Recent Reads

Ill Wind, by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason. This thriller begins with an intriguing premise. In response to a disastrous oil spill, an oil company releases a "designer microbe" which is supposed to break down the petroleum. Unfortunately, the microbe's appetite for hydrocarbons turns out to be much less finicky than they had anticipated. Disaster ensues.

Unfortunately, about the middle of the book, the focus shifts away from the mechanics of the authors' doomsday scenario and the book turns into a postapocalyptic survival story of the Enlightened Few versus the Militaristic Barbarians. It's not bad on its own merits, but it didn't interest me as much as the first half of the book in which the "petroplague" and its effects were the center of attention. It is intriguing to contemplate how much of our everyday life, and the infrastructure that supports it, is based on a set of complex, artificially-manipulated chemical substances derived from a substance that was practically ignored until the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Both heroes and villians are ensemble casts. I found that the good guys seemed to blur together. It's the villians of the piece who are truly individualistic, especially one memorably narcissistic sociopath. It's a little disturbing seeing the world through *that* pair of eyes. The authors upset the readers' expectations somewhat by making their first glimpse of a character who will become one of the primary antagonists of the novel a positive one. It's a bit unsettling, and perhaps helps to suggest that "interesting times" sometimes bring out the worst, rather than the best, in people.

Sundiver, by David Brin. Brin's "Uplift" series of books are well known and successful, but it seems to get a slow start in this first book. The "dolphins in space" theme, which seems to become much more prominent in his later books, is here just a minor subplot.

Dolphins, like chimpanzees, have been genetically modified by human beings to achieve sentience. This turns out to be fortunate when humans make contact with more advanced alien races, since it turns out that the whole structure of politics among advanced spacefaring races is based on a presumption that a species can only achieve sentience through being "uplifted" by a more advanced race, which then exercises authority over its "client" species. Humans have no known Patron, but can at least point to two species that they themselves have "uplifted", thus fitting themselves, albeit somewhat insecurely, into the framework of interstellar politics.

It may be that I was just in the mood to be bored when I read this book. The human characters seemed uninvolving and the alien characters freakish. As frequently happens, I found the setting to be more interesting than any of the characters. The protagonist, Jacob Demwa, seems to have an eventful past which is alluded to but never fully explained. As the story opens, he's working in the dolphin uplife project. But before long he's pulled away to help investigate a series of strange occurances on a kind of high-tech bathysphere being used to explore the Sun. People inside the shielded Sundiver have reported seeing apparitions -- "Sun Ghosts" -- in the chromosphere, shapes which appear to have life and volition. This throws a wrench into not only human thought, but the complex prestige-and-protocol system by which the Uplifted races view the universe. For all their superior technology, they have never discovered any such thing, and it may ruffle some feathers (or analogous appendages) to be upstaged by a mere "wolfling" race outside the established system of patronage. Sundiver, and those aboard her, may be delving into an unexplored sphere of hellish heat and pressure, but they're also delving into the philosophical rifts that divide humans into political factions like that technology-admiring "Shirts" and the fiercely independent "Skins", and the far more devious rifts of politics between alien races, some of whom may not care particularly about the best interests of a race of insolent barbarians without any history or connections in the great game of interstellar politics.