"When the first child is born in space the final horror will begin ..." Howzat do ya for high concept horror? We're updating the usual ET agenda away from nuts and bolts milestones such as our first atom blasts and radio waves pouring into space towards the most personal, biological subject possible. There must have been something floating on the cosmic winds around this time because Alien debuted contemporaneously, presenting the final word on outer space body horror. To avoid suspense, I'll have you know The Adam Experiment isn't a patch on Alien's terror. It's more in line with the grubby imitators such as Inseminoid or Xtro, managing some effective moments here and there but largely limp and unfulfilling. The publishers also manage to typo the author's name right on the inside cover!
For starters, we're in the far flung year of 1991, with the mighty Space Lab V and its crew of 3,000 (!!!) orbiting 300,000 miles out from Earth. Near future SF settings are always tricky, and here Simmons stumbles a bit - why exactly is this gargantuan super sci-fi spaceship necessary for what's attempting to be a plausible, grounded thriller? We dance around the central conceit of a pregnancy in orbit for far too long as well, filling up time with dead end plotting which leads me to think that Simmons simply wasn't up to the task of fleshing out his own ideas. There's some nice suspense at the beginning, as a NASA tech receives notice from Pioneer 10 that its internals have been accessed - that's accessed, not destroyed or blown open, by something out there beyond the solar system ... something that now has a map back to Earth.
Soon we're zipping up to Space Lab V with our main characters including Dr. Cortney Miles, "a skilled researcher whose long blonde hair and model's figure seemed more suited to a fashion show than a row of test tubes." Ha! We faff around for a while with experiments and scientific rivalries before we finally get down to business: the beast with two backs, in space! And here's where the terror, such as it is, begins. Something is coming, from out there. It's alien, unknowable, uncommunicative. And we are utterly helpless.
Spoilers here, for the better parts of the story: the aliens are huge, biological monstrosities, miniature planetoids covered in horrible eyes. Upon reaching Earth they gently deposit Pioneer 10 onto Space Lab V, with one major, frightening alteration: the woman on the plaque has a hole drilled through her womb! For whatever reason, they don't want us breeding beyond our planet. At the same time, they somehow are abducting hapless humans from our planet's surface and medically mutilating them! Here are some effective scares, as the aliens' POV is simultaneously sinister, logical, and totally opaque. The climax builds effectively as well, minus one little detail: the note "To be continued ..." What a rip!
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| Classy hardcover edition |
Author Geoffrey Simmons is a bit of an odd duck. I'll let him speak for himself:
I am physician who is Board-certified in Internal Medicine and Disaster Medicine. I have a B.S. in Zoology and I have completed the course work for a Masters degree in Microbiology. I am also a Fellow with the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture. I have studied the theory of evolution for over forty years. For thirty of those years I was an ardent supporter of Darwinian ideas. I now, however, find the data supporting this theory scientifically untenable.
Our history strongly suggests we are here, at least in part, to re-create human facsimiles, called humanoids. One can readily see a constantly improving, convergence of designs over time. We are now copying many of those designs. This book braids human capabilities (designs) together, such as vision, ambulation, hearing, tasting and consciousness, using the two standout, contemporary explanations of our origins, i.e. Intelligent Design(ID) and the theory of evolution. This book shows that evolution, if it is to be believed, requires a lot of Intelligent Guidance (sometimes called the God of the Gaps). Just the changes needed to go from cold-blooded animals to warm-blooded animals would require several the entire texts of thick chemistry, biology and physics books. Or, from land mammals to sea mammals. Or walking animals to animals that control flying, landing and nesting in trees.
He never wrote a sequel to The Adam Experiment, though he managed a couple other thrillers before devoting himself to Creationist texts. For some creeping fear bogged down in pedestrian plotting, The Adam Experiment earns two starchilds out of four:
A Berkeley Medallion Book, 1979 (original pub. 1978)
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