Accidental Creatures

Anne Harris

Completed 8/23/2018, Reviewed 8/23/2018

3 stars

This was an entertaining novel.  However, it was written in a way that I can only call fluff.  It had an interesting premise and interesting ideas, but the execution made it feel like pulp fiction.  It made for very easy reading.  In fact, I read it in two days; granted a lot of that was during down time at work.  The book is packed with a lot of action and dialogue.  There’s not much in the way of quality prose.  But it was fun and light.

The story concerns GeneSys, a giant biotech firm that creates organic polymers.  It is the biggest corporation in Detroit, now that cars are mostly a thing of the past.  Residents can either work a desk job or be vat divers, people who dive into vats of the highly toxic chemicals that create organic polymer products.  Accidents occur often, killing the vat divers with horrific deaths.  The chemicals taint the DNA of vat divers whose offspring have DNA damage.  They’re called sports.  The book follows a group of sports, two of which, Chango and Helix, grow to love each other.  It also follows a brilliant scientist, Hector Martin, who is developing a biological entity for GeneSys to do the work of the vat divers.  Hector’s experiments lead to a scientific breakthrough that threatens the stability of GeneSys, and embroils everyone in a battle against the megacorporation.

The plot may sound confusing but it all makes sense as you read it.  To be more specific leads to spoilers, so I left it rather vague.  The story is somewhat cyberpunk, with its evil megacorporation, designer drugs, artists, and bionetwork.  It has a gritty feel, though not as much as say a William Gibson novel. 

There are a lot of characters in the book, but they are easy to keep track of.  The sports are a pretty fun lot, though Chango and Helix are the primary characters with the most amount of story time.  Chango is the younger sister of Ada, a woman who was a pioneer in the unionizing of the vat divers.  Ada suffered a tragic vat diving accident and died a horrible death.  Chango is highly suspicious of the circumstances surrounding her sister’s death.  When Helix, her girlfriend, expresses interest in vat diving, Chango of course goes through the roof.  Helix doesn’t know why she wants to be a vat diver, but she knows she must become one. 

Helix is an interesting character.  Unlike Chango, whose mutation is having two different colored eyes, Helix has four arms and fanged canines.  Her adoptive father, Hector Martin, the brilliant scientist previously noted, has kept her pretty much locked away from society.  Helix runs away one day, falling literally into the arms of Chango.  Her journey to figure out who she really is leads her to meeting others like herself and eventually to the battle with GeneSys. 

I give the book three stars out of five.  It’s an exciting romp with a lot of twists and turns.  It could easily be given an action-sci-fi movie treatment.  I thought there were some plot holes, but the action kept me from thinking too much about them.  I didn’t think it was a great novel, but I never got bored with it.  The book won the first Gaylactic Spectrum Award for best novel with positive LGBT content back in 1999.