The Affinity Trap
Martin Sketchley
Pyr, 320 pages
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Martin Sketchley’s debut novel has the
far-future setting
and galaxy-spanning plot that’s newly popular these days in SF.
Alexander
Delgado is a veteran soldier and experienced covert operative for
Structure,
the world government that has come to exist in the wake of humanity’s
withdrawal into gigantic habitat towers, sealed off from the trashed,
polluted,
disease-ridden world of the far future. When Delgado was rising through
the
ranks, Structure was a reasonably democratic institution; but since a
bloody
coup by the power-hungry General William Myson, Structure has become a
corrupt
dictatorship, and Earth, once respected as an interplanetary
arbitrator, a hated
galactic bully. Delgado, whose loyalty to the previous regime made him
unwilling
to be sucked into the vortex of greed and graft to which so many others
have succumbed, has been punished by the sidelining of his career.
Embittered and cynical, he spends most of his time in aimless leisure
activities.
As the novel opens, Delgado is called out of
his semi-retirement
by General Myson himself. Earth is in imminent danger of war with the
Seriatts,
a powerful three-gendered alien race whose homeworld lies close to the
locus of
some of Myson’s many illegal dealings. To mend the political rift--and
also to
protect his personal interests--Myson wants to father a child by the
Seriatt
female Vourniass Lycern, who is the assigned child-bearer to the
Seriattic
Royal Household. Lycern, however, objects to the union, and has fled to
the
Affinity Group, a mysterious religious enclave on the planet Veshc.
Delgado is
charged to go and get her back.
Delgado fears he’s being set up--there’s no
way a
marginalized malcontent like him would be given such a mission
otherwise. But
he thinks he sees a way to turn the situation to his advantage,
possibly by
kidnapping Lycern and using her to manipulate the political situation.
But
Lycern, when Delgado finds her, is not at all as he expected.
Irresistibly
drawn to her, he succumbs to her sexual advances--a choice that has
disastrous
consequences, for Seriattic females secrete muscein,
a
pheromone that is powerfully addictive to males of any species.
Painfully
dependent upon Lycern, his ambitious plans in ruins, Delgado is faced
with
personal and professional choices that will change his life--and
possibly the
lives of everyone on Earth.
If you can accept the idea that two-sexed
humans and
three-sexed Seriatts are capable of cross-breeding, that Myson
impregnating Lycern
would be regarded by the Seriatts as a gesture of conciliation rather
than a
deadly
interstellar insult, and that Delgado, a hard-bitten, nano-enhanced
operative
who has encountered the Seriatts before in combat, wouldn’t know about muscein,
you may buy into the premise of this novel
(the first of a series). Sketchley writes with energy and
conviction, diving fiercely into Delgado’s complex internal conflicts,
lavishing detail on his various exotic settings. If the images thus
evoked (and
the action that accompanies them, especially once Delgado returns to
Earth and
falls in with a group of revolutionaries living in the ruined cityscape
outside
the habitat towers) seem to borrow a bit too heavily from the current
crop of
effects-laden SF films, Sketchley’s dense prose brings them to vibrant
life,
and he is able to create a powerful sense of atmosphere, and even,
occasionally, of poignancy.
Accepting the above notions, however,
requires some serious
suspension of disbelief--especially Delgado’s ensnarement by Lycern, on
which
the entire plot turns. Delgado is given an infocram file on the
Seriatts before
departing for the mission, which for flimsy reasons he ignores; even
so, having
gone into action against the Seriatts earlier in his career, wouldn’t
he at
least have heard rumors about the consequences of sex with Seriattic
females,
and therefore have the sense to resist sleeping with Lycern? Apparently
not;
when he realizes something isn’t right, and belatedly accesses the
infocram,
what he finds there is a surprise.
Also, though there’s quite a bit of detail about the three
Seriattic genders (mostly in aid of the gloopy sex scenes between
Lycern and
Delgado), almost no cultural or biological context is provided to put
it in. It
isn’t really clear why there should be a third gender at all, since it
appears
to serve a strictly social, rather than a biological, function. Apart
from some
passing remarks by Lycern, Seriattic society is a blank--a lack of
background
that not only makes it extremely difficult to understand why the act of
fathering
a child by Lycern should have such significant social ramifications,
but has
the effect, halfway through the book when Lycern and her pregnancy
become a
pawn in Myson's power game, of reducing the three genders and Delgado's
muscein addiction to the status of a mcguffin. At that
point,
any pregnant
alien princess would have served the book's purpose. We’re deep in Star
Wars territory
here--and
indeed the twist at the end, which no doubt is intended to make the
reader’s
jaw drop, reads like something borrowed from bad epic fantasy.
I
could go on but I won’t. This novel wasn’t ready for
prime time; if not for the endless cycling of publishing trends that
has
brought sweeping space opera back into fashion, I suspect it would have
remained in the author’s trunk. Yet Sketchley is clearly a talented
writer, and
in parts of the book this is abundantly on display. With fewer generic
elements
and a more internally consistent plot, his next novel might be really
impressive.
Copyright © 2004
Victoria Strauss
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