The Games - Ted Kotsmaka

As a widely published short fiction author, Ted Kosmatka's first novel The Games is hardly a debut. Since 2008, Kosmatka has seen eight stories reprinted in Years Best anthologies and received multiple award nominations, most prominently the Nebula for his story Divining Light. He's also a writer for Valve, creators of the massively successful Half-Life video games. With that in mind, I was looking forward to the The Games being a polished, layered, science fictional novel. What I got was a polished, straightforward, near term technothriller that calls to mind a taciturn Michael Crichton.

Set sometime in the near future, the games in The Games refers to the Olympics where the main event has evolved into a gladiator like competition with only one rule: no human DNA permitted in the design of the combatants. Silas Williams is the geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S. entry whose designs have led them to the gold in every previous event. Looking for an edge in the upcoming Games, Silas’s boss engages an experimental supercomputer to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the guy who invented the supercomputer, Evan Chandler, is batshit crazy and he's got more to accomplish that creating a genome never before seen on earth. Aided by the beautiful (aren't they all?) xenobiologist, Vidonia João, Silas must find a way to understand what he created and how to keep it from ruining everything he's built.

Before I go any farther I think I should disclose the fact that I wanted a lot more gladiator action. When a book is sold as containing genetically engineered gladiatorial combat, I'm looking for Jean Claude Van Damme's Bloodsport with chitinous armored sentient chimeras. Or maybe rabid vorpal bunnies. While The Games delivers on the crazy genetically engineered monster factor, very little of the novel actually takes place in the arena. Kosmatka instead focuses on the overworked 'you-can't-put-technology-back-in-the-box' angle.

As far as those kinds of stories go, The Games is a success. It's fast paced, full of tension, and just the right amount of blood and guts to sustain things. There's a little romance and the whole thing is a tragic story of technology run amok. Except, replace the Olympic setting with a remote island and the genetically engineered gladiator with a velociraptor or two and the end result looks an awful lot like Jurassic Park with a (very) slightly altered cast of characters. That's just not going to do it for me.

The characters themselves are likeable enough. Silas is a bit miscast as a once in a lifetime genius geneticist, but that's part of his charm. He's smart and athletic, loves to hunt with his bow and arrow, and no one can seem to get over how big he is. Everything about his character to me screams big time executive, not genius level scientist. Nevertheless, he comes across as incredibly conflicted about what he does and why he does it. The other motive character, Evan Chandler, is even more interesting. A functional (barely) autistic (maybe?), he struggles to interact with the real world, choosing instead to live within the virtual confines of his super computer. Outside them, the cast is archetypal and bland. The major villain, Mr. Baskov (the Olympic Commissioner) and the love interest, Vidonia João, fit into tidy boxes that eschew any sort of eye opening moments.

Considering Kosmatka's exceptional short fiction and his work experience in research labs, it comes as no surprise that the novel is well written and authentic seeming in its science. He presents the latter in a clear way that allows for suspension of disbelief without becoming Tom Clancy didactic. The tension is well structured and peaks at the right times. What I'm getting at is that this is perfectly good novel. It's just a novel I feel like I've read a half a dozen times.

Ted Kosmatka's first novel, The Games is a paint by numbers technothriller separated from its peers only by its level of polish and the interest ignited by the Olympic backdrop. For readers who rabidly seek out this kind of yarn, I suspect they'll find a great deal of enjoyment. For me, I kept waiting to be engaged at a deeper level, or caught off guard by a twist, or sucked into some bad ass monster fighting. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting.

Triggers - Robert J. Sawyers

Robert J. Sawyer is one of those names that float through the genre world that everyone presumes everyone else has read. Especially since his starring role on the hit television show Lost -- he's really good looking isn't he? Regardless, I was ashamed to admit that I'd never read Sawyer, who isn't quite genre and isn't quite mainstream, falling instead into an odd gully occupied by the likes of Michael Crichton, Margaret Atwood, and Peter F. Hamilton (that's a joke). Triggers, his newest novel set in a very near future United States, broke that pattern of behavior for me, but didn't entirely convince me of his status as an industry icon.

In Sawyer's vision of the future, terrorism and fear have overtaken America. Bombs in Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia have been detonated to catastrophic result. President Seth Jerrison has had enough. On the day before an unprecedented strike against the Middle East, an assassin's bullet strikes him during an address to the nation at the Lincoln Memorial. Rushed to the hospital (not George Washington Hospital?), surgeons struggle to save his life.

At the same hospital, researcher Dr. Ranjip Singh is treating a soldier suffering from PTSD. An expert on memory, Dr. Singh has developed an experimental device that can erase traumatic memories. When another terrorist bomb detonates, destroying the White House in the process, the blast perverts Singh's device, causing a group of people to access one another's minds. Now someone has access to the president's memories -- including classified information regarding the upcoming military mission. The task of determining who has switched memories with whom falls to the agent-in-change of the President's Secret Service detail, Susan Dawson, who's got problems of her own.

For all intents and purposes, Triggers is more psychological thriller than big idea science fiction. Sawyer's premise that an experimental memory machine gone haywire causes individuals to share memories isn't all that out there in a world where Flashforward and Momento have run the proverbial traps. He lays enough scientific foundation to suspend the reader's disbelief, but not so much that it becomes the novel's focus. Instead the focus remains on his cast of characters, how they interact with one another, and the inherent biases that make up their perceptions.

In that way, Triggers is not unlike the 1957 Sidney Lumet film 12 Angry Men, which was a character study of twelve white men sitting in judgement of a Latino teenager. In the film Lumet has:

"the self-made man who angrily remembers his son's defiance of authority. There is the garage owner seething with racial prejudice. There is the calm stockbroker who seriously has arrived at his verdict of guilty. There is the wise-cracking salesman anxious to vote so as to be able to get out to the ball game. There is the handsome, vacillating Madison Avenue advertising man. There is an old man, wise and benign with the years. And there is a refugee watchmaker who is appreciative of the ideals and freedoms of democracy." (N.Y. Times, A.H. Wheeler, 1957)

Sawyer likewise delves into the heads of each of his afflicted and disparate subjects, from the racist eighty-seven year old woman, to the opportunistic and libido driven attorney, to the misguided, but committed leader of the free world. Rather than a young man on trial for his life, Sawyer's defendant is the President's response to terrorism and the rightness of an eye for an eye. By the novel's conclusion his position is self evident. Using his cast of characters to ask what makes people unique and how those attributes color their interactions with the world, Sawyer ultimately focuses on those that unify.

Oh, did I have the wrong

Sawyer?

Unity, in the sense that there is or should be or could be some factor that brings 'us' all together, is a the underlying theme of Sawyer's novel and it's one I struggled with on a personal level. Perhaps that's why I found Triggers so underwhelming in the final moments. Sawyer carefully constructs tension built on the notion that the President's knowledge of a secret attack could be revealed at any moment, calling into question the safety and security of the United States. The resolution to the problem cuts through that tension like the Gordian Knot, not so much invalidating the narrative as rendering it obsolete. Even had I found the conclusion uplifting, as was surely intended, and not horrifying and off-putting, the consequences of it to the larger narrative remain intolerable to me.

That said, the construction and build-up to the conclusion are without peer. Sawyer demonstrates a tremendous ability to write compelling characters that cannot be ignored and a knack for pace. Going into the final pages I was already considering Triggers to be one of the better novels I've read this year. Of course, that makes my ultimate verdict so much harder to hand down. While Sawyer's newest novel contends for excellence, it fails to deliver on the promises made in the early chapters. What is presented as, and reads like, a techno-thriller, concludes like a novel with a philosophical agenda that's ill-suited to the trappings around it.

Fans of Robert J. Sawyer, and new readers alike, will find lots of like here, but I fear disappointment will be the most common outcome of its conclusion. Triggers is due out April 3, 2012 wherever books are sold.