BOOK REVIEWS

1999, Part K: November 1999

1999, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this month:

 

 

Virus Ground Zero
Ed Regis

Pocket Books, 1996, 244 pages $31.00 Can. hc, ISBN 0-671-55361-5

In 1995, a book titled The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, caused a stir among the American public. A dramatic non-fiction account of Ebola outbreaks in Africa and in a Washington DC suburb, it was propelled to the top of the bestseller lists by a combination of good writing, great reviews and an uncanny sense of timing: A few weeks after its initial release, another Ebola outbreak in Zaire made headlines and bolstered sales of the book.

Virus Ground Zero is, in many ways, a follow-up to The Hot Zone. It describes in detail the 1995 African outbreak. It draws an unofficial history of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the world's foremost anti-viral agency. It also aims to puncture the myth of "the coming plague", fostered in part by books like The Hot Zone. The result is a triumph of anecdotic storytelling, but a dismal structural failure.

The framework of Virus Ground Zero is provided by the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire. Regis meticulously -but entertainingly- describes the evolution of the outbreak from the initial cases to the ceremonial end of the emergency. It's a naturally gripping tale, with the detective-like work of tracking down the origin of the virus and the culture clash between American experts and third-world Zaire. Additionally, this being the nineties, the epidemic naturally becomes a media event, and the most blackly amusing parts of the book describe how the media presence in Kikwit was more numerous than the CDC virus experts, and far more obnoxious.

Regis adds to this report an unofficial (read; not always laudatory) history of the Center for Disease Control. Born out of the need to control Malaria in the United States in the 1940s, the CDC quickly grew outside its first assigned bounds to take on more and more duties outside malaria control or even disease control. By the nineties, the CDC had become a massive bureaucracy where only a tenth of all resources were directly assigned to infectious diseases. But the CDC can at least boasts of some significant successes: In the seventies, their efforts managed to erase smallpox, one of humankind's oldest enemies, from the face of the Earth. This story, and many others, are interwoven in the book.

And there lies the most significant weakness of Virus Ground Zero; a lack of organization. From the beginning, Kikwit crisis and CDC history are alternately covered, without clear chapter distinctions or indications. It's as if Regis flits from subject to subject as he likes it, ignoring chronology and often leaving "cliffhangers" at the end of each snippet, which won't be answered until much later in the book. Such a structure is fine for novels, but for a serious nonfiction scientific vulgarization, it's a fatal mistake. Even worse; there is no index. You can't reasonably use Virus Ground Zero as a reference book because there's no way of quickly locating an element. How these types of blatant omission still make it in today's publishing industry are left as a perverse exercise to the reader.

The real shame of Virus Ground Zero is that Regis is, basically, a rather good vulgarizer. His writing style is clear and witty. He selects good anecdotes and presents them in a way that make a point clear. He isn't afraid to criticize when it's appropriate. His explanations are clear and to the point. His central thesis -based on his examination of the non-event that was the Kikwit outbreak- that there's no such thing as "a coming plague" is carefully documented and does seem reasonable.

But presentation is often as important as content, and so Virus Ground Zero fails on factors external to the content. There would be several easy way to "fix" the book, from a simple index to a complete chronological re-organization of the book, but the current product is a nightmare of structure, a bunch of good stories impossible to consult efficiently.

 

 

The Perfect Storm
Sebastian Junger

Harper, 1997, 301 pages, $8.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-06-101351-X

Humans are not aquatic creatures. Even though our lineage most probably goes back to an H2O-saturated environment at some point, we're the product of a few million years of straight land-based evolution. We are, in our current form, ridiculously ill-equipped to cope with water in large quantities.

Maybe that why so much good literature has been about the sea. Melville's Moby Dick, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, etc... As comfortable landlubbers, we often forget how fundamentally inhospitable the ocean can be. Now here comes Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm to remind us of it once again.

In October 1991, a combination of factors along the northeastern Atlantic coast all contributed to the creation of "a perfect storm" --a storm that could not have been worse. Caught in the middle of it: The Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat with a crew of six men. They never made it back to port. The Perfect Storm is, in part, the story of their demise.

Not a cheery premise for a documentary, nor an easy one. How can we know what happened aboard a boat which disappeared at sea? Junger confronts the question in the introduction by stating up-front that he's using descriptions of similar events to describe the fate of the Andrea Gail, that he resisted the impulsion to make up quotes, that he interviewed friends and relatives to get an idea of the men's last days on shore. And, by and large, the book plays fair to this ideal, neither inventing or dramatizing facts. The narrative is filled with "it might have been the case", "did these men...?", "in similar cases" and other carefully-modulated modifiers. It doesn't matter: The book creates a convincing aura of authenticity.

Junger also sidesteps the question by adding other elements than the disappearance of the Andrea Gail to The Perfect Storm. We get to see the end of a yacht cruise, hair-raising rescues by National Guardsman and other dramatic events that happened during the storm of 1991. This broad focus helps maintain the interest in he book long after the Andrea Gail has gone under.

As for the quality of the book itself... well, it's obvious from the start that The Perfect Storm will be a superior read. Honest human interest bolsters technical details about the fishing industry and the result is both highly informative and compulsively readable. Junger not only did his research, but presents it in a way that's almost unequalled. Few books attain the level of intense fascination created by Junger. The result is a memorable work of documentary fiction.

A movie script has been adapted from The Perfect Storm, and is -as of this writing- undergoing the final stages of the primary shooting. It remains to be seen if the film will be able to translate Junger's carefully researched facts and documentary vulgarization to the big screen. Initial gut reaction would seem to indicate otherwise and this, coupled to the anti-dramatic structure and the unhappy finale, might not presage well for the finished product. Still...

The potential appeal for the book itself, in the meantime, is enormous. Non-fiction fans will find a book far better-written than the norm in genre. Docu-fiction fans will be fascinated by the accessible technical details and the meticulous research. Your basic reader, finally, will read the book in a single seating, grip the armrest of his comfy chair and change his mind about how he thinks we humans master the sea.

 

 

A Signal Shattered
Eric S. Nylund

Avon/EOS, 1999, 378 pages, $34.00 Can. hc, ISBN 0-380-97514-9

WARNING: Given that A Signal Shattered is a sequel, this review contains complete spoilers for Eric S. Nylund's previous novel A Signal To Noise. If you haven't read the first volume... you don't want to know.

Don't you hate sequels? Tired retreads of a once-successful premise, shamelessly exploited for commercial gain? Scarcely original tacked-on adventures to characters who would otherwise enjoy a good, uneventful off-screen life?

Well, A Signal Shattered, despite following the events of Eric S. Nylund's Signal to Noise, isn't a sequel in the most vulgar of terms. It's quite apparent that this is meant to be the logical conclusion of the events of the first book; a fully intended extension. Indeed, this novel begins scant seconds after the end of the previous volume.

Jack Potter is still stranded on the moon after Earth's destruction. With him; a motley crew of monks, spies and assassins. Even though they survived the catastrophe, they're still far from safe: their oxygen is running low, they don't have much food and they're all desperately tired. Within minutes, they're also under attack by unknown forces. And there's plenty of opposing sides, from Jack's old friends to hostile alien forces...

It's a cliché to say that a book was "breathlessly paced", but this is indeed the case with A Signal Shattered. The novel never stops, as crises are piled over new developments and Jack must cope with everything at once. This eventually takes its toll on the reader, who must eventually take a break from this breakneck pacing. Even with Nylund's best intentions, the book is still 378 pages and even if it's constantly exciting book, it's not a short one. Fortunately, Nylund's writing is sufficiently clear to carry the reader forward during the whole book.

Fans of the first volume have certainly noted the ease with which Nylund played around with hard-edged scientific concepts, from biology to physics with a heavy emphasis on information science. This novel continues the trend, with Nylund even making a strong push toward Greg-Egan territory with the dizzying big-idea finale. While not as easily graspable as the ones in Signal to Noise, the techno-innovations in A Signal Shattered create a convincing aura of pure SFness.

More than just a simply good conclusion to the story begun in Signal to Noise, A Signal Shattered also marks the potential beginning of a major new SF talent. If Nylund can keep up the clear writing, the fresh approach, the easy familiarity with techno-gadgets and the good pacing of his two latest SF books, he could easily become one of the next decade's SF stars. Though it would help to keep the whole story in one volume...

BRIEFLY: Nylund's Dry Water is a contemporary fantasy that nevertheless shows his SF roots though an SF-writer protagonist, various classic references and a spirit of systematic extrapolation that underlines the best SF. Dry Water is unfortunately a bit too scattershot to succeed fully, bringing in disparate elements together instead of focusing on the strengths of the Really Interesting stuff. Impatient readers, for instance, could solely concentrate on the Larry Ngitis passages and skim the other viewpoint characters without missing much. Generally speaking, the book is at its strongest when strongly rooted in reality, which makes the various "Dry Water" digression more annoying than satisfactory. It also gets a big too big for its bounds, to the detriment of a nice yarn. Still, if not a recommended book, it remains an interesting one.

 

 

Meg
Steve Alten

Doubleday, 1997, 211 pages, Book Club Edition, ISBN 0-385-48905-6

There are two ways to write a novel. The first one is to reach into your personal experiences, pull out your opinions and emotions about life and write a honestly moving narrative that works for you first, and everyone else after. The second way is to tailor a product to the marketplace, designing the flow of the novel to appeal to a large public and really aim for a mass audience. In a nutshell, that's supposed to be the difference between "literature" and "bestsellers".

Self-proclaimed artists will try to make you believe that writing literature is considerably harder than writing a bestseller. But is it really so?

While there is some truth to the widely-held observation that bestsellers are more formulaic than other types of fiction, it still takes great skill to put together the elements of a successful mass-market novel.

It's almost a given that first, a bestseller needs an intriguing premise. Meg not only promises something similar to JAWS by loosening a shark upon an unsuspecting human population, but actually promises more than JAWS by featuring something much bigger: A twenty-ton, sixty-foot-long Carcharodon Megalodon. "Meg" to its friends. An escaped Jurassic-era relic of unheard-of proportions: It features a head as big as a pickup truck armed with nine-inch-long teeth "with the serrated edges of a stainless-steel knife." [P.4] And, being a shark, it has all of the superior perceptive and motor skills of the world's most enduring predator.

The Meg is introduced in the first two chapters. The human characters come much later. There's the brilliant-but-flawed protagonist Jonas Taylor (no points for predicting what happens to a hero with a surname like that,) a paleontologist with a deep-reaching trauma. There's his wife, an ambitious journalist with plans to discredit her husband in order to divorce him with justification. (No point for guessing what happens to such a conniving woman.) There's Terry Tanaka, a young Asian woman with something to prove. Plus the usual array of colorful supporting characters, whether they're allies or not. They're realized competently, well-within the usual standards of the genre.

What happens with this premise and these characters is, like you'd expect, a book-long monster hunt. First Jonas has to go to the Meg, deep down at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. Then the Meg has to escape its natural habitat and wreak havoc, first in Hawaii then along the Californian coast. It's all very exciting, just as we'd expect it.

Ultimately, thrillers like Meg can be evaluated on their potential cinematographic strengths. And that where this novel truly shines. By the time one throwaway scene near the end basically destroys nine news helicopters in a mid-air crash, you can only grin in sadistic delight and buy the movie rights. A shark with a head as big as a pickup truck makes for memorable scenes!

The remainder, characters, dialogue and psychological unsophistication, is just dressing on the cake. Meg isn't JAWS, but it's good enough to be a worthwhile read on its own. "Two Words: JURASSIC SHARK" says the end-cover blurb. Not a bad review, in a nutshell.

[May 2007: I really tried to enjoy the next two entries in the Meg series, but they illustrate what happens to a good concept when you wring it dry. Both The Trench and Primal Waters fall into the trap ofdoing the same thing over and over again: The Meg gets loose, the Meg reappears and eats people, the Meg is captured, killed or driven away. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Primal Waters is a bit more interesting than the second tome thanks to some easy pot-shots at reality TV and a delirious scene involving baseball fans, but that's about it. Plus, there's something depressing about each novel beginning by driving accursed protagonist Jonas Taylor deeper in despair in order to give him some dramatic stakes. Alten: Let. It. Go.]

 

 

Borderlands of Science
Charles Sheffield

Baen, 1999, 367 pages, $32.50 Can. hc, ISBN 0-671-57836-7

We live in interesting times. Everywhere you look, things are changing, and they're changing at an accelerated rate. It used to be that a decade could pass without perceptible difference. Not anymore. Going back a decade from 1999 brings us to a world still locked in a cold war, without Internet, without decent personal computers, without quasi-classic cultural references like JURASSIC PARK and TITANIC. Anecdotal evidence aside, we are now collectively running along in a race called Progress.

Most of this progress is fuelled, directly or not, by science and technology. In Borderlands of Science, noted scientist and SF author Charles Sheffield tries to establish what is the extent of today's knowledge. "This book" writes Sheffield in his introduction, "defines the frontiers of today's science." This isn't an easy task, and even though Sheffield makes valiant efforts, the results still fails short of his ambitions.

Part of the problem, as Sheffield himself acknowledges, is that science is so mind-bogglingly all-inclusive and specialized to the point of rarefaction, that no sane individual can aspire to know all about it. Sheffield is, by formation, a physicist/mathematician with a body of experience in astronautics. This makes him an ideal writer to talk about physics and space exploration, but that doesn't make him an authority in chemistry, biology or computer science. Indeed Borderlands of Science falters when it tries to dissect these subjects, an impression strengthened by the pell-mell organization of the book.

The second problem of this book is that it's targeted, not to a general audience, but to aspiring science-fiction writers. You would think that publisher Jim Baen, in his marketing genius, would aim for a layman's audience numbering in the... oh... few millions. But instead, Sheffield passes his time pointing out potential "story ideas" where simply stating the state of current research would do just as well. Granted, this is an artifact of the book's origin (it derives partly from a series of lectures given by Sheffield to a bunch of wanabee SF writers), but it's still annoying to the (far numerous) readers without any interest in mining "story ideas" from this book.

Another marketing misfire is more readily obvious, at least on the hardcover edition: As it is now common with Baen large editions, their art geniuses have slapped a coat of metallic paint on the cover, making it garishly unpleasant to look at. Of course, given the already-ugly nature of the illustration itself, this might have been done intentionally. Still, Borderlands of Science deserved a more restrained cover along the lines of most popular-science books.

Even despite these various flaws, Borderlands of Science manages to be a pretty decent scientific vulgarization book. Sheffield writes with a certain amount of wit, and the result is a book that goes deeply into scientific jargon, but which always return before it's too late. Even though the structure is a bit hesitant at times, there is a very complete table of content, index and many documented references.

In short, a decent popular-science read for hard-SF fans.

[January 2000: Bad news for Sheffield: The ideal limits-of-science book already exists, and is called Visions, by Michio Kaku. It actually begins with a question raised by Sheffield at the end of his book: "Is this the end of science?" and proceeds from there by saying that the basic discoveries have been nailed down, but that the science of mastery awaits... Read the review, or the book, for more details.]

 

 

Sea Strike
James H. Cobb

Berkley, 1997, 351 pages, $8.99Can. pb, ISBN 0-425-16616-3

Military techno-thrillers are usually written by men for men, starring men fighting against other men with carefully described weapons in imaginary wars taking place in the not-too-distant future. More attention is usually given to the geopolitics, the fancy weapons and the action scenes than to character development or fancy prose. It's an unusually popular genre, at least if we judge it by its foremost practitioners: Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, Larry Bond have all spent some time on the bestseller charts, reaping the results of some pretty good efforts. With Sea Strike, James L. Cobb manages to produce a decent novel that perfectly fits into the genre, and provides good entertainment for any reader.

Cobbs innovate within his field by featuring a female protagonist: Amanda Garrett is the captain of the USS Cunningham, a stealth destroyer featuring the latest in high-tech devices. It's not the first time that the genre has seen major female characters (Clancy, for instance, has several strong female roles), but never so much at the forefront. Cobbs gets further points by convincingly building Commander Garrett as a reasonably realistic heroine. This reviewer was not enthused by the romantic subplot, but other readers might think otherwise.

Sea Strike won't turn off many readers by the difficulty of its prose style, which is still as efficiently functional as the best other novels of its genre. The technical descriptions are painlessly inserted, and the action scenes are detailed with the proper mix of detail and directness.

Of course, all of this takes a second seat to original plotting and cool but interesting realism. Fortunately, Sea Strike performs equally well in both areas.

In matters of geopolitics, Cobbs goes to good old China to find its antagonists, though things are made more interesting by a civil war involving not only Chinese dissidents, but also Taiwan. Though some passages dealing with internal Chinese matters could have been edited out of the novel, the development of the crisis is well-handled, doesn't seem too outrageous (once you get around the idea of a Chinese civil war) and competently presents both the military and the diplomatic side of things.

In terms of cool techno-gadgetry, Sea Strike remains in the realm of the believable, with only a few minor gadgets besides, of course, the USS Cunningham stealth destroyer itself. The gadgets are effectively used, however, and the technical jargon isn't undecipherable.

The emotional mark of distinction for this type of literature isn't a sense of wonder, of loss or of affection, but a sense of cool novelty from the action scenes. The best techno-thrillers (like Payne Harrison's Thunder of Erebus, or Harold Coyle's Sword Point) all feature individual vignettes, neatly integrated in the action but at the same time standing on their own as mini-scenes of inherent coolness. They must be visually spectacular, technically innovative and not without a certain sense of panache and ironic humor. Sea Strike has a few of them, from the smashing demise of a Chinese nuclear submarine to a last-last-minute helicopter rescue. They don't take Sea Strike to the classic level, but they certainly brings back some of the sheer fun of this type of novels.

The end result is a novel that's quite enjoyable. Normally, this wouldn't warrant a recommendation, but given the sad late-nineties state of the military technothriller as compared to its heydays of the early nineties, Sea Strike is certainly worth picking up for fans of the genre. James H. Cobbs has proven his belonging to the genre, and we can only await his next novel.

 

 

Blue Justice
Jeannine Kadow

Signet, 1998, 400 pages, $8.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-451-19588-4

From time to time, it happens that an otherwise good novel suffers from one single wacky element, a part of it that just seems incongruous with what we expect, or what we consider to be "acceptable". It happens that this single element destroys the novel, illustrating other structural flaws or simply turning the reviewer from an unbiased to a negative state of mind.

Blue Justice has such an element, in the character of Maria Alvarez, "a gorgeous 19th Precinct beat cop with a license to kill... and kill again." She not only the Police Commissioner's daughter, but she's also a flaming psychopath, serially sleeping with the whole NYPD police force, harassing co-workers and -oh yeah, that too- killing other police officers by the hearseload.

It stretches, bends, twists and crooks believability not only to include such a character in a book, but to base a whole novel around such an element. The logical blunders are so big that they threaten to engulf the reader's good faith. How are we to believe that such a twisted character could become a police(wo)man? How are we to accept the fact that she's never been found out by any other person? How are we to gulp down the assumption that she killed almost a dozen police officers in a year and no one figured out that she was romantically involved with most -if not all- of these policemen? How should we react to the idea that she could go around harassing a fellow police officer (charging harassment, hanging dead eviscerated cats in his locker, charging rape then retracting it, sending ominous letters, making unpleasant phone calls, etc...) in complete impunity?

These are the questions at the start of the novel. But then something quite wonderful happens; the narrative makes you accept it and you're in for the ride. Blue Justice isn't your usual cop novel; it twists the usual assumptions, takes a few large risks and ends up as a pretty interesting piece of work despite never being quite believable.

Most of the novel's strength is in the characters, from the thirty-year veteran Ed Gavin to rookie Jon Strega, tough-nails detective "Cue Ball" Ballantine and Ivy-league blond supercop Hansen, without forgiving psycho Alvarez. These are no simple caricatures, or movie cliché stereotypes. Struggling relationships, devious criminals and internal demons all vastly complicate our protagonists' lives. Things never go quite as well as planned, never to the appropriate persons. If Hollywood would be to bring Blue Justice to the silver screen, critics would be running to their word processors in order to call it "brilliantly revisionist" and such.

The premise of the book itself isn't conventional. Veteran Gavin is clued in that a rash of police suicides (including his partner) isn't as simple as it would seem, but even though he zeroes in on the killer's identity, it's never as simple as bringing in the handcuffs. Other things have to be attended to, and while these "other things" are mostly extrataneous to the remainder of the novel, they also constitute most of the atmosphere. In passing, we get a good look at the NYPD and its own little quirks and internal particularities.

While Blue Justice never overcomes this initial feeling of oh-goodness-I-can't-believe-it outrageousness, it still manages to pull itself together and deliver a good police procedural. The writing style is enjoyable, and the pacing is dynamic enough to compensate for other flaws. Maybe more interesting for jaded readers of the genre, Blue Justice is nevertheless worth a look. Just be ready to give some slack to the psycho killer.