I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.
-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
I read “Dead And Alive”, the third book of the trilogy, yesterday in one massive sitting, and it was really good. Really really really good.
The villain is a guy named Victor Helios, owner of a massive biotech firm based in New Orleans. Except “Helios” is actually Victor Frankenstein, who in Koontz’s version of the story escaped at the end of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, and has since used his scientific techniques to keep himself alive for 240 years. In that time he has massively improved his methods (no more robbing graves for parts), and developed a grand vision for the future. Now he grows his creations directly in cloning tanks, using advanced genetic engineering and direct computer-to-brain downloads. Victor’s grand plan is to replace common humanity (the “Old Race”) with his improved, enhanced “New Race”. The New Race is engineered to be perfectly loyal to Victor and completely sterile (family is a counterrevolutionary institution, distracting the worker from the greater good of society), to feel neither love nor joy, instead focusing all their efforts on the creation of a new, one-world order, free of religion and superstition, a New Race that will conquer and subdue nature, and eventually conquer the stars themselves.
(Victor, needless to say, is a big fan of Richard Wagner.)
Except Victor is blind to the flaw in his plan. The New Race is keenly aware of its slavery, and they hate and fear their creator. And the New Race also hates, hates the Old Race, because the Old Race can feel love, can have children, can pray to God, can pursue happiness in things other than the revolutionary transformation of society, things that Victor has denied them. Because of this, the members of the New Race inevitably have massive mental breakdowns, ranging from self-mutilation to homicidal mania. Victor remains blissfully unaware that all two thousand members of the New Race seeded in New Orleans are about to go on murderous psychotic rampages.
But Victor’s original creation, the original Frankenstein’s Monster, is still around. After two hundred years of wandering the Earth, and much time spent in monasteries, the original creation has gained control of his murderous impulses (deeply regretting his earlier crimes, including the murder of Victor’s first wife), and now calls himself Deucalion, after the son of Prometheus from Greek mythology. Deucalion has come to believe that God bestowed a destiny upon him at the moment of his creation, and that destiny was to stop Victor before his monstrous crimes become full-grown. (Victor’s crimes include deliberately inflicting autism upon some of his creations, to make them obsessively focused factory workers, and the murder of at least four of his wives who failed to please him. And that’s not even the nastiest stuff he does.) Deucalion has learned nobility and mercy, while Victor has grown ever more cruel and brutal. The monster has become the man and the man the monster, and now it is up to the man to stop the monster.
These three books (“Prodigal Son”, “City of Night”, and “Dead And Alive”) were quite good. I can’t understand at all why the third book got such poor reviews on Amazon. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the book came out three years late, which always ticks people off when they’re invested in a story. That, and Victor is a militant atheist, and militant atheists are always annoyed when militant atheism is portrayed accurately.
-JM
No comments:
Post a Comment