The Cassandra Complex

The time is 40 years in the future -- maybe not our lives, but certainly a reality that could be our children's. A novel of frightening and important ideas and issues: extreme overpopulation, megacorps, and hyperflu wars. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. Who will determine how the scales tilt? The characters are not sharply defined, but the novel is more about the vision than about the people.

Stableford has set The Cassandra Complex about 40 years in the future with the seeds of the action sown in our time. The novel is a prequel to earlier work but stands solidly on its own. The Cassandra Complex is really more of a techno-thriller than science fiction novel. The action is more in line with a police thriller than most hard SF. However, there is enough SF to satisfy fans of the genre. Stableford tends to fall in the trap when setting mysteries in SF that the investigator knows information about the times that the reader doesn't. If one likes to solve the mystery based on the clues then the information isn't in The Cassandra Complex to do so.All in all it was a fast-paced enjoyable read, I read it some time ago, but it hasn't stuck with me. It isn't new or original but it is well constructed.

Dr. Lisa Friemann, a 62 year old forensic investigator for the city of Bristol, England, awakens to burglars picking her unhackable locks and ransacking her apartment. On the way out they pause to paint "Traitor" on the wall, demand that she turn over whatever it is they were looking for taunt her that her longstanding lover's promises were empty words.All of which confuses her more than a bit, because she can't imagine who she's supposed to have betrayed or what she was supposed to be hiding. Besides, Dr. Morgan Miller, a brilliant if chronically independent biologist and gifted lover had never promised her anything...it wasn't his style.Lisa's not the only one touched by the events of the night. Mouseworld, a teeming research habitat of 500 thousand mice that had been in existence for seventy years to study the effects of crowding on behavior is gutted by arson, with no explanation, and Morgan Miller himself is abducted, his kidnappers escaping through a citywide blackout caused by a computer hack.Clearly someone thinks Miller has a secret worth killing for, at least mice, and possible men as well, and quite likely they think Lisa is in on it. Lisa, on the other hand, suspects that it's all a mistake, because she most definitely wasn't let in on any big discovery.With little sleep for the remainder of the book, Lisa, the Bristol Police, The MOD (Ministry of Defense), various mercenaries and a dazed researcher who suspects it's all his fault careen over the English countryside looking for clues, getting into scrapes and reflecting on what the world is coming to in the middle of the twenty first century.Could Miller have been hiding something monumental, like the secret of immortality (though he prefers "emortalilty" as a term) and if so, whom was he intending to trust with it, a foundation started by Nazis or one started by a Jew? And where do the third wave of feminists fit into all this anyway?The Cassandra Complex combines the thoughtful puzzle solving of English mysteries with excellent Science Fiction and a lot of illuminating social commentary and analysis. My only regret it that Brian Stableford, who's' future history has been getting better and better with each book, failed to resolve all the book's mysteries in a confrontation in a sitting room.The book takes its name from a stress related syndrome, where a person knows, or thinks they know, of an impending disaster and is helpless to stop it. You can pick your flavor of disaster, and indeed sorting among the many offered in this book is much of its point. Overpopulation, viral warfare, global corporate control, discrimination against "twentieth century leftovers:...they all take their turns and play their parts in Brian Stableford's latest book in the future-history series he began with Inherit the Earth. As are many of his stories, this one is based on a short story that was published in Interzone 29 in 1989, and reprinted by Gardner Dozois in the Year's Best Science Fiction.If Scie