Here’s a review for a book I didn’t finish by Michael Paul McDowell (writing as Michael P. Kube-McDowell). As you can probably guess, the reason I didn’t finish it is because I don’t have much that’s good to say about it. Most of the time, I’ll slog my way through an entire book, whether I like it or not. A book has to really do something to make me quit completely, rather than just put it down and come back to it some other day.
Kube-McDowell’s first book in years is an idea story, sort of. This is my term for S.F. stories that exist primarily to speculate about some new idea regarding a thing (usually a science thing) and then builds the story around the exposition of the idea. I think this works best in short fiction, but sometimes it works in long fiction as well. For instance, Larry Niven’s Ringworld is an idea story. The idea is what if you didn’t build a Dyson Sphere and instead just built a ring or ribbon around a star?
Niven also did this with The Integral Trees
to decent effect. Without the idea, the story is pointless. Kube-McDowell’s Alternities is not an idea story, despite it containing a somewhat novel idea for alternate histories. He could have substitute another idea sufficient to get people to other dimensions, and the story would have worked. World-building, like Tolkien, Herbert, and Miéville have done, are not idea stories. There is one central fact tying Dune together, that the planet is a desert planet. But the story isn’t about life on a desert planet; it just plays a key role. Bas Lag novels aren’t about exploring the technology
of Remaking. Remaking is a method for Miéville to explore themes such as how we treat the alien and push down our downtrodden. And it’s a good way to make monsters.
Vectors is about the soul, and the idea is that it can be transferred to another person on death. Reincarnation. He dresses it up in science and then tries to explore how this would work. It’s a fairly pedestrian concept, but such things some times turn out good works.
This one isn’t. The main researcher into the soul does so with the use of a zillion clichés. Publish your paper or lose funding. The eminent scientist of the field denigrating your work so you gotta fight against it. The rich beautiful love interest who supplies money & equipment. And then the coup de grace, how we get the researcher to stop just looking for the soul and make him start to look for how to reincarnate them. In this case, let’s kill off the love interest who just moved to be with him, and have no one believe or care that they were involved. Shut out of her life, now he’s gonna be forced to search for reincarnation in a desperate emotional need to validate himself.
Or so I presume. I quit just after the death thing. Because the day after the death of the love interest, he’s distraught, doesn’t want to leave the apartment because his lover’s next of kin might not let him back, and he calls his boss (the university president) to have her bring him some things. While there, she embraces him, they kiss, and then he gets angry and turns her away. With no previous build up of any kind of romantic relationship, a university president secretly desires one of her subordinates and makes a pass at him in his moment of emotional break-down. Uh, yeah. So wrong on so many levels and in so many ways, both as a plot device and a portrayal of how people act.
I put the book down.
Title: Vectors
Author: Michael P. Kube-McDowell (Michael Paul McDowell)
Imprint / publisher: Bantam Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 366 p.
Publication date: October 2002
ISBN-10: 0-553-29824-0
Subject: Reincarnation — Fiction
Subject: Science fiction, American
