10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Letdown for Phllip Kerr, May 27, 2002
This review is from: The Second Angel (Mass Market Paperback)
Author Phillip Kerr has written some amazingly diverse stories over the years, from the Phillip Marlowe-meets-the-Third Reich Berlin Noir trilogy to the high tech horror of "The Grid." Set in the year 2069, "Second Angel" is Kerr's stab at Near Bad Future science fiction. Unfortunately, it falls way short of expectations. Kerr is a master at creating memorable characters and scenes. This time out, however, his story is populated by a group of people who fail to generate much interest (even his main villian is just your standard issue bad guy and is bumped off well before the climax).
The backdrop against which the story is set has some interesting aspects. There's a computer generated assistant who is also a marital aid as well as a deadly Aids-like virus that has infected over 80% of the Eath's population, making unifected blood a commodity more valuable than gold. The polt, however, unfolds slowly, stalls and never really regain momentum. Annoying grammatical embellishments like the numerous footnotes (bizarre in a work of fiction) and the "author-narrator" repeatedly injecting himself into the story serve mainly as irritating distractions.
Overall, this is a disappointing work from an author who has produced many excellent works in the past.
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sets science back 100 years, October 23, 2004
This review is from: The Second Angel (Mass Market Paperback)
I am rarely so incensed by a book that I feel obligated to warn the reading public to stay away. My main objection is the way Mr. Kerr spreads his ignorance of mathematics and science to the public, like P2 for the intellect. This was touted as a scientifically sophisticated book but the science was so bad it ruined what little story there was.
I received the hardcover version as a gift. On the inner dust jacket they cite Mr. Kerr as having "encyclopedic intelligence". The back of the dust jacket has a blurb from Esquire saying this book "assaults your ignorance". It certainly does. Unless you can withstand Mr. Kerr's deadly assault on your knowedge base you are certainly more ignorant after you finish it than when you started out.
I didn't see any of the usual acknowledgements by an author citing valuable discussions with experts. All I can figure based on what I saw in this book is that either: (1) none were consulted, or (2) when they saw the finished product they asked to have their names taken off in embarrassment.
Some of the mistakes were mundane misnomers: "glutenate" for the neurotransmitter glutamate.
The worst problem is that the entire premise of the book rests on the naive concept that a blood-borne viral infection could be cured by a simple exchange transfusion. Gosh, why haven't we done that for AIDS? Let's all collectively smack ourselves on the forehead, then call the CDC and tell them what Kerr has figured out.
The vision of the future is faulty. Even if you stipulate all the quasi-science of the P2 virus and its cure, the resulting societal changes Kerr posits don't make sense. Marrow-stimulating drugs easily available today (such as erythropoietin that increase red cell production, and neupogen which stimulates white cell production) should have been very popular for those infected with P2. If donors used these drugs, they could yield even more units per year. I figure a healthy donor could cure one diseased person per year.
Care for more?
Phil flunks genetics 101 by getting heterozygotes and homozygotes backwards. Dallas and Aria are described as "homozygous" for thalassemia. If so, they would have the disease. In order for their child Caro to have the disease with two healthy parents, the parents had to be asymptomatic and HETEROZYGOUS, each contributing one recessive gene that then expressed the disease in their symptomatic HOMOZYGOUS daughter.
I am a physician who has practiced hyperbaric medicine. The hyperbaric stuff was laughable. Dallas has a sensation of extreme pressure, that forced the blood to the back of his body. Acceleration might do that (e.g., if you were in one of those giant centrifuges they train astronauts with) but hyperbaric pressure in a clinical chamber can't be felt - as you breathe you pressurize all the tissues of your body and rapidly equilibrate internal and external pressure.
At high pressure you have to breathe a special mixture of helium and oxygen so you don't get oxygen toxicity or nitrogen narcosis. If they did pressurize Dallas to that level, he'd need a loooonnnnnng time to decompress. For instance, professional divers working at several hundred feet depth on oil platforms can require several days to safely decompress after a dive of less than an hour. At the rate Dallas was decompressed from astronomically high pressures they would have killed him within minutes.
They don't make hyperbaric chambers that go to "hundreds of atmospheres". The world's record saturation chamber dive, using sophisticated techniques requiring HeliOx, was far less than 100 atmospheres and it took a month to decompress the divers.
Did anyone really buy into the explanation why a VR simulation had to be conducted on the moon?
MRI helmets for VR? Maybe for mapping, but the strong magnetic fields required for MRI would interfere with any electrical devices used to stimulate the cortex.
How about lead shielding for the environmental suits so they could safely pass through the reactor room? In moon gravity, you could wear a lot of lead without any trouble. These guys can buy a spaceship but not lead lined suits?
A computer search for the bank balance 112,462,239 was broken down in a search for substrings "1,12,4,62,23,and 9". What kind of search algorithm is that? Do you search Yahoo for "George" using "G" "eo" and "rge"?
The software "Microsoft 45.1" uses only certain politically correct "personas" like Einstein or John Lennon for the interface, but Hitler and Stalin are unavailable. You mean nobody did any third party "skins" or "mods". If you can make skins for Internet Explorer and mods for Half-Life, I'd guess you could come up with a mod for Stalin if you have the VR technology to do all that other stuff.
Gates' hair turns grey in a matter of minutes due to extreme fear during the simulation. Phil, do your homework - hair is dead tissue. The only way it turns color that fast is if you use Miss Clairol.
Statistics is not spared. We are treated to this little bit of logic: There are probably billions of planets capable of sustaining life, but we only know of one that does. Ergo, the odds of finding life anywhere else is on the order of billions to one. A little problem with statistical sampling there Phil - we've only really checked out one planet so far. And the number of inhabitable planets is just an educated guess. There are only a few documented planets. The rest is conjecture, unless I forgot the names of the other billion known planets.
It's like saying there are 4 billion people on the planet but I only know one person named Herman, so the odds of anyone being named Herman are 4 billion to 1. Using Kerr's statistical logic and the available data, with nine known planets and one with known life, the odds are 9 to 1.
I love this one: Helium is used to cool the reactor because it doesn't boil. Ummmmm, how does liquid helium get to be a gas then, bubba?
I could go on, but I think you get the general picture. It's a skimpy story built on misinformation that goes well beyond the usual suspension of disbelief, and you're actually more ignorant after you've read the book if you're not careful.
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