2015 SF, one of a loose series but intended to stand alone. Something
very strange is happening around the top-secret teleportation project…
Well, see what you think. In an opening scene with characters
we'll never meet again, someone gets home from a trip and doesn't
recognise his wife; indeed, asks her what she's done with the real
one.
Then we meet Mike Erikson, who has HERO written in 72-point letters
across his t-shirt; his old high school friend is now a senior guy at
DARPA, and thanks to Mike's unique mental skills (more on that later)
he's being invited to go in and find out what's going on at the
project.
The project turns out to involve teleportation via space fold, i.e.
you bend the universe so that over there is briefly next to right
here and step through. But one of the problems is that the staff are
on edge: they keep complaining that little details are wrong, for
example someone's moved their office to the other side of the
corridor.
Does anyone with the great good taste to be reading this blog not
know what's going on yet? Everything I've talked about is given to the
reader by chapter 9 of 59. The brilliant scientists are clueless, and
even amazing Mike takes until chapter 33 to draw the obvious
conclusion. And almost immediately after that things move into an
extended series of action sequences that takes up most of the rest of
the book.
(Mike not only has a total photographic memory, he has perfect
indexing too: he can call to mind everything a bit like something he's
thinking about, mentally compare them side by side, and so on. He's
perfectly placed to correlate the entire contents of his mind. When we
meet him he's working as a high-school English teacher in a small
town, supposedly because he just wants to have a normal life rather
than being an unhappy supergenius, though what we see of it doesn't
seem like much of a life.)
Also these scientists don't act like scientists. They're entirely
lacking in curiosity about how all this works and what the edge cases
might be; even with an excuse late in the day, this just doesn't
convince. Also their personalities are minimal: Olaf looks like
Humphrey Bogart (this is never significant) and snaps at everyone.
Jamie is a beautiful ex-cheerleader hacker who hates, and then
inevitably falls for, Mike. And so on and so on. All the women are
introduced in terms of their attractiveness; none of the men.
One of the major action sequences has one end of the gate opening to
vacuum. OK, that's going to be terrifying and damaging. But this is
happening in a heavy cinderblock building with occasional skylights;
it shouldn't keep sucking at full strength once all the air inside has
rushed through (flow rate is proportional to pressure differential).
Someone who's managed to get to the outside wall probably shouldn't be
plucked off it and sucked through; this is air pressure, not gravity.
Surviving would still be a major challenge, but not in the way Clines
thinks.
There is a strange exceptionalism going on, perhaps because Clines is
American: everybody cares very deeply about whether they are the
"original" Mike or Olaf or whoever, or one from a parallel world, when
it's extremely clear that it doesn't matter, because most of the
time there's no way to tell and even if you can you can't do anything
about it.
And right at the end some Men in Black turn up. We don't learn much
about them, but it seems that their job is to watch out for and
suppress this particular technology. So, um, why didn't they turn up
years ago when the project started? Or days ago when it kicked into
high gear? Sadly it's all too obvious that the non-diegetic reason is
"so that Mike could be heroic and save the world on his own, and then
take a job with them".
Argh, frankly. This is terrible. I will admit I finished it, but I
stuck with it first to answer the question "how long until these Big
Brains spot the obvious", then "and what is Clines actually going to
do with this intriguing idea now that his characters have finally
noticed", and finally "oh wow, how much worse can this get". In ethos
this feels much more like a horror book than like SF: although it's
presented as an SF-style mystery, with questions about what's going on
with and around the project, the profound incuriosity and readiness to
forget everything once the threat has been dealt with put it for me
more in the survival-horror camp, where nobody really cares what's
going on as long as they can live till dawn.
I strongly recommend that you do not read this book.