Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

marypcb and I finally went to see The Two Towers last week - twice. I'm not going to bother you all with yet another review, but one thing did catch my eye, that I haven't noted anyone else remarking upon.

Tolkien's aim for his series was to create a historical mythology for Britain (on a par with the Edda and the Suomi myth-cycles), and he meant for Middle Earth to be seen as part of the history of our world - some time in the remote past. Watching The Two Towers I realised that this was something that Peter Jackson and the folks at Weta Digital had seized upon, and in a rather amusing way.

Take a look at the film depiction of the wargs. Not particularly wolflike, but if you take a trip to a museum or read a book on prehistoric mammals you'll see certain similarities with the amphicyon (also known as the "bear-dog"). Neither bear, nor dog, the grizzly bear-sized predator was a major predator in both Europe and the Americas.Then there was the oliphaunt, this time not treated as an elephant, but as a four-tusked mastodon - probably a species of trilophodon or similar. All creatures that lived millions of years ago, when history would have been lost in the fossil record, and scoured from the world by glaciers. A nice way of showing Tolkien's world was linked to ours, but lost in time and myth.

Of course, I'm now even more sure that there's another sprawling saga for the folks at Wingnut to film: Julian May's Saga Of The Exiles.

SF has had a love-hate relationship with Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind for a long time now. There's something in its thesis of how humanity became a conscious, self-aware, animal that grabs the imagination, and flings the reader to one or other side of the argument. It's also a difficult argument to assess, as we have no way to even start to prove or disprove the thesis. One thing's for sure: Jaynes has inspired many, vastly different, SF novels, from authors including Neal Stephenson and Harry Turtledove.

Jaynes' theory lies at the heart of Paul Levinson's latest Phil D'Amato novel, The Consciousness Plague. Phil is that rara avis, the SF detective. Though, unlike Gil the ARM or Baley, he's not a technology buff - in fact, he's a specialist in forensic medicine for the New York police. It's not surprising that D'Amato's cases revolve around the extremes of biology.

The Consciousness Plague wraps two plot threads around each other, twisting and turnng out of the central theme: "What is memory?". A dead body in Central Park leads to questions of identification and relationships, while a new antibiotic used to combat the infections associated with influenza appears to cross the blood/brain barrier, causing random amnesia. D'Amato struggles to solve one case, while trying to warn of the dangers of the others - only to find that the two are tightly linked, and answers in one affect the progress of the other.

As the body count mounts, D'Amato is desperately trying to show that this isn't the first time that changes in medical techniques affected consciousness, while struggling to find out just who the murderer is. And did the early use of molds as medicine encourage the development of writing by affecting the near perfect memories of the ancients? It's a race against time to solve the crime and to prove the effects of the new drug on memory, before the influenza season swings round again.

Unfortunately this is a disappointing novel. While the earlier D'Amato shorts and the novel The Silk Code are engaging works, there's something missing here. Levinson uses the storty to attempt little Hitchcock homages, but loses track of the plot. Vital evidence arrives by authorial fiat in awkward coincidences, and the plague of memory loss is treated as a mere inconvenience. There's little here to teach us more about D'Amato, and little engagement with the central questions. All in all, The Consciousness Plague fails both as police procedural and as SF. It's a pity, because Levinson is capable of much more than this potboiler.

"I didn't tell them we were experimenting with a Goan, but all went horribly..."

"...chili-shaped?"

"I was going for 'wrong', but that works for me..."