The Luminous Dead. By Caitlin Starling.
Harper Voyager. $16.99.
Call it The ISP Phenomenon. The survival
against long odds of an Irredeemably Stupid Protagonist is part and parcel of
adventure stories of all kinds. That includes not-really-science-fictional ones
such as Caitlin Starling’s debut novel, The
Luminous Dead.
Superficially science fiction, the novel
is really an old-fashioned thriller with at most a veneer of SF. Yes, it is set
on another world a couple of hundred years in the future, with easy space
travel and all sorts of high-tech equipment available to the population. But
Starling makes a classic error of novice SF writers: she plucks technology
advancements out of her authorial hat but leaves nonessential (to her) elements
of the story in undisguised 21st-century form. Thus, while complex full-body
ultra-manipulative protective suits allow cave explorers in Starling’s imagined
world to accomplish far more than they otherwise could, there has apparently
been absolutely no medical
advancement for centuries, since the various stimulants, anxiolytics and sleep
aids in use by the super-well-equipped cavers are exactly like current ones,
with identical effects, side effects, and aftereffects. Um, not likely.
Starling also, in her rush to set up what
she really wants to write – a thriller pitting two very different people
against each other in the service of a more-or-less common cause, resulting in
both of them being forced to delve deeply into their emotional and
psychological beings – sets up a creaky “framing tale” to explain why only a
single caver, wearing one of those high-tech suits, can handle highly dangerous
belowground explorations. It seems that there are hyper-powerful,
hyper-dangerous “Tunnelers” beneath the ground – a direct ripoff from, or
tribute to, the sandworms of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune – and they destroy any human group larger than one,
because…well, just because Starling wants it that way. There is really no
reason for this, and no suitable explanatory setup. If a single 250-pound
person can explore safely, for example, how about two 125-pound people? How
exactly do these terrifying and enormously powerful creatures count the humans
belowground, and to what do the Tunnelers respond or fail to respond? For
Starling, these are side issues and therefore ones she passes over lightly –
but SF readers will surely focus on them and find them more intriguing than the
author does. (And apparently human/animal ethics have not evolved any more in
this “future” than medical science has: the Tunnelers, which are natural
inhabitants of the cave system and have evolved to fit their ecological niche,
are deemed deeply evil, their wanton destruction not only worthy but also to be
celebrated by humans.)
Starling cares primarily about the ISP.
Her name is Gyre Price, who as a girl enjoyed doing some informal, amateur cave
exploration. Then her mother, to whom Gyre was not particularly close, up and
left, and since then Gyre wants nothing more than to find her mother – pretty
thin motivation, all in all. So Gyre falsifies her cave-exploration credentials
to get herself hired for a super-lucrative and super-dangerous job that will
pay enough so Gyre can start the search for her mom. The job comes with the
most-up-to-date exploration suit available, with bells and whistles on its
bells and whistles. So Gyre, being an ISP, does
not learn about the suit’s functions before putting it on and therefore
repeatedly runs into self-caused life-threatening problems. And this
super-high-tech suit happens to have an all-communications kill switch that, in
the silliest part of a decidedly un-silly book, Gyre just happens to throw and
just happens to be unable to switch back (since she never, you know, studied
the suit’s workings), so she is completely cut off from her surface “handler”
at a number of crucial junctures.
Oh, and the “handler,” who turns out to
run the super-successful company that made Gyre’s suit, actually tracks down
Gyre’s mother while Gyre is belowground, and downloads the information to
Gyre’s suit – and Gyre, so desperate for this material for so long, decides not to look at it. This has been her
100% obsession, remember, so when she gets what she wants, she turns her back
on it. Perfect ISP behavior. Furthermore, as circumstances deteriorate around
her, when Gyre desperately needs something to cling to, such as her adult-life-long
obsession, she again decides not to look at what she has wanted for so many
years. Even when she believes, quite reasonably, that she is about to die, she
decides not to look. This level of unbelievability would be laughable if
Starling paused to think about it, but she is too busy with the next plot twist
to bother.
Gyre’s handler, Em, has issues and
obsessions of her own – part of the point of The Luminous Dead is that these two very different women are in
many ways flip sides of each other, and there is both an emotional attraction
between them and a physical one. Why Em’s super-sophisticated equipment
contains a switch that an ISP can use to cut herself completely off from her
handler, with neither of them able to reestablish contact, is just one of many
plot contrivances never adequately explained. Or rather they are adequately explained, in a “meta”
sense: they are there for the benefit of the author, not the characters and not
plot consistency. Starling writes of Gyre at one point, quite seriously and
with the intent to evoke readers’ emotions, “She was pathetic. They both were.”
The fact is that this is quite true – just not in the emotionally trenchant way
Starling means it. At another point, Gyre, in a fit of childish pique and to
get back at Em for not being sufficiently emotionally available (!),
deliberately smashes all the backup power sources for her suit except one,
knowing for sure that she will not
need more than one and determined, determined,
to teach Em a lesson. Any reader with even a modicum of familiarity with
thrillers will know exactly how dumb this is and exactly what is going to
happen (if not precisely how it will
happen). Indeed, it is only a few pages later that Gyre is saying, “This wasn’t
supposed to happen!” Gyre: a perfect ISP.
It is a shame that Starling hews so
closely to The ISP Phenomenon in The
Luminous Dead, because the book is filled with genuinely tense, sometimes
thrilling scenes, and the detail lavished on describing the dangerous elements
of cave exploration is impressive. Em has Gyre follow dozens of previous cavers
– most of whom died – into a terribly dangerous set of underground passages,
not because she is seeking rich ore deposits, as is the norm on this
ill-defined planet, but because she is seeking information on the fate of her
parents, who went on an early multi-person exploratory journey and ended up
dead. Maybe. There is a mystery about their fate. And there is an additional nicely
sketched mystery here – another of the book’s strong points – when Gyre starts
finding bodies of previous cavers sent in by Em (not a surprise) and then
discovers supply caches missing or partly empty (yes a surprise). Unfortunately, as Starling herself becomes more
wrapped up in the relationship between Gyre and Em, she seems to forget the way
she has strewn the path with mysteries: most of them remain unexplained by
book’s end, which is distinctly unfair to readers.
What Starling focuses on with increasing
intensity as the book continues is Gyre’s mental state. Never particularly
stable to begin with, it begins to deteriorate more and more quickly, and as
Gyre’s nerves start to fray because of a multiplicity of her own ISP mistakes
as well as the challenges inherent in the job she is doing, readers need to try
to figure out whether Gyre is seeing genuine people or creatures living,
impossibly, deep in the cave system; whether Gyre is hallucinating; or whether
Em has knowledge far beyond anything she has disclosed to Gyre, to whom she has
told quite a few lies already (with Gyre telling Em a number in return,
although it is worth mentioning that Em discovered the phony elements in Gyre’s
résumé but nevertheless decided she would be a good fit for this exploration –
another plot place where “why?” is a question never adequately answered).
The usual elements of ISP Phenomenon
thrillers are nicely handled by Starling, including the very-very-very-near-death
experiences of the ISP, the motivational uncertainties of the characters, and
the deft way in which the good-bad dichotomy between the principals rebalances
and changes over time. Starling has a strongly cinematic writing pace, allowing
only brief respite between perils as Gyre’s role as ISP brings her right to the
verge of madness and/or oblivion time after time. The interaction between Gyre
and Em, although somewhat formulaic, is also well-paced and well-handled. And
the interweaving of real-world dangers with possible mental deterioration,
another trope of the thriller genre, is managed with similar skill. It is
unfortunate that Gyre never rises above the level of ISP and never seems a
fully formed character, nor does Em go much beyond the formulaic antagonist-who-may-not-be-so-awful-after-all
role. The Luminous Dead is in many
ways a strong debut novel, but it has enough rough edges to show that
Starling’s abilities require some honing if she wants to rise above ISP-focused
genre potboilers in future books – although, to be fair, genre potboilers using
The ISP Phenomenon can be a very profitable authorial niche.
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