![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Well, that was a book, I guess
I've been going through my books, trying to unload the ones I'll never read again and read some of the enormous to-read pile that I've acquired over the years from library book sales and used bookstores and whatnot. There are books in this pile I've had for a decade without reading them. I think it's safe to say I don't need to keep them anymore.
I decided to read one of them tonight, and I'm not sure if a book in recent memory has made me go "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK" quite so many times in the first few chapters (until I gave up).
The book is Ember From the Sun by Mark Canter, and it is ... well ... it's a book. That was published. By Bantam-Doubleday, even!
The general premise of the book sounded promising. A scientist manages to implant a surrogate mother with a Neanderthal embryo, so basically it's Jurassic Park with Neanderthals. But why, oh why are all thrillers involving Neanderthals so mind-bogglingly terrible? The last one I tried to read was this one, which ticked off every last item in your basic terrible-Crichton-ripoff plot outline. Such as, for example, the characters finding the camp of the research team that disappeared before them, discovering the journal that explains what happened to the other team, and deciding to read it in linear order to preserve the suspense of the ending, while something is attempting to pick them off one by one. It is difficult to appreciate their plight when I just want to scream, "Read the last page first, you morons!" at them every 3 pages or so.)
Anyway. Ember From the Sun. The cut isn't really for spoilers - although yes, there are extensive spoilers, but seriously, are any of you actually going to read this book? Mostly it's just cut to keep you from having to wade through all this if you don't care.
So, for starters, the author doesn't seem to have even a passing acquaintance with research, on anything. Though it doesn't help that the book is dealing with subjects I know something about (well, the setting and the prehistory stuff, at least), so I'm acutely aware of just how well-researched it isn't.
It opens on the "tundra" of interior Alaska. Actually, interior Alaska is taiga forest and muskeg swamp, and the only reason why I'm pointing this out is because it mentioned tundra pretty much continually, and while there are actually some areas around Denali that technically qualify as tundra due to their elevation, TUNDRA BY DEFINITION DOESN'T HAVE TREES. But this "tundra" had fir and pine trees. Which we also don't have. Not to mention all the references to animals we don't have, such as badgers. Yes, I know I'm being Pedantic Lass about it, and it's not like most books set in Alaska are any better at the finer details, but seriously, is it that hard to crack open a field guide?
Anyway, a little group of Alaska Native hunters are out hunting caribou - a family consisting of a Native guy who went off to Seattle and got a degree in archaeology, and his sister and dad. The author made up his own tribe, which I guess in this book is an improvement over maligning any actual tribe, since nothing to do with these people bears the slightest resemblance to actual Alaska Native people; it's a hilarious mishmash of New Agey and Noble Savage stereotypes. Aside from Archaeologist Guy, they are ~in tune with the land~, and don't use guns or motorized vehicles; they are hunting caribou with SPEAR THROWERS, and for transportation, they use dogs pulling wheeled carts. (Wut.) There's an ongoing implication that the nearest city is Seattle. It's not like Alaska has cities, or universities, or anything of the sort. The sister doesn't know what popsicles are. And so forth.
It's mentioned in passing that the big-city archaeologist brother made his career by finding a 25,000-year-old, perfectly preserved Cro-Magnon burial in Alaska. This definitely would be a game-changer, considering that the earliest evidence we have for human occupation in Alaska is around 13,000 years old, and Cro-Magnons were in Europe. Also, the description of the Cro-Magnon burial bears not the slightest resemblance to any I've ever heard of. But anyway.
Come to find out, the sister can talk to wolves (????) and the wolves cooperatively hunt with them, by chasing the caribou towards them, so they can attack with their spears. I CAN'T EVEN. This all falls apart when big-city brother, spooked by the wolves, shoots a wolf and all the wolves run off. (There's also a spectacularly pointless and weird chapter in which the alpha wolf he wounded, since it can no longer wolf properly, yields itself to one of the other wolves in the pack for a mercy killing. Because that is definitely a thing wolves do.)
So now his family is pissed at him and they have a fight and he takes off for the village in the dog cart. Along the way, he falls out of the cart and finds himself miles from shelter. He takes refuge in an ice cave he chips out of a glacier (.... A+ survival strategy, buddy) and here he discovers the body of a (kinda) frozen 25,000-year-old Neanderthal woman.
(Let us pause to appreciate the fact that Neanderthals, like Cro-Magnons, lived IN EUROPE, which is only like 8000 miles away from Alaska. Details!)
She's not really frozen, but actually full of natural antifreeze, like a hibernating frog, although she is legitimately dead. Like no archaeologist ever, he pretty much just picks her up and totes her off to his lab in Seattle without even so much as taking in situ photos or mentioning any of this to anybody. Because ... that's a thing that would happen. And there he completely dissects the body. NOOOOOOOOOOOO. Afterwards, he seems to have defleshed the bones, because he wants to display her skeleton. AUGH. Do you know how meticulously scientists try not to destroy the rare instances of preserved soft tissues in archaeological specimens? gggnnnnhhhhhggggggggggg.
And he's doing all of this in secret, because he doesn't want anyone to know about it until he can publish on it. He doesn't seem to have the slightest interest in exploring the area where he found her for more artifacts. Meanwhile, his sister poked around the area of the ice cave and discovered a beaten-gold amulet apparently belonging to the Neanderthal woman, which she is now wearing, with a map incised on it. NEANDERTHALS DIDN'T WORK METALS OH MY GODDDDDDDDDD. Which is probably me being Pedantic Lass again, except, it's like 20,000 years before anybody worked metals; this would be like Roman centurions having laser guns and this just being a perfectly normal thing.
Anyhoo, while he's examining the Neanderthal corpse, the World's Worst Archaeologist finds out from a blood test that she's pregnant, and then discovers the pregnancy is actually a blastocyst that's only divided into 8 cells and hasn't implanted yet, so it's still viable. (No pregnancy test in the world could detect it at this stage - SHE'S NOT ACTUALLY PREGNANT YET - but this is only a small drop in the ocean of stupid that is this book.) So he starts looking for a surrogate mother to implant it into. He does this by advertising in the paper, offering to pay a hefty sum to a no-questions-asked volunteer surrogate. (I would love to see the grant proposal for this.)
Believe it or not, this is where the plot really goes off the rails. There's a power outage at the university which causes his lab freezer to stop working, so he suddenly has to find a surrogate mother RIGHT NOW (there's only one freezer in the whole world, I guess?), and, continuing with the sort of stellar decision-making abilities he's shown so far, he ends up picking a 15-year-old teenager off the street for that purpose. Then he kinda just takes care of her throughout the pregnancy and delivers the baby himself. WHAT EVEN. (She almost dies during childbirth because, well, he's an archaeologist, not an obstetrician, and Neanderthal babies are big. We're well beyond "failure of scientific ethics" and into felony territory here, I think.) Then she bonds with her Neanderthal baby and, rather than giving it to him, runs off with it. While she raises her Neanderthal daughter in a small town, where no one is even remotely suspicious that anything hinky is going on, the archaeologist spends the next 18 years basically stalking them.
At this point I couldn't take it anymore, but I'd like to point out, in closing, that the Neanderthal girl is both mildly psychic and has the ability to heal people. This comes into play during a spectacularly dumb climax, which I skimmed, that involves following the gold map amulet to a cave full of the preserved bodies of her people that's about to be destroyed by evil miners, and something to do with her soulbonding with the archaeologist dude.
ETA: Heaven help us all, the author seems to have recovered the rights and brought it back into print via self-publishing. I would like to point out that the cover is actually a remarkably accurate visual rendition of the content of the book: incoherent, weird, New Agey, and full of elements that don't quite work together.
I decided to read one of them tonight, and I'm not sure if a book in recent memory has made me go "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK" quite so many times in the first few chapters (until I gave up).
The book is Ember From the Sun by Mark Canter, and it is ... well ... it's a book. That was published. By Bantam-Doubleday, even!
The general premise of the book sounded promising. A scientist manages to implant a surrogate mother with a Neanderthal embryo, so basically it's Jurassic Park with Neanderthals. But why, oh why are all thrillers involving Neanderthals so mind-bogglingly terrible? The last one I tried to read was this one, which ticked off every last item in your basic terrible-Crichton-ripoff plot outline. Such as, for example, the characters finding the camp of the research team that disappeared before them, discovering the journal that explains what happened to the other team, and deciding to read it in linear order to preserve the suspense of the ending, while something is attempting to pick them off one by one. It is difficult to appreciate their plight when I just want to scream, "Read the last page first, you morons!" at them every 3 pages or so.)
Anyway. Ember From the Sun. The cut isn't really for spoilers - although yes, there are extensive spoilers, but seriously, are any of you actually going to read this book? Mostly it's just cut to keep you from having to wade through all this if you don't care.
So, for starters, the author doesn't seem to have even a passing acquaintance with research, on anything. Though it doesn't help that the book is dealing with subjects I know something about (well, the setting and the prehistory stuff, at least), so I'm acutely aware of just how well-researched it isn't.
It opens on the "tundra" of interior Alaska. Actually, interior Alaska is taiga forest and muskeg swamp, and the only reason why I'm pointing this out is because it mentioned tundra pretty much continually, and while there are actually some areas around Denali that technically qualify as tundra due to their elevation, TUNDRA BY DEFINITION DOESN'T HAVE TREES. But this "tundra" had fir and pine trees. Which we also don't have. Not to mention all the references to animals we don't have, such as badgers. Yes, I know I'm being Pedantic Lass about it, and it's not like most books set in Alaska are any better at the finer details, but seriously, is it that hard to crack open a field guide?
Anyway, a little group of Alaska Native hunters are out hunting caribou - a family consisting of a Native guy who went off to Seattle and got a degree in archaeology, and his sister and dad. The author made up his own tribe, which I guess in this book is an improvement over maligning any actual tribe, since nothing to do with these people bears the slightest resemblance to actual Alaska Native people; it's a hilarious mishmash of New Agey and Noble Savage stereotypes. Aside from Archaeologist Guy, they are ~in tune with the land~, and don't use guns or motorized vehicles; they are hunting caribou with SPEAR THROWERS, and for transportation, they use dogs pulling wheeled carts. (Wut.) There's an ongoing implication that the nearest city is Seattle. It's not like Alaska has cities, or universities, or anything of the sort. The sister doesn't know what popsicles are. And so forth.
It's mentioned in passing that the big-city archaeologist brother made his career by finding a 25,000-year-old, perfectly preserved Cro-Magnon burial in Alaska. This definitely would be a game-changer, considering that the earliest evidence we have for human occupation in Alaska is around 13,000 years old, and Cro-Magnons were in Europe. Also, the description of the Cro-Magnon burial bears not the slightest resemblance to any I've ever heard of. But anyway.
Come to find out, the sister can talk to wolves (????) and the wolves cooperatively hunt with them, by chasing the caribou towards them, so they can attack with their spears. I CAN'T EVEN. This all falls apart when big-city brother, spooked by the wolves, shoots a wolf and all the wolves run off. (There's also a spectacularly pointless and weird chapter in which the alpha wolf he wounded, since it can no longer wolf properly, yields itself to one of the other wolves in the pack for a mercy killing. Because that is definitely a thing wolves do.)
So now his family is pissed at him and they have a fight and he takes off for the village in the dog cart. Along the way, he falls out of the cart and finds himself miles from shelter. He takes refuge in an ice cave he chips out of a glacier (.... A+ survival strategy, buddy) and here he discovers the body of a (kinda) frozen 25,000-year-old Neanderthal woman.
(Let us pause to appreciate the fact that Neanderthals, like Cro-Magnons, lived IN EUROPE, which is only like 8000 miles away from Alaska. Details!)
She's not really frozen, but actually full of natural antifreeze, like a hibernating frog, although she is legitimately dead. Like no archaeologist ever, he pretty much just picks her up and totes her off to his lab in Seattle without even so much as taking in situ photos or mentioning any of this to anybody. Because ... that's a thing that would happen. And there he completely dissects the body. NOOOOOOOOOOOO. Afterwards, he seems to have defleshed the bones, because he wants to display her skeleton. AUGH. Do you know how meticulously scientists try not to destroy the rare instances of preserved soft tissues in archaeological specimens? gggnnnnhhhhhggggggggggg.
And he's doing all of this in secret, because he doesn't want anyone to know about it until he can publish on it. He doesn't seem to have the slightest interest in exploring the area where he found her for more artifacts. Meanwhile, his sister poked around the area of the ice cave and discovered a beaten-gold amulet apparently belonging to the Neanderthal woman, which she is now wearing, with a map incised on it. NEANDERTHALS DIDN'T WORK METALS OH MY GODDDDDDDDDD. Which is probably me being Pedantic Lass again, except, it's like 20,000 years before anybody worked metals; this would be like Roman centurions having laser guns and this just being a perfectly normal thing.
Anyhoo, while he's examining the Neanderthal corpse, the World's Worst Archaeologist finds out from a blood test that she's pregnant, and then discovers the pregnancy is actually a blastocyst that's only divided into 8 cells and hasn't implanted yet, so it's still viable. (No pregnancy test in the world could detect it at this stage - SHE'S NOT ACTUALLY PREGNANT YET - but this is only a small drop in the ocean of stupid that is this book.) So he starts looking for a surrogate mother to implant it into. He does this by advertising in the paper, offering to pay a hefty sum to a no-questions-asked volunteer surrogate. (I would love to see the grant proposal for this.)
Believe it or not, this is where the plot really goes off the rails. There's a power outage at the university which causes his lab freezer to stop working, so he suddenly has to find a surrogate mother RIGHT NOW (there's only one freezer in the whole world, I guess?), and, continuing with the sort of stellar decision-making abilities he's shown so far, he ends up picking a 15-year-old teenager off the street for that purpose. Then he kinda just takes care of her throughout the pregnancy and delivers the baby himself. WHAT EVEN. (She almost dies during childbirth because, well, he's an archaeologist, not an obstetrician, and Neanderthal babies are big. We're well beyond "failure of scientific ethics" and into felony territory here, I think.) Then she bonds with her Neanderthal baby and, rather than giving it to him, runs off with it. While she raises her Neanderthal daughter in a small town, where no one is even remotely suspicious that anything hinky is going on, the archaeologist spends the next 18 years basically stalking them.
At this point I couldn't take it anymore, but I'd like to point out, in closing, that the Neanderthal girl is both mildly psychic and has the ability to heal people. This comes into play during a spectacularly dumb climax, which I skimmed, that involves following the gold map amulet to a cave full of the preserved bodies of her people that's about to be destroyed by evil miners, and something to do with her soulbonding with the archaeologist dude.
ETA: Heaven help us all, the author seems to have recovered the rights and brought it back into print via self-publishing. I would like to point out that the cover is actually a remarkably accurate visual rendition of the content of the book: incoherent, weird, New Agey, and full of elements that don't quite work together.
no subject
...WHAT.
What is any of this I can't even.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
... until I hit the emergency 15-year-old surrogate Neander-mama, and then I wound up reading the rest of that whole paragraph through my fingers.
OH MY GOD WTF.
(... and then he *soulbonds with the former baby*??? oh my god what the everloving fuck) (I am reduced to epithets!)
Wow. Just wow.
no subject
no subject
They even seem to be terribad in slightly overlapping ways, though at least Sawyer doesn't attempt to mangle the archaeological field, he just says "alien tech, alternate universes, moving on now". Too bad that what he moved on to was Misogyny Lite...
Lowlights I remember include: the Neanderthals are all bisexual and each has a male and a female mate, but female Neanderthals live in a separate part of the city because PMS, haha (with extra smug "haha, just kidding, it's really because empowerment!! But PMS is just that funny"), and the main protagonist gets raped by some bush-lurking rando on her campus for no reason at all except the author didn't know how to stop her jumping into bed with Our Neanderthal Hero without that. Blech. Since the third book is titled Hybrids, so presumably she does go on to bang him at some point and bear happy little Neanderthal babies after Getting Over (TM) being raped or whatever, but no way was I going to keep reading.
no subject
I am sad that Bad Archaeologist's sister didn't hook up with Neanderthal baby and have the psychic wolves eat him.
no subject
A+, would read, unlike the rest of this book.
no subject