BURNING PARADISE by Robert Charles Wilson

I wanted to like Burning Paradise, and read it even though I was turned off right away. And even though I wrote a superior version of the same book, which was published in 2011 under the name Sensation. I had liked his Spin and Axis very much—so much that even a second use of the conceit "Something has surrounded the planet and changed life as we know it" didn't bother me.

Anyway, in this book, the First World War was the last major war. Radio technology seemingly brought the world together, and a series of historical mishaps and missteps thwarted the designs of warmongers and conquerers. So, no Cold War. Also no Internet or cell phones. The US remains a manufacturing powerhouse. And it's all the fault of a "hypercolony" of unintelligent but hive-minded aliens that are interfering with radio transmissions in order to keep the Earth sufficiently peaceful for them to build a birthing chamber and then swarm out. Humans, for their part, have discovered the "radiosphere" and have built their broadcast and telephonic technology around it, but otherwise nobody seems to really care about exploring the radiosphere (which is the hypercolony and not to be confused with the astronomical term). A handful of scientists and their spouses—all of whom have precisely one personality trait each—have learned the truth and created a secret society with which to examine and perhaps even fight the hypercolony. But then many of them were killed by "sims"—human-looking beings run by the hypercolony. You can tell the difference between a sim and a human because sims have one fewer personality traits than humans.


The cover really captures the excitement of the plot, and the charisma of its characters!

Anyway, as it turns out, the parasitic hypercolony also has a parasite of its own. Well then, that's almost interesting, but not really. The parasites want to keep the hypercolony going for a little bit longer so they too can swarm out, but the hypercolony...actually, as the hypercolony already swarmed, there's no particular reason for the remaining pseudo-consciousness to care about anything, but care it does. Care enough to...KILL! And sleep with TWO hot chicks—well, one hot bitch (that's her personality trait) and one bland geek (that's her personality trait).

Anyway, this is a short novel that consists of people talking about the hypercolony a lot, and a hare-brained scheme to stop it, and then...and then, well nothing. About three-fourths of the way through the book I started dreading that this might be the beginning of a lengthy series, but nope, everything just wraps up. As it turns out, one of the major characters is a sim, and he has arranged events so that the bland geek can blow up the hypercolony birthing/swarming facility with dynamite, so he can die. The parasites make several half-hearted attempts to talk the bland geek's uncle into helping them keep the birthing/swarming facility going for a few years until they can finish using it, but he doesn't buy what they're trying to sell, because they are parasitic aliens. Despite both hypercolony and colony parasite being capable of bloodshed via their sims, the chamber itself is about as well-protected as a Long Island strip mall. Uncle and geek walk right in, set up the dynamite, and up it goes. Big whoop, as we used to say in Brooklyn.

Do I keep saying anyway? Of course I do. That's how this story is told. Anyway, this happens. Anyway, this person thinks X. Anyway, this person might be dangerous. Anyway, we got into a car and left. Anyway, here's some fake IDs and money to make everything easier.

And if one spends several seconds thinking about the plot, why bother? The sim infiltrator could have simply blown up the chamber himself a few years prior. The hypercolony could have built a temporary single-use b/s chamber (yeah, BS chamber!) in the first place, since they are aware of the existence of their parasite. Or hell, the sim could have gathered up all the material by the scientists (he was the main scientist's "son") gone to the FBI with it, and then said, "To prove my case, I will now shoot myself in the head, which is full of green slime." Or a different sim could have, with a handgun, barged into a different national newscast each week and shot themselves in the head until the general public figured it out. Then of course humanity would have found the birthing chamber and destroyed it.

Or hell, just leave it alone. The hypercolony-parasite doesn't seem to be a danger to the hypercolony. After all, the hypercolony did swarm successfully, right? I don't spend much time worrying about my eyebrow mites either. Only the husk was looking for a mercy killing, but it could have killed itself far more easily without involving the scientists and their geeky nieces at all.

Nor is the setting very interesting. It's basically what the 1950s would have been without "duck and cover" paranoia, or the Beats, or jazz, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nor is there much debate at all about whether blowing up the hypercolony's birthing chamber would be a good thing, given the hypercolony's beneficial influence on the prior century. One of the scientists is asked to think about it, but then we cut to another set of characters (and off-page the scientist is told some personal information which we never get to him really react to) and nobody cares at all. Nor apparently did anyone think about it. The secret society of scientists forgot to communicate with political scientists, sociologists, risk specialists, or even some telephone engineers. Now there is something of interest here—the head of the secret society is portrayed as a narcissist with delusions of grandeur, but ultimately his foibles feel like a way of just wrapping the book up sooner. If he's easy to dispatch, and his plans just aren't very good, we don't need to spend pages and pages dealing with him.

Ultimately, I was bored. I read the book because it was short, a few pages at a time, in my workplace's men's room. After I was done, I went to the grocery store and left it there in case someone else was interested in a free hardcover novel. I happened to go back to the store this evening, and the book was still on the shelf under the community bulletin board, where I had left it. Next time, call a book like this Contractual Obligation and I'll know to skip it.