The Secret Of Life (Hardcover)

Paul McAuley's usual topics and tropisms are well-employed in
this new biotech SF-thriller. In 2026 a Martian microbe, secretly
brought back to Earth by a Chinese expedition, is accidentally
released into the Pacific during an attempt to steal a sample by
Cytex, a powerful but unscrupulous American biotech firm. The
Mars-bug thrives, and grows into strange floating islands, which
shed 'slicks' that kill terrestrial marine life. The descriptions of
this strange alien invader are reminiscent of Ian McDonald's
wonderful _Chaga_, with a nod to H.G. Wells' _War of the
Worlds_. I'm not fully-qualified to judge McCauley's biologic
premise (and MacGuffin), which it wouldn't be fair to reveal, but
he's done his homework -- I'm weaselling here because of a
research lapse I'll mention a bit later, but rest assured his premise
is just fine for fiction. Is there a biologist in the house?

The Americans send an expedition of their own to Mars, hoping
to duplicate the Chinese discovery. The expedition scientists
include Mariella Anders, our protagonist and a biological genius
on the level of a Feynman or an Einstein. Like most geniuses
(genii?), she is unconventional: Mariella's foibles include body-
piercing, soft drugs, and rough sex. This last is used for blackmail
by Penn Brown, an odious Cytex scientist also on the Mars
expedition.

Mariella is a high point of the book, and McCauley's best
character yet, I think. The descriptions of her scientific education
and career are full of neat observations and insights -- McAuley is
himself a former research scientist -- and her portrayal as a
Feynman-level genius is wonderful. A gen-Z greenpunk
biogenius -- all right!

The Martian scenes -- about half of the book -- are very fine,
strongly reminescent of Kim Stanley Robinson's RGB Mars
trilogy: impeccable (I hope) research and extrapolation, poetic
descriptions of alien landscapes, palpable excitement in exploring
a new world -- and a sadly-realistic portrait of the techno-squalor
around the Martian settlements, comparable to Swanwick's gritty
(and great) "Griffins Egg".

When Mariella returns to Earth, on the run with stolen samples
of the 'Chi', the Martian superbug, the story becomes a more
conventional -- and less interesting -- pursuit-thriller. I lost track
of the cardboard villains and bit-players (I fell asleep), and I'm not
interested enough to go back and sort them out. The dramatic
'climax' is just silly -- Mariella the greenpunk genius as a
charismatic crowd-pleaser at a big bioscience conference -- well,
my dears, you've been warned, it ain't the high point of the book.

McAuley makes a few other stumbles, notably in his Southern
Arizona scenes, where he misplaces a mountain range by a
hundred miles [note 1]. And the authorities seem curiously
unconcerned about the rapidly-multiplying Martian 'slicks', even
as they're ruining fisheries and alarming voters.

The bottom line: _The Secret of Life_ tackles big, meaty issues,
it's well-written, and it's fun to read. Even though it's not
completely successful, I'd say it's pretty much a must-read for
hard-SF and McCauley fans.
________
Note 1) -- illustrating the danger of using a setting the author
doesn't know well, when he encounters a reader/reviewer who
lives in that setting. This lapse will pass unnoticed by most
readers, but makes me uncomfortable about the quality of his
research in areas I don't know as well. Not that I read SF to learn
science (or geography), but McAuley has a reputation for playing
the hard-SF game with the net up.... And I do hope the many
mangled place-names are corrected in the US edition.

Happy reading!
Pete Tillman
(review written 4-01)

But the truth is the story fails to explore many of the scientific possibilities of this premise. The organism languishes passively in the ocean, while the story focuses on preaching for the virtue of open science versus the evilness of big corporations. As a scientist myself, this is something I certainly would agree with...but really didn't find anything very new added to this discussion. The science is so "good" and the corporation is so "bad" there's really no tension.

The other major complaint I had (you might not be as annoyed by this) is the writing style. This is my first time reading a book by McAuley and I felt it would have been much better at about 250 pages than the 400+ that it weighs in at. All too often extraneous paragraphs are tossed in on subjects utterly unrelated to the story. Here's a simple example (one of many). The heroine is discussing with someone how they should travel together. The other poor fool mentions something about horses and we then get a paragraph as our heroine internally recalls her childhood pony. What it's name was. How she loved it, etc. They then decide to take a car. In the right hands this could lead to greater character depth...but I found it mostly to be just filler and ended up skipping over many paragraphs like this.

The exception is the section on Mars which is tightly written and full of interesting ideas and tense situations. Sadly for me that portion was drowned out by the meanderings on Earth and the overall lecturing tone of the book.