Subject: _Wildlife_ by James Patrick Kelly

From: [email-masked] (Christina Schulman)
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 23:29:45 GMT

_Wildlife_ by James Patrick Kelly

_Wildlife_ has a wonderful cover, a crisp collage of bright images,
including a spaceship, a ravelling DNA double helix, and the Statue
of Liberty, all of which are relevant to the story.  Unfortunately,
the cover is the most likable thing about the book.

As the story opens, video journalist Wynne Cage is escaping from a
space station where she accompanied a data thief who has just stolen
WILDLIFE, a collection of data which may or may not be the key to
true artificial intelligence.  From this less-than-original start,
the novel keeps sinking even deeper into a morass of cliches about
sex, drugs, and AI.

The first section of the book is from Wynne's point of view, and covers
her escape, her developing love affair with the twisted man who
commissioned the raid, and her loathing for herself and her father.
The second section takes place several years earlier, and is told
from the point of view of her father, Tony Cage, a rich and famous
designer of recreational drugs.  The third section jumps forward almost
a hundred years and centers on the Wynne's son Peter, and the fourth and
final section centers on Wynne again, except that by this time there are
several of her.  All this skipping around in time gives an overview of
the social and technological changes over a century, although the society
viewed is primarily that of the filthy rich.  ("My dear Wynne, money only
gets filthy if you let the grubs handle it.")

The central theme in _Wildlife_ is the conflict between parents and
children, with the added weirdness that the Cages are all clones of
their "parents," give or take the gender.  The parents alienate their
children by attempting to control them, and the children turn around
and exact terrible revenge, which rapidly grows tiresome.  I'm not even
going to touch all the various sorts of cages and wombs throughout the
book.  Kelly also explores the question of where humanity begins and
ends, although he doesn't say anything particularly original.

Kelly isn't actually a bad writer, as such.  His prose isn't bad, and
every now and then he turns out a wonderful phrase that's wasted on a
book this unpleasant.  ("Getting him to talk about himself is like
moving a refrigerator.")  He does have an irritating habit of dropping
in didactic little passages about subjects like Stonehenge and Neptune.

Kelly is trying -- trying so hard that it's painful to watch -- to write a
novel that has depths beyond the usual straightforward cyberpunk angst
and adventure.  This is certainly commendable, and I'd like to see more
authors try this, but somewhere in the process of assembling his themes
and symbols and crises of identity, he ended up with a novel about
unlikable people doing unpleasant things to one another with fairly
meaningless and cliched results.

Reading _Wildlife_ is like watching flies pull the wings off of each
other.  Avoid.

%A   Kelly, James Patrick
%T   Wildlife
%I   Tor
%C   New York
%D   February 1994
%G   ISBN 0-312-85578-8
%P   299 pp.
%O   hardback, US $21.95

-- 
Christina Schulman   Pittsburgh NMR Institute   [email-masked]