he year is 2026. In an unnamed city that may or may not be New York, the world economy is administered by financial genius Wendell Blaine. Two pillars of that economy are genetic engineering and virtual reality, no longer separate fields but branches of a single discipline, a kind of software coding that translates from the genetic to the electronic and back again with effortless fluency. Virtual reality parlors are everywhere, featuring Survivor-type contests keyed to players' DNA. Artificial life forms, known as wetware, are equally common, from toothy beavers that sing advertising jingles to humanoids made with limited intelligence, built-in expiration dates and augmented abilities of the sort useful in those thankless but necessary tasks, like sanitation and soldiering, on which society depends.
Hal Briggs writes code for Galapagos Wetware. He is a genius of a different stripe, a sad, disaffected loner sickened by the soulless uses to which his work is routinely put. Always an artful coder, Briggs, moved by a desire to "put some of this to rights," departs from the design specs of his current assignment, the production of an artificial man and woman indistinguishable from human beings. In addition to coding for "the handgun stuff," as he puts it, Briggs begins to code for the personal, the intangible: "the sheen of a blue sky, say, on the bare legs of a young woman. Or the expression in the eyes of a human being who is doing what is necessary and right, and who is brave." The female he names Kay Remilard. The male is Jack Portman.
Hal crafts Kay into his ideal mate, a woman of transcendent beauty and musical talent who "perceives love as that moment where the ordinarily beautiful becomes ominous." He fashions Jack into the perfect best friend. He commits the ultimate wetware crime by making them fertile, so that their doctored DNA has the potential to enter the human gene pool. Per project specifications whose origin and purpose remain mysterious, they are also ruthlessly efficient killers.
Then, as economic crisis threatens to engulf the city and topple Blaine, Kay and Jack vanish from Galapagos Wetware. Soon reports of a deadly new contagion surface from the city's seedy underbelly. Hal, who has fallen in love with Kay, realizes that he wasn't alone in his tinkering; someone else was tweaking the code. Now that someone has stolen his creations and loosed them upon the city to wreak an obscure but terrible vengeance.
A disappointing near-future cyber-noir
In some alternate reality where surnames are destiny, Craig Nova is a science-fiction writer. But in this reality he's known for edgy, beautifully written mainstream thrillers like The Good Son and Tornado Alley, novels that explore extreme emotional and psychological states with a crisp intelligence and surreal precision of language worthy of comparison to the early work of Don DeLillo. Unfortunately, in his latest novel, Wetware, Nova lives up to his name in another sense: he flames out.
It's not the writing itself that sputters; Wetware abounds with passages where "the ordinarily beautiful becomes ominous" (and vice versa). But it's not enough. The best science fiction features more than beautiful writing: it features beautiful ideas whose implications are rigorously, logically and artfully elaborated through setting, plot and character. It builds worlds that ring true on every level ... or at least, to tweak the words of Courtney Love, "fake it so real they are beyond fake." Like many mainstream writers who turn their talents to science fiction, Nova founders on the shoals of world-building.
The evidence is in plain sight, starting with the title. Every moderately well-read SF fan knows that "wetware" is a term invented by Rudy Rucker and in use well before his 1988 novel of that name. Readers will search Nova's book in vain for acknowledgment of Rucker's priority. Similar borrowings are strewn across every page. A pinch of Bruce Sterling here, a dash of Paul J. McCauley there, some sprinklings of William Gibson, all set to simmer in a sauce of diluted Philip K. Dick, and—voila!—an "authentic" sci-fi gumbo ... suitable for mainstream tastes!
But while such appropriations lend Nova's future a surface plausibility, that plausibility breaks down upon closer scrutiny. The details fail to cohere into a believable whole that's more than the sum of disparate parts. I don't know if the coding system Nova imagines is scientifically possible, but I do know it won't be around as soon as 2026. Similarly, because Kay and Jack are dangerous and valuable prototypes, there would be security and oversight measures in place at Galapagos Wetware that would make Hal's tinkering, and their subsequent escape, more difficult than Nova seems to realize or to care about.
These are but two of the many details that don't add up. Wetware's future, despite its glaze of hipness, has a second-hand quality. It's as ersatz as Tomorrowland. How can characters that readers come to care about flourish in such shallow soil? Without the foundation of a believable future, Nova's characters can't support the weight of his plot or the flights of his pen. Kay and Jack, Hal and Blaine and others all dwindle to stereotypes while the plot, as if to compensate, grows increasingly lurid and melodramatic, marching stiffly toward a conclusion as predictable as it is unsatisfying.
