Customer Reviews

Bugz :Contact Book Zero

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This could have been so good. The central conceit of David Jackson's "Bugz: contact. Book Zero" is a great idea. It is both timely and topical, as well as brave and challenging. It is that tiny sub-atomic particles, zillions of times smaller than even the smallest so far discovered by particle physicists, are amongst the most powerful and potent agents operating within the universe. And that these particles possess something that mankind has long sought: an alien intelligence. And, what is more, an alien intelligence that has existed since the Big Bang itself and which for countless ages has been carefully shaping and steering human destiny, as part of a giant cosmic struggle to restore order and harmony to a fractured universe. These particles/intelligences call themselves Bugz; and with the switch-on of CERN's new Parallel Beam Collider one summer's day in 2042, physicists are all set, finally, to discover the "God particle" itself and to make First Contact with these alien intelligences. The world will never be the same again.

The possibilities for first-rate and challenging story-telling here are legion. Two potential subjects spring to mind immediately: an exploration of the irony of alien intelligences being discovered not in outer space, where we've traditionally been looking for them but rather in "inner space", contained within everything, including ourselves; and second, an exploration of the further irony that in their endless pursuit of an ever more fine-grained understanding of just what drives the universe, which many argue increasingly removes the scope for there being any "guiding hand of God", scientists should one day stumble upon that very hand itself. And then, there are the challenges related to presenting the experience of infinitesimally small but infinitely powerful beings residing at the quantum level of the universe in terms that a human reader can appreciate. And all of this even before one gets into a consideration of any dramatic storyline itself.

The publishers have done a lavish job in producing this book, especially the limited edition hardback edition, which is beautifully printed and bound, complete with a sewn-in bookmark. It is profusely illustrated with charcoal sketches and computer-generated artwork by Malcolm Fryer, vying with the words for dominance of many of the pages of the book. The font is nice and clear and easy on the eye, while the paper is high quality, bright and dense; the book weighs pleasingly heavy in the hand.

So where is my problem? As I have already said, in the hands of a good writer, someone with clear vision and a strong sense of story-spinning, this book could have been tremendous. Sadly, David Jackson is not such a writer. The narrative story threads, what few there are, are simplistic, under-developed and unbelievably shallow in scope. The book's chapters flow less as narrative units and more as scenes within a film or story boarding script, making this book feel like it is a failed movie-pitch that has been re-cast in book form. The writing style -- especially in its depiction of characters and their dialogue -- is perhaps best described as "comic-book cliché", all the way from the checked picnic cloth of the ambitious (but bumbling) Cambridge don, named, naturally, Icarus and coming, also naturally, from a long line of Cambridge dons, right down to the high heels and chilli pepper red lip gloss of the villainess (who is, naturally, Russian, called Svetlana and, also naturally, born of peasant stock). All of the human characters are flat -- one-dimensional, even -- and undergo not a scrap of development at any time during the story. The story explores no aspects of common human experience whatsoever.

But worse, to my mind, is that rather than rise to the challenge of representing in ways that might translate meaningfully into the human experience the Bugz' quantum (probabilistic) existence, "lived" over and within time-frames which (at both micro and macro levels) are unfathomable to the common human mind, Jackson has chosen to anthropomorphise their existence in a trite and trivial way. Instead of imbuing their sense of existence and purpose with a suitably awe-inspiring mystique, he has reduced them to comic-book characters at an almost sub-human level, portraying them as being of either a power-seeking or glory-seeking nature (depending on their spin), more intent on playing out games of politics and power than actually steering the cosmos. Rather than show that a full understanding of the true universe of the Bugz is beyond human comprehension, whilst still making their intent plain, Jackson has merely chosen to obfuscate both intent and experience in a barrage of words drawn from the vocabulary of the particle and high-energy physicists, with scant regard for the meanings of those words, or the quantum mechanics contexts within which they are used, mixing them freely with as many silly pseudo-technical words started with 'z' as he can dream up. And instead of utilising the nature of the quantum universe to further the ends of the story in any way, Jackson ignores it altogether, requiring his Bugz to resort to classical physical means of interacting with their (and our) universe. Which is silly.

More than anything else, this book most reminds me of the old movie from 1982, "Tron" which, in concept, took computer coding entities and gave them life within a virtual world context. But which, in reality, produced a story about which no-one can recall very much afterwards other than the image of people running around a cartoon computer-buss landscape, while dressed up in rubber suits with neon coloured stripes. This book is a similar great idea disappointingly handled.

David Jackson should leave science-fantasy to people who really know how to do it. (Check out "The Visitor", "The Fresco", "Sideshow", "Raising The Stones" for some examples.) He would be better to move into devising Bond-style movie scripts, and other trivial entertainment, for which he might have some aptitude. He says that he called this Book Zero "because it is like the confluence of the x and y axes [...] it is a beginning: a Genesis of an idea." I can think of a simpler explanation. It is because the book has nothing to say.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, indeed!

It would give me much greater pleasure to award this book a more favourable notice than I honestly can. For one thing the book is beautifully produced, but far more importantly the theme it tackles is simply tremendous. We are to imagine sub-atomic pico-particles possessed of individual identities and individual intelligence, and we are introduced to a scenario in which they make contact with our own human race. Such a theme would have taxed the highest powers of the dark visionary Olaf Stapledon himself. Stapledon started at the other end, the big end so to speak, with his universe of intelligent stars and nebulae. Who else might have been able to do justice to the proposition envisaged here I don't know, but it would have taken someone with genuine vision, and at random the names of H G Wells, Arthur C Clarke and Doris Lessing occur to me as being at least possibilities. However it is not Stapledon, nor Wells, nor Clarke, nor Lessing whom we find here, but Mr David Jackson `Born in Ilkley, and having a keen interest in history...A great fan of the Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov'.

What strikes me most about the story is how culture-bound it is. It takes place in towns that Mr Jackson has been to - Cambridge, Geneva, Venice - and to that extent I was comfortable with it, being familiar with these places myself. However when these beings of unimaginable alienness fight out their decisive Armageddon in Cambridge of all places, what it put me in mind of was nothing so much as Dr Who back in Tom Baker's day, with the Time Lord ensuring the future of the cosmos wherever it suited the show's limited budget to do so. Another aspect that surely must strike any reader forcibly is that the Bugz think and act much like intelligent insects in some pulp science fiction. Theoretically such entities should be indefinable except by arithmetical or algebraic expressions, but here we find them with shapes, colours, sexes and even modes of conveyance. They have been in existence since the Big Bang itself, but their motivations are awfully like the motivations of a race that is barely a couple of million years old. What has happened to their cultural intellectual and emotional development in all that time? Above all, considering they have the entire cosmos at their disposal why on earth (forgive the phrase) are they getting so excited about the inhabitants of one minor planet? What makes us so important? - other than because this author is one of us, of course, and he thinks like this so they have to think like this as well.

The prose style may betray the influence of Asimov, and that would be a pity as prose style was not one of Asimov's greater talents. The characterisation is flat and the story-line is frankly boring. It was a real struggle to make it to the end of the book. A certain amount of cod-science is only to be expected, and I am used to it from, say, even so gifted a writer as Iain M Banks. Come to that, neither Stapledon nor Wells knew a fat lot about physics, and it does not bother me in the least. However Mr Jackson should have taken elementary care over what he says, for instance how can a constant be reduced to anything whatsoever, as on p 246? A constant is what it says it is - constant. The proof-reading is generally good, and I may have to give up the rearguard resistance against the solecism `wreaked'. However `it's' for `its' will not do: among them the author and proof-readers should have made up their mind whether they want `artefact' or `artifact'; and when I behold `irridescent' I suspect that among them they don't even know how to spell it. Strangest of all is an inexplicable, and plain ridiculous, fixation with the letter z. This symbol is confined to languages using the Roman and Greek alphabets, and in most of them it is nothing special - not in German, not in Italian, not in Spanish, and in French often so unimportant that it is silent and not even pronounced. However in English it could be perhaps thought of as slightly exotic, and that, in keeping with the generally culture-bound tone of the narrative is presumably why the Bugz seek to indicate their approach by beaming a letter z on to the nocturnal waters of aqueous Cambridge. I don't really know why Mr Jackson strains his inventiveness to call his subatomic personae Ziel, Zein and such like. He might as well have called them Zmith Jonez and Robinzon and gone on his way rejoicing.

This is not the sort of assessment I would have liked to offer, but I do not have the option of not reviewing the book, so this is what the assessment has to be. My heart sinks when I see the suffix `zero' to the book's title, but while wishing Mr Jackson well I have to echo Mr Punch's advice for those about to marry, just in case he has a sequel or sequels in mind - `Don't.'