Reviews

Maximum Light Tor Books Hardcover, Jan. 1998

Tom Easton (ANALOG)     "Nancy Kress continues to work with biotechnology in her latest, MAXIMUM LIGHT. She begins by supposing a future whose single biggest problem is the decline in sperm count among human males. This is something we can see happening today, and some researchers are willing to blame it on the hormone- mimicking and disrupting effects of many of the synthetic chemicals we have released into the environment. Others are far more cautious, perhaps because our civilization is utterly dependent on these chemicals and everything we make with them. To do away with them would seriously cramp our style.     Yet if we do away with them....This is where Kress comes in, portraying a world where you see gray-haired old farts at every turn and it's just going to get worse because most people can't have babies. Kids are scarce. Demand is high. Cloning doesn't work, at least for humans, and people are so scared of genetic engineering that the government has banned it and anything that smells of it (except for the medications that let the old farts keep getting older).     Meet smart-assed Shana Walders. Far too cocky for her own good (hey, she's a kid, kids are national resources, and besides she's got great tits), she sees something she shouldn't while on a National Service gig, and gets very angry when everyone, even a Congressional committee, refuses to believe her. Kress plays it coy, but she doesn't take long to show the card: Shana saw chimps with human faces and hands created by "vivifacture," growing tissues from cell samples and shaping it on a template (in this case, the young chimps' skulls). Dressed, they look human enough to satisfy many a maternal urge.     Where did the human tissue come from? Meet Cameron Atuli, blithe (gay) ballet dancer. He doesn't remember much, for he has had memory surgery to erase some traumatic event, but it isn't long before Shana spots him and recognizes the face on the chimps.     Meet Nick Clementi, elderly scientist and government advisor. He gets involved, does a bit of investigating, and finds signs of a heavy duty cover- up. Something strange and ominous is going on, and it has a lot to do with vivifacture, maternal urges, and what must necessarily happen when essential research is made illegal. (Remember the "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will hve guns" line?)     The MAXIMUM LIGHT title doesn't mean much until you reach the end of the tale, but I'll see no more than that this one easily lives up to the towering Kress reputation for thoughtful, interesting, well done SF. Too, it could easily have been serialized in these pages; if it had, it might well have won the Anlab vote in its category." Joe Mayhew (Washington Post)     "In Maximum Light by Nancy Kress, three first-person narrators tell the story: Shanna Walders, a clueless tennaged girl; Cameron Atuli, a homosexual ballet dancer; and Nick Clementi, an aging medical scientist who advises Congress on crisis control. Happily, Kress gives her characters a complex inner spark of humanit that keeps them from being mere caricatures. This novel is about a very serious sexual problem -- endocrine failure due to synthetic environmental polution.     'Atlanta had rain, sheets of it, slabs of it. Before I could help myself, I started ticking off all the synthetic, windborne disrupters that were probably coming down with each drop. Hexaclorobenzene, kelthane, ocotchlorostyrene, the alkyl phenols . . .'     Because of a severe drop in fertility thre are fewer children in the world. Some rich would-be parents will do anything to acquire a child of their own. Therefore entrepreneurs have been hard at work to provide child substitutes, despite legal or moral inconveniences. Vivifacture, the making of human spare parts, has become a reality, and someone has devised a way to graft human hands and faces to chimpanzees to provide 'babies.' They actually (sort of) look more like humans than do the dogs or cats some people have been pushing around in strollers.     Kress's villains are not diabolical conspirators but willfully ignorant hypocrites, shortsighted and greedy dunderheads, the well-intentioned half-baked - in short, us. But we are also the heroes whose generosity, honesty and energy could turn our lemming tribe away from the polluted waters ahead.     This is a wry book which will delight the thoughtful reader." Clinton Lawrence (Science Fiction Weekly) A global fertility crisis and monkeys with human faces converge in mystery...     Shana Walders is nearing the end of her mandatory tour of duty with the National Service Corps when her company is assigned to help the Army secure a neighborhood contaminated by a train wreck. She talks her sergeant into allowing her to help escort evacuated residents back to their homes to rescue their pets. But the man she's shepherding breaks away, enters a home, and runs off with a cage full of monkeys that appear to have human faces.     Later, a congressional committee calls Shana to testify about the incident, which smacks of black-market DNA labs. Most DNA research is outlawed, even to find a cure for the ongoing world fertility crisis. But only one person on the committee believes her story--Nick Clementi, a scientist who was appointed to the committee by FDA Commissioner Vanderbilt Grant. Nick believes the monkeys could have been created not through DNA technology, but by vivifacture, a method of growing tissue on a host without combining genes.     After her testimony, Shana receives a letter declining her application to join the Army. Dismayed by this turn of events, she reluctantly agrees to go with some buddies to the city to beat up some gays. But she notices that one of their intended victims--a pair of ballet dancers--has the same face she saw on the monkeys. She thwarts the attack and later confronts the man. His name is Cameron Atuli, and he recently had induced amnesia to wipe out the memory of a traumatic incident.     Shana is arrested, and without anyone else in Washington to turn to, she calls Nick. Nick bails her out, setting into motion events that will bring all three characters together to find out just what Cameron has to do with the bizarrely altered monkeys and the fertility crisis. Much more than a mystery     In Maximum Light, Nancy Kress creates a richly detailed future in which the fertility rate has fallen by 90 percent for reasons no one completely understands. Kress weaves an intricate mystery using the threads of the scientific, political and economic implications of the crisis. Her tapestry is an exciting suspense story, with clues revealed logically and with a tension-filled conclusion that resolves the major issues of the plot without seeming at all contrived.     But this is much more than a mystery novel. Kress uses her world to explore a vast array of issues, ranging from the conflict between religion and science to the high social and personal costs of selfishness, not to mention abuses of power. She portrays her characters with precision, giving them the kinds of flaws that lead to mistakes and ethical dilemmas. The story itself is told from the separate viewpoints of Shana, Nick and Cameron in alternating chapters. This technique allow Kress to explore various dilemmas through each character's perspective. Since each has different motivations and reactions, they help to bring Kress's world into a focus that's both sharper and broader than a single viewpoint alone would have allowed.     Though it's still a little early to predict such things, Maximum Light could well turn out to be one of the year's best science fiction novels. It certainly has a great deal to say, and it's a joy to read, even if readers are just looking for an entertaining mystery. Kress certainly has become one of our best writers. -- Clint Clinton Lawrence Copyright ©1998, Science Fiction Weekly, Reprinted with permission

Copyright ©1999 Nancy Kress