Customer Reviews

Useful Idiots

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This science-fictional outing by Jan Mark was obviously inspired partially by politically-correct insanity within the US in the late 1990s, triggered by the discovery of "Kennewick Man," and including deranged legal attempts to prevent archaeologists from examining the fossil! It is "juvenile fiction" only in the sense that the main character, Merrick Korda, is a graduate student at a university. The themes and settings are otherwise entirely adult. In Mark's mid-23rd Century world, archaeology is largely forbidden, barely tolerated, because it concentrates on "origins" in a culture that is attempting to become completely homogeneous. The subtle key to the novel's incidents is that in this culture, also, people almost invariably live alone. Thus the main character, Merrick, and his major professor Turcat, fail to understand until far, far too late that no one can be trusted, no matter how sympathetic they appear, or how cooperative they are, given that the researches of Merrick and Turcat have uncovered the long-buried secret of an impossibly valuable item.

Mark must be congratulated for one of the kinkiest sex scenes ever included in a "young adult" novel, although it is tastefully confined to a few sentences. The ending will leave most readers dissatisfied, to say the least, since Merrick never really figures out what is going on and the story is told from his viewpoint. We never find out precisely who has been working behind the scenes to cause all the trouble, much less what their precise motives and goals might be.

As usual in Mark's short stories and novels, all the characters are complex and have "deep revolving" matters going on beneath their placid, civilized surfaces, but because of the narrow focus on Merrick most of them do not make much impression. Unlike in most science fiction, where there is a continual emphasis on razzle-dazzle advances in technology, Mark's story fills in the background of this distant future world slowly and indirectly. As another reviewer remarks, the result is "sophisticated," and demands quite a bit from the reader. Marketed as a "young adult" novel in the US, it will never reach the audience that could appreciate it.