n the near future, a corporation called SimGen is the Microsoft of genetic engineering. Founded and run by two brothers, Mercer and Ellis Sinclair, SimGen owns the patent on sims, chimpanzees whose DNA has been tweaked with human genetic material. Neither animals nor persons, they are property ... or, not to put too fine a point on it, slaves. Smart enough to talk but not smart enough to talk back, sims are strong, obedient, scrubbed clean of all violent and sexual instincts and, best of all from SimGen's point of view, designed with a built-in "expiration date," thus ensuring a continuous need for replacements.
Thanks to SimGen's political contributions, as well as other services rendered and pressures brought to bear out of the public eye, the government has raised no objections to the existence or treatment of sims, which SimGen leases rather than sells, retaining ultimate ownership and responsibility. Apart from a few protesting voices from the religious right, who view sims as abominations, and animal-rights activists, who see them as abused critters, America is happy to swallow SimGen's assurances that its sims are happy and well cared for.
Then labor attorney Patrick Sullivan, golfing with a client at an exclusive club in Westchester County, New York, where all the caddies and service personnel are sims, is approached by a sim named Tome who wants Patrick to help them form a union. Not for better wages or benefits, but for the simple right to enjoy each other's company. As Tome explains in the baby-talk/Bizarro-world dialect, seemingly lifted from bad Tarzan films, that Wilson gives all the members of his hybrid species: "Sims grow up large group, no mommy, no daddy, just child sims. Get know others, make friend, then take away. Come here, make friend, then take away. Want stay together. Want family."
Romy Cadman works in the Office for the Protection of Research Risks, in the Division of Animal Welfare. She uses her government position to gain access to SimGen facilities, reporting back to a mysterious masked man named Zero, who runs a shadowy organization devoted to the destruction of SimGen and an end to the exploitation of sims. When Patrick's quixotic efforts gain national media attention, Zero dispatches the beauteous Romy to suss him out.
Unfortunately, Patrick has also come to the attention of SimGen's top brass, including their chief of security, a cold-blooded killer named Luca Portero, who represents the interests of a quasi-governmental outfit secretly pulling SimGen's strings. Portero is ordered to stop Patrick and Romy, now working together, by any means necessary.
A paint-by-numbers thriller
Wilson's not really concerned with genetic engineering in Sims. No, he's into genretic engineering. That is, the art of melding two or more literary genres to create a hybrid form. In the hands of a skillful writer like Greg Bear, genretic engineering yields Darwin's Radio, a fine novel that combines the page-turning suspense of a first-rate thriller with cutting-edge science fiction in a way that not only instructs and enthralls, but raises ethical issues of serious contemporary import. Wilson routinely injects supernatural or fantastic elements into his thrillers to lift them above the mundane; here, he hitches his wagon to the hottest science of the day.
The result is a paint-by-numbers thriller that almost contemptuously ignores pesky historical and scientific issues it cannot help but raise yet only addresses incidentally. Like it or not, the parallel between sims and African-American slaves, for example, is drawn inescapably by history. It neither can nor should be dismissed by the author, even if it does threaten to run his formula thriller off track. His obligation, having introduced these elements, is to explore them. Had he done so, this might have been a better book. Wilson's exclusive focus on the machinations of SimGen, Zero, et al. trivializes the slavery of the sims by reducing them to something on the order of a trade secret at play in a game of competing industrial and government interests. That could, of course, be a valid approach ... except that the sims, with their doglike eagerness to please their human masters, and their stereotypically primitive linguistic skills, are bathetic caricatures designed to arouse our pity (and often our amusement) on the cheap; they are all—even Tome, the most fully developed sim character—faceless counters, utterly interchangeable and represent a significant failure of imaginative empathy on the part of the author. So much for the social relevance of Sims.
As for the science, Wilson claims in his author's note that the scenario he postulates "may seem like science fiction, but it isn't." Well, actually it is—and what's more, it's bad science fiction. Authors are free to make whatever claims they like about the science in their stories; readers typically don't care how ludicrous or impossible they may be, so long as they are believable within the context of the story. What that requires is a bit of real scientific knowledge and a lot of writerly legerdemain. Again, the novels of Greg Bear can serve as excellent examples of these qualities in action. But Wilson doesn't care enough about the science of Sims to make it seem plausible ... even though his climax depends upon it. Instead, he relies—again—on stereotypes to do his work for him: In this case, the general public's willingness to suspend disbelief (if simple credulity merits that critical term) and accept genetic engineering as a synonym for magic. So much for the science of Sims.
What's left is a thriller that dutifully but joylessly touches all the expected bases of action, suspense, twists and romance. There's something draining about the very competence with which Wilson puts Patrick, Romy, Portero, the Sinclairs, even Zero (in fact, especially Zero), through their paces. They are like sleepwalkers ... or, rather, like sims, for in the end they, too, are no more than slaves to a master unable or unwilling to grant them the dignity of a real existence, if only on the page.
