Red Genesis (The Next Wave, Book 1)

S. C. Sykes, Red Genesis (Bantam, 1991) Back in the day, when I was living in a small and godawfully boring suburb of Philadelphia, I used to go to a weekly series of poetry readings, get besotted, and rant. One of the other hardcore attendees was Sandy Sykes, a wonderful lady who had just completed and published a science fiction novel called Red Genesis, intended to launch a new arm of Bantam's science fiction wing, Spectra, called The New Wave. I'm not much of a science fiction fan, the last piece of hard sci-fi I actually finished and enjoyed being Greg Bear's Eon all those years ago, and so the copy I got from her ended up languishing on the to-be-read pile for almost ten years. Sandy, if you're out there, here's my public apology. Mea culpa maxima, because here's the answer to your inscription: you'd have to have liked my poetry an awful lot for you to have appreciated it as much as I liked this book. Red Genesis is the story of Graham Kuan Sinclair, a corporate bigwig as the book opens, whose slightly unethical dumping practices combine with the more unethical dumping practices of companies decades before him to create something very nasty. Nasty enough, in fact, to kill three and a half billion people. While it's pretty well established that Sinclair isn't at fault for what companies that were bankrupt before his birth did, his actions were the straw that broke the camel's back, and the courts impose a novel punishment on him-- Sinclair is banished. To Mars. By this point in human development, Mars is colonized, albeit by small, rival groups that have little to do with one another. Not being skilled in anything except running corporations, Sinclair would seem to be at a disadvantage in a place where everyone's got some kind of marketable skill. But through the friendships he makes along the way, he finds himself more effective than he ever imagined he could be. Pretty standard sci-fi stuff, no? But the characters are drawn so well, and the emotional bonds between them are so accurately portrayed, that it's impossible not to get involved in what's going on. And by the time the (completely unexpected, by the way) climax of the book comes around, it's devastating. Could it have been even better? Good question. I could have done without the Asimov-penned preface (dry recitations of facts-- come to think of it, rather like most Asimov novels I've tried), and while the afterword by MIT prof Eugene Mallove is more engaging than Asimov's preface, it pales in comparison to the novel itself. Skip them both and get straight into the meat of the thing. It's only halfway through January of 2001, but I've already found one book that's a shoo-in for the year's ten-best list.

The begining of this book is eerily real, with an environmental disaster, and corporate sculduggery. What makes the book shine is it's portrayal of the main character, and his drive to survive and find purpose. The descriptions of Mars are real enough to feel gritty and the plot has enough suprises to keep you from putting down the book before the story is done. This is not a "series" book but a stand-alone that does the trick. A terrific first novel and eagerly awaiting another book by this author!