Title: The Darwin Elevator
Author: John M Hough
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WorthyReleased: 7/30/2013 ISBN-13: 9780985327811
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a pre-release "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley! I will be reviewing others of this nature in future and will note which ones those are in the review.
I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a brand new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of his story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll usually find elsewhere!
Note that this novel is titled (not entitled!) The Darwin Elevator, not "Darwin's Elevator". Cool author's name - it sounds a bit like Jason and How! (although the last name might be more of a Huff - I don't know!). The title refers to a space elevator at Darwin on the coast of the Northern Territory of Australia. The basic premise of the story is that at some point in the relatively recent past (from the novel's PoV - the story is set in 2283), unidentified aliens with unknown purpose, appeared in orbit above Darwin and set up this space elevator before disappearing. This novel promises to be the first volume in the 'Dire Earth Cycle'. I have to say I find it laughably pretentious when the word 'cycle' is employed in place of 'trilogy' or 'series' whatever the set is supposed to end up as! But let's press on!
Humans began using this elevator, but they discovered that very soon after this was put in place, a viral disease began spreading through the human population, killing nearly everyone. About a million people are left alive: a tiny handful of them had a natural immunity to the virus; another ten percent of the population reacted to the virus not by dying, but by mutating in a form of 'sub-human' which evidently behaves like a ferocious animal. Most people seem to believe that the aliens brought the virus. Since alien viruses are unlikely to thrive in the human community, this suggests that either this popular belief is wrong, or the aliens deliberately engineered the virus specifically to wipe out the human population (or perhaps the "aliens" are actually human?!).
The space elevator emits a field which apparently protects people against the virus, so a small dystopian (yeah, I went there!) community ekes out a living there. A military organization guards the space elevator, sending supplies up to the space station in return for food being sent back down, but there is antagonism between the terrestrial and space communities. How the virus got so out of control so fast is not explored - at least not as far as I've read so far (about 25% in). Why they couldn't figure out how the immunity worked isn't explained yet either. Perhaps people simply died too fast - we’re told they die within four hours, but if the virus was that deadly, then how did it spread?
Talking of Darwin, viruses evolve too, and eventually they 'learn' to coexist or they die out. A virus which is too virulent, as this one is, cannot survive because it kills victims before it has a chance to spread. Of course, this also depends on its vector, and perhaps these questions are answered deeper into the novel than I've read so far.
Again, this is a galley proof, but the quality is excellent. I found only one error so far, which was on page 12, where "climber's" appears when it ought to be (as far as I can tell) "climbers". You may recall, if you've been reading my reviews, that I mentioned a blow-up in England over the misuse of apostrophes not long ago!
The protagonist, Skyler Luiker (an amusing play on Luke Skywalker), is one of the immunes, and with a very small team of similarly immune colleagues, he operates a huge transport aircraft which flies around the world salvaging anything of value they can recover, and bringing it back into the Darwin safety zone for trade. Unfortunately, and all too often, it’s pillaged by the military base in charge of the elevator. Skyler gets a big deal offered to him to recover some records from a space observatory located in Japan - at the limit of the aircraft's range. And so the adventure begins!
There's a dichotomy between the space community's goals and those of the terrestrial community, which is pretty much all about survival and protecting the space elevator which is their food source. Up in space, the man in charge, Neil Platz, has been secretly stocking a module with supplies. His plan is to survive the next visit from the aliens since he fully expects them to return, based on some calculations he and a colleague have made, but he discovers that someone on the station has the viral plague, and he has no idea how this could have happened. The virus is not supposed to be able to grow in the shadow of the space elevator - but perhaps it's evolving after the principles initially set out by Charles Darwin himself, over one hundred and fifty years ago?
Platz has an aid trained as a special forces operative and then who worked as a hired assassin until she realized she couldn't kill people anywhere near as efficiently as the virus was doing. At that point, she threw in her lot with Platz for the opportunity to get into the space station. She kills the infected man and they space him to hide the evidence, but he is not to be the last. Another such victim has been found down in Darwin within the (supposed) safety zone of the elevator. Her death has been, so far, dismissed by people there, but clearly something has changed, and Platz is wondering if the next phase of alien activity isn't a return by the aliens themselves, but a change somehow taking place in the existing status quo.
The Japan trip goes without incident (if you discount an ineffective assault by three sub-humans) and Skyler's team return with their prize - data cubes - and a few other trinkets which will be worth something. When the cubes are delivered to Neil Platz, he tells their middle man, Prumble, that he wants to retain Skyler's team exclusively. Things are definitely changing! Their next trip is a follow up the the Japan trip, but this time to Hawaii to get some related data. From this point on, things start getting tough. Like they weren't already!
Quick bit of humor: there's a bar called 'Ten Backward' (Star Trek fans will appreciate that one!). There's also a problem with one of these telescopes which they visit - we're told it's in a valley between the mountains. That's not usually where telescopes are situated, but I'm willing to let that go because I'm enjoying the story so far. Who knows? I've never been there! Maybe the telescope there is in a valley!
Of course, Tania from the space station is added to their crew, which consists of a sniper, Jake, a pilot, Angus, and the second-in-command, Samantha, who is kick ass. and they run into scores of zombies. Well - that's what they are. I hope Hough has something he's going to do with the zombies because they're just tedious right now. But we get the expected here - Skyler and Tania are on their way to becoming an item after some not-so-subtle telegraphy. This bothers me a bit, because although she's said to be smart, it's not her smarts which have come to the fore but her surpassing beauty - which is evidently rare, ground-side. Can we not get away from this - the broken hero and the outstandingly gorgeous heroine?
Frankly, although I love Indian women, my interest is in Samantha, but how that happened is a mystery because in order to really be interested in someone you have to know something about them, yet we're told nothing about this crew. The description is all around the action, and problems, and how cruel the ground-side director, Russell is. And yes, he's a mean son of a bitch, and so the fact that he's going to get his druthers seems to be telegraphed loud and clear, but we're not going to see it in this volume! We hear scarcely a whisper about the crew, and that bothers me. Samantha is the only one who gets any real airplay but we don't learn anywhere near enough about her.
The story is supposed to be about the crew, in particular, Skyler, but the story isn't about the crew - it's about what the crew does. We're fed scraps, but it's not really enough to get me attached to them at all, so when one of them dies, I feel nothing even as we're told how cut-up the rest of the crew is. I felt nothing because I knew nothing about this crew member. There's still time to fix that (for the rest of the crew, that is!), but Hough has left it damnably late! And in the end it doesn't matter because bad things happen to the crew! Things go to hell in a hand-basket and bad people get their way. Nor do I feel there's any real reason why Skyler and Tania should see anything in each other, although that's the way it all seems to be pointing.
This wouldn't matter in the normal course of things, because it would all work out well in the end. But Hough doesn't end this novel. He leaves the end open for volume 2 (and the end of that open for volume 3?) and that doesn't sit well with me. Things happened that I would like resolution to; two characters seem to have disappeared and I want to know what happened to them, but I will never know unless I let the author blackmail me into reading the next volume, which I refuse to do. I won't do it because I have no investment in this novel and I feel no compulsion to go there! Even though I liked this volume well enough, and will rate it worthy because I don't feel so badly cheated as I did with Paradox for example, I feel no addiction to these characters or to the story. Maybe you will!
