BKSPARES.RVW   980620

"Spares", Michael Marshall Smith, 1996, 0-586-21775-4
%A   Michael Marshall Smith
%C   10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY  10022-5299
%D   1996
%G   0-586-21775-4
%I   HarperCollins/Basic Books
%O   800-242-7737 fax: 212-207-7433 information@harpercollins.com
%P   305 p.
%T   "Spares"

In "The Adventure of the Creeping Man," Conan Doyle gives us the
prototype of all the "monkey gland eternal youth serum" science
fiction stories.  Towards the end of it, Sherlock Holmes notes that
the existence of such an elixir of youth would give rise to "survival
of the least fit."  The spiritual and wise would accept the chance to
move on to another possible level of existence, while the crass and
material would give anything to prolong their current state.

So too in "Spares" does Smith point out that the insurance of having a
perfect and ready supply of transplantable parts would give rise to a
truly evil level of irresponsibility.

It is the truly insane parts of the book that sound initially
reasonable.  Why not build a business empire on the productive, and
waste, capacity of bored husbands, boyfriends, and fathers whiling
away the time they spend waiting for shopping expeditions?  And yet it
is those parts of the book that sound outrageous that are most real. 
While tracking down a prostitute and a retarded teenager a man is
viciously reminded of his dead wife and daughter by a diversion?  Too
real, much too real.

It is probably because of this ability to go to the true heart of a
superficially surreal scenario that allows us to accept the leaps
Smith does make into the twilight zone.  Many science fiction authors
are enamoured of building elaborate artificial worlds with annoying
and irrelevant detail.  In this case you become so involved that you
don't care *why* the trees are so greatly to be feared: you are only
thankful that the characters escape without encountering the vicious
fauna.

There are, of course, a number of incomprehensible, but acceptable,
technologies, such as engines capable of driving several kilometre
long and 200 story high cities through the air.  But Smith also has a
realistic grasp of computers.  Storage, on disk or in non-volatile
RAM, gives you the essence of any computer, without the need for
dragging all the hardware along.  "Collapsing code" is not real, but
seems to be a reductio ad absurdum for the tendency to build higher
and higher levels of programming languages.  (On the other hand, the
protagonist seems to have a serious understanding of computer source
code, with little reason for it.)

(Only one serious mistake in siting the story in the United States
rather than Britain, aside from some minor dialect issues: North
America simply does not smoke that much anymore.)

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998   BKSPARES.RVW   980620