seriousfic

Quick: How boring do you think a novel about psychic brain-eating cavemen should be? If your answer is very, this may be the book for you.

There's nothing egregiously terrible with this, it's just so po-faced in its desire to be the next Jurassic Park, without any of the tension of Michael Crichton's work. The premise, that a tribe of Neanderthals have survived and evolved psychic powers, should lend itself to a lot of trippy gonzo sci-fi. Add in a love triangle, one corner of which is learning to get his Uri Gellar on, and you've got yourself something that should be like a Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis story. But instead, there's just a lot of false verisimilitude. The author is actually trying to make psychic cavemen seem plausible.

Background: Matt Mattison (really?) and Susan Arnot -- "once lovers, now academic rivals" according to the backcover -- are archaeologists who are forced back together when their old mentor goes missing. And yes, they are interrupted in the middle of their respective dig sites and lectures, just like Jurassic Park. They broke up because Matt cheated on Susan; of course, she was also cheating on him, but she justifies it as having "sensed" his unfaithfulness and cuckolded him as a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction policy with penises. So take your pick of sympathetic lead, the cheater or the judgy hypocritical cheater.

With the help of the mysterious institute that their mentor, Kellicut, worked for, they mount an expedition to find him and discover he's gone native with a bunch of modern-day Neanderthals. (Insert Jersey Shore, Republican Party, Marvel editorial staff joke here.) They're teaching him to use his latent psychic abilities. Apparently, Neanderthals had a group consciousness, because they could project and receive images from each other, and thus never developed language. A lot of the book is spent exploring the Neanderthal society, which could be interesting in A Mote In God's Eye sort of way, but it never really amounts to anything. It comes off as a bunch of anthropology wank. There's even a weird subplot where the characters discuss whether or not they can interbreed with the Neanderthals, which is the kind of thing you should either run with or leave out. There's no big shocking reveal or twist, they're just psychic cavemen. That's not interesting enough to carry a novel; you need to have a story that cries out to be told with psi-anderthals.

Kellicut is the guy Susan cheated with, and in the present he uses his newfound psychic powers to voyeuristically spy on her, but nothing comes of it. Neither does the mysterious institute's attempts to capture Neanderthals to (of course) discover how to use their psychic abilities as a weapon. The plot is mainly concerned with the evil brain-eating Neanderthals, who prey upon the good Neanderthals. I found this to be highly derivative of the famous relationship between the Morlocks and the Eloi, minus the social commentary and inventiveness of Wells.

Kooky Kellicut himself somehow manages to be more annoying than our can't-keep-it-in-their-pants heroes, as he arbitrarily withholds information while still constantly lecturing. At first, he talks about how the good Neanderthals (vegans, natch) are superior to man because of their awesome psychic powers (read: Tumblr). Then he says that evolution favors the brain-eaters because they're more aggressive and insists that it's wrong for Susan and Matt to interfere with "nature's plan," as they do to rescue one of their party from the BRAAAAAINS crowd (don't worry, there's no suspense in this, since he's such a dink you don't care if he's rescued or dies horribly). Which really has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. The whole point of the theory is that it's random chance. Complaining that someone is interfering with evolution is like saying that by flying in an airplane, people are disrespecting "gravity's plan" for them to fall.

Have a discussion on ape-man heroism: "But that doesn't take away from individual heroism. It makes the whole species more heroic. Maybe we still have some of that in us too, even without the telepathic power." Yes. Of course humanity has the concept of heroism, having invented it and all.

Kee-wak was on the lip of the lip[...] He had red paint around his mouth so that it looked like an open wound, his eyes offset in black were sunken like a hyena's. Why so serious?

This book is so simple, a caveman could've written it.