Subject: Review of Wildlife by James Patrick Kelly

From: [email-masked] (Curt Wohleber)
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 21:36:09 GMT

Wildlife
	by James Patrick Kelly
	Reviewed by Curt Wohleber, Copyright 1996 Curt Wohleber

James Patrick Kelly's _Wildlife_ abounds with weirdness: 22nd century
technology allows people to mutate themselves into dinosaurs, star-spanning
spacecraft or 3/4-scale replicas of the Statue of Liberty. But if you're
looking for cyberpunk thrills a la William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, be
warned that _Wildlife_ is oddly genteel, reading like something a less
prolix John Updike might write if he lived in 2126. Kelly's jaded characters
may undergo genetic transforms and attend bizarre virtual reality parties,
but they also hang out in shopping malls and 7-11s and exhibit no more
decadence and anomie than the L.A. rich kids of Bret Easton Ellis' _Less
Than Zero_.
	_Wildlife_ is actually four connected novellas. The oldest section,
originally titled "Solstice," first appeared in _Isaac Asimov's Science
Fiction Magazine" in 1985 and showed up a year later in Bruce Sterling's
_Mirrorshades_ anthology, which along with William Gibson's _Neuromancer_
forms the core of the cyberpunk canon.
	After a slam-bang opening involving a data-thief and the multimedia
journalist covering his escapades, _Wildlife_ settles down into a chronicle
of a dysfunctional family of clones: wealthy drug designer Tony Cage, his
"daughter" Wynne and her "son" Peter--as in Peter Pan--whom Wynne keeps
artificially stuck at a biological age of 11. Amid a world undergoing
wrenching changes, the Cages are relentlessly inward focused (the Cages are
"caged," get it?) and, except for Peter, rather nasty.  And even Peter
irritates on occasion, too disaffected to even react to death threats from a
shadowy corporate operatives. His redemption boils down to a fairly
conventional coming-of-age story.  Elsewhere, salvation appears in the form
of a high-tech Buddhism, computer-aided _satori_.
	The Cages are simply different incarnations of the same individual,
the jealous and narcissistic Peter Cage, which is perhaps why I found
_Wildlife_ claustrophobic despite a narrative that stretches across a
century and to the edge of the solar system.

%T      Wildlife
%A      James Patrick Kelly
%C      New York
%D      1994
%I      Tor

Curt Wohleber | [email-masked] | 314.442.5777  
Columbia, Missouri |  http://www.blarg.net/~wohleber