In Christopher Brookmyre’s superlative One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, he invents the concept of BDQ: Bullet Deadliness Quotient. Essentially it is the rule that you can’t go changing the rules halfway. If you want dangerous realism in your action movies, it’s got to stay that way, and not turn into “your John Woo movies: zillions of rounds goin’ off an’ the only thing they ever hit is glass”.

BDQ is a fine concept and just as applicable to science fiction. And Richard Morgan’s Black Man (called the cringe-inducing Th1rte3n in the US) fails to abide by its own rules.

Black Man is set 200 years hence. Genetic ‘variants’ have been bred for the classic undesirable tasks — compliant females for prostitution, aggressive males for soldiering. The central character is one of the latter, a ‘variant thirteen’, despised by practically everyone, not allowed to breed, locked up or sent to Mars for the safety of everyone else.

This would have been fine for the sake of the story if he’d just used the “genetically engineering super-soldier” approach. They are ten a penny and not really a problem. We’ve been doing that kind of thing with crops and animals for tens of thousands of years. But instead the author decided to resurrect hunter-gatherer man from tens of thousands of years ago.

The central conceit is that since they were hunters, they were naturally stronger and faster than the farmers that succeeded them. I’m not convinced of the argument, since that would suggest there would be massive genetic differences between us flabby office workers and the few remaining nomadic hunter-gatherer societies that still exist in Africa and South America. This is not an argument or evidence I have ever heard presented.

But taking that as a done deal, we also have to assume that these old genes actually coded for smarter people too, something I find even harder to believe. Human society demands technology and intelligence — I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that would be bred out as dangerous.

But finally, and most importantly, is how the author ignores all biological repercussions of the story setup. He claims to have got the idea from reading one of science writer Matt Ridley’s books. It’s a shame he wasn’t paying attention while he did so. Not only are we to believe that the variant thirteens are stronger, faster and more intelligent but they also have more effective immune systems. Despite being pre-agriculture they can also drink alcoholic beverages without serious side-effects. Consider that even the ability to process milk is a very recent development for Europeans it all seems desperately implausible.

Notably, for someone who cites Matt Ridley (author of Nature via Nurture), he ignores the effect of nurture and environment on people’s personalities. At only one point does one of the characters mention that these so-called uebermensch were given combat training and so on from an extremely young age. The effect this would have on a person’s nature is completely disregarded by everyone else.

The rest of the book was similarly disappointing. The story had about a dozen endings before it finally stopped, abruptly. The most interesting character was a female variant thirteen: this was so unusual that the other characters didn’t know such a thing existed. It was like the scene in X Men 2 when Wolverine meets Lady Deathstryke. And then just like she is killed in the movie, this woman promptly vanishes after claiming to be pregnant. The most interesting part of the book and gets ignored from then on… The writing was a bit on the florid side for me, too. I was cringing too regularly, which is never a good sign.

I finished Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction. Excellent book. It had some fantastic quotes in it which I now can’t remember. I’ll see if I can find them when I get time to look at the book later.

It’s sort of dystopian, but with a different slant than normal. There is less of the social darwinist ferocity of Neuromancer or Bladerunner, and more of an anarchist feel to the strange society described. The UK seems to be divided into semi-autonomous city-states. The US has become a hands off global dictatorship by merging with the UN. Above that, an entity known as Space Defence trains its satellite-mounted lasers on anything it doesn’t like the look of.

Down on earth the world is divided into a million different factions of all political persuasions: green militants, neo-luddites, fundamentalist Christian enclaves and Trotskyite militias. It’s really pretty head-spinning trying to remember where everyone fits into the whole scheme, which I suppose is half the point. Now that the book is finished, I’m still not completely sure which alleged factions actually existed and which were mythical global conspiracies.

It was enjoyable though, for all its confusion — artificial intelligence, politics and some far-fetched science. The closest thing I can compare it to (and believe me, I’m not sure why this comparison comes to mind) is Feersum Endjinn without the funny language. Not because the books are in any way similar but just from the feel of them.

I find it hard to describe, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Right, those quotes. Unfortunately I can only find one at the moment. I should have done something terrible like folding over the pages when I found the good lines the first time round.

(She'd often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)

After my indecision last week whether to read The Star Fraction or The Children of Men, I went with the latter. h2_the_foodie bought me it for Christmas after we saw the film, which was very good.

The book is quite different in feel. For a start, the ruggedly handsome Theo from the film is a weary fifty-year-old Oxford academic in the book. I thought this would take a bit of getting used to but the character very firmly puts his stamp on the story.

But the general conceit of the book is identical — mankind has stopped reproducing and no-one can tell why. It’s been nearly twenty years since a human child was born. Britain is preparing itself for that final good night, as the population ages and no-one can see a purpose in anything.

The four parts of the UK are ruled by dictators who have created a society somewhere between a police state and a retirement home. The atmosphere of the first half of the book is one of utter hopelessness, where relationships and politics and religion and discovery and invention all seem like too much hard work.

It’s very compelling — I was reading it on the train last week and as we pulled in to the station I remember standing up and feeling incredibly detached from everyone. Like everything going on around me was just “going through the motions”. It took me a few minutes to snap out of it.

Sadly the ending wasn’t as good as it could be. Also, the science behind the book was even more muddled than the film. Not only were men not producing fertile sperm any more (reasonable to some degree) but all the frozen sperm in storage magically became useless too. Eh? That’s not even trying to make sense.

I finished A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil (Christopher Brookmyre’s latest book) and I must confess to not being impressed at all. In fact, I’d nearly go so far as to say it was his worst.

I’m reading Anansi Boys, and it’s very good. And naturally, for a book about the progeny of the West African spider-god, all of the main characters are black. The hero, the heroine, the weird aunts from childhood, and so on.

But in my head that’s not how they look. They all look white. I suppose this happens all the time when I read, it’s just that I don’t notice it. One of the characters in Banks’ The State of the Art is described as some sort of blue yeti-like creature. But apart from that one scene where I’m forced to imagine him as the author did, he’s still the same “white man from Oxford” that everyone else is. (Though actually “white man from Edinburgh” is a more accurate description.)

On Wednesday, as mentioned, I passed my driving theory test. Hah! And then I went to Waterstone’s and bought myself books as reward: one Christopher Brookmyre and two Neil Gaimans (Gaimen?).

• A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil, Brookmyre (latest)
• Anansi Boys, Gaiman (latest)
• Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman (old; collection of short stories; includes the brilliant ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’, a Lovecraft parody/homage)

So, compared to reading the new Brookmyre book, talking to you guys sucks. Bye! :-P

I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.

I enjoyed The Selfish Gene more than Y: The Descent of Men but they have very different purposes. For a proper popular science book I’d recommend getting hold of the 30th anniversary edition of Dawkins’ book. If you want more of a sedate run through the history of (the biology of) maleness, go for Jones’ book.