SCORPION
Christian Cantrell
Penguin Random House
REVIEWED BY PETER STUPPLES
There is a central thesis to this novel that has its origin in the nightmare of 9/11: that a method must be found through technology to make sure that no such disaster can ever happen again on the planet.
The novel, set a century or so in the future, opens with a straight who-done-it: a string of murders around the world are committed by The Elite Assassin, who leaves seemingly random four-figure digits tattooed onto the skin of victims. The victims are of different ethnicities, ages and genders. They appear to have nothing in common.
CIA agent Quinn Mitchell, whose mind has a circuitry optimised for solving complex problems, becomes aware of a French project, The Epoch Index, that uses zeitgeist algorithms to pinpoint potential targets of blackmail, assassination, drone annihilation. What if such a list can be found not retrospectively, but from the future, prior to the crimes being committed, such that potential perpetrators can be eliminated before they can carry out their mission? Can such a list be sent, obtained from the future? Quinn knows that the CIA would not pass up the opportunity to turn the future into the ultimate asset.
The Epoch Index [the possibility of time transmission] was detected by the Large Hadron Collider over a decade ago, but it was not until a Korean physicist named Henrietta Yi had the idea of using parallelised neural networks to analyse the backlog data that it was finally discovered. Yi has a personal motive for her work. Her parents were killed in a recent atomic attack on Seoul. Does the murderer have access to the Epoch Index and is already eliminating those who would become terrorists in the future? Yi has a rare congenital disorder: chromatic illusory palinopsia, that ultimately will be of use to her as she also seeks to find, understand, and make use of the Epoch Index, seemingly in competition with Quinn.
The complexities of loyalties of all the characters in the novel make for difficult reading - who is working for whom or what? Even those running the CIA special projects may have their own loyalty agendas. Are the characters driven by The Mission (to pre-empt existential threats) or by The Science (quantum and particle physics)? What is clear is that surveillance systems 100 years on make hiding anything or anyone almost impossible, unless you have special powers from a disorder or a doggedness that is almost paranormal.
Doggedness is certainly called for from the reader, as twists and turns threaten to undermine the pleasure of reading. For some, the hard work of keeping up with Cantrell’s mix of politics, science, and sci-fi fantasy will turn them off from turning the pages. For others, this may turn out to be the turn on, indeed the real fiction of the future.
Peter Stupples, now living in Wellington, used to teach at the University of Otago
