Black Milk
by Robert Reed
Review by Alex McLintock
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Ryder has perfect memory: total recall. You might not think that so
unusual if you lived in a society which could avoid genetic defects
at birth, and add improvements at will. Physical speed and agility?
No problem. An extra few percent on the Intelligence Quotient, you
coud have that instead. But there seems to be only one Ryder.
One genius, Dr Florida, built up this all encompasing science of
genetic tailoring and he has a financial empire to match. He is a
friendly uncle figure to most of the world's children, and
particularly when he endows them with his annual "Easter Egg Hunt".
Dr Florida annually releases new genetically engineered creatures
into the parks of Earth just so that the children can hunt and
capture them.
Ryder and his treehouse building friends want very much to win
that competition.
I am always nervous when the protagonist of a novel is a child.
I very rarely expect a "Rites of Passage" novel, and instead I
usually think the novelist is aiming at a juvenile market. Reed
uses this ploy to distract you from the massive disasters waiting
to happen. The genetic engineering is rife throughout the culture
of Earth. Any number of things could go wrong from a bad disease,
to killer "baby tiger" pets, to just genetically engineered kids
who did so well at work that they put all their parents out of
work. None of this is really important to Ryder and his chums who
are more interested in building treehouses and childish
one-upmanship.
We get the disaster though. We have to really otherwise not
enough would have happened inside the novel. The characters
wouldn't have changed and we would have gotten upset at the waste
of time. And yet the disaster is a secondary issue. I still want to
know more about the relationships between the characters. I want to
know more about the problems which tailoring children caused. What
happened to their ecology?
Those complaints weren't thought of whilst reading the book
however. I read and enjoyed this without worrying about the author
giving me everything I could take. I bought this book on the
strength of other Robert Reed novels I have read. I still say he is
a massively underrated author.
Oh, my only complaint during the novel was this. Why did he have
to call the scientist "Dr Florida". That is far too close to "Dr
Manhatten" and the phrase "A Florida clinic in California" took a
couple of re-readings to get straight.
ISBN: 0 356 18806 X
Publisher: Orbit
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