  Close Encounters of the Worst Kind, 2007-01-08
Hard, near-future science fiction is the most difficult to write because it demands that the writer extend scienctific and technological trends to fit with near-term political and economic realities. Unlike pieces which take the longer view, a short term piece can only succeed if both its characters and its structure are believable. Paul McAuley is a highly educated, erudite, disciplined bio-scientist whose writing credentials suggest that "The Secret of Life" ought to be both readable and entertaining.
No one is expert at everything. Faulkner was perhaps one of the world's best writers because he was able to consistently discriminate between the inclusion of information that is enriching and the addition of descriptive information that serves only as ballast. The scientist as writer labors under a more rigorous discipline - in order for science to be useful and informative, to sustain validity and rise to a wholly inclusive standard, the scientist is obliged to report everything, leaving out nothing, so that those who evaluate the data sets can see where the anomalies arise with respect to the mainstream.
In fiction, especially science fiction, the inability or unwillingness to suspend this all-inclusive approach produces not richness but tedium. And because McAuley is erudite, he is irresistibly compelled to throw in everything including the kitchen sink and all the plumbing that goes with it. The book begins with such a relentless barrage of descriptive materials that the reader is obliged to plow through ten pages before anything meaningful happens. Indeed, McAuley could take a lesson from Dick Francis and Elmore Leonard, whose character portrayals require the reader to fill in the blanks with their own visual images.
While I appreciate knowing that the writer truly understands the entire scope of all the relevant issues associated with his story line, I found it hard slogging to bushwhack my way through the jungle of page after page of gratuitous descriptive material to find the characters and the story line. This makes the book a difficult read for anyone except perhaps those who prefer to read an endless, essentially unrelated litany of facts, simply because they like to know the facts about such things. The problem with even this element of the book is that the vocabulary provided by the author is largely technical jargon understood only by those who possess PhD's in biotechnology, genetic engineering, paleo-geology and astro-physics. Pretty tough sledding for the average reader.
On the other hand, McAuley provides an occasionally resonating glimpse into the catastrophic results produced by political alliances between multi-national corporations with undeclared agendas and the agencies of government created to regulate them. The combination of ruthlessness, desperation, greed and power-mongering found in the corporate characters is more than matched by the parochial attitudes of the radical greens, the Chinese government, committees of the US Senate, academic tyrants, socialist revolutionaries and nut cases that populate the story line.
I found McAuley's depiction of the main character to be unbelievable - not because she was portrayed as being more than human but because the discipline required to rise to the vaunted standard of scientific rigor she is supposed to evoke cannot coexist with a set of personal values which utterly refuse to discriminate between responsible and inappropriate behaviors outside the lab. After working with scientists of all stripes for more than 40 years, I recall meeting none whose hard-won credentials were given such short shrift as Mariella's characteer exhibits. She is simply not believable.
Finally, the most difficult parts of this book are the repeated passages during which McAuley's characters pontificate endlessly about their point of view. The moral, ethical and practical aspects of the consequences arising from the introduction of Martian DNA to Earth's unprotected environment becomes a series of lectures rather than an exercise in mutual discovery. As a reader, I much prefer to participate in the discovery of the mystery rather than be lectured to about it.
The principle question forming the premise of this book is simply stated: If you had reason to believe that life exists on Mars, what lengths would you go to to find it? And if you are willing to operate as if the ends always justify the means, and if you succeeded in discovering a new form of life on Mars, what would you do with it? And what would happen if you did? If you could, would you? And then what?
I'd like to be invited to take the ride from start to finish with all the characters. For me, great science fiction writing is a contact sport. This book fails to rise to that standard.
Big sprawling book with some structural problems . . . ., 2005-07-29
THE SECRET OF LIFE is a big, sprawling, highly episodic book that seems to lack an ending.
On the paragraph level, McAuley writes quite well. For instance, he describes one of his southwestern characters: "She is wearing white, tasseled cowboy boots that add ten centimeters to her not-very-considerable height, white silk shorts and a matching bolero jacket over an orange T-shirt, and shades herself from the noon sun with a fringed parasol. Her skin is so pale the maps of her blue veins show through, her teased and waved blond hair looks as fragile as spun glass." The author weaves a lot of this vivid description through his narrative. When he directs his keen vision to landscapes, he makes Mars come alive for the reader. At this level, McAuley writes very well.
But there are some structural oddities in the book that put me off. After moving into the second section of the book, which puts the central character, Mariella, about to blast off for an exploration of Mars, McAuley -- at this unpromising point -- decides to wander off into the protagonist's distant past and tread water laying out background -- for about 35 pages. He woolgathers about his character's youth, about her academic wanderings from university to university, about her half-successful marriage. What an awful time, when the reader is keyed up for the launch to Mars, to just put all the action on hold. Worse, a large part of this meandering seems to be only borderline relevant to the story. What a way to kill reader interest! I must be honest. I began to skim, because I reached a point I couldn't bear any more.
The episodes set on Mars were excellent, in part through the writer's descriptive skills and in part due to his extensive science background. If one could somehow excise this and make it a short, stand-alone novel, I would rate it a "5 stars." Unfortunately, McAuley seems determined to press on.
The last third of the book -- set back on Earth -- blurs past in a kaleidoscope of changing scenes and settings. Too much, too fast. Every few pages we move to a different locale to the point that we almost lose track of where we are. Characters spin by too fast to assume any reality.
The book has no ending. It just stops. The dangerous alien life choking the seas has not been not vanquished . . . indeed, it has not even been attacked. In lieu of an ending, the final pages wonder out loud how -- possibly -- this peril may be defeated. And yet, I thought the survival of earth and the recovery of the seas was the whole centerpiece of the plot!
In terms of politics and social philosophy, the author sets up some straw men, then proceeds to knock them down one by one. The "greens" who love the earth -- all totally admirable -- are pitted against corporate robber barons. No one is ever ambivalent or complex -- they wear either the white hat or the black hat. "High Noon" with Gary Cooper had more psychological complexity than this.
Still, I must say, the book held my interest very well in part. I made it to the end expecting a conclusion. It was only in the closing pages that I began to realize the author had no intention of writing one.
Intriguing premise, underwhelming execution, 2005-04-04
I have an amazing ability to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. My willingness seems to be inversely proportional to how seriously the book seems to take itself; the more it sets itself up as hard science fiction, the more believable I expect it to be. The Secret of Life takes itself very seriously.
The premise is that a foiled act of industrial espionage releases a Martian microbe into the ocean. With no natural enemies, the organism multiplies rapidly, making growing stretches of water uninhabitable for terrestrial life.
The American government gives a powerful corporation exclusive access and patent rights to the organism. The corporation's proprietary attitude toward the organism and general lack of cooperation ends up hobbling the government's ability to effectively counter its threat. Other forces in the government decide to make an end-run around this obstacle by sending Mariella to Mars to find the source organism - which is not covered by the patent.
I really had trouble buying that a corporation would risk the public relations disaster of being seen as endangering life on earth. It also seemed unlikely that the government would hold the preservation of earth's life as lesser value than a group of patents. It seemed supremely naive to propose a scenario in which other governments (many of which have less than stellar track records on patent protection, anyway) would also honor these patents. So the entire premise of the book was on pretty shaky ground for me. Mariella wasn't a strong enough character to win me over.
I was planning on giving this book 3 stars when I came in here, but reading other reviews reminded me of other things that bugged me about the book. That, and the fact that it was so darn forgettable that I had to remind myself what the book was about (I read it within the past 3 months), made me lower my score.
After looking over some of the other reviews, I think Ms. Klausner misplaced her review. The book she is talking about looks like another book by the same author.
moronic characters - mildly interesting science, 2004-02-06
How could the guy who wrote the books of Confluence - Ancients of Days etc., have penned this stinker? Why do all English Caucasian male
SF authors write from a female heroine narrative? I swear that the last ten books I have read by English White male SF authors
could have been written from the same generic template.
McAuley goes one better - we actively dislike the STANDARD FEMALE
HERO. She takes drugs, sleeps around with darn near anything and her closest friends are a lesbian couple who have "their own"
daughter via implantation. How PC!!!The Flight Engineer of the crew to Mars is a college and state football hero, mandatory brown skin, who "habitually wears a baseball cap turned sideways" with a "PH.D in the esoteric
mathematics of eighteen dimensional space" -you know how relevant
rappers are in advanced math! When I read this I almost fell out
of bed laughing. Why do we always have this racist drivel pumped out by male caucasian SF writers? Ursula Leguinn can handle
a variety of skin tones and biological makeups that have
dignity and value and dimension -this seemingly escapes her male
contemporaries.
If I wanted to read some standard politically correct,I am a modern kind of accepting-guy crap, I would venture to the new age section of the bookstore and not the Science Fiction section.
When the book is not offending you with two dimensional half-wit
characters, McAuley seems to be offering some mystical, cloudy,
objection to Dawkins et al, perspective on evolutionary genetics
without ever actually saying what the alternative might be, outside of some kind of 'holistic' approach. Please, Paul, stick to space operas -you really shine there, but lighten up on the Politically Correct crap - we are all getting very tired of cartoon characters.
A stirring saga of science, Mars, and life, 2003-12-29
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Rating: "A-". A stirring saga of science, Mars, and life, marred by a
weak ending, but well-worth your attention.Paul McAuley's usual topics and tropisms are well-employed in
this new biotech SF-thriller. In 2026 a Martian microbe, secretly
brought back to Earth by a Chinese expedition, is accidentally
released into the Pacific during an attempt to steal a sample by
Cytex, a powerful but unscrupulous American biotech firm. The
Mars-bug thrives, and grows into strange floating islands, which
shed 'slicks' that kill terrestrial marine life. The descriptions of
this strange alien invader are reminiscent of Ian McDonald's
wonderful _Chaga_, with a nod to H.G. Wells' _War of the
Worlds_. I'm not fully-qualified to judge McCauley's biologic
premise (and MacGuffin), which it wouldn't be fair to reveal, but
he's done his homework -- I'm weaselling here because of a
research lapse I'll mention a bit later, but rest assured his premise
is just fine for fiction. Is there a biologist in the house? The Americans send an expedition of their own to Mars, hoping
to duplicate the Chinese discovery. The expedition scientists
include Mariella Anders, our protagonist and a biological genius
on the level of a Feynman or an Einstein. Like most geniuses
(genii?), she is unconventional: Mariella's foibles include body-
piercing, soft drugs, and rough sex. This last is used for blackmail
by Penn Brown, an odious Cytex scientist also on the Mars
expedition. Mariella is a high point of the book, and McCauley's best
character yet, I think. The descriptions of her scientific education
and career are full of neat observations and insights -- McAuley is
himself a former research scientist -- and her portrayal as a
Feynman-level genius is wonderful. A gen-Z greenpunk
biogenius -- all right! The Martian scenes -- about half of the book -- are very fine,
strongly reminescent of Kim Stanley Robinson's RGB Mars
trilogy: impeccable (I hope) research and extrapolation, poetic
descriptions of alien landscapes, palpable excitement in exploring
a new world -- and a sadly-realistic portrait of the techno-squalor
around the Martian settlements, comparable to Swanwick's gritty
(and great) "Griffins Egg". When Mariella returns to Earth, on the run with stolen samples
of the 'Chi', the Martian superbug, the story becomes a more
conventional -- and less interesting -- pursuit-thriller. I lost track
of the cardboard villains and bit-players (I fell asleep), and I'm not
interested enough to go back and sort them out. The dramatic
'climax' is just silly -- Mariella the greenpunk genius as a
charismatic crowd-pleaser at a big bioscience conference -- well,
my dears, you've been warned, it ain't the high point of the book. McAuley makes a few other stumbles, notably in his Southern
Arizona scenes, where he misplaces a mountain range by a
hundred miles [note 1]. And the authorities seem curiously
unconcerned about the rapidly-multiplying Martian 'slicks', even
as they're ruining fisheries and alarming voters. The bottom line: _The Secret of Life_ tackles big, meaty issues,
it's well-written, and it's fun to read. Even though it's not
completely successful, I'd say it's pretty much a must-read for
hard-SF and McCauley fans.
________
Note 1) -- illustrating the danger of using a setting the author
doesn't know well, when he encounters a reader/reviewer who
lives in that setting. This lapse will pass unnoticed by most
readers, but makes me uncomfortable about the quality of his
research in areas I don't know as well. Not that I read SF to learn
science (or geography), but McAuley has a reputation for playing
the hard-SF game with the net up.... And I do hope the many
mangled place-names are corrected in the US edition. Happy reading!
Pete Tillman
(review written 4-01)
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