Philip Kerr has put away his pre-war Berlin detective Bernie Gunther, whom he described in three briliant novels and written SF - a hunt for a serial killer set in the near future. Reviews of the book already have pointed out that it is flawed - it is not an edge-of-the-seat book, though they have failed to point out that Kerr seems to have failed to double check his work. It was the realism of the earlier books that made them special, here it shows in strange lapses - the M'Naghten Rules are called the McNaghten Rules, and the constant reference to T.S Eliot's The_Waste_Land (a murder victim is named Mary Woolnoth, for instance, something which has no bearing on the story) clogs the story with heavy irony.

However, whether he knew it or not Philip Kerr has proved to be prescient in a couple of ways that have much wider ramifications. One is probably intentional, the other probably not. (There is a third: that Robert Harris's recent bestsller Fatherland unhealthily shares the plot of Kerr's last novel which other reviewers have pointed out).

The first of Kerr's presciences is the role of gender. The detective hero of the book is a heroine, Jake Jakowicz, rather like the Helen Mirren character in TV's Prime_Suspect. She emphaises the role of male violence, which has expanded massively in Kerr's near future ("over 700 per cent, since 1950" up to 2013), with serial, recreational killers "roaming the EC" engaged in "Hollywood-style gynocide".

However, gender is not a matter here of the sex of the victims but of women being portrayed as victims. A book like Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman's The_Serial_Killers reveals just as many examples of serial killers hunting down men, and not necessarily for homosexual purposes, as women, that Philip Kerr can be seen as contributing to the recent debate about feminism and the backlash. Feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Susan Faludi, and their popularisers in the gutter press such as Julie Burchill, argue that women are always victim and men only victimisers, an argument that Germaine Greer condones in recent journalism. The plot of this book revolves around the scientific discovery that only men have the brain function to be violent, which might be seen as producing a proof of their arguments in a fictional form, but there are one or two clues in the novel to suggest that Kerr does not believe that he is portraying things as they are or as they will be: the murderer at one point sits in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, where once had sat Winston Smith just before he loved Big Brother. Perhaps this world is just as ruled by the hidden Thought Police as by the police force which employs Chief Inspector Jakowicz.

Killers come from "those males whose brains lack a Ventro Medial Nucleus (VMN) which acts as an inhibitor to the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus (SDN), a preoptic area of the male human brain which is the repositary of male aggressive response". The murderer and his victims all come from this type of person, who have been identified and counselled like present-day AIDS sufferers or trauma victims. Yet they are all potential death dealers and all are men. "A machine based on the old Proton Emission Tomographer, and developed by Professor Burgess Phelan of the Nuffield Science Institute at Cambridge University, is able to determine those males".

Frighteningly, New_Scientist reveals that this kind of research is being argued for, and the 26th September 1992 issue details a planned conference about this. The article says "A brochure introducing the conference (called 'Genetic Factors In Crime' planned for October at the University Of Maryland) stated that 'genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal behaviour'". Then NS quotes a critic of the conference: he "saw the conference as part of a 'violence initiative' planned by the National Institute of Mental Health. He says the cornerstone of this initiative will be the testing of inner-city schools - most of whom are black - for biological markers, such as low levels of the neurotransmitter 5-hydroxytryptamine that allegedly make them prone to violence". The allegations about the American research are that it is racist. Kerr turns the theme into sexism, but he has recognised that it becomes a world-shaping ideology: science becomes part of that ideology, it is not independent, and just as, say, police forces have taken over the drug culture and made it criminal, or in pre-war Germany took over race and made it criminal, so they take over the role of the sexes and of sexual relations and criminalise them.

I was not aware of this type of scientific claim until this issue of the NS, and perhaps Kerr was unaware of it too, but this book makes the implications of that kind of abuse of the scientific process stunningly clear by its ability to extrapolate it. That remains the value of Speculative Fiction.