Gwyneth Jones gajones@prinny.pavilion.co.uk Mutagenesis by Helen Collins (Tor Books NY 1992 hbk $22.95 349p) reviewed by Gwyneth Jones A while ago, apparently, we were a lot cleverer than we are now. We were capable of all kinds of things that we can no longer contemplate: space travel, world government, benign control over our environment, a cure for every disease including death. But that was long ago. It seems that every second sf novel I've read in the last year tells this story, or something like it. Science fiction looks back from a place beyond, at the future we used to have: and maybe tries to explain what is it in us that stopped us from getting there. In Hellen Collins' Mutagenesis, a foraging party of earth people arrives at a planet colonised in the age of expansion and lost for several hundred years. The aim of the expedition is to bring back precious strains of foodplants: specifically grasses, cereals; to a degraded ecosphere where billions are starving. The rationale itself is expansionist. It seems unlikely that famine is ever going to be 'cured' by an immensely costly space programme. No matter, this is a story. To their surprise they find a surviving human community, whose 'fathers' are appalled at the sight of uppity females on the lose. Doctor Mattine Manan, 'earth's top microbiologist,' finds herself a prisoner on board the ship -- her vital role in the scientific expedition cheerfully ditched in the name of cultural relativism. The patriarchal colonists are god-fearing, bible-quoting cereal farmers. All the women are referred to as 'daughters' and the men as 'fathers.' The daughters are silent and cloistered; tended by large, tame animals. The fathers are ignorant and backward by earth standards, but dignified and solemn beyond their years. To the male scientists the regime seems normal: maybe even a lost ideal of a slow-speaking, homespun life in the mid west (for the purposes of this story the USA is synonymous with earth). Doctor Manan spots at once that something bizarre is going on. For one thing, this planet should have no large animals, and a cursory examination shows that these bear-like nursemaids have human hands. The men won't listen to her, and her only female colleague is a docile feminine type. Mattie escapes from the ship and meets some rebellious 'daughters.' There begins a long journey-quest across the alien prairies, under an inimical blazing white sun. The scientist is in search of an explanation for the weird set-up that seems so natural to her male colleagues. The 'daughters' have no clear goal: maybe they're going to rescue a friend who was taken away to the ominous Eastcountry. But even Elizabeth the artist, initiator of rebellion, is too childish to understand that her actions have consequences. Dagdan chemistry won't support human life. The grain grown on these immense prairies has been 'changed' for the alien planet, and presumably would have to be changed back to be any use on earth. But this issue becomes secondary to Mattie's discoveries about the daughters. They do no work, nor are they bovine breeding machines, as one would suppose. They serve no purpose at all. Their 'fathers' keep them like dull ornaments, there are no sexual relationships; both male and female babies are manufactured somehow in Eastcountry. As Mattie learns the journey continues, with a good painful slowness -- at least at first. There are a series of adventures, blurred by storytelling that's either deliberately clouded or perhaps simply inexpert. The fugitives find refuge, are pursued, discovered, escape, find allies, are betrayed. The 'daughters' are believably infuriating, pitiful and fascinating babes-in-the-wood (there are many references to fairytale) as they emerge from their cocoons of induced passivity. They develop a range of talents: Elizabeth the artist, Erin the instant engineer, Ariella the supernaturally accomplished mimic, so that they become the magically gifted companions of Mattie's quest: at which point fairytale jars uncomfortably against sf realism -- even though this is supposed to be a story of gene- manipulation magic. Finally, they arrive at Eastcountry as prisoners. Mattie discovers that the tailoring of ideally empty 'serene' women like the daughters is only a step on the way. The Wizards-of-Oz behind this sinister prairie idyll are genius bio-technologists. They have outlawed normal reproduction and designed acceptance and passivity into both sexes of their subjects. They are bent on a Final Solution to the problem of female gender. The evil-nazi-geniuses with their wooden lab equipment are fairytale dressed as realism. We're given some philosophical musings about a morbid fear of incest in a small population, but no real rationale for their astonishing success, or explanation of how this bizarre situation developed. Nor is there any clear discussion of why it is necessarily evil to interfere with the sacred rites of conventional reproduction. But Mutagenesis is a reproduction technology scare-pamphlet: social medicine, attractively packaged in an sf adventure story. Science fiction 'realism' wouldn't necessarily serve its purpose and the lack of it need not interfere with the reader's interest. However, Mutagenesis is also a novel of character. Helen Collins has gone to some pains to make Mattie a real person, and to create the unpredictable, wilful innocence of her protegees. But other considerations get in the way of coherent development. Mattie's brief lust-affair with a young 'father,' is a case in point. One gets the feeling that the writer decided someone had to have sex, so that the ignorant 'daughters' could find out about the birds and the bees. When one of her male colleagues 'falls in love' with one of her Dagdan protegees, (whom he perceives as ideally feminine, in her state of delayed development), she is righteously indignant until the parallel is pointed out to her. But her seduction of the child-man was not half so innocent: did it have an element of vengeance? And what are we to make of Mattie's affair with the captain of the spaceship crew: the father-figure boss who makes passes at her, then betrays her, and then becomes her lover? Mattie as the rebellious daughter, returning to the fold? Good characterization is incoherent. Real people don't behave like 'goodies' or 'baddies.' But the incoherence of realism sits uneasily with the pamphlet-fairytale, and only leaves the impression of a writer who raises complications she can't control. Inconsistencies of plot and character, and blurred storytelling, make this an interesting rather than a successful first novel. Helen Collins' writing is not without promise. The slow journey across the prairie is evocative, and the fog of frustration that surrounds Mattie Manan in her struggle is splendidly done. But though the issues raised are serious, and Collins is clearly a serious writer, her treatment of the reproduction technology nightmare is confused. The venal, stupid, domineering behaviour of Mattie's male colleagues implies that the situation on Dagda is merely an extreme case, not at all a weird aberration -- and yet Mattie and the 'daughters' still fall in love, still succumb to lust, still return to the father for approval and protection. The qualified happy ending does not deal with the contradictions of this helpless collaboration, and only gives frustrating hints of something more complex than a pamphlet. We're left with a muddied fable of gender nationalism (men are bad, women are good), neither ruthless enough to convince, nor thoughtful enough to offer any way out for the feeble (feeble- minded!) but virtuous sex.