Tor, 448 pages, $25.95
In an unspecified but not too distant future, Nicholas Hyde finds himself helping out on the green and socially responsible side of Obligate Corporation. We meet him doing fieldwork, trying to catalog, for future identification, year-dead human bodies. It's ordinary enough work – noting locations, sampling DNA, enumerating the wounds that killed the 40-odd decedents at that site.
The novel starts off in a depressed Congo, where hemorrhagic influenza killed 70 percent of the population. Originally thought a bioweapon, the disease also caused famine, starvation and cruise-missile attacks, but that's backstory.
The current story starts when Hyde's supervisor asks him to tag along to a hot site, a massacre recent enough to have the corpses still bleeding. With a helicopter crew and a squad of Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers, Hyde, his supervisor and a government observer fly to the location to see what's what.
National soldiers are anchored in the river nearby, reluctant to come ashore. The human bodies have been torn at, skulls broken, brains and livers eaten. But the team finds something like a hairless white chimpanzee with internal body armor (though chimps are extinct), missing its head from a shotgun blast. The teeth scattered around are all canines and incisors – not a molar to be found.
Hyde also finds a survivor, a male infant. When the White Devils attack again, he manages to get the baby and, barely, himself aboard the chopper.
Things get worse. Gene-spliced plasmids are loose; they cause the "plastic disease," wherein your body starts producing polymers under the skin, leading to a stiff and painful death. Other strange recombinant things have happened further back in the bush, where lax governments let wealthy biotech companies do as they wish.
"White Devils" is a breathtakingly plausible thriller, as fast-paced as, say, a Michael Crichton (and slightly reminiscent of his "Congo"), but a helluva lot scarier.
The Labyrinth Key
Del Rey, 320 pages, $13.95
Jaron Kwok is in Hong Kong, working for the National Security Agency, and he's about to disappear. He's working on quantum cryptography as part of the ongoing infowar between China and the United States, with some superb equipment, including binotech (combined biotech and nanotech) implants. He takes up his DIVE gear (Deep Immersion Virtual Environment), delves into his latest simulation and tells himself a story.
When hotel staff notice the smoke and smell, they find Kwok's ashes on the bed. Not that these are really quite ashes, and just maybe Jaron isn't ...
Well, of course he is. That's why NSA drafts Ben Cho to find out what happened to Kwok, or at least to follow up on the work. There are some important questions to be answered, or at least asked.
One question Hendrix asks about through his characters is the notion of bandwidth in quantum computing. If you were to build a machine capable of modeling the entire universe, would the universe need to continue? Could it continue? This recalls Arthur C. Clarke's short-short story "The Nine Billion Names of God," to which Hendrix does eventually allude.
Keeping and/or stealing secrets is an important element in quantum computing, because it can lead to quantum cryptography. If one side or the other finds a way to make either sort of QC work, there'd be no second place. There are very important ends here, and some very intense means.
As the surface plot spins, it seems the Chinese bureaucracy is more fragmented than monolithic, but then, so's our NSA. Double-and triple-agents pop out of the wickerwork, weaving in their intricacies. Not only are Kwok's remains not really ashes, but neither Kwok nor Cho is what he seems. Not that most of the other characters are what they pretend to be.
Yes, it's a labyrinthine plot, and some of it does fly into high abstruseness, but this is a very intriguing book.
Warner Aspect, 334 pages, $23.95
Very much further into the future, some billions of years along, a young Original Human female named Cley narrowly survives the murder of the rest of her clan and the despoiling of the library that contains most of the biological history of humanity.
There have been lots of sorts of humans as time passed, from those who could conceive of moving the solar system nearer the center of the galaxy (and be patient enough to do it), to long, deep thinkers, to the Supras, one of whom Cley falls in love with.
Things other than humans have changed. Seeker After Patterns is a six-legged derivative of raccoon stock. Seeker heals Cley, and, eventually, when it comes time for Cley to escape from the Supras, shows her the way into interplanetary space, aboard a pinwheel tree. Interplanetary space is rich with life, from trader/transport Leviathans that can range among the planetary orbits to rapacious space sharks with radar sense that prey where they will. Some of these forms may be "natural"; Benford suggests that humans of one variety or another may have seeded some of them.
But they, and perhaps this entire universe, are under attack by beings who live in at least four spatial dimensions. Benford gets into deep and abstruse areas here, but the interaction between Seeker and Cley propels an interesting story.
Benford throws off scientific notions like a sprinkler tosses droplets. If you're interested in such, you should look into this far-reaching novel.
Jim Hopper, of North Park, has enough trouble with beings who live in three spatial dimensions.