EDEN 2.0

In Gould’s SF fantasy, angels and demons do battle from the creation of Earth to the spacefaring future.

This epic plays out in two plotlines over thousands of years and several star systems. One centers on the prison ship Harvester, whose brutally exploited convicts and androids are forced to mine the planet Dudael hundreds of years from now. Falsely convicted science whiz Vincent Riorden gets plucked out of the inmate pool by Capt. Morigan to investigate a magnetic anomaly—a promotion that requires him to get neural implants that connect him to a hive mind run by the ship’s computer. Vincent’s storyline is slow to get going, and much of it is spent introducing the intricate, often fascinating technology of landing craft; robotic flesh looms that weave whole bodies; and grisly cyborg prostheses. However, it finally takes the character to a door in a Dudael tunnel that could lead to a mysterious alien presence. Alternating with this gritty space-dystopia narrative is the celestial melodrama of Azazel, an angel charged by Yahweh with protecting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Much cosmic mayhem ensues; Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit amid a pitched battle between armies of angels and demons as curlicued trash-talk resounds: “Answer me, Lance of Uriel! Do you truly not fear me?” Azazel confronts such hellish monstrosities as Abaddon, a cross between a crab, a hydra, and an annoying child. As years pass, Azazel gets to know Adam’s son Cain as well as fallen angel Lucifer, both sympathetic figures. However, he’s demoralized by Abel’s death, the Great Flood, and other biblical catastrophes, and he starts blaming Yahweh for them. He eventually suffers a nervous breakdown, and the fallout from it brings both him and Lucifer aboard Harvester.

Gould’s yarn feels a bit like a mashup of Paradise Lost, a Transformers movie, and Blade Runner. His prose is distinctly Miltonian in its gorgeously poetic passages—“Beyond the spears of light there was only the ink of space, black and reaching as far as the eye could see, marred only occasionally with wisps of star-bearing mist.” However, it also displays Milton’s Latinate verbosity. For example, where other authors might have a character say, “Nah, just a hunch,” Gould has him say, “Nah. Just a hypothesis of my own construction that I’ve yet to share with anyone.” The bloody action scenes have a hallucinatory dazzle (“Flesh and tendon parted in lashing whips of gore, leaving severed faces to fall to the dirt and leer into the scarred sky”), but the book often bogs down in morose rumination on the problem of why Yahweh condones evil. The chatty but evasive Yahweh never answers that oft-posed question, and indeed, the heavenly presences here are an unimpressive lot—either callous and hypocritical or, like Azazel, confused and depressed. Lucifer, fortunately, steals the show with his gleeful, charismatic malice. Overall, Gould’s SF futurism is atmospheric and engrossing, but it’s marred by an ungainly supernatural narrative with too much pointless theologizing.

A richly imagined but grandiose and overstuffed fantasia.