The Secret of Life [Hardcover]

As I was reading I had a certain irritation with the heroine, Mariella Anders, she seemed too intelligent yet occasionally plain daft and ,dare I say this, had too much background. In fact Macauley plays a deft game of giving us interesting snippets of her past throughout the book. This can be annoying but as the book finishes it really pays off.

I also felt the sex balance was off-kilter intially but with the Firstborn Crisis taken into account and a neat plot twist at the end I realised all the characters had to be just as they were. Paul has made a tight thriller out of complex questions of scientific ethics and as ever he points the way ahead for SF. Bravo PJM.

The novel starts well, in classic hard-sf style, as biologist Mariella Anders learns about the Martian 'oilslicks' spreading throughout the world's oceans, and prepares to fly to mars to identify the source of the infection and find a cure. While the traditional weaknesses of hard-sf are apparent - pages of scientific jargon that the author expects all the readers to be instantly familiar with (in this instance I doubt that anyone without at least an A-level in biology will understand the more technical passages) and the preference of intellectual ideas over emotional content leading to a rather dry textbook feel at times - the central mystery is strong enough to keep the reader hooked.

Unfortunately once Mariella obtains a sample of the Martian lifeform things go downhill as the novel steers firmly into techno-thriller territory. Following an unconvincing D.I.Y. Earth re-entry after stealing a Chinese spacecraft, Mariella spends the last third of the novel on the run from the various shady characters with a vested interest in the Martian biotechnology.

There's some good arguments made regarding big business co-opting of science, but ultimately the momentum of the novel is lost as we go into sub-James Bond territory (stopping off for some unnecessary continuity ties with McAuleys' novel Fairyland), while the various inhabitants of McAuley's 'invisible country' seem over-familiar from previous novels.

Crucially, apart from one section where a Chinese expedition gets accidentally infected, there's no sense of threat from the Martian lifeform itself, with no sign of the 'claustrophobic tension of Alien' promised by the cover blurb. For all that this Martian biology may overrun the Earth itself the threat remains an abstract intellectual one, and a real missed opportunity when compared to Ian McDonald's similar alien threat in Chaga.

The Secret of Life contains some great ideas, but as a novel this is a rather dry intellectual exercise, lacking in drama or emotion. An interesting read, but not a particularly enjoyable one.

Okay, so now you've got a basic idea of McAuley's new book, imagine it's also written by someone who can actually construct a decent sentence not to mention a plot that takes in mutation, mars and murder (if not quite the mafia)

If life was fair this would be a break-through novel, putting McAuley up there with the big names not just in SF but in thrillers as well.