My review of Paul McAuley’s White Devils was based on the UK edition (from Simon & Schuster UK), so I haven't seen the US edition's publicity materials. But McAuley's UK publisher really wants readers to know the novel is a thriller. “The first genuine 21st century thriller,” the cover copy proclaims. “Not since The Firm has there been a thriller that grips so tight,” the press release trumpets. “This is his debut thriller,” the biographical blurb declares. Nowhere do the words “science fiction” appear (and the titles of McAuley’s other books aren’t mentioned). Yet White Devils, which unquestionably is a thriller, is also, equally unquestionably, science fiction. Unlike typical bio- or technothriller writers, who invoke the dangers of hard science but generally set their doomsday scenarios in a recognizable present day, McAuley has constructed a chillingly plausible near-future world to frame his tale of suspense, which in turn springs organically from those science fictional principles.

Nicholas Hyde, a man on the run from his past, is a worker with Witness, a humanitarian organization that investigates atrocities and human rights abuses--of which there are many in mid-twenty-first century Africa, ravaged by brand-new plagues and biotechnology run amok, as well as the older, more established ills of civil war and colonialism. When he’s asked to join an investigation team on a “hot scene” investigation of a recently-reported massacre, he doesn’t expect to face anything more dangerous than the Loyalist soldiers of Green Congo’s recently-overthrown military dictatorship. But the victims have been killed in a particularly horrifying way, and their bodies bear bite marks that don’t look human. Within moments of discovering the corpse of a very strange apelike creature--dead-white and hairless, with knifelike teeth and claws instead of nails--the team is ambushed by more of the same. Incredibly quick and strong, intelligent enough to be able to seize and use the team members’ guns, they destroy the party in a matter of moments. Only Nick and a government observer survive.

The government observer calls the creatures “white devils”--perverted creations, he says, of the gene hackers who ply their trade across the Congo River, in the Dead Zone where biowar diseases and gengineered plagues still rage unchecked. But when Nick tries to tell the truth about what he saw, no one wants to hear it--in fact, a full-scale coverup has been initiated, directed not by the government or the army, but by Obligate, the mega-corporation that all but owns Green Congo. Obligate is one of a new breed of ecologically-minded transnationals that eschews the destructive practices of its predecessors, espousing a philosophy of low-impact technology, indigenous integration, and local philanthropy. Still, given that it bought up all of Green Congo’s debt in exchange for free license to rebuild the country as it pleases, it has the authority and the resources, not to mention the vested interest, of an old-style colonial power.

Nick soon realizes that it’s not Obligate as a whole that’s desperate to cover up his encounter with the white devils, but one Obligate employee in particular. Determined to speak for his dead teammates, he sets out to uncover the truth. It’s a quest that allies him with two other people who have dead to speak for: Elspeth Faber, a paleoanthropologist in search of justice for her murdered scientist father (whose groundbreaking genetic discoveries may have contributed to the white devils’ creation), and Teddy Yssel, an alcoholic bush pilot whose boyhood friend died at the white devils’ hands. Their journey--and the secrets of Nick’s past--sets them on a collision course with Cody Corbin, a psychotic Christian fundamentalist eco-terrorist on a divine mission to eradicate the abominations of gengineering from the face of the earth, and leads them into the heart of the Dead Zone, where discoveries even more terrible than the white devils wait to be made.

This is a book that can be read on several levels. First and foremost, there’s the thriller-style plot, which propels Nick and Elspeth ever deeper into mystery and peril as they pursue the convoluted secret of what the white devils are and how they came to be. McAuley’s cool narrative style lends itself very well to this sort of fast-moving tale, where action and suspense are the true protagonists, and the characters--though intelligently drawn--are propelled by the plot, rather than vice versa. The plot turns are occasionally extreme (especially those involving Cody Corbin), but never entirely improbable. And though I’ve complained in another review about my difficulty with books that attempt to create the illusion of simultaneity by rapidly intercutting between several concurrent storylines, McAuley is one author who’s able to handle this difficult technique effectively.

White Devils is also a fascinating science fictional speculation on a disturbingly possible near future. McAuley’s twenty-first century world has been devastated by plagues natural--hemorrhagic influenza, a.k.a. the Black Flu, which killed enormous numbers of people worldwide and decimated the population of Africa--and bioengineered--the plastic disease, transmitted by a bacteria that has acquired a gengineered plasmid originally designed to create polymers in plant cells. There's also Cellulose-9, a virus-borne enzyme that converts the cellulose in plants to a new form with a room-temperature melting point, thus creating the Dead Zone (a disaster precipitated by a US-declared “war on bioterrorism”, which like the current war on you-know-what wound up unleashing what it was supposed to contain). This radically transformed environment has spurred the development of, among other things, “Gaian” capitalism, of which corporations like Obligate are the prime exponents. McAuley’s portrait of Obligate is partly satire (it’s like The Body Shop on steroids, with its pious eco-friendly attitude and happy corporate culture), but also deadly serious, for underneath the Gaian cant lies the same ugly colonialism that has wracked Africa for centuries. “I know what Europeans did to this continent,” one of the characters says. “Atrocity upon atrocity...and now the Europeans are here again, pretending that they have the highest of humanitarian motives when what they’re actually doing is recolonizing the place.”

Even beneath the face of the most extraordinary change, the basic facts and motivations remain the same. This premise runs throughout the book, and it’s on this third, thematic level that White Devils really stands apart from the garden-variety thrillers to which its publicity material compares it. Most unchanging of all, perhaps, is the human capacity for violence, whose ubiquity McAuley explores in a variety of ways--the ancient hominids Elspeth and her fellow paleoanthropologists dig up, their bones marked with the unmistakable signs of brutality; Nick’s and Elspeth’s appalling destination in the Dead Zone, where an utterly degraded savagery has become the bond that holds a community together; the Gentle People, Elspeth’s father’s gengineered australopithecines, who have been stripped of the genetic markers for aggression yet develop aggressive behaviors even so; and of course Cody Corbin, a purehearted and incredibly vicious killer, whose totally natural violence is as intrinsic as the white devils’ artificially created ferocity.

And yet there’s ambiguity. Just as the Gentle People are capable of aggression, the white devils are capable of learning, and of suffering. Life cannot be controlled, even with the most painstaking of scientific methods. This is a second, equally compelling theme that threads through the story--which, from the plagues that have wracked the whole world to the white devils that threaten one small part of it, is all about the escape from human command of the products of human hubris. McAuley makes the (science) fictional references explicit, invoking Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau. He also acknowledges his debt to Heart of Darkness, locating Nick’s and Elspeth’s final destination just west of Kisangani, “where Kurtz, in that novel, was supposed to have his station”.