It's a story with an intriguing setup, if perhaps anti-technology at times (ala Chrichton) that tries to deal with ideas about evolution, sentience, and intelligence. Unfortunately, the final acts of the story devolve into an utter mess, with character decisions being nonsensical and the specifics of what's happening becoming utterly confusing and hard to figure out. I did manage to finish it, which is more than I can say for some SPSFC4 entries, but overall, Wilderness Five is a failure even if you are open to its themes.
Plot Summary:
Thirty Years ago, a disaster involving unchecked manifold technology on Platform Sengai on Wilderness Five threatened all of human space and was just barely stopped due to the efforts of one survivor.
Now, Dr. Lancett, her partner Hurst, and her team have used their science and efforts to try to make Platform Temper on Wilderness Five a paradise at the edge of Sol Space. Learning from Sengai, the team eschews use of the same unchecked manifold technology in favor with extremely limited and carefully controlled applications, as required by laws promulgated since Sengai. And while Lancett knows that this paradise is going to be spoiled by human hands, the team's contracts with the corporation Trojan Apparatus ("TA") guarantee them a piece of the land for their efforts.
But then a billionaire seeking the secrets of immortality convinces (or bribes) the TA to use Platform Temper for his own ends: using manifold technology, supposedly carefully controlled, to evolve ape-like beings quickly into the ancestors of humanity so as to discover the secrets of how a species could develop sentience. The project seems immensely vain and dangerous, and Lancett resolves to shut it down the moment it's clear the billionaire's project crosses the line. And she's not the only one watching, for the billionaire has brought with him Bryn of Marineris, the Invigilator who tracked down all those responsible for Sengai and has made it his life's mission to stop any future misuse of Manifold technology.
But other actors have their own plans for this project on Wilderness Five and soon both Lancett, Bryn, and everyone else on the station will find themselves caught up in a crisis that threatens not just the platform....but all of humanity.
Wildnerness Five jumps around a bit between point of view characters (even showing parts from the perspectives of antagonists), but largely in the end comes down to Bryn and Lancett as its main protagonists. The story also spends the beginning of each of the first few parts 30 years in the past following the survivor of the Sengai disaster. These flashbacks, which are often misused and are annoying when done poorly, actually work here to create intrigue about what happened back then and what could possibly be happening in the present day plot. And the story's technology, if a little confusing at first, is intriguing (if otherwise kind of silly and feeling more like magic than realistic in scientific principle) as it deals with Manifold tech that allows the scientists to evolve animals and plants more quickly. This allows the creation of terraformed platforms with Earth-like animals and plants like we see in other SciFi works, but gives the work its own twist on how that's possible.
Still, while the setup and initial setting works to give us an obvious conflict and plot thread to follow, the follow through winds up extremely poor and confusing. As I noted above the jump, there's certainly a Michael Crichton-like plot here of a billionaire's greed misusing science for horrible ends, spruced up with the designs of a distant corporation, and the products of that science coming back to bite them all. But beyond that setup, you wind up with characters behaving extremely rigidly in one way only to suddenly change their minds or to act in ways completely against their prior character. Or you have relationships that don't feel real in any way, such as Lancett's relationship with Hurst, which is adversarial from like the start despite the tone being that the two actually do love each other, and then continues to have both of them take conflicting actions that make it hard to figure out how exactly they're supposed to have any chemistry. And characters hide secrets from each other that don't make sense in any way, just to make it worse.
All of this might be forgivable if this was an excellent piece of idea-based scifi, which it seemingly is trying to be, but the final 30% of the book is a confusing mess, with the author trying to convey ideas about the power of intelligence, evolution to a higher life form, and the damage that intelligence causes to others around them. I THINK there's a theme here about evolution, intelligence and population growth inevitably causing destruction and disasters (a right wing concept that's honestly laughable when looked at fwiw), but it's really hard to parse, and trying to figure out what exactly is happening as beings start merging together near the end is....a lot. Even if I don't particularly like the ideas, Wilderness Five doesn't put them together in a coherent way, which prevents it from even making a decent argument, and certainly prevents it from being a really satisfying read. So alas, I would skip this one.
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