Sheldon J. Pacotti

Eighteen years in the making, Gamma (γ) is a tour de force of hard science fiction masquerading as a pot-boiler. It’s Michael Crichton by way of Thomas Pynchon; prose alternating between a clinical academicism, claustrophobic noir, and unstable stream-of-consciousness. The follies of academia, science, uneven development, et al., are center stage in this fast-paced thriller about engineering the human genome and the web of institutionalized classism, sexism, and racism that fueled — and continue to fuel — the biotech revolution. Like Pacotti’s work on the 2000 video game, Deus Ex, we also see our fair share of political and corporate conspiracies, too.

[N.B. This review includes images and footnotes, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

With Gamma, you can feel author Sheldon Pacotti’s struggle to give voice to marginalized cultures and minorities. Distrust of not just government, but intellectuals and scientists, is at an all-time high in 2037, and, as corporate favoritism and the abuse of human subjects send ripples through our social hierarchy, every affected party has their voice heard and felt. From the research scientists in the middle of the experiments, the engineered – or ‘transgenic’ – subjects themselves, the beat officers dealing with the sometimes violent ramifications of this distrust, to the crowd in the street expressing that distrust and frustration: Each is understood; empathized with. It makes Gamma’s world one of the most believable and real futures I’ve experienced, and I’m absolutely stunned that Gamma was forced into self-publication. It’s one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read in years.

In 2037, Shannon Jones has been in prison for ten years. His experiments in genomic engineering at Caltech were publicly denounced for their unethical abuse of human subject terms, and the sometimes-fatal consequences his work had on the transgenic subjects. His work, however, led to a biotech revolution that propelled his former employer, White Incubator, Inc., to the forefront of biotechnology – unfortunately, it also left a lot of unhealthy subjects and faulty research in the hands of aging, arrogant scientists who didn’t understand the research as well as they could have. This itself created a near-status quo of stilted discoveries and genetic products with short-term implications, rather than the paradigm shift Shannon Jones was hoping to gift to the world....

Shannon Jones was himself a victim of the same research: Dr. White, father of the biotechnology leader White Incubator, Inc., crudely replaced an infinitesimal portion of Jones’ genes with those of selected donors and a few original modifications. Jones was born brilliant beyond his lower-class upbringing, but his mind was also unstable and struggled with empathy. Without a stable, specific diet, his mind is also prone to becoming increasingly unstable. Dr. White’s experiments seemed to be fueled by abuse of lower-class subjects — who otherwise didn’t know better and served as grossly-affordable patients — and a self-loathing racism that wanted to force the ‘savagery’ out of the disadvantaged. Jones was engineered to engineer others, and eventually be the scapegoat for White Incubator’s more questionable, often ignorant research.

The plot moves with Jones’ escape from prison and the unveiling that White Incubator had covered up the existence of a control group in the condemned research: Clones – termed ‘Normals’ by the media – of transgenics with no genetic alterations. Gaining access to the Corpus – a public-domain repository for scientific research – Jones hopes to help all those subjects still suffering from the effects of earlier errors left in his and Dr. White’s research. A woman who bears a startling resemblance to his lost daughter is one of those subjects, and the primary driver for his actions. Over the course of the novel, Jones becomes a symbol of injustice for the voiceless masses; he’s been branded a monster, his voice taken from him, by figures of government and corporate power. He’s a symbol of intellectual freedom, suppressed by the very institutionalized prejudice that created and then controlled him. He’s also knowingly responsible for irredeemable betrayals of his subjects’ safety, fully aware that errors in his experiments could and would end in suffering and sometimes death. It’s not always easy to root for him.

Shannon’s potential daughter, Luz, has spent her entire life struggling to break out of her class. Hearing that she could be a transgenic subject, another product of abuse being dusted under the rug and ignored like the Normals were, is a bombshell. She inches towards cliché by being a prostitute by night, and an intellectual artist by day, but she and the narrative are furiously self-aware of her life as a cliché in a way that’s refreshing. Those around her struggle through mental gymnastics to punish Luz, and then paint her as the root cause of her own suffering, someone deserving of every ill she gets. Still, Luz might be the weakest lead in Gamma for being born from condescending stereotypes, even if much of what defines her character is being aware of those stereotypes.

In the midst of the ongoing political and social chaos initiated by Jones’ escape, Detective Jalil Medan copes with the rising distrust in the streets – distrust which includes authorities like the police force, seen as a dumb, brutal arm of higher powers. Jalil, new on the job, is almost immediately thrust into the spotlight thanks to footage of him beating a subject far more than he should have. His minority status as an Islamic son of immigrants doesn’t help, either.§ The brutality in his actions wasn’t black-or-white, however, as he was blinded by his own injuries sustained from the subject. (Despite this, he constantly questions and regrets his actions as angry and impulsive.) Like Shannon Jones, his being a minority provides an easy scapegoat for his superiors to get away with their own abuses of power.

It’s a complex web of interconnected issues and individuals. It’s never clear – to me, at least – who the monsters are (if, indeed, anyone is). Is Shannon Jones’ research really monstrous, especially if it potentially leads to the end of many diseases and genetic disorders? Is it perhaps society’s fear of change – of the near-mythological singularity on the horizon – that creates the monster from the genius? Such a sought-after singularity might only be possible, it posits, through widespread acceptance of public-domain knowledge; by the refusal to privatize knowledge behind academic or private databases. It’s a wonderful thought, that.

Gamma’s a passion project of nearly two decades; sometimes it’s a mess of ideas with how much it tries to accomplish, but it’s a beautiful mess, nonetheless.… (more)

Fans of the ground-breaking video game Deus Ex -- with which Sheldon Pacotti served as lead writer -- will find a lot to love with Demiurge (also released in 2000). Its world is of a far-future (really far: like, 2997 far) where significant social problems such as overpopulation and food shortages have been 'solved' by the breakthrough technology of the title, and humanity lives in a coldly mechanical world of limitless potential.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

Demiurges are capable of instantiating anything -- including biological materials -- at next to no cost. Our own consciousness can be stored by these devices, and placed in the body of our dreams. With any degree of travel, our bodies are reinstantiated to be the ideal (whether that be 30-year-old model you, or 6-year-old boy you, or chimpanzee you -- possibilities are as infinitely explored as the tech allows), effectively extending our lifespans indefinitely. The future of the 'net is also quite transformed, and digital lives, families, vacation homes, &c., are frequently stored online.

It makes for a complex world of evolving, confusing social problems (seemingly born from immortality's malaise). Global society, e.g., is biased against breaking the traditional western family structure, but Demiurge's families are reaching a strained point of incompatibility after hundreds of years together. Generations are so separated by decades or even centuries that there's little to no connection between parents and their children.

There's a lot to the world of Demiurge, but that's never its focus, just wonderful worldbuilding. The focus of this cyberpunk-noir tale is Detective Paul Cramer's search to understand why he himself -- an 'original' instantiated body -- went rogue while working a woman-in-red case. The woman under investigation has been populating the world with illegal copies of herself, all clueless as to their own origins or the meaning of their copies.

The mystery lightly dances around the Ship of Theseus idea and human consciousness without ever being too obvious, while also exploring transhumanist notions of our evolution. With an online civilization, we have the potential to script our own consciousness, controlling happiness and accomplishment through narrative 'self-help' software. There's even a suggestion that those behind the woman-in-red mystery are pawns in a larger organism's attempt to unite humanity under the banner of a single-organism civilization. (This should sound familiar to Deus Ex fans!)

Few things bothered me. Despite providing an interesting mystery, Demiurge falls back on some negative, outdated female stereotypes. It's not just the seductive woman in red -- there are barely any female characters, period, and they are either devoid of personality or nagging, cheating caricatures.

Similarly, for such a globe-trotting adventure, the world of Demiurge feels like a wasteland. There are only a handful of characters populating every scene, and every scene feels utterly isolated from the world. We, as readers, are told that the woman in red is instantiating herself thousands upon thousands of times in every major city, but we never feel like a human civilization even exists outside of Paul Cramer's immediate family and two or three friends from work. Paul Cramer is also famous -- famous enough to have an action figure and be the figurehead of the world's police force, but this adds nothing to his character, and contributes nothing towards any social interactions because there is no one to interact with!

But despite those issues, Demiurge is a wonderfully-written, grossly under-appreciated cyberpunk mystery. Pacotti's writing is brimming over with technological and philosophical ideas, making Demiurge easily comparable to the best of Philip K. Dick and, of course, the quality Pacotti & co. delivered with Deus Ex.

Pacotti has his earlier short story collection, Experiments in Belief, available for free on his website. While it's a bit hit-or-miss thanks to the inclusion of juvenilia, cyberpunk fans owe it to themselves to give his mature stories a shot (e.g., 'Evil Spirits Travel in Straight Lines'; 'Conversations with the Noösphere').

His second novel, γ (Gamma), is due out this year.… (more)

Sheldon Pacotti is best known (or only known, unfortunately) as the lead writer for the ground-breaking 2000 video game, Deus Ex. His self-published writing should feel familiar to any fans of Ion Storm’s game, similarly meshing science, politics, religion and philosophy in a style that veers between academic and thriller. Pacotti rarely wastes words, and he tries to convey heavy concepts through entertaining plots, rife with conspiracies, political turmoil and an uncomfortable number of accurate social-technology predictions.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

Experiments in Belief is a collection of Pacotti’s ‘best’ short stories from the ‘90s, from his collegiate juvenilia to technological and philosophical frameworks for Deus Ex. Because of this, it’s a mixed-bag of a collection, and many stories--particularly the juvenilia--are short bursts of great ideas that never make it past the surface. (A good comparison would be Philip K. Dick, known for his surface ideas far more than his execution.)

To get the negatives out of the way, the opening story, ‘End of a Long Winter,’ is one of these nuggets. A nice concept executed blandly: An old man shares his musings on how immortality has impacted society in the future; how he’s treated as elderly in a world without wrinkles. Then it ends. (This concept is further explored in Pacotti’s excellent novel, Demiurge.)

This opening of an idea, immediately followed by an ending, hurts a number of these tales, particularly those acknowledged as juvenilia in their prefaces (see: ‘No Secrets,’ ‘Royal Colors’--an out-of-place attempt at YA fiction that just feels bitter and gross--, and ‘Match Heads’--which is more Raymond Carver or Breece D’J Pancake sentimentality than anything, making it the most at-home-in-a-creative-writing-class story in the bunch).

‘Evil Spirits Travel in Straight Lines’ impressed the hell out of me, and was my favorite in the collection. It toes the line closest to hard science fiction, portraying emotionally-stunted academics researching a new strain of malaria in Africa. Their personal problems and general pettiness create translation issues as they intrude (à la Jared Diamond) and condescend local cultures to benefit themselves in the name of the Western world. It’s thoughtful in its portrayal of perspective: In its attempt to understand the individual in a world where Western technology or philosophy is so darned intrusive, whether it be the local population or the academics. This story is the thematic seed for much of Pacotti’s later writing, including Deus Ex, covering that complex interplay of science, religion and politics. (Have I mentioned? -- It's a crime that Pacotti's still this obscure when he was publishing work like this and Demiurge in 2000.)

Highlights here tend to focus on the humanity amidst all the technology, and the irrational rationality with which people tend to justify their social problems as either correct or non-existent. ‘Conversations with the Noösphere’ relates the quiet geniality of Kurzweil’s singularity, which is both infuriating and comforting to the protagonist: Infuriating because his usefulness is being replaced by a predictive software he frequently disagrees with; comforting because that same software that makes him feel inadequate is so essential to his coming to terms with his wife’s death. ‘Vanishing Point’ is about curing homosexuality through medicine. Its overt delivery feels somewhat dated to the ‘90s now, but it still carries some poignancy in the light of unconscious, institutionalized discrimination being far more prevalent than anyone will ever want to admit. ‘Incantation’ ends the collection with how expensive intelligence-enhancing drugs affect social dynamics between rich and poor. How can children with hard home lives compete in a school system that openly gives the edge to families that can afford these drugs? (How can they compete now?) It’s a difficult, but interesting story, sometimes hampered by the same sentimentality that affects ‘Match Sticks.’

I love that Pacotti, by his own admission, tries to learn by writing rather than writing what he already knows. Sometimes it falls flat (‘A Great Burning’), but it’s more often successful in exploring uncomfortable (to many) or unique perspectives (‘Azadi’, ‘Signs’). Like Dick, his stories are bristling with weighty ideas and perspectives--and unlike Dick, he often has the writing chops to match.

Since there are a number of duds in this collection, I highly recommend checking out story highlights available for free on the author’s website--or pick up his novel Demiurge, which competes with the best of this collection at a grander scale. After an 18-year editing process, his second novel, γ (Gamma), is looking equally-spicy and is due out this year.… (more)