A corpse in the water introduces many a mystery. Not so many of them have the body discovered by submarine divers, with bodies adapted to life beneath the waves, but it would still provide an entry into scientific discussions of how long the corpse has been submerged, how fat becomes adipocere, or even how diatoms and weed identify the channels through which the body has been washed. Alison Sinclair gives these sort of things little time. The mystery continues, but the investigation of it becomes less important and although there is a final dénouement, it has little drama attached to it.
The subject of Blueheart (distant and eponymous planet, only rarely visited by FTL ships) is the struggle between those who wish to terraform the watery world and those who wish to adapt to the sea. In turn, the adaptees are split between those who wish to live as sea creatures (which they must achieve through major surgery, preferably when young), and those would live in dry holdfasts, only going out occasionally. Protagonist Rache is out on one of his occasional trips with his son when he discovers the body.
When we discover that Rache has a history - he was once of one school and moved to the other, and at sometime his wife has disappeared - and then discover the wife's twin sister turning up; more relatives; more strained relations (daughters who hate their father for not having paid for their mental improvement and data plugs, brothers who just want to impress bosses with their programming skills); and scheming bosses - we start to recognise that Alison Sinclair's template turns out not to be a detective story. Soap opera and melodrama start to come to mind.
However, this is a soap opera based in a world of high-tech - these people can only satisfy their urge to become fish through the technology available to them. Strangely, Sinclair pays little attention to developments in surgery and gene modification, even though she implies that the adaptations are of a Doctor Moreau-like painfulness, and Blueheart parents having operations performed on their children, at ages young enough for the most major modifications, accept that they will be seriously punished for child abuse if caught. The technology on Blueheart is I.T. However, in echoes of John Brunner, it is technology having biological metaphors applied to it. When Rache is having the database in his holdfast upgraded a worm assault takes place, and the airlocks fail. People drown in the disaster. Rache's sister-in-law, luckily, is an expert- voyageur, who can interface directly with the net and discover how the tutor virus got in.
Blueheart then enters one of its sub-themes: access to data, and modification of it. Characters have to plot and scheme in order to access data. Information about gene modifications is held in public domain databases, but rules on data privacy also apply. In turn, one has to be an expert to access all of the information. In a short info-dump in chapter two it is explained that our parallel processing has been replaced by "a contextually anticipatory dynamic net", but, with Rache's sister-in-law, Teal Blane Berenice, being a net mistress, she has an in to the system. Confusingly, characters also use "net" to mean the network of computers and terminals which anyone might access. Somewhere behind the computer screens there is also information about illegal adaptations, though why anyone would want to keep their information where it was retrievable at all, no matter how deeply hidden, is another question.
There are natives with net skills, too. That one of them should start to mope, and then attempt suicide, might suggest that in addition to feeling unhappy about the holdfast drownings he also feels guilt. No one bothers to investigate the man's actual guilt. He does break down and reveal his part in the virus, before naming his actual master, at the end, but completely without any prompting. The detective element of unveiling villains has been abandoned by Sinclair long before.
The first corpse belonged to a young woman. She came from a distant and remote region, and showed signs of illegal adaptation, but after an initial investigation (halted by the mass drownings), no one takes any further interest in her. Rache's son, Daven, does not even take a morbid adolescent interest in the girl. Again, Sinclair avoids a motif that the mystery genre would open to her.
And again, the adaptees are being struck by a new disease, whitesickness, which is slowly devastating them, like smallpox among the aborigines. And no one takes an interest in the etiology and possible cure of the disease. This means that the spread of the real virus and the spread of the computer virus are never compared. One allows the other (its purpose is to hide that the disease, like smallpox again, was intentionally spread), but one is never seen as a mirror of the other. So just as the different genres fail to interact, so does the inability to join images, and Blueheart is weakened as a result.
One can see a strange example of this confusion between words and content at the lowest level. Take a short paragraph such as:
"Her spine stiffened. 'Are you implying that - that I - caused Adam's death?' she said flatly." (page 78)
The woman's body has changed, she has paused, repeated herself, and said one word ("I" in italics) with emphasis, how can she have said it "flatly"?
And one can see it at the highest level of the ecology of the planet. There are algae and grasses in the seas, and there are unattractive predators (Rache goes hunting a lava eel), but of the main bodies in- between ("the grazers") nothing. It is as if the first riders across the prairie failed to mention the buffalo, even when they must have been riding among them (and Sinclair's characters swimming among them). As, presumably these grazers also make up the main part of the adaptee's diets it a strange absence. "Net" never means fishing net on this water world.
Technology, disease and new worlds have come together recently in Jared Diamond's non-fictional Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (Norton 1997). While Diamond has received good reviews, though none without qualification, Sinclair's situation must be worse. Working in fiction should not only have given her the opportunity to explore Diamond's subjects, it should have allowed her to invent even more, answering questions the historian could only pose, but the gaps and the failure to make connections stand out, and the new world recedes. Blueheart has something missing at its centre.