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Ancestor by Scott Sigler
I'm not quite sure where to begin in this record of my impressions of Scott Sigler's Ancestor. Let's get out of the way that it's a Jurassic Park ripoff. Maybe ripoff is too harsh but the comparisons are undeniable: Genetic Experiment Goes Awry On Small Island Resulting In A Mismatched Group Of Scientists et al Being Hunted Down By Monsters Whilst Isolated From The Outside By Harsh Weather Conditions. Let's throw in some industrial espionage and a lot of guns and...
Hmmm. Maybe "ripoff" isn't too harsh after all.
The characters in this book are unbelievably thin. Half a dimension each, if you're lucky. Things get so very much worse if you're female, and hilariously bad in anything resembling a relationship. Much to my disappointment Sigler also failed to write various forms of insanity with any conviction. Takes more than nightmares, visions of orange spiders and a knife fetish to make me feel someone's gone over the edge. Such a shame considering the reasonable job he did with mad people in Infected and Contagious.
The science. Well. At Swancon a friend had kindly (and yet with a charming degree of outraged splutter) pointed out to me a couple of passages of text where the key scientific narrative points were introduced.
Spoiler alert.
One, that the risk of viral contamination from xenotransplantation could be eliminated by growing human-compatible organs inside a genetically contructed mammal so primitive its genome was free of virii.
Two, that the immune response of the cows used to incubate the constructed animals could be suppressed by giving the beasties cow skin, because the skin was on the outside, right? From earliest moments of cell mitosis, apparently. Uh, no. Just no.
Moving on.
I was relieved to discover that the reason the beasties were nightmarish monsters was that the mentally ill geneticist had nightmares about monsters. The alternative--that an attempt to recreate an itty bitty primitive mammal had simply Gone Horribly Wrong--was mercifully not the case. But let's not think too hard about the science m'kay?
So what does Ancestor do well? It was written for a target audience of Sigler fans (a.k.a. Junkies), and judging by their comments on his website, they seem rather more interested in blood and gore and action than character motivation and scientific veracity. So blood, gore, running, crashing and shooting is what they (and subsequently other readers) get.
I appreciated the running gag re vampire romance novels, and the in jokes about self publishing.
In a narrative sense there's a pretty hefty waste of what seems to be a major plot thread: the fact that a black ops goverment task force is hunting down the project. The corporate stuff is underdone; the espionage patchy at best. Come to think of it, most of the monster hunting/attacking scenes seemed pretty stupid (i.e. impossible to visualise) too. I also struggled to visualise the monsters themselves with their black and white spotted cowhide; the best I can do is an angry salamander. The cow hide was supposed to be important, but I just couldn't suspend biological disbelief.
As a novel it sucks. On the bright side it's easy to read and trips along quite quickly, and we're not distracted from the monsters by philosophy, flashbacks, or scene setting. Actually, it reads like the type of thin movie novelisation that's just a prose version of the script (and not even the shooting script at that). It's a popcorn movie I'd quite happily see, as long as it didn't take itself even the slightest bit seriously.
Hmmm. Maybe "ripoff" isn't too harsh after all.
The characters in this book are unbelievably thin. Half a dimension each, if you're lucky. Things get so very much worse if you're female, and hilariously bad in anything resembling a relationship. Much to my disappointment Sigler also failed to write various forms of insanity with any conviction. Takes more than nightmares, visions of orange spiders and a knife fetish to make me feel someone's gone over the edge. Such a shame considering the reasonable job he did with mad people in Infected and Contagious.
The science. Well. At Swancon a friend had kindly (and yet with a charming degree of outraged splutter) pointed out to me a couple of passages of text where the key scientific narrative points were introduced.
Spoiler alert.
One, that the risk of viral contamination from xenotransplantation could be eliminated by growing human-compatible organs inside a genetically contructed mammal so primitive its genome was free of virii.
Two, that the immune response of the cows used to incubate the constructed animals could be suppressed by giving the beasties cow skin, because the skin was on the outside, right? From earliest moments of cell mitosis, apparently. Uh, no. Just no.
Moving on.
I was relieved to discover that the reason the beasties were nightmarish monsters was that the mentally ill geneticist had nightmares about monsters. The alternative--that an attempt to recreate an itty bitty primitive mammal had simply Gone Horribly Wrong--was mercifully not the case. But let's not think too hard about the science m'kay?
So what does Ancestor do well? It was written for a target audience of Sigler fans (a.k.a. Junkies), and judging by their comments on his website, they seem rather more interested in blood and gore and action than character motivation and scientific veracity. So blood, gore, running, crashing and shooting is what they (and subsequently other readers) get.
I appreciated the running gag re vampire romance novels, and the in jokes about self publishing.
In a narrative sense there's a pretty hefty waste of what seems to be a major plot thread: the fact that a black ops goverment task force is hunting down the project. The corporate stuff is underdone; the espionage patchy at best. Come to think of it, most of the monster hunting/attacking scenes seemed pretty stupid (i.e. impossible to visualise) too. I also struggled to visualise the monsters themselves with their black and white spotted cowhide; the best I can do is an angry salamander. The cow hide was supposed to be important, but I just couldn't suspend biological disbelief.
As a novel it sucks. On the bright side it's easy to read and trips along quite quickly, and we're not distracted from the monsters by philosophy, flashbacks, or scene setting. Actually, it reads like the type of thin movie novelisation that's just a prose version of the script (and not even the shooting script at that). It's a popcorn movie I'd quite happily see, as long as it didn't take itself even the slightest bit seriously.