rising Sun
and
Sphere
should not be forgotten ... although some, like
The Terminal Man
and
The Great Train Robbery
(vt
The First Great Train Robbery
), have advisedly been.

Part of this criticism is true of
Prey
; or, to be more accurate, this criticism is true of parts of
Prey
, but they're the least interesting parts – as you might expect – and in a curious way don't affect in any substantive way one's opinion of the novel as a whole.

Jack is a high-flying, cutting-edge computer programmer out of work because, in his last job, he attempted to whistle-blow concerning the corrupt dealings of his boss; as a result, he was fired and a whispering campaign was started within the industry to besmirch his name. His wife Julia more than compensates for the drop in family income, however, being herself a high-flyer in the nanotechnology company Xymos; so financially it's no great problem that Jack stays at home as a house-husband and father while searching for a job. However, and even though he in many ways hugely enjoys this role, it does bring about psychological insecurities; and at first it is to these that he attributes his growing conviction that Julia is having an affair.

His youngest child falls ill with a mysterious skin inflammation – an inflammation that abruptly disappears when the toddler is placed in the MRI chamber for a magnetic scan. Julia accidentally drives her car off the road and, although pretty badly injured, in hospital vociferously refuses to allow herself to be subjected to an MRI scan.

Jack is suddenly phoned by his old company. One of the programs he created for them is being used by Xymos, and is causing problems – not because of any fault in the program's writing but because Xymos have been a tad overambitious in its application. Could Jack step in as a consultant to sort things out? He sees this as an opportunity to get to the truth about Julia's supposed affair, accepts the job, and is immediately on the way – even as she lies in her hospital bed – to Xymos's nanotechnology manufacturing plant somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The particular sphere of programming that is Jack's speciality is that whereby AI is approached not through trying to design an artificial intelligence from above, as it were – through the design of a comprehensive program that will, hopefully, cover every problem the AI might encounter – but through the creation of large numbers of basic units which are given relatively few rudimentary rules; these units, interacting, will evolve new behaviour patterns of their own, and this evolution may generate a compound entity that, if not a sophisticated artificial intelligence, will be something that looks pretty goddam like it. The parallel here is with the so-called "group mind" of ants and termites: an individual termite has so little intelligence it's probably wrong even to use the word, but has
just enough
to grasp a couple of simple rules or imperatives, and it is through the application of these rules or imperatives that colonies of thousands and millions of termites display behaviour patterns that include architectural feats so sophisticated even we ourselves would have difficulty countenancing them.

Xymos has applied such principles to swarms of nanobots, and has released several swarms into the desert in order to accelerate their evolution – their development of exploitable quasi-intelligence. This stratagem has worked far more effectively than Xymos anticipated; unfortunately, the swarms have evolved out of control. Worse still, their imperatives have driven them, so that they may build more nanobots, to seek fresh organic material – in other words, to become killers of living creatures, humans included should humans be available.

That's the first and by far the most interesting part of the book, and it's made even more interesting not just by the author's uncharacteristically sure handling of Jack's situation and introspections but by his copious infodumping: the flashing to and fro between a genuine narrative zeal and fascinating tidbits related to programming, nanotechnology and animal behaviour creates a fine tension.

Then, inexorably, the "Film me! Film me!" side of Crichton takes over as Jack and a steadily attritioned band of Xymos workers endeavour to destroy the swarms through penetrating their hive, blowing things up, enacting cunning plans, and so on. They are countered not just by the swarms but by those humans, including Julia and her supposed lover, who have been taken over by swarms of nanobots and thereby made fitter, stronger and a whole lot nastier. There are things out there, Jim, with which man was never meant to meddle ...

The cracking-adventure part of the book is competently enough handled that one is never positively bored, and certainly it contains more than a sufficiency of filmic set pieces, some designed to take advantage of the very latest CGI special effects. Faces dissolving? – we gottem! Near-invisible swarms of nanobots coalescing into human simulacra? – right on! Fisticuffs in a Frankensteinian laboratory? – you betcha! A daring venture into a creepily atmospheric subterranean hive with spooooooky lighting and lotsa explosions? – Crichton's your man! Even so, its melodrama does seem a heck of a let-down after all the careful work of the first part of the book; the pages may turn faster, but that's merely because there's far less on each of them to engage the interest.

Crichton's denouement is effective within these limitations, and perfectly satisfying in context even although by this time I didn't believe a word of it ... which creates a slight dichotomy of the intellect, because the
very
last thing in the book is a three-page bibliography of perfectly sober books and articles, and I found myself looking at this, too, with a sort of tolerant, amused incredulity. Were they genuinely useful, or was this just an Ann Coulteresque exercise in citation-gallop?

Overall, however, this is a pretty good sf novel, and it's also pretty good as "Bestsellers" go – indeed, the first 140 pages or so are sufficiently fine that you won't have wasted your money even if you don't bother reading the rest of the book. So in a way one begrudges the novel its bestsellerdom very little alongside some of the genuine drek, the truly witless pabulum, that's hyped to the top of the sales charts.

This said, is it not slightly galling that, purely because of the arbitrary classification of this book (like all of Crichton's novels) by the book trade, it is likely to sell several hundred times as many hardback copies in the USA as other sf novels of a similar type that are at least as good and quite often better. The best 2002 novel I've read so far is likewise a near-future sf tale, is likewise extremely accessible to a mainstream readership, gripped far more absorbingly than even Crichton's first 140 pages, and kept this up for the entire book ... yet Elizabeth Moon's
The Speed of Dark
was classified by the trade (and indeed its publisher) not as a "Bestseller" but as "that sci-fi stuff", so 99% of the readers dodging the fortress walls built out of copies of
Prey
at the entrance to every Barnes & Noble in the land will never even have
heard
of Moon's book, let alone think to buy it.

—Infinity Plus