Author: S L Dunn
Publisher: Prospect Hill Press (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
(Note that the cover is numbered as page one in this novel, so that the novel doesn't actually starts until p5 and runs to p389). I made a good attempt at getting into this, but it just did not hold my interest, so I have to call this a DNF and not something that I can recommend.
This novel's main protagonist is Kristen, and thankfully she isn't telling it in first person, although it is initially told from her PoV. She's supposedly a genius and was signed onto an innovative project to design an artificial cell made from new proteins not found in nature (so I gathered!).
Later I learned that this is really just a regular cell, but with something added to it to make it a bit different. It wasn't very clear! Sometimes this is a good thing because it keeps the writer safe, but in this case it was so vague and fudged that it was really hard to picture exactly what this cell was supposed to be and what it wasn't!
I have to wonder about some of the biology here. Like I said, the author has fudged it enough that you can't really get sufficient purchase to argue against it! This is a smart and safe move in some regards, but it also made it really hard to see why the cell was supposed to be so ground-breaking and innovative. There was also one problem where the author suggests that cancer cells and viruses are neither alive nor dead. While I have heard that said about viruses, I've never heard it said about cancer cells, which are very much alive.
A living thing is something which intakes energy, outputs waste, respires, and reproduces. Even at the cellular level, these functions hold: they're integral parts of the cell's genetics, so I didn't get what was meant in that these scientists had created a cell if it didn't do any of these things. This is compounded by the 'revelation' on page 21, that the cell can reproduce, like this was unexpected. I'm sorry but were no genes for reproduction included in the cell's genome when it was designed? If not, then how is it reproducing now? If they were, then how is the fact that it's reproducing in any way surprising? This made no sense to me.
Kristen apparently isn't as smart as we're expected to believe here either, since she doesn't seem to grasp that the genome controls everything, but it cannot do anything for which it has no genes! If there are no cells for directing the production of higher-level structures, then the cell will not go on to develop a multi-cellular form, much less specialize such that some cells differentiate into bone, others into skin, others into neurons, etc. The cell isn't magic. It doesn't produce these things out of thin air, it produces them as directed by its genome.
So again, I don't get how these people are supposed to have created this cell from scratch, yet evidently do not have the first idea of what it can or cannot do! This makes no sense, and given how ignorant they are of what they've done or what purpose it might serve, or of what they were trying to achieve, none of the accolades they receive make any sense at all.
This cell is named the Vatruvian Cell after Professor Vatruvia, the lead scientist on the project (and cool name by the way, evoking da Vinci's Vitruvian man, of which I included a rather warped representation in my book Poem y Granite), but we're never given any indication as to what the purpose of it is: what the end result was expected to be or was hoped to be, or how this could possibly be of any use to anyone or any thing. It's considered so important that Vatruvia seems to be able to write blank checks for whatever he wants because of it, but we're never given any reason to buy that.
Scientists like genome pioneer Craig Venter are working on developing "artificial cells" so that part isn't anything new, and is certainly not Nobel prize-worthy. That was a bit off, frankly. I seriously doubt that anyone would get a Nobel prize in any of the hard sciences handed to him within a year or so of the work for which he's nominated. The prizes are usually handed-out based on the value of a new discovery, which takes some time to make itself known. Relatively few such prizes are given out purely for invention, which is really what Vatruvia did.
The idea that 'non-natural' proteins are being used seems to be what's new, but anything that can exist in nature is natural, so I didn't get in what way this was artificial (other than that humans created it). The story-telling here was far too vague. I didn't like the use of 'man' (as in 'mankind') either, on pages thirteen and nineteen. It excludes woman, and yet this novel features a woman as the main protagonist! I wish writers would use 'humankind' and 'humanity' instead, or something like that.
So this was a long-winded way to say that I was already struggling with this novel, and really not connecting with the main character. I liked even less the second main character, a know-it-all guy, who was introduced shortly after the first character and who seemed really fake to me. It seemed (and again, I didn't finish this so I can't comment on this knowledgeably, but it seemed to me that this guy's sole purpose was to provide a love interest for Kristen, which weakened her in my eyes. The hero needs some dude on hand to prop her up? She can;t go it alone? What's up with that?
Where it really went quickly downhill for me however, was in the bizarre introduction of a completely different planet, which evidently had come up with this same invention of this magical new cell, from which (I gathered) invulnerable and ruthless warriors were created. Even though the blurb had led me to expect something like this, the presentation of it in the end just struck me as bizarre and (despite the cell link) having nothing to do with the other story!
Yes, I know (or at least I guess) that these two disparate tales are going to be integrated but I just could not read any further. The second story came blundering in like a bull in a china shop, and in its frenetic thrashing around, it made little sense to me. It didn't seem to fit at all, and although I pushed on for several more chapters, I found my mind wandering and simply could not generate any honest interest whatsoever in pursuing this second story arc. Given my already waning interest in the first story, I decided to call it quits there, and start on something else instead. Life is short and novels are multitudinous! It's not worth my time to have to fight to like a story when the story itself really isn't lifting a finger to help me.
