Muddles, Overblown and Derivative: White Devils
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Author: Paul McAuley
Title: White Devils Genre: "Too much," David Bowie used to intone on behalf of MTV, "is never enough." Sorry, Dave, I beg to differ: too much can, indeed, be simply too much. A case in point: Paul McAuley's White Devils, which definitively proves that too much of a good(?) thing just might become boring. Greetings from deepest, darkest Africa, 2050-style. The Dark Continent has long gotten the short end of the stick - its minerals exploited, its people enslaved, its land grabbed by thoughtless colonialists - why should things be any different the middle of the 21st century? In fact, things may be worse than ever before: its population is plague-ravaged and a vast area of the continent's center has been rendered sterile by a genetically-engineered plant disease. The spawn of hundreds of bioengineering firms - most benign, but some malignant - runs amok in a land controlled by transnational companies and a handful of local warlords. Nick Hyde likes it in Africa anyway - it's as good a place as any to disappear, and that's exactly what he wants to do. But when the ex-med student, ex-soldier, turned aid worker is sent to help document a massacre in the jungle, his calm and complacent life is turned upside down. Hyde is one of but four survivors when a research party is attacked by child-sized hominids, ghostly killing machines. When Nick refuses to recant his account of the attack, his life becomes forfeit to Obligate, the company that might as well own what's left of this chunk of Africa. Matthew Faber has his own stable of child-size hominids, the "Gentle People." And he has a smart, famous, and beautiful daughter, Elspeth, who suspects that her father's legacy might include a little more than some retro-engineered Australopithecenes. When a visit to her father's compound plunges Elspeth into a nightmare of her own, it's a sure bet that she and Hyde will combine forces to track down whoever made the White Devils. Will it be her stepmother? her Dad's old running buddy Danny Lovegrave? or someone else entirely? The pair backtrack the trail through the literal jungle of the Congo and through a figurative jungle of double- and triple-crosses, greed, revenge, and even some good old-fashioned righteous killing rage. Even if they can fight their way through the warring tribesmen, a team of hired killers, and the most hostile landscape imaginable, the two will finally face the ultimate test: the White Devils themselves. Probable, Possible, or Plausible? McAuley depicts a near future in which genetic engineering has run amok, a not-uncommon theme in recent science fiction, much of which forecasts an apocalyptic event brought on by uncontrolled genetic experimentation. McAuley's event - pandemic hemorrhagic influenza (think "Ebola") - is, interestingly enough, neither apocalyptic nor anthropogenic. Other than that little bit of information, however, McAuley pretty much lets the post-apocalyptic plot thread peter out. Where he concentrates his prognostication, instead, is upon "gengineering," his coinage for "genetic engineering." McAuley's vision, however, is pretty standard stuff - ground that's been well trod already: humans cosmetically altered, or genetically modified to enhance senses or endurance; strange diseases, and gratuitous alterations of the flora and fauna. Of course he differs in detail from similar works such as Jeff Long's Year Zero or Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: the diseases he invents include one in which human cells are tricked into producing long-chain polymers, so that the victim dies by slowly altering to an ambulatory pile of plastic. Of floral and faunal alterations, he imagines that no surviving butterflies have their original wing patterns - all now sport the logos of soft drinks and sporting goods. But McAuley whimsically (or perhaps not?) has a habit of paying homage to those who have gone before. Like Michael Chrichton's gene-jockeys in Jurassic Park, McCauley's biologists have attempted to reconstruct extinct species - saber-tooth tigers, mastodons, pre-human hominids. Where it gets strange is that the scientists working on these projects had been hired to stock a theme park called "Pleistocene Park." Like the Jem'Hadar of Star Trek DS-9, all the gengineered constructs have been "designed" needing a dietary supplement to survive. And that plant disease that ravaged the African rain forest? It turned all plant life it touched into "cellulose 9"... I got the impression that McAuley is a fan of Vonnegut. Oh, Yes, and he's also watched "Mad Max: Thunderdome" a time or two... As a writer McAuley has fulfilled a portion of his contract with the reader: he's provided a plot, setting, and characters; spiced these main ingredients with heavy doses of violence and mayhem; twisted in a bit of suspense; and spiced the mixture with a bit of love and a pinch of sex. The result, however, suffers from (stretching the recipe metaphor to the breaking point) overcooking. The moment the female lead is introduced, it is a sure bet that she'll eventually connect with the male lead (and they'll do the horizontal bop a time or two). Within a few chapters, it becomes obvious that merely being mentioned in the text is a death sentence (with, of course, the exception of the hero and heroine - maybe). Flat characters are cardboard cutouts, especially the corrupt local military and the soulless corporate drones; scientists are all marvelously competent and dedicated (except the ones who become managers)... And, most of all, everyone has deep, dark secrets - which, when they finally come out, aren't all that deep ot dark after all. Perhaps the worst sin, however, is that McAuley's plot is laden with excess threads. He switches back and forth between the sins of "mind sculpture" and "gengineering," drags his characters through at least one too many firefights, tosses more warlords than necessary at the little team's "epic quest." Pared of excesses, tightened up, and stocked with fewer stereotypes White Devils could be a winner. In its present state, though, it's an also-ran. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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