I just yesterday night finished Brainrose. I sat in a tub full of cold water to do it, hoping against hope that it would all come together in the end. Well, Nancy Kress isn’t a bad author…
Brainrose is set in the year 2022 when science has discovered a surgical procedure that will allow individuals to remember their past lives. At the same time a plague is sweeping the land that causes people to start forgetting everything. Before long the victims end up living the same day over and over again until they die. Sometimes they repeat the same action over and over (like writing a letter) not remembering to eat or sleep until death. No one knows how it’s transmitted and you don’t know you have it until it’s too late. Also in the mix is a corporate sponsored "religion" which claims that no matter what we do to the Earth, it will heal itself. Florocarbons away Mother Earth will fix it. This is a very nifty premise.
The story centers around three people. Caroline is the estranged daughter of famous actor Colin Cadavy and mother of a little girl who has the plague. She’s having the surgery to escape from her life. She’s not happy with the one she’s living and she hopes she was happy in the past. Joe McLaren is a lawyer working on the Presidential commission studying the plague. He’s having the surgery because he has MS and one of the side effects is that it cures MS. And Robert Anthony Brekke, a petty con man whose surgery is being paid for by a wealthy man for no reason that is explained. These are interesting people with real motivations.
So what went wrong?
For one thing, writing in the near future is always a dicey thing. After a couple of years all your predictions start to fall apart. At one point Caroline mentions seeing her father perform for Queen Diana. Depending on how much of a royal watcher you are, ouch. Kress also set up the AIDS Plague as a major historical turning point that allowed the government to pass a lot of anti-gay laws. Not only did the AIDS Plague she predicted not come to pass at quite the scale she assumed, the ACLU would have been all over national laws prohibiting homosexual activity, plague or not. You could hear my suspension of disbelief snapping ten miles away.
And then there was this weird thing Kress did in her writing. It may not be as noticeable to most folks, but I have read and written enough the I pick out important plot points. Reading this book I felt like Kress was handing the plot points to me and saying "this is important, hold on to it." It’s hard to explain, but it was strange. And some of them didn’t end up getting tied into the story. If there was a point to the repeated references to Falstaff, I didn’t catch it and I’ve been dragged, kicking and screaming, through more Shakespeare than I want to think about. (If you end up reading the book, let me know if you agree that Lear would have been a better reference.)
There also was that quasi religious ending. There was no indication that it was coming. Nothing hinting that Robbie might be the messiah (or not.) It almost seemed like Kress hit the last chapter and thought "hey, wouldn’t this be cool." Robbie isn’t the messiah, by the way. He’s John the Baptist. Somebody else is the messiah, but he doesn’t want to be.
If you still want to read Brainrose knowing all this, go right ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Nancy Kress is ok, I don’t seek her out, but I don’t avoid her either. However this isn’t one of her best efforts. Go for Beggars In Spain instead, I think it’s her best book so far.
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