Rating: WARTY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I liked this story initially, but I had several problems with it: some of the writing was a bit off, the story moved slowly, the main character seemed really quite stupid at times, and the premise of a stolen genome was really thin. Even so I might have been willing to rate it positively, but the ending was such a let-down that I honestly can't bring myself to commend it was a worthy read.
The basic story is that of a future world which is highly technological and idyllic, and in which men are completely absent, having died out as a result of a plague which inexplicably seems to have afflicted only men. The story tells us that the plague attacked the Y chromosome in several different ways, which was why it was so successful, but it fails to address the fact that the Y chromosome is largely a degraded X chromosome, so it begs the question as to why this plague didn't affect any women? Why didn't it affect male animals? The chimpanzee genome is almost identical to the human genome, so did all the male chimps die out too? Again, it's never even mentioned, much less addressed. Closer to home, the question of what happened to transgendered people is completely ignored - like they don't exist or worse, don't matter. This was a bad no-no.
Equally bad was a complete failure to address how this had affected the world of human society and industry. While I don't doubt that there are women who would be thrilled were there no men around (and sometimes I don't blame them quite honestly!), I can't imagine that every woman on the planet would have been happy that no men were left. How did that affect life? How did they start to recover? Given that men are so pervasive in business and sports and so on, how did it affect those things? Women can of course fill any role that a man can, but that doesn't mean they come to that role with the same experience as the men who had been, prior to their disappearance, doing it on a daily basis, so what happened in the interim, until the slack was taken up? Did robots fill in?
On that score, this world, replete with AI, seems inexplicably devoid of robots and by extension (so to speak) of male sex dummies! Did every woman become lesbian? How? Why? Did the women immediately start trying to work out how to clone more women? How did that fare? Were there setbacks? Fights? Civil war between women? None of this is addressed. It's like the loss of the entire male half of the population was a complete non-event! While that's amusing to postulate, in practice, it needs addressing. The thrust of the story is not about that, so I didn't expect reams of backstory on the topic (that would have been boring), but to fail to address it at all, not even in passing, in casual remarks here and there perhaps, is inexcusable.
Anyway, after so much time without men, there is a movement and a scientific project that's been going on for five years, to recreate the male genome. It's not explained how come there isn't anywhere a computer file, hard drive, set of disks, or textbooks or anything remaining as to the male genome.
Given that the male genome is almost identical to the female one, it isn't explained why it's taking so long - except for some vague and farcical hand-waving about the virulence of the virus, and the fact that the genome must be robust enough to counter it, but this made little sense. If it attacked only human males and all human males died out, then the virus had to either die out along with them, and so would not be a problem, or it had to find a reservoir in which to survive and in time, to evolve. If it evolved, it would be a huge and ongoing problem, threatening even the female population! None of this is addressed, not even in passing.
One of the biggest problems in these dystopia type of stories is the failure to address the rest of the world. Did all humans die out or was it just in the US? If so, there are already males in other countries! Did even the males on the International Space Station die out? Those on remote islands? Even if they did, other countries are probably working on bringing men back and at the very least, they certainly have the genetic information available, but this story behaves as though the US is the only country on the planet!
Unfortunately, that's the blinkered tack that far too many of these futuristic stories take, and it makes the story seem really dumb. None of that was adequately addressed. I don't imagine for a minute that if all men disappeared, suddenly every country would get along and throw away its nationality to join together and make a world alliance. People aren't like that, not even women. If the US Republican women can't bring themselves to join the US Democrat women in issuing a condemnation of the president's repeated misconduct (at best) towards women, how can you expect women from entirely disparate nations to ever agree on anything like a world government?
Even without all of those issues though, the big problem with this novel was that the main character repeatedly came off as being less than sharp. She kept having dreams in which an urgent message was imparted to her. Now admittedly in keeping with this kind of a story, the message was vague to the point of uselessness - and frustratingly and irritatingly so - but this doesn't change the fact that something urgent was going on, and yet Athena never once reacted to this like it was an issue. She just let it wash over her like nothing was wrong, no problem existed, she was not somehow chosen to resolve a supposedly serious issue, and so on. This made her look stupid to me, like some sort of lackadaisical country bumpkin who just didn't get it.
Like I said, it didn't help that the dream warnings she kept getting were annoyingly vague. It's so reminiscent of other stories or movies/TV shows I've encountered where the psychic gets warnings of an impending murder or a disaster, yet they never get detail enough to stop it. Instead of "Stephen Davidson is going to be murdered by David Stephenson on the corner of Fifth and Main in Big City with a knife at two in the morning on Tuesday the eighteenth," all they get are the most worthless and vaguest of details and it's really irritating.
It would have been far more interesting had the warnings been specific, but something else had prevented the protagonist from getting the problem solved, but this was not such a novel. This one was of that same, vague, irritating nature, and given where the warnings were coming from, they ought to have been much better, but the worst part about this was again Athena's complete lack of motivation. She was so passive throughout, that she herself was annoying.
The reason that the premise was thin with regard to the genome being completely gone was several-fold. First is the ambient ignorance that seems so pervasive when it comes to how information is stored in a computer. There seems to be this crazy notion that if the information is copied, it's not really copied, but instead it's actually removed from the original and shifted entirely to another location. This isn't how copying works.
The problem here seemed not that someone had copied the genome, but that the genome was gone: i.e. erased. It is possible to delete the information, but deleting normally doesn't actually delete it, it simply marks the location as vacant - so it can be used for other storage, but unless the storage has been significantly overwritten since the deletion (which is how it's truly deleted), it's quite possible to recover it.
Having said that and in view of some information that became revealed later in the story, it's possible the thief did erase the information, and in such a way that it was impossible to recover it, but never once was this mentioned, nor was it explained how this thief got by the AI watchdogs. Instead, there was just this bland and blind assumption that it was gone and there were no backups, which was profoundly stupid. Of course there are backups, and unless the people operating the system are complete morons, the back-up is off site and in a secure location, preferably on a different medium that does not permit electronic outside access. So for example if you have some songs on your computer and also stored on disks, then if they're accidentally erased from the computer, you can restore them from the disks.
Now if even one person had simply asked, "It was deleted? Can't we recover it from off-site backup?" and was given a definitive "No!" (because the backup had been tampered with, for example), then the story would have made a lot more sense, but no one, not even the police captain in charge of the inquiry, ever asks this. It was a glaring hole through the whole story, but nowhere near as glaring as the fact that this whole thing was a charade, but I can't go into that without revealing a plot point (not that the plot ever pursued that point - which accounts for my dissatisfaction with the ending, an ending which just sort of fizzled out).
There were some oddities in the text here and there, such as when Athena who has of course never met a man, views them fantasy-like as having rough, calloused hands and strong arms. Whence this idea of what men were like? Maybe she read it somewhere? The thing is that it doesn't say that in the text, so it leaves this question hanging as to how she knows - or more accurately, why she has this bizarre idea of what a man is like. It's never addressed, nor is it addressed why Athena, evidently a lifelong lesbian, is suddenly fantasizing, completely out of the blue, about strong men.
At another point in the text I read the word "brusk" - except that it's not a word. The actual word is 'brusque', which comes to us from the French, via the Italian, via the Latin (as always it seems!) from a word meaning a brush, so it's really apt, but you'd never know that from 'brusk' which sounds like some sort of snack food for a teething toddler. It would seem that the misspelling used here is disturbingly becoming acceptable. The problem with such linguistic languor is that we lose the root of the word, and our language becomes poorer for it.
At another point I read, "The sky had turned from dark black to dark blue" but isn't dark black just...black? Another kind of oddity arrived when I read, "At the bottom if the box lay a small, pink, sapphire object." The problem with this is that sapphire isn't pink. Sapphire is a precious way of saying of aluminum oxide and it can come in orange, purple, and yellow as well as the more commonplace blue, but if it's red, then it's not a sapphire, it's a ruby! So whence the pink sapphire? No idea. By 'sapphire-like' was the author talking about the shape of it? But 'sapphire' isn't a shape, so I have no idea what was meant there.
One more thing I found confusing was when Athena, looking out of her apartment window one morning, spies a river of delivery drones so thick it obscures the pedestrians below it on the street. The thing is that in this world, everyone apparently has 3D printers in their home to make things, such as clothes, and even breakfast, so why is there this massive need for delivery drones? What are they delivering - masses of printing 'ink'? This seems to have been one more case where this world hasn't quite been thought through, and it happened way too many times. That and the thin plot and lackluster main character really disappointed me, and I therefore cannot commend this story.
