Killing Time

Information is the disease, but what is the cure?

Killing Time By Caleb Carr Random House Hardcover, Nov. 2000 $25.95 ISBN 0-679-46332-1

arr's novel opens with a short enigmatic prologue set in the year 2024. The action then retreats to 2023 for the majority of the narrative, eventually looping fully around to catch up with the now-clarified prologue and extend it through climax and coda.

Dr. Gideon Wolfe, psychiatrist, historian and best-selling author, learns serendipitously of an apparent tampering with the omnipresent digital media record of the recent assassination of the female president of the United States. Following the thread of the conspiracy--despite the admonitory murder of his partner, a PI named Max Jenkins--Wolfe ends up in a Florida prison interviewing a suspect, an anthropologist named Eli Kuperman. During their talk, a weird and dramatic escape opportunity occurs when an all-powerful airship smashes open the prison. Wolfe takes the option offered to him of climbing onboard the outlaw ship to learn more.

The miracle ship is the invention and property of brother-and-sister geniuses, Larissa and Malcolm Tressalian, the adult children of dead Internet billionaire Stephen Tressalian. Subject to unethical genetic engineering--Malcolm, the first subject of the yet-unperfected process, was left a cripple, unlike his sexy athletic sister--the pair have paid for their intellects with various physical and emotional problems. And now, they reveal, they intend to reshape the world according to their principles and vision.

Humans are sheep, lulled by the opium of the Internet into accepting whatever cruel practices their greedy global masters choose to employ. However, the Tressalians, by planting hoaxes in the Web, hope to reveal the foundation of lies on which the world rests, thus sparking a revolution. Inducted into the international team of soldier-savants--Eli and Jonah Kuperman, Julien Fourche, Leon Tarbell and Justus Slayton--Wolfe soon finds himself fighting and scheming in Afghanistan, Scotland, California, France and Malyasia. But one of Malcolm's schemes goes horribly awry, resulting in the nuclear destruction of Moscow by a rogue Mossad agent named Dov Eshkol. This proves too much for Wolfe, who bails out into Africa. But after a brief sojourn among the warring natives of the degraded dark continent, Wolfe is reunited with his understanding cabal of friends to participate in Malcolm's final grandiose plan.

Voyaging with a 21st-century Verne

The hardest, most disconcerting thing to nail initially about this foray into SF by best-selling historical novelist Caleb Carr (The Alienist) is the tone. Broad and old-fashioned, nearly comic-bookish at times, the voice leads the reader into assuming at first that a farce, burlesque or parody is being presented. But no, it eventuates that Carr is attempting to tell a straightforward, state-of-the-art, mimetic near-future tale. But the choice of the fussy, pedantic, moralistic Dr. Wolfe as the narrator militates against any kind of sleek Gibsonian effects.

Moreover, Carr's primary genre role model appears to be no one more modern than Jules Verne. The megalomaniacal genius-reformer Malcolm Tressalian and his super-airship are straight out of Verne's Robur the Conqueror. And when this Thunderbirds-vintage craft first plunges under the sea, the reader wants to shout, "Holy Captain Nemo!"

Despite these two drawbacks--a stuffy, stiff protagonist (the love scenes between Wolfe and Larissa feature dialogue such as "You unimaginable swine!" and "No need to go to town with it") and a plot and themes straight out of the revolutions of 1848--Carr manages to move the action along crisply, with many punchy short chapters. His extrapolations and speculations are clever enough, but all seem to hinge on whatever headlines were weekly prominent in Time magazine (where installments of this book first appeared), from female genital mutilation to "water wars." Finally, the climactic deus ex machina involving time-travel is full of more logical holes than even Michael Crichton's Timeline.

I'd advise readers looking for a novel with these same themes to turn to Bruce Sterling's Distraction. And I'd advise Caleb Carr to try a little time-travel of his own, back to eras where his style and concerns don't clash with his subject matter. -- Paul

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Also in this issue: Tropic of Creation, by Kay Kenyon

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