The Cassandra Complex

Rating:
Summary: SFRevu.com: British Police drama with an SF twist.
Review: Dr. Lisa Friemann, a 62 year old forensic investigator for the city of Bristol, England, awakens to burglars picking her unhackable locks and ransacking her apartment. On the way out they pause to paint "Traitor" on the wall, demand that she turn over whatever it is they were looking for taunt her that her longstanding lover's promises were empty words.

All of which confuses her more than a bit, because she can't imagine who she's supposed to have betrayed or what she was supposed to be hiding. Besides, Dr. Morgan Miller, a brilliant if chronically independent biologist and gifted lover had never promised her anything...it wasn't his style.

Lisa's not the only one touched by the events of the night. Mouseworld, a teeming research habitat of 500 thousand mice that had been in existence for seventy years to study the effects of crowding on behavior is gutted by arson, with no explanation, and Morgan Miller himself is abducted, his kidnappers escaping through a citywide blackout caused by a computer hack.

Clearly someone thinks Miller has a secret worth killing for, at least mice, and possible men as well, and quite likely they think Lisa is in on it. Lisa, on the other hand, suspects that it's all a mistake, because she most definitely wasn't let in on any big discovery.

With little sleep for the remainder of the book, Lisa, the Bristol Police, The MOD (Ministry of Defense), various mercenaries and a dazed researcher who suspects it's all his fault careen over the English countryside looking for clues, getting into scrapes and reflecting on what the world is coming to in the middle of the twenty first century.

Could Miller have been hiding something monumental, like the secret of immortality (though he prefers "emortalilty" as a term) and if so, whom was he intending to trust with it, a foundation started by Nazis or one started by a Jew? And where do the third wave of feminists fit into all this anyway?

The Cassandra Complex combines the thoughtful puzzle solving of English mysteries with excellent Science Fiction and a lot of illuminating social commentary and analysis. My only regret it that Brian Stableford, who's' future history has been getting better and better with each book, failed to resolve all the book's mysteries in a confrontation in a sitting room.

The book takes its name from a stress related syndrome, where a person knows, or thinks they know, of an impending disaster and is helpless to stop it. You can pick your flavor of disaster, and indeed sorting among the many offered in this book is much of its point. Overpopulation, viral warfare, global corporate control, discrimination against "twentieth century leftovers:...they all take their turns and play their parts in Brian Stableford's latest book in the future-history series he began with Inherit the Earth. As are many of his stories, this one is based on a short story that was published in Interzone 29 in 1989, and reprinted by Gardner Dozois in the Year's Best Science Fiction.

If Science Fiction is a device to provide metaphors for discussing contemporary issues, the Mouseworld provides a metaphoric stage to discuss the issues of the novel.

Every step of the chase is discussed at some point in terms of the behavior of the overcrowded mice, from the meekness of "citizen mice" who go along with whatever demands are made on them to the notion that all cultures are ruled from without, but "Secret Masters", for the mice, researchers, for us, governments and cabals.

Stableford's notions of the future and his analysis of it's seeds in our past and present continue to grow richer and more illuminating.

Although he doesn't tend to recycle his characters from book to book, Lisa, a Forensic Detective of the near future has all the qualities a serial heroine needs. I'd be more than happy to read further stories with her in the lead, and the BBC should note that this book would adapt itself to the tube with a minimum of fuss.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining if not memorable
Review: Stableford has set The Cassandra Complex about 40 years in the future with the seeds of the action sown in our time. The novel is a prequel to earlier work but stands solidly on its own.

The Cassandra Complex is really more of a techno-thriller than science fiction novel. The action is more in line with a police thriller than most hard SF. However, there is enough SF to satisfy fans of the genre. Stableford tends to fall in the trap when setting mysteries in SF that the investigator knows information about the times that the reader doesn't. If one likes to solve the mystery based on the clues then the information isn't in The Cassandra Complex to do so.

All in all it was a fast-paced enjoyable read, I read it some time ago, but it hasn't stuck with me. It isn't new or original but it is well constructed.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining if not memorable
Review: Stableford has set The Cassandra Complex about 40 years in the future with the seeds of the action sown in our time. The novel is a prequel to earlier work but stands solidly on its own.

The Cassandra Complex is really more of a techno-thriller than science fiction novel. The action is more in line with a police thriller than most hard SF. However, there is enough SF to satisfy fans of the genre. Stableford tends to fall in the trap when setting mysteries in SF that the investigator knows information about the times that the reader doesn't. If one likes to solve the mystery based on the clues then the information isn't in The Cassandra Complex to do so.

All in all it was a fast-paced enjoyable read, I read it some time ago, but it hasn't stuck with me. It isn't new or original but it is well constructed.

Rating:
Summary: Good future vision, too preachy
Review: THE CASSANDRA EFFECT is set in a near future (mid-twentyfirst century) England. Overpopulation has become a major problem, huge corporations rule as the cabel, and plague wars have replaced the bomb as the great fear. Author Brian Stableford draws out logical consequences from today's biological sciences with discussions of disease, cloning, and population spikes.

Unfortunately, Stableford describes this potentially fascinating world through long blocks of descriptive dialogue, internal dialogue, and description. Rather than have information flow from the story, it is presented to the reader in huge slabs which must be choked down if one is to continue with the story.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I find the premise interesting, the plot was certainly fine, and the one significant character, Lisa, a police officer and biologist, was likable and well motivated.

I found the dense writing to be a fairly stiff price to pay for an intriguing concept.

Rating:
Summary: Near Future Thriller about Biotechnology
Review: The newest novel in Brian Stableford's ongoing future history is _The Cassandra Complex_. Most of the other novels and stories in this series have been set a few centuries in the future. After a devastating series of "plague wars", featuring genetically-engineered plagues, Earth's population has been greatly reduced, but the survivors have made extraordinary advances, mostly in bio-technology, and they live greatly extended lives, while the biosphere as been artificially restored from the environmental ravages of the 20th and 21st centuries, and many of the plants and animals are engineered for greater efficiency. _The Cassandra Complex_, however, is set much earlier, in 2041, as the first plague wars are just starting. (Note that all these novels can be read independently.)

The heroine is Lisa Friemann, a 60ish British policewoman who has specialized in using genetic methods to solve crimes. She is very close to a few men at the University where she earned her PhD, especially the eccentric Morgan Miller. The novel opens with her apartment invaded: the intruders are looking for some data they believe she has hidden somewhere. But she cannot imagine what they could be after.

As she joins the police investigation, she realizes that Morgan Miller has been kidnapped, apparently by the same group that invaded her apartment, and a long-running "experiment" of Miller's, called Mouseworld, has been bombed. Mouseworld is a huge colony of research mice, and the experiment has shown how mice adapt to conditions of overcrowding. Stableford makes the point that the Earth is as overcrowded as Mouseworld, and that humans probably will not adapt as well as mice: a crash is inevitable (as the other novels in the series have shown). But this novel is concerned with Lisa's quest to find out what secret it is that Morgan Miller must have had that the criminals want. Miller and Lisa were close, and they remain close, so Lisa can't believe she would have hidden anything important from him. But she knows nothing important, and can only speculate: does the secret involve generalized resistance to the coming plagues? in which case the corporations that are de facto rulers of the world would be very interested -- or might it involve a plague itself? -- or something quite different, such as immortality. Miller's last known contacts were with crank groups which were known to be interested in extended human lifespans -- perhaps they kidnapped him for such a secret?

Lisa spends the couple of days of the book's action searching for Miller or his kidnappers, though the real interest is in figuring out Miller's secret. Stableford uses this to portray his future: with widespread "smart" clothing technology, and considerably advanced medical treatment due to genetic engineering, as well as a fractured political/financial landscape, dominated semi-secretly by a few corporations. Lisa's old connections with some radical feminist groups come to seem important. The eventual resolution is fairly logical and interesting.

This is a decent but not great book. For one thing, the central secret, which is actually pretty spooky and scary, is still a secret worthy of only a novelet or so. The book feels quite padded, with lots of somewhat pointless rushing about. Stableford seems interested mainly in portraying his future, but really this particular segment of it is a bit thin, and just not quite interesting enough. And his characters stay at arm's length, somehow. Worth reading, but only middling stuff.

Rating:
Summary: GIVE ME A BREAK!
Review: The themes in The CASSANDRA COMPLEX are much too complex (overpopulation,longevity,biological warfare). The story as told by an emotionally confused, female forensic pathologist is very confusing. The book would have been easier to digest if it were read back to front. That everything came out nicely in the end was contrived and not motivated by any of the character's actions. Everything just sorted itself out in the last few pages. Well made stories show great craft but rarely enlighten the reader...

Rating:
Summary: GIVE ME A BREAK!
Review: The themes in The CASSANDRA COMPLEX are much too complex (overpopulation,longevity,biological warfare). The story as told by an emotionally confused, female forensic pathologist is very confusing. The book would have been easier to digest if it were read back to front. That everything came out nicely in the end was contrived and not motivated by any of the character's actions. Everything just sorted itself out in the last few pages. Well made stories show great craft but rarely enlighten the reader...

Rating:
Summary: Memorable and frightening vision
Review: The time is 40 years in the future -- maybe not our lives, but certainly a reality that could be our children's. A novel of frightening and important ideas and issues: extreme overpopulation, megacorps, and hyperflu wars. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. Who will determine how the scales tilt? The characters are not sharply defined, but the novel is more about the vision than about the people.

Rating:
Summary: Memorable and frightening vision
Review: The time is 40 years in the future -- maybe not our lives, but certainly a reality that could be our children's. A novel of frightening and important ideas and issues: extreme overpopulation, megacorps, and hyperflu wars. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. Who will determine how the scales tilt? The characters are not sharply defined, but the novel is more about the vision than about the people.