Disposable Lit Reviews

Baen Books, 2000
412 pp.
ISBN 0-671-57882-0

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If you’ve never heard of this novel, there may be many reasons why, but one of them is certainly that the book has been saddled with one of the most godawful covers of all time, an unimaginative piece of generic art suitable for a rote-written conventional fantasy.

The novel behind that cover is not a fantasy, and it’s certainly not conventional. Instead, it’s one of the more imaginative and multi-layered science fiction novels I’ve read in the last few years.

The main story is that of Achibol, a charlatan “sorcerer” in a post-technological future two thousand years from now, and Benadek, the street urchin who practically forces himself upon Achibol as his apprentice. The world that Benadek knows isn’t a natural one, and Achibol knows it; because of a polluted biosphere millennia before, scientists had madea new “placeholder” version of humanity called “simples” in order to keep some rudimentary form of civilization alive while the genome of true humanity was preserved until the pollution ran its course. These simples, with redundant genes so they can withstand the contaminants without mutation, have been engineered for set societal roles: “Honches” are police and soldiers, “boffins” are merchants and businessmen, “cozies” are administrators and governors, and “poots” are, well, women — given only the desire to find a man and have babies. This limited version of humanity was only supposed to last a thousand years, until mutagens were no longer found in the environment, but there was a flaw in the plan: True unengineered humans didn’t die out entirely, but survived in scattered enclaves where random mutations built in limited gene pools. The temples at each small population center, were supposed to have started implanting the full human genome in simple wombs as soon as mutations no longer showed, but because the true humans still show up now and again, the temples react to them as detrimental mutations had have held off the reintroduction of full humanity for an extra thousand years. Achibol is one of the original scientists, kept alive through technology, and journeying from temple to temple to reprogram them to ignore the true humans who upset their program and finally usher in a humanity of full potential again. His apprentice, though, seems himself to be a true human — and a mutation he carries, a certain level of physical mutability, may be the key to redefining humanity entirely.

This alone would be an intriguing tale, but that’s not all it is. The story of Achibol and Benadek is being told to us from a further future countless millennia hence, when humanity has spread across the stars — and when “humanity” has become a catchall term for all sentient beings of whatever physical form, who now almost universally have the ability to become, to change physical form at will. In this universe, the idea of a single origin world for a single original type of humanity is scoffed at; common wisdom is that human sentience sprang from hundreds of different planets, with mutability and becoming seen as the natural end to any intelligent lifeform’s evolution and convergence into humanity.

What ties these two settings together is a complex literary project which has gathered the myth cycles of a thousand different worlds, all of which deal in some manner with the tale of archetypal figures Achibol and Benadek, who stand for the development of theability to become in all of these disparate cultures. These ancient tales are fed into a huge biocybernetic artificial intelligence to condense, cross-reference, and distill down, if not a pure version of the legend, then at least a universal one. No one expects the archetypes to have a basis in historical fact; but as the “biocybes” put out chapter after chapter of the tale we read, the researchers nervously begin to realize that the tale being told plays right into the hands/tentacles/whathaveyou of those most radical anti-intellectuals, the One-Worlders, who believe that humanity did indeed spring from a single planet, and that Benadek, a spindly mammalian biped, may indeed be the literal progenitor of humanity.

This is a novel which follows two fascinating lines of speculation, one on the significance of myth, and the other on the import and meaning of being human. The latter is especially engaging, as it contrasts both the engineered “simple” humanity and the mutated “true” humanity of the future Earth, and that much farther future in which the idea of being tied to a single somatoform isa handicap, almost a blot upon one’s status as fully human. Where do hardwired social roles end, and true personhood begin? Is ther such a thing as being almost human? Or partly human? Or, even, too human?

The novel’s been out about three years now, and if the Amazon sales ranking is any indication, it’s been summarily ignored. That’s something between a pity and a damned shame. One hopes that Douglas’ next novel will bear a cover that,at the very least, won’t drag it down to obscurity.

Nathan Shumate