Killer Armadillos

kw: book reviews, science fiction, cloning, genetic creation

A cover blurb from Alternative Words boasts, "Better than Jurassic Park!" Better how? More guts and gore! Stronger soldiers! More cussing! Bigger weapons! Stupider politicians!! Fiercer monsters! Even less likely plot twists! More dastardly betrayals! Prettier scientists in peril!

As a cliffhanger yarn, The Genesis Protocol by Dayton Ward is hard to beat. While Michael Crichton's novels have thrills aplenty, Dayton Ward's books are like the X-Games compared to the Olympics. (By the way, with me that isn't a plus)

The premise: It all began with an innocent idea, "Let's make a jungle in an isolated Utah desert area, where plants and animals that can metabolize pollutants can be developed"—by direct DNA creation, apparently. Of course, nothing funded by Washington can get away without the military getting a horn in. And of course, as the techniques are perfected, the generals get more and better, and more scary, ideas of how to use them.

Thus, the book begins with this secret jungle, full of all kinds of lab-created plants and animals, that has become quite risky to even enter, because of the toxins there the creatures are adapted to ingest, and their own toxic by-products from such ingestion. At that point, I find myself asking, "OK, I thought the idea was to turn poison into water, air, and salt. What's the idea of making bad poisons into worse ones?!?"

The culmination is a set of animals termed "harbingers", supposedly so named for a Victor Harbin, the main military meddler in the background. Of course, for once, you can see the author's machination here, naming a character such that he can name his chief monsters a word meaning "one going before" and "omen". Opens the door to a dandy sequel, no doubt, as does the final chapter, even more.

As science, of course, it is infinitely less plausible than anything in "Jurassic Park", which is already on the bleeding edge of infeasible (see The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World by Rob Desalle & David Lindley). As an escapist adventure story, however, it's quite a romp for the rough at heart.