quasar's Full Review: Paul Melko - Singularity's Ring
Apollo Papadopolous is training to be the captain of a spaceship. There are a few other quints vying for the job, but Apollo is the best candidate and is sure to get the position. Then Meda is seduced by the last remnant of the old Community, Malcolm Leto, then raped and fitted with a brain implant allowing her to interface with Community technology. She is returned to Apollo, but the powers that be worry that she's now controlled or controllable and choose another captain. The new captain doesn't calculate as well as Quant, isn't as strong as Strom, doesn't have the dexterity of Manuel, but Elliott O'Toole plays by the rules and that's more important to those making the decisions.
Not being chosen as captain leaves Apollo vulnerable to a rogue agent, forcing Apollo on the run. Apollo discovers much about the Community and about their own society and government, information no one wants released. The world is in danger, but no one wants to believe them. It's up to Apollo individually and collectively to stop Leto and several others looking to destroy their world because no one else will help or even believe that there's a problem at all. Can Apollo go undercover to stop Leto? What happens to the current flawed system if they do? You'll have to read Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko to find out.
Confused at all about that description? If you're not, you should be. The names don't line up with individuals as we instinctively expect. Melko's world is one populated with genetically engineered collective human hives, entities composed of pairs, trios, quartets, and quintets of individuals who function as single beings called pods. Grown in creches, kept separate from other humans so they bond with each other, the collective beings take on a joint name and subvert themselves and their individual personalities to the collective. At the same time, each member of the collective has a specific role and specialties. Apollo is strong because Strom is strength personified. Apollo is a scientific and engineering genius because Quant is a mathematical savant. Apollo can communicate well because Meda articulates better than nearly anyone else around. Apollo handles mechanical repairs and other tasks requiring dexterity because Manuel has quick hands. Apollo is smarter than the average bear because of Moira's intelligence. They speak as individuals only to each other; to the outside world they have no identity beyond that of Apollo.
This is a very interesting idea, one that could lead to an excellent and unusual book if handled well. Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with this implementation of the idea. First of all, Melko introduces a lot of inconsistencies to the rules of the collective entities. At times he says that collectives are bred together in creches as explained above. At other times, he talks about adults forming together into pods or adults deciding to remove specific individuals from an established pod and placing them within another group.
We see most of the action through the eyes of one of the individual members within Apollo and their viewpoints don't always jive with the idea of the collective. It's clear they still have individual free will despite acting as a group out of habit and training, but they slip out of shared mode in unexpected ways that seem inconsistent with the tenets of the collective as laid out. Some of this can be attributed to training - Apollo mentions that they've had practice acting as a trio and a pair or even singletons - but there doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to when they're truly a collective acting in concert and when they can act on their own (for either the benefit of the whole or solely as individuals).
The viewpoint shifts are sometimes difficult to follow, particularly because there really isn't a lot of difference between the voices of the different pieces of Apollo. That may be intentional to signify how much they are part of a single being, but given that the internal dialogue presented was very much from an individual viewpoint it didn't work for me. I was particularly unhappy that Quant sounded very normal and very similar to the others because we discover at some point that she's autistic. I'd have preferred to be shown this rather than told this; I realize autism manifests itself in different ways and this might have been difficult, but I still felt it odd that Quant comes across as a perfectly normal science geek in all of her interactions and actions. Labeling her as autistic was so arbitrary and didn't seem to have any real relevance to the story. It seemed like a stunt rather than a genuine element of the character.
Perhaps the biggest sin of Singularity's Ring is that it's very difficult to follow the action in the second half of the book. The events through the decision to give the captaincy to O'Toole mostly make sense (the one exception to this is when Meda goes off to see Leto, appears to enjoy consentual sex, wakes up with an implant, then classifies everything as rape, but that could be explained through revisionist history to keep Apollo from suffering too much from Meda's mistake). However, once the captaincy is lost things start getting very weird and it's hard to figure out what's going on a lot of the time. The basic goal - stopping Leto - is clear, but how specific actions will lead toward that goal is often fuzzy at best. The book loses focus at times, drawing in some of the evils of the current system Leto is fighting against and leaving readers unsure what the ultimate point is. I found it very difficult to figure out the ending and to decide whether it met the promises made leading up to it which left me vaguely unsatisfied.
Singularity's Ring had a lot of potential. I liked the idea and even the basic characters within Apollo. However, the book has a lot of execution problems and eventually devolves into a confusing mess. I'd like to see Melko revisit this idea further along in his career to see if he can do it better because it's a concept worthy of a good book. Unfortunately, Singularity's Ring is not that book.
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