The Cosmic Mystery of the Century

   I have just finished reading the uncorrected proof of the 512 page novel "Singularity", (spoiler alert) due to hit the shelves in November 2004. After reading the proof, I went exploring on the net and found some most interesting reading. In fact, the site that includes the "Table of Terrors" was definitely a better read than the novel.
   The jacket blurb informs the reader that "Singularity" is Bill DeSmedt's debut thriller, and the quoted 'advance praise' gushes so effusively, you can almost hear the intake of breath as you read the book described as "the sort you can't decide whether to zip through, for the excitement, or to read slowly, to savor." Allow me to introduce a line or two of 'advance criticism' here, just to keep DeSmedt's time-travel train from getting off-balance and crashing onto its side.
   What DeSmedt has really written is the script for a movie. He should just have saved time and trees by going straight to the nearest movie producer, instead of going to a publisher. Weren't enough trees already felled in the actual Tunguska event? Why do more have to be sacrificed in order to get DeSmedt's shallow characters onto the printed page? The author opens his little literary soul to us and reveals that his book results from "couch-potatohood". While watching a rerun of "Cosmos, Episode IV" dealing with meteor and cometary impacts, he first heard the theory that the Tunguska event might actually have been a collision between the earth and an atom-sized black hole. He quotes himself as talking to the TV and saying "What if the damn thing never came out? Finally, he sits down at a word processor and his novel begins to ' write itself ' .   
   One annoyance that DeSmedt and his word processor foists on his readers repeatedly is his need to make sure you know the Russians in the story are speaking accented English. He does this by replacing the letter "J" with this supposed phonetic replacement of "DZH' every time a Russian says a name that begins with "J". That means that you have to put up with the character Jack being Dzheck half the time, and John being Dzhon as often as not. We get it already, DeSmedt! You have Russian characters in your book. The question has to be asked, though. If you are not going to do the phonetic thing with every word they utter, why bother with just the one sound? Annoying!
   Speaking of annoying, meet Marianna, the heroine of the piece, and see if you can't picture Keira Knightley bringing her to the screen. She is a woman who works throughout most of the novel to keep herself away form any emotional entanglement, repeating endlessly to herself her mantra "love dies", while she "throws her weight around in ways that would have had a mere civilian up on charges". Employed by the government agency CROM, Marianna is involved in the attempt to keep various weapons scientists and engineers formerly in the employ of the USSR from turning their expertise over to terrorist organizations. She is sufficiently trained in martial arts to stop Yuri, the novel's killing machine, by breaking his elbow. In one scene, she is shown a Star Trek-esque machine that replicates objects. It will, for instance, make a coffee machine -but not the coffee. Marianna excitedly begins to look through the machine's catalogue. The male lead thinks to himself how like a woman that is, to go "shopping", but doesn't realize that our heroine is actually checking the list of weapons the machine is capable of producing! Don't mess with this one! Yet this woman, obsessed with the latest in weaponry though she is, is still so beautiful that you can just hear the violins playing softly in the background when she meets John Knox, the reluctant hero of the piece. Though she is speaking to Knox about how he is about to become involved with a dangerous secret mission, "her feline movements held far more fascination than her lecture material".
   Now before you go demanding to see Angelina Jolie cast in the role, you should know something. Just to show that he can create characters with depth and real humanity, DeSmedt takes great care to let us know, more than once, that Marianna is quite small-chested. She is also sufficiently the little woman playing at fitting into a man's world that this is a major concern for her. Although, in the course of events, she finds herself at a private pool and surrounded by other women going topless, she passes up on the pleasure since she is so aware of her small breast size. Never mind whether or not she is engaged in an operation to save the world from madmen, she is, after all, only a woman and should never lose sight of that fact. The scene that nearly had me upchucking came when she and Knox were " nestled together like spoons in a drawer". (You just knew that was going to happen, didn't you?) Enchanted by her lover, she lies there dreamily thinking to herself how wonderful he is because he "didn't mind how small she is on top". Come on, DeSmedt! Stop trying to pretend you can write believable lines for a woman, especially when you write such twaddle.
   The science of the story is interesting, and more than enough to make you curious. DeSmedt concludes his book with a list of Further Reading suggestions, and I am sure many will want to look up some of those titles. The author takes no license with the facts that have been collected about the Tunguska event. He makes it clear, too, that more is unknown than is actually known, but the servicability of the tale ends there. Yuri is clearly to be best portrayed by Vin Diesel, or some other muscle-bound individual who needs to do little more than grunt during the movie. Knox could be played by someone like Nicolas Cage, who specializes in soulful stares at the camera. Mycroft, the story's resident nerd could actually be Bill Gates' chance to break into films. Not his real name, Mycroft is a rich, eccentric computer geek who helps to save the day. Who else but Gates is so internationally recognized as geekdom personified?
   The story leaves room for a sequel, since the question of the black hole - "What if it ever comes out?" -is left unanswered. At least this blockbuster ends on a happy note. Our heroine finally frees from her old, tiresome mantra, and finds a new one. "Love is real" she says as the movie credits begin to roll ... I mean as the tiresome novel finally grinds to a halt. If only the characters were real, too.