Finally. A book I didn’t like.
Characters I couldn’t relate to. Action — mostly macho hunting action — that was boring. Dialogue that was even more boring. An antagonist, in the form of a giant burrowing alien, that was intriguing, yet at the same time immensely boring. (In more ways than one. Ha ha.) Some thinly-veiled political allegory about socialism vs capitalism that came in on the boring-o-meter even below the rest. And an ending that came on a-sudden, briefly threatening to move the boring-o-meter, but not having the punch after all.
I have since learnt that this hard-to-find book (it’s out of print; I’m not all that surprised) is based on, or is a homage to, or something akin to, a William Faulkner short called The Bear.
In a way, this explains much of the feel of the book. The feel is old-school: a bunch of men hunting. A bunch-of-men that covers the usual bunch-of-men spectrum, from the old and grizzled, to the young and idealistic (our protagonist, Manuel), from the trigger-happy, to the, well, still trigger-happy. These are hunters after all. It could all have happened in some pioneer enclave in 18th or 19th or even 20th century America/Africa/Asia/Australia/Another A. The fact that it happens on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, hundreds of years in the future doesn’t diminish the old-timey feel.
While I’m being picky, the mix of technologies didn’t gel with me: in fact I think it pretty much has things backwards. In the future imagined in this story, the human race is genius at biological manipulation yet poor at electronics.
On the biology side there is magical genetic engineering (beasts that have been engineered to help terra-form Ganymede) and medical rehabilitation (regrow limbs). And on the electronics side there are crap radios and a general lack of interconnectedness and information flow. Come on, their radios don’t work properly? Really? In the words of a once-popular catchphrase of British comedic origin, “I don’t believe it”. And on that interconnectedness thing I just mentioned, there is not even a hint of the information age in all of this. The people are all disconnected (notwithstanding their faulty radios), and there is a sense of isolation that, even on a moon of Jupiter, I have a hard time coming to grips with. Maybe this is because this book was written back in the 1980s (1990s), before the advent of the World Wide Web. I therefore have the lens of the last couple of decades to look back through, but still, in this age of Facebook and Twitter and RFID and targeted advertisements and GPS and other technological terrors, it grates.
All right, fair enough, maybe in the future we will be genius at genetic engineering and have marvels of medicine that we can’t even dream about today. But to not have radios that work? That, my friends, is bollocks. And lazy convenience for the sake of the story. You see, plot points rely on this incongruence. Radios that don’t work properly, so people can be out of communication at inopportune times. How convenient indeed.
And, if biological science is so far advanced, where are the bioengineered humans? Where are the super-senses, the super-powers? Even if the bioengineering humans to that degree is not a done thing, where are the power-assisted space suits and the other accoutrements? I think that’s the problem: there are no great leaps of imagination in the technology. It reads like a 1950s pulp novel.
To the story: I’m afraid the 1950s pulp novel comparison is still apt. There is an otherworldly vibe going on with the mysterious alien artefact, but the surrounding hunt is just plain uninteresting, and the lack of strong female characters makes it feel too boys own.
I also failed to pick up much in the way of character development. There might have been, but if there was it was too subtle for me. The protagonist felt too passive: things happened to him that he had no control over and his powerlessness transferred to me reading the book. Maybe that was the intention, but it’s not a good feeling.
And the ending? Oh, the ending. With a denouement that stopped off at some orbital facility and had a diatribe on capitalism versus communism that washed right over me, the very conclusion to the book just did not do it for me. OK, people who walk with me wear those T-shirts with the “I’m with stoopid” slogans on them, arrows all pointing at me, but I just did not get the ending. I think there might be some heavily encoded diatribe on the human condition in there somewhere, but I can’t be too sure.
I found the book a shame, because the concept was intriguing: an impervious mysterious alien artefact rumbles around Ganymede — a Ganymede in the throes of being terraformed, what is more — and a boy seems to have a connection with it. But the execution missed its mark for my mind: it felt like I was reading it through frosted glass.
