Rating: WARTY!
According to the book cover, the Star-Telegram out of The Fort Worth (that's the best they could do! LOL!) says that Gene Wolfe is among the best writers working in this country - although a search of the Star-Telegram's website returns zero results for 'book review gene wolfe'. Admittedly, the Star-Telegram's search engine sucks majorly, so maybe it's in there - it's just impossible to find. Google is no better, however, at finding it, so what are we to conclude? Well I conclude that whoever wrote this acclamation (assuming someone actually did) doesn't know what they're talking about. In pursuing their desire to discover what her dad knew, Coldbrook and Smithe track down an astrophysicist her father had visited, and this "best writer" turns him into a clichéd university eccentric professor wearing tweeds, smoking a pipe (this is in the future, remember) with a clammy handshake. Seriously, that's the best this 'best writer' can do?
Coldbrook is the girl whose father and brother have died, apparently in connection with something in a novel her father had locked in his safe. Smith is the clone of the author of the novel, titled "Murder on Mars". Coldbrook checks him out in order to try and figure out what happened. In this world, writers are cloned after their death and the clones are stored in libraries where they can be consulted and checked-out like library books. I found this an intriguing idea, but the execution of it made no sense, and I quickly grew tired of the amateurish writing.
This book was published in 2015, yet it has a 1950s feel to it. Let me complement that by saying I don't mean that as a compliment. There was something off about it, and it wasn't just the first person PoV which I typically don't like. That wasn't so bad in this case, but there was something off about the writing. The story, which is told from the clone's perspective, is about Colette Coldbrook and EA Smithe as I mentioned. The latter is called a 'reclone' but I have no idea why. Clone is quite sufficient. If you clone someone a second time, it's still a clone. At first I thought 'reclone' was being used to indicate when someone had been cloned before, but this was not the case, so this pretentious use of a meaningless word was annoying. It is, however, typical of the way in which sci-fi writers write.
Talking of which, the cloned authors aren't even allowed to write, so we're told. There is more than one "edition" of the clones, so what I didn't get the value of this when databases and AI's could do the same thing much more cheaply and without any controversy. I mean, what happens when you borrow one from library A and another from library B where they've 'grown up' apart and so are different? Which one is closest to the original? We do learn what happens when they are found to be no longer of use - they're burned. How that works in detail isn't explained. What also isn't explained is what happens when the clone exceeds the age at which the original died? Are they killed and cloned anew? I cannot imagine any society tolerating this! At the very least, even if the majority accepts it, there would be a solid and vocal movement against it, but we never hear of such a movement - at least not in the fifty percent or so of this novel that I read.
Smithe is kept in a library, and these library clones are not considered human, but how that ever came to be goes unexplained. Library clones have to sit on a shelf in the library - a shelf designed to resemble a small room,with one wall missing. They're required to stay there through library opening hours, but can get out and wander around when the library is closed, yet despite their demeanor being exactly that of a regular human being, not a one of them seems to have any issue with the fact that they are essentially prisoners and slaves.
The book, "Murder on Mars, was the only thing in her father's safe. Her brother had the safe opened after dad died, and now her brother is dead too. Two henchmen men show up at Coldbrook's apartment demanding the book, but they leave without it. Evidently these two victims are safe until and unless the henchmen find out where the book is. The blurb tells us, of the book, "It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police," but the book isn't lost. It's in her possession as it had been from the start of the story! Unless she loses it later, beyond where i could stand to read, then this is an outright lie!
Coldbrook struck me as precisely that - a cold brook. She was unpleasant and completely anal. When she takes her borrowed man home, even though she has a large apartment with many rooms, she confines him to the living room and bathroom, flatly refusing to let him use bedroom or even the kitchen. After the tough guys have tied-up both Coldbrook and Smithe (naked!), ransacked the apartment and then left, Smithe gets himself free, and using a knife from the kitchen, he cuts her free too, yet she chews him out for going in the kitchen! What a bitch!
Evidently there's something critical in that book, because when, out of curiosity, they try to obtain another copy by ordering it from a book printing shop, there are no more copies to be found. The story was therefore interesting if annoying. What could be in a book - a book that was until recently widely available, that suddenly became important when that one copy got out of the old man's safe? Unfortunately, I quickly lost interest in what the mystery was because the writing was so awful, and the world-building so nonsensical. I mean, for example, that these clones are not legally human, so what's to stop some jerk checking out the authors of their fancy and raping them? It couldn't be judged rape, could it, if they're not human? Maybe they just fine you for defacing library property?
If the cloned author was supposed to represent the original, it would be a spectacular fail because these clones were not the original and had completely different life experiences from the author, even if they did have the author's original memories - memories that would be subject to modification, and therefore thoroughly unreliable! Despite their unwarranted credibility in front of gullible jurors, eye witnesses are in fact the least accurate source of evidence in a trial precisely because they readily modify their memories for one reason or another, and without even knowing that they're doing it.
The author has hover-cars and hover-cabs! Why? That's never going to happen because energy is far too expensive and gasoline is going to be gone completely in a few decades. It takes far more energy to support the entire weight of a vehicle and move it, as would be the case in this hover world, than it does to support the vehicle on wheels and merely employ energy to move it, as is the case now. The robe (a robot rube - I made it up!) in the cab tells Colette that it will take a load of energy to go where she wants to go. Well then don't use a hover-cab! Duh! Worse than this, the cab is sentient at least to a degree, but speaks like this: "Don't mean nothing by it". Seriously? A cab is programmed to speak like that? The more of this crap I read the less confidence I had in this author having thought things through. Yes it's impossible to predict the future with any great accuracy, but that doesn't mean that anything goes in a sci-fi novel. The future will, as it has in the past (!), grow organically from the present. If you can't have your future doing that, then you're making the wrong choices in your novel.
One of the things the author repeatedly mentions is print-on-demand operations. Most things in this word are electronic, including books, but you can get print books by ordering them online and having a business sprint up one copy which is mailed to you. This is the same system which Amazon and others use to facilitate self-publishing. Right now, these machines which print and bind books are a bit on the steep side to buy, but the price will come down, just as it has for 3D printers. In the future, anyone who enjoys print books will have a machine at home which can do it. There may be online print houses, but it made little sense that a book-lover who was rich, like Coldbrook was wouldn't have such a machine.
There are some oddities which contributed to the feel that this was a fifties novel, such as when Smithe says, "I pulled off my shoes and stockings." Who calls socks stockings these days? Later, he refers to them as socks, so there was no consistency. Every time I read something like that, it kicked me out of suspension of disbelief, and this novel was a really bumpy ride! It didn't help that, true to sci-fi writing everywhere, the author was constantly trying to come up with cool names for stuff and failing epically. Computers were called screens, even though there's no such term, nor even a hint of such a term, in use today. The only way that term is employed now is to describe the things we swipe when reading an ebook! Worse was diskers! Disks are out of style already, yet he has us using them in the future?
I was also surprised to learn that men nearly always tell the truth because they're awful at lying, whereas women are good at lying and lie fluently. What?! He has Coldbrook say this, but that doesn't make it any less of an insult to both genders from what I can see. I got to the start of chapter nine, which is almost half-way through, and the chapter was so pathetic and so pedantic that I simply quit after reading one page of it. There are better things to do with my time. I cannot recommend this novel based on what I read.
