Edenic Apples and

Edenic Apples and "Acid" Reflux

01/05/2005

Wisman, Ken. Eden: The Novel. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2004. 208 p.

After a lengthy stint of being widely published by small presses, and having stories accepted for publication in a long list of genre oriented magazines and ezines, including Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone and Tomorrow SF, Ken Wisman has broken through to the realm of major publications, with the release of his short novel Eden by Bloomington based Authorhouse. A fan favorite, Eden opens strangely, with a brief introduction by the author which explains where the ideas for this fantasy/science fiction trip about creation and life came from its birth in a series of some forty psychedelic drug trips that Wisman took between 1998 and 2000. The images he saw during those trips, and the insights he had into the nature of creationism and life affirmation, led him to pen what amounts to a dramatized tract on New Age religion, science and philosophy.

And this is the main problem with novels that are basically illustrations of a worldview. It becomes too easy for characters to be nothing more than mouthpieces for varying philosophical schools of thought. The issue I take with such novels as a reviewer is that it seems to me, if an author wishes to illuminate readers' minds by challenging them with theories of life, the universe, and everything, that author could simply write a philosophy text. The point of a novel is to relate a story, not have characters engage in Socratic Dialogue after Socratic Dialogue. Personally, I prefer that Wisman had simply written about his drug trips and realizations in autobiographical form. I cannot help but wonder if he himself did not sense this as well, being he frames Eden with narratives of his experimentation with hallucinogens.

This is not to say that the final product, the futuristic tale of Calif, a wealthy interstellar patron of the arts who finances a creation experiment, does not have some merit. Calif has artists (world makers) and scientists dream up an Eden-before-the-fall ecosystem, one void of predatory death, a marriage of creationism, the philosophies of mysticism and a futuristic science Ankh. Basically an extrapolation of Wisman's realizations, Ankh recognizes humanity as an embodiment of "the Universe's will to create life." Calif's team is sent, via wormhole travel, to a distant corner of the galaxy, where the world creators can begin to envision their new "mixed" creatures without government interference. Alas, as in Mary Shelley's classic, when humans presume to play God, the results tend to be disastrous.

At the story's heart is a young female artist, Alepha. Our heroine has a wonderful gift: she possesses the ability to create worlds through her imagination. However, as with any scientific endeavor, humans (or humanoid creatures) will find a way to muck things up. Although mankind has developed the technology to colonize the universe via wormholes, its members still have not learned to master destructive emotions such as jealousy and guilt, so the project quickly goes wrong. One of the artists, it seems, is a holdover from the time of The Religious Wars, and he harbors a secret belief in God-as-Creator, an idea that has in the novel been dismissed and replaced by the universal will to life, a more passive creationist myth that also makes humans, as a collective, God with a capital G. Wisman's mad scientist cannot handle the perceived heresy of the team, and he tries to destroy the collective's efforts, resulting in the clash between various chimera, mixed winged creatures such as heliocats and the larger hellcats. By the end of the war between Religion and Science/Art, some main characters lose their lives, and others are changed.

This is certainly a plot line that could have produced an excellent novel. However, Wisman's characterizations leave a lot to be desired. What we do know of Gammeo, Iamoendi, Etty, Thera and the others comes mostly from interviews done by Alepha using her journal, an opal that serves as a recorder. Of course, this mechanism allows Wisman to expostulate on diverse and often competing philosophical positions. But the stiffness with which each character represents him or herself linguistically rivals the stiffness that readers will sense from these cardboard characterizations. The plot line itself holds together, but unfortunately is highly predictable as science fiction goes.

Wisman's strength in Eden is the creation of bizarre grotesqueries, the animals that inhabit Eden. Though striking, however, the chimera he describes are not very believable. They are the types of creatures that would be much more at home in fantasy than they are in what purports to be a science fiction novel. In a nutshell, Eden shows potential, but the conflict that Wisman creates is merely a vehicle for his ideas. This is not to say that science fiction fans will pan Eden en masse. Those who are not turned off by the relentless optimism and innocence that Wisman's characters possess, and those who desire novels that test the philosophical waters of creation and life, will find Eden to be thought provoking. Just don't expect the storytelling abilities of a Douglas Adams or Arthur C. Clarke.