Gene Mapper - Taiyo Fujii

I've been making an effort to pick up one new release every month, and it's been coming up with some pretty great results. I hadn't heard of Taiyo Fujii before, but found his book Gene Mapper on an IO9 post on June releases. (Eventually, I'll get to reviewing them the same month they're released, but I digress.) Fujii is a Japanese author, and Gene Mapper is his debut novel, just released in English translation.

In the world of Gene Mapper, much of the world's natural crops have fallen to a blight called Red Rust, leading to a rise in genetically engineered foods. Mamoru Hayashida is a gene mapper who works for a company, L&B, developing Super Rice 6, or SR06. Only the field of SR06 that's been planted appears to have some sort of invader, which could spell trouble not only for L&B, or Mamoru's career, but genetically engineered (or in L&B's preferred nomenclature, genetically distilled) plants entirely. It's Mamoru's job, with the help of Takashi (a victim of a side effect of L&B's super rice zero), to figure out who and what the invader is and whether or not they can stop it. It's a high-tech mystery, a whodunit of virtual reality proportions.

I think it's the translation that hinder this book for me. It's as if something is being lost in going from Japanese to English, and I have a certain sense of being lost. I really like Fujii's concept of augmented reality, using AR stages for conversations and work and broadcasts and all kinds of things, but I don't really understand how it works. I can see someone entering an AR Stage and seeing the augmented reality, but what would someone not on any stage see them doing? They're talking and moving in their stage, sometimes having private conversations, and so wouldn't they be talking and moving in the real world as well? I guess I don't understand the privacy factor of that, just as an example. And again, I think this is partly due to the translation. The worldbuilding, while interesting, is not very clear in english, and more difficult to really engage with.

In another part of the book, Mamoru goes into the SR06 field wearing a special suit that has a weird kind of emotional control built in. The 'augmented reality' turns into a real hindrance, but that whole portion just makes no sense to me. I don't understand why they're wearing the suits in the first place--maybe to prevent contaminating the field, though I'm not sure with what, if the genetically distilled rice is supposed to be so stable--but also, I really don't understand why they would need or even want emotional control in the first place. That just makes no logical sense when you look at how it completely derailed Mamoru's mission. The only purpose I can see it serving is a plot point that reveals Takashi's true nature, which really, it needs to make sense on the surface as well as move the plot forward. Thumbs down.

I felt the ending to be a little forced. It reminds me of the theme of the movie Antitrust, where the culminating moment is the scrappy underdog releasing the corporate badguy's code to the world. Mamoru knows that revealing the engineered animals will prompt people around the world to create their own, but he can't let the 'nature guerrillas' get away with their plan to discredit genetically distilled rice with underhanded means. So he releases the entire code and user manual to the world, thinking hey, now everyone will do it right. I don't follow the logic, I guess. I mean, sure, you're giving those who would possibly do a bang-up job of replicating a bunch of engineered grasshoppers by themselves the tools to do it correctly, but just because someone has the tools doesn't mean they're not going to purposefully create something destructive. I appreciate the effort to create a more complex ending than everything-is-fixed, though. There probably wasn't any way they were going to come out of that situation with an entirely happy ending anyway, but it does feel as if that's the feeling that's trying to be pushed there--the code's out, everything's okay now. Resolution, in the context of fiction, does not have to be Solution. Not every problem in a story needs to be Fixed.

Overall though, if you don't mind feeling a little lost in a sea of buzzwords, it's not a bad read. I think a lot of other fantasy and scifi I've read has primed me to be okay with not necessarily understanding everything that's going on, though I like clarity more. It's a fun read on it's own, and high-concept, which is always nice. But somehow it also doesn't necessarily stand out to me. Not bad; but not necessarily great, either.

Overall: 3 stars

Amazon: Gene Mapper

More reviews: Gene Mapper on Librarything (average 3.5 stars)

Gene Mapper on Goodreads (average 4.0 stars)