Disposable Lit Reviews

AvoNova, 1994
403 pp.
ISBN 0-688-13418-1

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“You can’t go home again.”

By the latter years of the 21st century, Earth had become too polluted, too congested, too conflicted to survive. Many grand gestures were made to placate the panicking hordes, and of them was the initiative to search for other habitable worlds to conquer. Such missions, traveling at sublight speeds, would scarcely have any effect on the masses left behind, but it was a gesture, a paean to that ol’ human can-do spirit, and several ships were sent out to find a new Earth.

The ship Search didn’t find it. They found nothing that was remotely habitable without at least as much shielding from the outdoors as existed in their spaceship. Between rotating shifts of cryogenic suspension, they passed decades in their exploring tour of disappointing candidates, until finally homesickness spread through the crew, and they forced the captain to turn around and take them home.

But the Earth they returned to was not the Earth they left, hundreds of years earlier.

The Genetic Soldier of the title (and let me get this out of the way: the title is misleading, and the cover of my book club edition is even more misleading) is the Atkin’s Tommy, young general of the force based in a small village in what had been Australia. His job is mainly that of peacekeeping within the village and between his and others in the loose local alliance. He’s an intelligent man, trained in duty since childhood, but also educated by his unofficial surrogate father Libary, who governs the Library overlooking the village. Within the Library, dozens of Ordinands and Readers seek to catalog the fragile documentary remains of the Last Culture, though not in search of technology; this stable semi-agrarian society chugs along quite nicely with natural light and inborn disease resistance and semiphore towers to communicate over distances.

And it is into Soldier’s bailiwick that Nugan Taylor drops, planetary contact specialist of partly Koori descent and the linguistic training to stumble through communication with an Earth her people don’t recognize. And which, she soon discovers, will not welcome back this out of place remnant of the last culture. But how do you tell three hundred people, tired of being cooped up in a starborne tin can, that there is no place for them on an earth which, to their eyes, is almost idyllically underpopulated?

The “genetic” part of the title refers to the subraces of humanity who live in the village: the Desert Genetic like Soldier, thin and wiry with plenty of aboriginal blood, and the stockier Mixed Genetics who comprise the main part of the citizenry. Each genetic breeds true, thanks to partly to an aggressive breed-matching program overseen by the Mas, the matriarchal authorities in the village, and partly through pheremones which the dying geneticists of the Last Culture, the “Wizards,” had instilled as part of their plan to engineer a humanity which could live with the biosphere instead of off it. That’s a large part of the summary rejection of the returning Searchers: their haphazard genetic makeup and their insensitivity to pheremones makes them dangerous wildcards whose introduction to the populace would upset the carefully managed balance.

Turner writes with an easy and simple style, with just enough elegant turns of phrase to assure the reader that the simplicity of the prose is intentional and crafted. He does occasionally slip in his third-person omniscient viewpoint and give us the inner thoughts of more than one person in a single scene (a pet peeve of mine — it jars me like few literary devices can), but given the amount of exposition he manages to slide almost painlessly within the conflicts of human and Human drama, I’m inclined to forgive. He weaves the interpersonal story in with the thoroughly understandable and thoroughly alien culture which has arisen from the new humanity’s genetic imperatives. The book is both thought-provoking and emotionally engaging, and the cover quote from Ed Bryant that “George Turner is the best-kept secret in contemporary SF” is rendered a partial untruth only by the fact that Turner died in 1997.

As I read, I had the nagging suspicion that bloomed into fullblown realization by the time I finished the first couple of chapters: I had read this before. I’ve owned the book for probably fifteen years, so I’ve certainly had the opportunity, but I had forgotten the cover entirely (again, not surprising, given how poorly the cover illustration conveys the nature of the story inside), and the contents almost as fully. I don’t think I’m quite ready to hide my own Easter eggs, but every few chapters I started wondering whether I had finished the book the first time I had read it, until some other vague memory of what I was reading popped up. To tell the truth, I’m a little ashamed that a book I found so compelling this time through had entirely dropped through the sieve of my memory. I only hope that I will remember it more fully this time, as is its due.