Brian Stableford, Dark Ararat (2003)

You won’t be surprised that the title caught my eye, for it repeats that most excellent dyad ‘AR’ not once but thrice. Thrice! I read it out of sequence, since it is (the author-note says) the fifth of a series of six; I may, accordingly, have missed nuance or depth. The ideas are cool, but the prose is Content Delivery System style, bogged down again by lecturettes on DNA-analogues and speculative biology (there are a lot of these) or else by a broadcast sowing of pico-cliché. People cast one another wry looks; people engage in wishful thinking; things are user-friendly or falter slightly or turn the tables—and it’s all like this. Lots of books are written this way, of course, and it doesn’t make for actively bad prose, but it so comprehensively salts the ice of the novel’s idiom that the prose can never achieve the glorious glissando of Nabokov or Updike. Accordingly it never feels very vivid or engaging. So it goes.

I liked the purpleness of the thoroughly-thought-through alien world; I liked the kit the human explorers have to wear, including a special coating of their innards (lungs and digestion ‘from mouth to anus’) to be able to walk around in it. The whodunit element was a little underbaked, and the Core Cool Idea, to do with an alternative genetic model to DNA/RNA, was put over in a slightly unmasticated fashion. But it was cool for all that. But, but, but! There was a but, and I’ve been trying to lay my finger upon what it was. I suspect it has to do with the competence of the piece: the competence of the extrapolation and worldbuilding, the adequacy of the plotting and characterisation. There's something deadening in that. I don't mean that I hoped the novel would go beyond competence. What's beyond competence? Super-competence, which would be even more deadening. Something needs to be let-go-of. There's needs to be some thing or things creatively fucking-up the adequacy, of it doesn't come alive. But maybe that's merely a personal crotchet of mine.