RogerBW's Blog

The Fold, Peter Clines 20 November 2024

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.

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  1. Posted by John Dallman at 09:47am on 20 November 2024

    Wow. That's just ... pathetic as an attempt at writing SF in the modern day.

  2. Posted by J Michael Cule at 12:32pm on 20 November 2024

    Has the author never read John Brunner's THE INFINITIVE OF GO?

    I swear that's the same plot but with more optimism about the ability of humans to handle the technology.

  3. Posted by RogerBW at 12:36pm on 20 November 2024

    In retrospect I think that this may be evidence for why writers should, even if they're not fans, be aware of the ongoing conversation that is their genre. Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" was first published in the October 1968 Galaxy (you can read it from archive.org here), and it makes a point about parallel universe stories (loosely, that it doesn't matter what happens, because all the things that might happen have happened just as much in the parallel worlds) which cannot be un-made.

    I don't demand that H. Beam Piper take it into account, because he was writing his Paratime stories between 1948 and 1955. GURPS Infinite Worlds goes to a lot of trouble to avoid the implications in order to get a Paratime-style setting, because they're very hard to reconcile with a coherent story; but that's fine, the authors are aware of Niven at least. Micaiah Johnson's The Space Between Worlds takes the point and runs with it to say something new. But when someone is writing over forty years later and shows no sign of having either read the story or thought things through as far as Niven did, I'm inclined to say that this might have been an OK story in the 1950s, but the conversation has moved on and that isn't a story that needs to be told any more.

  4. Posted by ashley pollard at 07:17pm on 20 November 2024

    Pity, I had that on an Amazon list, recommended by someone, who I forget, but now deleted.

    And it has 4,343 reviews with an average of 4.2.

    Jeez.

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