Customer Reviews

The Secret of Life

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am amazed at the short memory of many professional reviewers. Many seem to think that this is a major change of direction for McAuley, a deliberate turn to the more commercial. In fact it is a return to previous endeavours, and the hard political / bioscience near future timeline he created in the wonderful and hallucinatory 'Fairyland'. Mind you, you have to read this book carefully to get that point - I suspect that many 'pros' just don't bother.

So what's the deal? Well, it isn't really about life on Mars. That's just the background for what is effectively a debate about science and society, and quite a complex debate at that. Despite the fact that there are 'daring hero(ines)' and 'big villains' in the tradition of sci-fi political thrillers (think Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net as an near ancestor here), McAuley is actually more interested in the inbetweens and the contradictions. His heroine Mariella is a feminist scientist opposed to the corporatisation of research and the macho culture that promotes reductionism above holism. McAuley understands the range of green, environmental and left responses and even sympathises with parts of them - his portayal of the emerging diversity of post-environmentalist culture is remarkable compared with some of the more gung-ho 'ain't science grand' school of sci-fi writers. As a result he is actually far more effective at getting across his argument than some (see Greg Egan's Teranesia for a failed attempt). The various radical groups in this book understand that life should be enjoyable, sensual, a pleasure - however they don't always appreciate what could make that a possibility for everyone. McAuley is saying that that science, in the form of research to solve real social problems, is not the enemy of society but is an essential part of enabling life to be this good for all.

But don't let me make you think that this is a worthy lecture. McAuley is an excellent writer with an unintrusive style that moves the story along. The opening sequence would grace any top thriller movie. The scenes in space and on Mars are effectively tense and claustrophic, just as those in the deserts of Arizona are expanisive and full of post-millenial possibility. In terms of character, Mariella is quirky and far from the stereoypes of either sci-fi women or scientists, and other important characters are also complex and varied enough in their emotional and political baggage to be believable. The resolution is satisfying, uplifting and positive.

The Secret of Life works very well in many different ways. If you like your scienctific optimism spliced with strands of feminism, environmentalism and real-world politics, this will be just your cup of tea.
What more could you want?
(Just another 'Fairyland', please!)

-----------------------------------------------------------
Rating: "A-". A stirring saga of science, Mars, and life, marred by a
weak ending, but well-worth your attention.

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)

In 2026, humanity faces a new crisis. There is a humongous biological growth in the Pacific that threatens to destroy the food chain. NASA believes that the Slick is a result of a find by the Chinese on the Martian polar cap. Microbiologist Mariella Anders joins a team of scientists investigating the Martian northern icecap to determine what the Chinese actually uncovered.

However, the idealistic Mariella must contend with bottom line scientist Penn Brown of Cytex, who wants to monopolize whatever is discovered, especially the means to eradicate Slick. On Mars, the Chinese team working at the site where the organism was originally found flees the area as they are now contaminated. The NASA team finds samples of the original organism and Mariella makes a desperate effort to return them to earth, alienating Cytex, the Chinese, and NASA.

THE SECRET OF LIFE is an engaging science fiction novel that once again shows how talented Paul McAuley is in getting his message across within an entertaining plot. Mr. McAuley rips extremists on either side of scientific discovery through his intrepid lead character. The greed and the ban without debate types are skewered and ridiculed for their intolerance towards the common good. However, the secret to what enables Mr. McAuley's books (see his Confluence stories) so good is he rips skin, but does so inside a believable, terse futuristic tale.

Harriet Klausner

Hard, near-future science fiction is the most difficult to write because it demands that the writer extend scienctific and technological trends to fit with near-term political and economic realities. Unlike pieces which take the longer view, a short term piece can only succeed if both its characters and its structure are believable. Paul McAuley is a highly educated, erudite, disciplined bio-scientist whose writing credentials suggest that "The Secret of Life" ought to be both readable and entertaining.

No one is expert at everything. Faulkner was perhaps one of the world's best writers because he was able to consistently discriminate between the inclusion of information that is enriching and the addition of descriptive information that serves only as ballast. The scientist as writer labors under a more rigorous discipline - in order for science to be useful and informative, to sustain validity and rise to a wholly inclusive standard, the scientist is obliged to report everything, leaving out nothing, so that those who evaluate the data sets can see where the anomalies arise with respect to the mainstream.

In fiction, especially science fiction, the inability or unwillingness to suspend this all-inclusive approach produces not richness but tedium. And because McAuley is erudite, he is irresistibly compelled to throw in everything including the kitchen sink and all the plumbing that goes with it. The book begins with such a relentless barrage of descriptive materials that the reader is obliged to plow through ten pages before anything meaningful happens. Indeed, McAuley could take a lesson from Dick Francis and Elmore Leonard, whose character portrayals require the reader to fill in the blanks with their own visual images.

While I appreciate knowing that the writer truly understands the entire scope of all the relevant issues associated with his story line, I found it hard slogging to bushwhack my way through the jungle of page after page of gratuitous descriptive material to find the characters and the story line. This makes the book a difficult read for anyone except perhaps those who prefer to read an endless, essentially unrelated litany of facts, simply because they like to know the facts about such things. The problem with even this element of the book is that the vocabulary provided by the author is largely technical jargon understood only by those who possess PhD's in biotechnology, genetic engineering, paleo-geology and astro-physics. Pretty tough sledding for the average reader.

On the other hand, McAuley provides an occasionally resonating glimpse into the catastrophic results produced by political alliances between multi-national corporations with undeclared agendas and the agencies of government created to regulate them. The combination of ruthlessness, desperation, greed and power-mongering found in the corporate characters is more than matched by the parochial attitudes of the radical greens, the Chinese government, committees of the US Senate, academic tyrants, socialist revolutionaries and nut cases that populate the story line.

I found McAuley's depiction of the main character to be unbelievable - not because she was portrayed as being more than human but because the discipline required to rise to the vaunted standard of scientific rigor she is supposed to evoke cannot coexist with a set of personal values which utterly refuse to discriminate between responsible and inappropriate behaviors outside the lab. After working with scientists of all stripes for more than 40 years, I recall meeting none whose hard-won credentials were given such short shrift as Mariella's characteer exhibits. She is simply not believable.

Finally, the most difficult parts of this book are the repeated passages during which McAuley's characters pontificate endlessly about their point of view. The moral, ethical and practical aspects of the consequences arising from the introduction of Martian DNA to Earth's unprotected environment becomes a series of lectures rather than an exercise in mutual discovery. As a reader, I much prefer to participate in the discovery of the mystery rather than be lectured to about it.

The principle question forming the premise of this book is simply stated: If you had reason to believe that life exists on Mars, what lengths would you go to to find it? And if you are willing to operate as if the ends always justify the means, and if you succeeded in discovering a new form of life on Mars, what would you do with it? And what would happen if you did? If you could, would you? And then what?

I'd like to be invited to take the ride from start to finish with all the characters. For me, great science fiction writing is a contact sport. This book fails to rise to that standard.

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards, McAuley ("Confluence Trilogy") sets "The Secret of Life" in 2026, when global warming has submerged portions of the US coast, new viral infections menace humanity, and corporate greed reigns. The newest threat is a fast-growing slick in the Pacific, absorbing all nutrition in its path. Genetic examination suggests the slick is of Martian origin, probably brought back by the Chinese.

As life has never been found on Mars, this discovery excites scientists for numerous reasons, few of them altruistic. The protagonist, brilliant, bohemian, holistic biologist Mariella Anders, joins her nemesis, corporate-funded biologist Penn Brown and a NASA geologist, Anchee Ye, on an emergency Mars mission. Stalked by radical greens and shadowed by FBI, a rebellious impulse compromises Mariella's position, forcing her to leave for Mars under contract to Brown's employer, Cytex. Not wholly believable.

The Chinese have also mounted another mission and the tensions escalate as Brown, Mariella and Ye race across the desolate Mars landscape toward the pole and the rumor of life. Greed, accident and miscalculation leave the mission in perilous disarray and Mariella, trusting only herself, seizes the samples and flees.

There's plenty of action and speculative science on the origin of life but it's hard to believe even the most ruthless among us would risk sacrificing the entire human race for profit. If there's no people, where's the profit? An excellent writer, McAuley is at his best describing the eerie Martian terrain, truly evoking the strange, harsh, beauty of land without life.

This near term hard science fiction novel covers a lot of territory, the politics of science being one of them, Paul McAuley is a scientist so he illuminates some of the in-fighting that occasionally occurs in scientific research. I thought the story was very well executed, and characterization was superb. The plot concerns a microorganism that is spreading in the Pacific ocean and threatening the food chain, and may have part or all of it's origin on the planet Mars. Dr. Mariella Anders, a microbiologist, does her part to investigate, and is also sent to Mars for further investigations, with a greedy corporation seeking to monopolize the research. Mariella is also a free spirit, delighting in the pleasures of living, well done, and not another puritanical novel here! Paul McAuley throws in some dead accurate social commentary in this novel also, and you can even learn a bit about biology in addition. But beware, this is not a shoot-em-up space opera, it is very cerebral and may cause a reader to actually think, but it still has it's share of action and suspense, and the trek across the surface of Mars is a masterpiece.

I found this novel to be very readable, it drew me in as I read more and more each day to get to the end to see what happens, and it is not far-out as some science fiction is today that lose touch with reality. This novel has as it's centerpiece a great biological mystery that I found fascinating, wrote in an easy to read, flowing style.

I found McAuley's Secret of Life to be both a disappointing and difficult read. It's disappointing because the premise is excellent. A Martian organism with the ability to evolve rapidly by modifying its own DNA is released on Earth. Many exciting possibilities are immediately raised and the opening chapter is full of excitement and drama. The story follows our heroine as she attempts to retrieve a live sample of the organism from Mars and then her efforts to study the organism and release those results to the scientific community.

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.

A tense political thriller about possible bacteria that the Chinese might have discovered on the planet Mars? Sign me up!

For some reason that I can't quite fathom, this book seems to get a bad reputation among fans, mostly because it's more hard science than the types of novel he had just come off of, notably the Confluence series. But after spending several years and three novels in that rather off-kilter setting, it's not impossible that the guy wanted to try something different. So instead of creating yet another bizarre world and sending us on a world spanning saga, he scales things down a little. Let's give him a break, shall we?

Is it as ambitious as his previous works? No, not really. But nobody expected Tolkien to whip out a trilogy every time out either. The deciding factor of whether a book should be worth the effort or not isn't how it's compared to the author's past works, but if it's any good on its own. And this one is.

Trading the far future and alien vistas for a setting a bit closer to home, McAuley brings us to an Earth that is undergoing something not akin to a red tide, otherwise known as "The Slick". It's filling up the oceans and all the scientists are trying to figure where exactly it came from and how to stop it. It's suspected the Chinese might have found life on Mars and brought it back and somehow lost track of it, but the Chinese aren't talking. Some corporations might have made some progress into unraveling it, but they aren't talking either, because revealing too much isn't exactly how you get the profits to roll in. Meanwhile, NASA is thinking of sending another crew up there to basically check out the Chinese site and see what happened once the Chinese have cleared out. Enter Mariella Anders.

McAuley manages the rather neat trick of having her be a know-it-all genius who never becomes annoying, as she becomes the center of a debate that has at minimum three sides and several of those sides are willing to commit violence to get their way. In fact, almost everyone is willing to shoot someone else. For a novel centered around the discussion of what one's moral and intellectual rights are regarding the DNA sequence of an alien chunk of bacteria, there's an awful high body count and a lot of bloodletting going on. From the opening sequence alone, it's clear there is going to be tense and coupled with McAuley's hyper-detailed style of writing (his descriptive abilities rival Dan Simmons, giving you a wealth of detail without overwhelming the reader or slowing the story down, and yet leaving enough for the imagination) it reminds me of nothing more than a better written Michael Crichton novel, feeling contemporary without the "ripped from the headlines!" sensation like the author is trying to be contemporary.

And it is science-fiction, even if the aliens barely play a part. It's a world a few years removed into our future, where missions to Mars are routine and science (especially genetic engineering) has managed to get itself distrusted something fierce, thanks to a crisis that Dr Anders had to basically help manufacture a virus to save everyone from. But what helps to keep it gritty and grounded is the constant political maneuvering that goes into every step the characters make, as NASA grapples (and goes to bed with, in some cases) the companies that are looking to make money off this, governments grapple with each other and posture, and different factions of people who want to go green jockey to make themselves heard. In the midst of it Mariella is just trying to get the real science aired, and stop people for using it for their own selfish purposes. She's a flawed woman attempting to do the only pure thing here, and it's a fine anchor to rest the novel's themes.

Because, as someone else pointed out, the story isn't so much about life on Mars as the intersection of how we deal with science, the distance between our eager appropriation of new technology versus our nervousness that we've unleashed something terribly wrong and we won't be able to undo it. Mariella argues for a free information system, which is a bit utopian but still purer than everyone else's ideals, which are to co-opt ideas for their own purposes. To this end the novel falters slightly because it feels like everyone is a fanatic in some respect, and while Mariella has some charm, by the eighth time Penn Brown drones on yet again about how Mariella is wrong, you may want someone to change his channel. It doesn't get better, with some greens wanting to totally embrace technology, some people wanting to go back to living with the planet "Ishmael" style, and the companies out to do what is best for everyone, as long as theirs profit involved. Everyone is protecting their own interests and seeing Mariella navigate that while maintaining her own ideals winds up being a tense tightrope walk and the gateway to some heady discussions about how we perceive science and what its ultimate role is in our society. Will it show us the way forward, or does it need to be restrained before we wind up killing ourselves with it?

Lest you think it's all boring opposing thesis statements, McAuley manages to concoct some extremely tense action sequences, with a bravura bit in the beginning, along with a nail biting standoff on the planet Mars as well a rescue mission that turns utterly violent very quickly. These little blips of action keep the stakes high and softens some of the more strident arguing before it gets grating.

Is it perfect? Nope. But is it a finely realized SF thriller in a future that feels two steps away from ours, lived in and just as petty and confused? Yes. McAuley may lose points from some people by not stretching his imagination in a flashy fashion, but his storyteller skills are in full force here, creating a literal page turner that also functions as a roadmap of sorts for the arguments we're having now and will continue to have as this mess of a century rolls onward.

I have an amazing ability to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. My willingness seems to be inversely proportional to how seriously the book seems to take itself; the more it sets itself up as hard science fiction, the more believable I expect it to be. The Secret of Life takes itself very seriously.

The premise is that a foiled act of industrial espionage releases a Martian microbe into the ocean. With no natural enemies, the organism multiplies rapidly, making growing stretches of water uninhabitable for terrestrial life.

The American government gives a powerful corporation exclusive access and patent rights to the organism. The corporation's proprietary attitude toward the organism and general lack of cooperation ends up hobbling the government's ability to effectively counter its threat. Other forces in the government decide to make an end-run around this obstacle by sending Mariella to Mars to find the source organism - which is not covered by the patent.

I really had trouble buying that a corporation would risk the public relations disaster of being seen as endangering life on earth. It also seemed unlikely that the government would hold the preservation of earth's life as lesser value than a group of patents. It seemed supremely naive to propose a scenario in which other governments (many of which have less than stellar track records on patent protection, anyway) would also honor these patents. So the entire premise of the book was on pretty shaky ground for me. Mariella wasn't a strong enough character to win me over.

I was planning on giving this book 3 stars when I came in here, but reading other reviews reminded me of other things that bugged me about the book. That, and the fact that it was so darn forgettable that I had to remind myself what the book was about (I read it within the past 3 months), made me lower my score.

After looking over some of the other reviews, I think Ms. Klausner misplaced her review. The book she is talking about looks like another book by the same author.

THE SECRET OF LIFE is a big, sprawling, highly episodic book that seems to lack an ending.

On the paragraph level, McAuley writes quite well. For instance, he describes one of his southwestern characters: "She is wearing white, tasseled cowboy boots that add ten centimeters to her not-very-considerable height, white silk shorts and a matching bolero jacket over an orange T-shirt, and shades herself from the noon sun with a fringed parasol. Her skin is so pale the maps of her blue veins show through, her teased and waved blond hair looks as fragile as spun glass." The author weaves a lot of this vivid description through his narrative. When he directs his keen vision to landscapes, he makes Mars come alive for the reader. At this level, McAuley writes very well.

But there are some structural oddities in the book that put me off. After moving into the second section of the book, which puts the central character, Mariella, about to blast off for an exploration of Mars, McAuley -- at this unpromising point -- decides to wander off into the protagonist's distant past and tread water laying out background -- for about 35 pages. He woolgathers about his character's youth, about her academic wanderings from university to university, about her half-successful marriage. What an awful time, when the reader is keyed up for the launch to Mars, to just put all the action on hold. Worse, a large part of this meandering seems to be only borderline relevant to the story. What a way to kill reader interest! I must be honest. I began to skim, because I reached a point I couldn't bear any more.

The episodes set on Mars were excellent, in part through the writer's descriptive skills and in part due to his extensive science background. If one could somehow excise this and make it a short, stand-alone novel, I would rate it a "5 stars." Unfortunately, McAuley seems determined to press on.

The last third of the book -- set back on Earth -- blurs past in a kaleidoscope of changing scenes and settings. Too much, too fast. Every few pages we move to a different locale to the point that we almost lose track of where we are. Characters spin by too fast to assume any reality.

The book has no ending. It just stops. The dangerous alien life choking the seas has not been not vanquished . . . indeed, it has not even been attacked. In lieu of an ending, the final pages wonder out loud how -- possibly -- this peril may be defeated. And yet, I thought the survival of earth and the recovery of the seas was the whole centerpiece of the plot!

In terms of politics and social philosophy, the author sets up some straw men, then proceeds to knock them down one by one. The "greens" who love the earth -- all totally admirable -- are pitted against corporate robber barons. No one is ever ambivalent or complex -- they wear either the white hat or the black hat. "High Noon" with Gary Cooper had more psychological complexity than this.

Still, I must say, the book held my interest very well in part. I made it to the end expecting a conclusion. It was only in the closing pages that I began to realize the author had no intention of writing one.