lade, Mark Budz's first novel, is set in a near-future world struggling to right itself after an "ecocaust" 50 years earlier. Billions of people died, many species were wiped out, and sea levels rose disastrously as the global environment went into toxic shock. In the aftermath, humanity fragmented into clades, groups with a common biochemical signature that allowed them to survive in their own environment.
By the time of the novel, there are around 2,000 clades, often sorted according to geographic or ethnic lines. Exposure to an unfriendly clade environment can be painful or even fatal, so everybody is highly attuned to the "pherions" that carry clade markers. Pherion production and management is in the hands of governments and a few multinational corporations such as RiboGen, where Rigo, one of the protagonists, works. The novel follows Rigo and his girlfriend Anthea, a childcare worker who lives in Santa Cruz.
Rigo's current project for RiboGen is to develop plants with pherions that can survive the environment of Tiresias, a captured comet being prepared for human habitation. Anthea has a sick child called Ibrahim brought to her for help and discovers that his illness is the result of his carrying previously unknown pherions. Meanwhile, Rigo is asked to go to Tiresias to supervise the installation of the plants, but the mission goes badly wrong—seemingly because of sabotage. Anthea and Rigo gradually discover that these apparently unrelated problems may be connected. But with shadowy organizations maneuvering around them, how can two people save themselves, let alone anyone else?
A dazzling debut novel
Clade is a very accomplished first novel—indeed, it's a very accomplished novel full stop. Budz's characters are well drawn, the Californian setting is vivid, and, without preaching, he makes some strong points about the fragility of our environment. In particular, the vision of a world where safety or danger is shown by pherions, carried as scents, is compelling.
What lets Clade down is the thriller plot that Budz feels obliged to bolt his characters onto. More than most science-fictional futures, his is one where readers can imagine ordinary people just getting by and making a living. Anthea and Rigo are among the most believable "ordinary people" to have turned up in an SF novel in a long while. So to have a story of conspiracies and coincidences running through the book not only stretches believability but also undermines the impact of Budz's future world. Some of the coincidences are frankly not credible. For instance, late in the book, Rigo's Information Agent (a sort of highly developed Palm Pilot) solves some insuperable problems by transforming the language of pherions into a virtual reality that grants Rigo all the answers he needs at that point. It's just a bit too convenient to be believed.
Moreover, Clade tends to be cute rather too often. Both Anthea and Rigo's Information Agents talk in malapropisms or quotations that get grating after a short while. The book's last couple of paragraphs, too, are a misjudgment, a splurge of sentiment in a novel that otherwise refuses easy answers.
To some extent, though, these are nitpicks. Clade is never less than readable, and frequently absorbing, as Anthea and Rigo try to find their way out of the maze of hidden dangers they've been dropped into. A sequel, Crache, is apparently on the way. With luck, it'll have the vividness and humanity of Clade, but not such a contrived story.
