Generally, I hate posting about a book I didn’t like on this blog. Celebrate the things you love, and don’t bother with the things you don’t.
However, Extinction by Douglas Preston was sent to me through Netgalley with the assumption that I would post an honest review, and so I feel a bit compelled to go against the above advice. I read somewhere that they keep track of whether or not you’re actually reviewing the books you get, and not doing so may hurt your chances of getting something later. I’m not sure whether that is true or not, but I figure why risk it.
Anyway, a bit about this book and why it didn’t really do it for me.
Namely, this book felt SLOW. Generally, I’m a big fan of precision and attention detail. A well researched book is a well written book. However, there’s a balance here that is potentially difficult to achieve, and I think the crucial element to getting that balance ‘right’ actually has less to do with how much detail an author provides, and more to do with what the audience expects those details are about.
I’m going to just get this comparison out of the way early since it will doubtless come up, but in a book like Jurassic Park, we patiently read (and if you’re me enjoy) a veritable ton of information about DNA, how genes work, and how de-extinction could work, but we do so because we’ve been promised DINOSAURS WILL EXIST (!!) and wow what an amazing and awe inspiring thing that is.
If you’re hoping that Extinction will provide something of an update (after all JP is over 30 years old) to that science, you’ll be severely disappointed as very little time is devoted to it. Most of the exposition in Extinction seems to be focused more on police procedure and depicting a ‘realistic’ investigation.
As such, there are long stretches of this book which felt like they had little or nothing to do with de-extinction at all, and could have taken place anywhere, and been about any random crime. It seems to me, that the hook for this title was its connection to prehistoric life, and while this connection does take on more prominence with a twist towards the end of the book, Extinction expects its reader to work through about 75% of the story before getting to this point.
Something else which stood out to me, was the book’s orientation towards its characters. In general, I felt like the book spent more time setting up characters we don’t like to fail, rather than building up characters we do like to triumph. This is my first Douglas Preston book, and in general I’ve read very few thrillers, so I’m not yet certain whether this is a convention of the author or the genre, but it didn’t quite land for me. I like to see a ‘bad’ character get their ‘just desserts’ (lolz) as much as the next person, but here it felt a bit one-note.
In the afterword, Preston writes: “My novel Extinction is a way for me to say to readers: welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau.” In some ways this is a good comparison and one of the areas in which I felt the book succeeded was in presenting some argument surrounding the ethics of de-extinction.
One character in particular, chief scientist Marius Karman, actually suggests that we have a moral imperative to resurrect species which we had a hand in the extinction of. I’ve seen this argument around in other places, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it come up in a work of fiction.
On the surface, this argument seems reasonable, but I think the novel is able to show that this kind of thinking doesn’t work wholesale, and isn’t a good idea for every species.
So Should I Read This One or Not?
Ultimately, I’d say it’s ok to miss this one. The best comparison I have for the experience of reading this book would be like watching a show like NCIS. While the story is kind of sandwiched between a unique (ish) premise, and a action-packed finale, most of this book felt like boilerplate police procedural, unengaged with the very premise which hooked readers in the first place.
Where the book succeeds, is perhaps in updating some of the moral argument around genetic engineering, though there is only slight reference to the state of the science behind such issues.
That’s all I have for this week. What are your thoughts? Am I missing something big here? Please leave your thoughts in the comments!
alligators and aneurysms! 