----- Original Message ----- From: "Leigh Meyers" <leigh_m at sbcglobal.net>
Not GE... Just an example from the world of BigPharma.
GE's time will come. And it *will* be a *nightmare*.
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http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1151832,00.html
Here be monsters
The future is bleak, PD Smith finds, as Paul McAuley takes us to hell and back in his dark biotechnology thriller, White Devils PD Smith
Saturday February 21, 2004
Guardian White Devils by Paul McAuley 521pp, Simon & Schuster, £12.99
In the 21st century, humankind, with its advanced technology and primitive morality, is irretrievably fallen - or at least that's the view of Cody Corbin, a Bible-quoting eco-terrorist in Paul McAuley's taut scientific thriller. "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow," is Cody's favourite line from Ecclesiastes (chapter 1, verse 18). McAuley's memorably psychotic "Radical Green warrior" sees it as his divine mission to kill anyone who defiles God's sacred text - the Book of Life was never meant to be edited by man.
Cody has plenty of targets in a world where "biopunks" with "body mods" (such as leopard hair or lizard eyes) hack genes as easily as kids today hack computer code. Any hi-tech low-life can "gengineer" nature: the rainforests are full of brown and orange butterflies whose wings are ironically decorated with the biohazard sign. "It's a very simple hack," we're told. But gene hacking has also produced a terrible plastic disease, caused by a gengineered bacterium that slowly and painfully transforms human body cells into plastic.
McAuley's near-future world is already recovering from another devastating disease: Black Flu, or haemorrhagic influenza. In Britain the pandemic killed 150,000, but in Africa half a billion perished. America thought the virulent disease was caused by bio-terrorists and launched its cruise missiles at anyone who "ever bought a Petri dish", provoking a world war. Only later did they realise that Black Flu was not a bioweapon but a jungle disease, like Ebola virus.
Set in the Congo about 40 years in the future, White Devils provides a chillingly believable portrait of a country torn by civil war and disease, its flora and fauna corrupted by gengineering and its natural biological wealth plundered by "transnats" such as Obligate, a "pro-Gaian" multi-national that effectively owns the Congo. It's a country "where people expect to find monsters", and monsters are exactly what McAuley's hero, Nicholas Hyde, discovers. "It's as if one of the gargoyles from the square tower of the Saxon church next to his mother's house has come to life," thinks Nick, as he struggles to describe what attacks him and his colleagues in the jungle. It's un diable blanc, says his African friend. The creature looks like a "shaved albino chimpanzee", with black claws, hard cartilaginous plates under its skin, a mouth bristling with sharp fangs, and a voracious appetite for human flesh.
The authorities suppress Nick's story, suggesting he was attacked by child soldiers crazed by drugs. But he isn't convinced. As savvy and iron-jawed as any gumshoe in a 1950s pulp crime novel, Nick doggedly pursues the gene hacker who created these nightmarish creatures. For Nick, it's about more than loyalty to dead friends; it's personal - he's on the run from a past that's almost as shocking as the truth about the white devils.
On his way, he teams up with Elspeth Faber, the daughter of a scientist who has taken refuge from his own past on an isolated desert island. This Prospero shares his island not with Caliban but with the Gentle People, the result of a scientific experiment to recreate an early form of human, Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa four million years ago. But how are these supposedly gentle creatures linked to the white devils? Even his own daughter does not realise the full extent of Matthew Faber's "unforgivable act of hubris", and God's self-appointed nemesis, Cody Corbin, is wholly without mercy.
Just one step ahead of Cody, Nick and Elspeth have to travel into the genetically engineered heart of darkness to find the truth about the white devils. Near where Mr Kurtz had his station in Conrad's story lies the Dead Zone, "a post-apocalyptic wasteland ... a slice of Hell risen to the surface of the world". In this Dantean landscape even the trees have melted, their cells liquefied by escaped gengineered viruses. Here both Nick and Elspeth confront their past - individually and as a species. Elspeth says, "we're the white devils, the Gentle People ..."
McAuley's plot roars along like a bushfire, crackling with fast and brutal action. An award-winning science fiction writer, he has created a compelling if somewhat unlikely hybrid of Crichton and Conrad, a dark and atmospheric scientific thriller that keeps you gripped until the very last page. McAuley is a biologist by training, and raises the spectre of a biological science out of control. He knowingly invokes the long tradition of mad, bad scientists in fiction, from Frankenstein to Dr Moreau. White Devils depicts the science of the future as a compromised ideology, the plaything of narcissistic individuals and big business. As the octogenarian biopunk Darlajane B puts it: "Fortunately, the world is not a tidy place any more. There is no neat cause and effect ... Rationalisation, like science, is dead."
· PD Smith's illustrated biography of Einstein is published by Haus.