nvironmental catastrophes wrought by genetic wars have left humanity on the verge of extinction. The species' only hope for survival lies with a handful of generation starships designed to carry humanity's seed to "Earth-clones"—worlds similar to Earth or close enough to Terra for humans
to settle on.
As Brian Stableford's Dark Ararat opens, the starship Hope has finally arrived at its destination, and one of its crew—ecologist, prophet and TV personality Matthew Fleury—has just been awakened from suspended animation. But not everything is as Matthew or the rest of the frozen colonists imagined it would be.
The world which Hope orbits is a billion years older than Earth, and while it does have an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, that's about all it has in common with humanity's homeworld. The local life forms aren't based on DNA, refuse to be broken down into nice categories like "plant" and "animal," and come in varying shades of purple. The ship's crew—which has lived out several generations in the 700 years it took Hope to arrive at the new world—has launched a rebellion against the ship's capitalist owner, implementing their own neo-socialist system. Ship owner Shen Chin Che has fled into the ship's bowels to wage an electronic guerilla war that has all but halted colonization efforts. Down on the surface, the planet's inherent strangeness is coloring the colonists' perspectives, leading many of them to believe that the planet is inherently inhospitable to humanity.
But as badly as the colonization is going, it has just gotten a lot worse: There has been a murder in this new Eden. The victim was Bernal Delgado, an ecologist investigating ancient city ruins apparently left behind by now-extinct humanoids. Some suggest the city builders aren't quite as dead as people thought, lending support to arguments to withdraw from the planet. Others say one of the handful of individuals sharing the city-side camp must have perpetrated the crime. Now Matthew must replace his fallen friend and must help his newly revived compatriot—former police detective Vince Solari—figure out who (or what) killed Bernal Delgado.
A murder mystery among the stars
Dark Ararat is Stableford's fifth "Future History" novel depicting the effects of genetic engineering run amok. But while some authors would doom their stories by getting caught up in an ecological apocalypse, Stableford goes to great lengths to show the possible benefits of genetic
engineering, from second skins that shield colonists from Arafat's alien spores to "internal technology" that instantly compensates for and begins repairing injuries to the secret to eternal life, known as "emortality."
From its opening lines, Dark Ararat brings to mind some of science fiction's classic stories, especially Isaac Asimov's Elijah Baley mysteries The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. As in those novels, the murder mystery turns out to be the catalyst that ignites revolutionary changes in the book's fractured societies.
Hard science-fiction fans will enjoy the biological jargon that oozes from the book's pages as Stableford describes the decidedly weird non-DNA building blocks of Arafat's life forms. The jargon is never too overwhelming, though, and Stableford manages to explain it all without resorting to intelligence-insulting infodumps. Stableford does an excellent job of manifesting Ararat's genetic idiosyncrasies, creating chimerical aliens who have sex on a cellular level, but seem unable to reproduce as full-sized beings. The very idea that traditional sex doesn't exist has radical implications for evolution on Ararat, and unraveling how the creatures have managed to evolve is as much a mystery as the book's opening murder.
The book is an excellent antidote to the banality of Star Trek's first contacts, which almost always involve beings with near-identical genetic structures and usually end up with some sort of sermon about the dangers of interfering with pre-warp races. Not so Dark Arafat, which—while it acknowledges the mistakes of the past—has the good sense to realize that humanity just might learn from them.
And it's not just with the book's ecological elements that Stableford runs against type—he even manages to find good uses for the ever-maligned TV, which at the book's beginning is under the totalitarian control of the ship's captain, but by the end has been liberated to help unify the
colonists in their mission. It even has a capitalist as something close to resembling a good guy. Those two aspects alone are almost as radical as the aliens genetic structure.
Throughout the book Matthew—who realizes heroism was as much responsible for driving humanity to the stars as desperation—seeks to stir the colonists to action, stressing again and again that it's the brave and bold who will succeed in their efforts, not the beaten and sulking. This mantra,
which starts off subtly but builds to a roar by book's end, provides the book with a refreshing sense of optimism and helps it build to an inspiring crescendo.
