Subject: RED GENESIS by S. C. Sykes

From: [email-masked]
Date: 18 Sep 91 16:02:46 GMT

{Moderator's note:  Bibliographic data are at the end of the review.  
	--djdo}

                         RED GENESIS by S. C. Sykes
                     A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		      Copyright 1991 Evelyn C. Leeper

     RED GENESIS is the first of a new series from Bantam Spectra.  My
comments on this series in general are at the end of this review, but first
I will discuss RED GENESIS.

     RED GENESIS has been described as being Heinleinesque, and not without
reason.  Sykes gives us a powerful business tycoon as our strong main
character.  Convicted of killing millions through a series of accidents
involving toxic waste, Graham Kuan Sinclair is exiled to the Martian
colonies--forever.  Forbidden any contact with Earth, any news of Earth,
even a watch showing Earth time, he must make his way, without money or
inherited power or influence.  (Yes, the parallel to Edward Everett Hale's
"Man Without a Country" is obvious--Sykes quotes Hale at the beginning of
the novel.)  Since there's never any doubt Sinclair will survive--at least
not to my mind--the only question is whether he will remake the new world to
his liking and control it the way he did Earth, or learn a new humanity and
social conscience.  With the spate of "powerful man suffers serious
misfortune and finds sensitive inner self" movies this year (REGARDING
HENRY, THE DOCTOR, DOC HOLLYWOOD), this plot may look old, but I'm sure RED
GENESIS was written before any of the films were made and merely reflects a
social trend.  But even with the handicap of familiarity, Sykes manages to
balance the libertarian with the socialist to achieve an ending that doesn't
hand the reader a canned party line in either direction.  If some of the
plot elements are unlikely, obvious, or both--well, I'm willing to forgive
them for the sake of a good story with good characters, which this is.

     Asimov's introduction about Mars reads like all his science essays over
the past twenty-five years and Eugene Mallove's closing essay on Mars says
nothing new.  Their inclusion makes the book look as if it were aimed at a
school audience ("Learn science through science fiction!") and needed some
educational material.  But anyone who needs the material probably won't find
the story interesting, because the story assumes the reader knows something
about Mars.  (Not to mention that a package with such pretensions to
education should not include the canard about the Great Wall of China being
the only man-made object visible with the unaided human eye from the moon.
To distinguish an object twenty feet wide from 240,000 miles would require
the eye to have a resolution of 0.001 SECOND of arc--physically impossible
given the dimensions and placement of the retina's rods and cones.  And if
it could detect an object twenty feet wide and thousands of miles long, it
could also detect I-80, which is considerably wider.)  It's a cute packaging
trick, but the novel is strong enough to stand on its own.  RED GENESIS is a
very promising first novel for Sykes and an auspicious start for "The Next
Wave."

     Bantam Spectra's "Special Editions" series seems to have fallen by the
wayside (or been replaced by their "Signature Editions," reprints of books
they feel did not get enough attention the first time around).  This new
series is "The Next Wave," which Bantam describes as a "dramatic new series
of books at the cutting edge where science meets science fiction."  Packaged
by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, each book has an introduction by Isaac
Asimov and a scientific essay relating to the novel's subject matter, as
well as a novel by a (relatively) new author.  I suspect the latter is true
in part because the entire work is copyrighted by Byron Preiss Visual
Publications rather than by the author, the essayist, and the cover artist.
(Asimov retains the copyright on his introductions--but then, he's Asimov.)
This bothers me in part because this means the cover artist is uncredited
inside (though there is the signature "Jensen" on the cover art itself,
strangely enough with a copyright symbol, so who knows who DOES own the
copyright?), and in part because having the novel's copyright assigned to
Byron Preiss Visual Publications implies that any financial benefit goes
there as well.  I could be wrong, and Sykes is entitled to make whatever
deal she wants in any case, but I prefer to be sure the author is benefiting
from her or his work.

     None of this has anything to do with RED GENESIS, of course, which I
highly recommend.

%T      RED GENESIS
%A      S. C. Sykes
%C      New York
%D      August 1991
%I      Bantam Spectra
%O      paperback, US$4.99
%G      ISBN 0-553-28874-1
%P      332pp (plus 20pp introduction and 38pp essay)

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 908 957 2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or [email-masked]