The Monkey Trap by Lee Denning

A few months ago Lee Denning contacted me and offered me a chance to review the first two books in his new Nova Sapiens trilogy. I’ve finished the first one, Monkey Trap, and as I promised him, here are my thoughts (the good and the bad).

The basic premise is that two other-wordly entities arrive at Earth and take over two host humans. They both promise to elevate all humans to the next stage of evolution if only their host manages to kill the other host/symbiont. Clandestine battles ensue and many other people scramble to figure out what is going on.

Summary: Never judge a book by it’s cover. Monkey Trap is a clever concept with a novel execution. If you can get past the usual rookie author mistakes I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I have quite a few problems with this book, but all are fairly minor and easily overcome. I’ll be focusing on these problems in the first half of the review, but I wanted to make it clear that I DID enjoy the book, and you probably will too. That said, let’s start with the “bad news” first.

First off, ‘Lee Denning’ is actually a pen name for a father/daughter writing team. He’s a soldier, scientist and engineer and she’s a psychologist, poet and mystic. Unfortunately this is fairly evident in the writing and the book does feel like two people wrote it at times. I applaud the family time, and actually think that the two wildly different perspectives helped flesh out the story, but somewhere along the way there wasn’t enough put into the blending of the two sets of writing into a single whole.

Second, the symbionts explain to their hosts how and why certain powers are developing in great detail at times. This wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that BOTH characters get told nearly identical things in the same gory detail. The solution is simple, as a reader I just skipped a few pages when a repeating explanation came along. I understand that the characters need know the hows and whys of their new existence, but as a reader I don’t need to be told twice. Some things are better left unwritten.

Third, In addition to this repetition, I think the authors make another classic rookie mistake. Inevitably an author knows more about their characters than anyone else in the universe. They created them after all. The problem crops up when author(s) think that this story is just as interesting as the one they are trying to tell. in Monkey Trap the authors open the book with dozens of pages (50+) describing “how we got to this point in their lives.” This almost destroyed the book for me. I put it down and I emailed Denning to ask him how I could rectify the problem. He effectively told me to skip to chapter 16 when things started to get going. I suggest that if you read this book too, that you speed read chapters 3-16. If you skip them outright you won’t miss much, but there are few sections in there that are worth the read.

Fourth, I think there are too many threads in this story. After talking to Denning he revealed that when they originally structured Monkey Trap, they “wanted to make a truly cross-genre story (thriller, mystery, romance, mysticism, philosophy, sci-fi, fantasy), with deep characters. We worried about biting off too much in a first book, so we purposely set the thing up with (roughly) five scenes per chapter, with headings to tip off readers and thus let them skip or skim stuff that they weren’t interested in.” Once I clued in to this structure I was able to use it to my advantage and speed read the parts that were only vaguely interesting. The structure they chose does help with this problem, and I’m glad they gave the reader this tool to use while reading.

Lastly there is the cover. “Never judge a book by it’s cover” in this case is literally true. The cover, while impressive from a fine arts point of view isn’t what you’d expect from the major publishers. It’s simply lacking something. It’s accurate to the story once you reflect on it, but I doubt it’s helping the sales. Moreover the back cover copy leaves a little bit to be desired. Cliché phrases like “keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time” and “unrelenting action and suspense” always give me that skeptical “yeah right” feeling. If you ignore the cover and look deeper (say at Chapter one) then you’ll begin to see what this duo can really write.

So, that’s the BAD news. What about the good news? Well without giving away much of the plot the story is compelling and the action is excellent even if it’s not exactly “unrelenting.” The symbiont aliens enable latent powers in the two hosts based on the manipulation of different kinds of energy and physical laws. They can levitate and fly, transpose, control gravity and extract energy from other dimensions. Nothing more far fetched than that of NBC’s Heroes (a show I love) and all powers make sense within the context of the plot.

The story has many “oh that’s convenient” moments, but as the book grows they actually help bolster the story and the ideas rather than distract from it. The ending is well constructed and appropriate once you’ve come to know the characters.

Also, while Denning suggested that I skip the thread about the Global Consciousness Project, it was actually one of my favourite parts. This is a real project with real and interesting results and can be found at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/. In the book perturbations in the random data eventually give the staff at the project the ability to track our enhanced duo as if they were transmitting their latitude and longitude (GPS coordinates) to the world. As a math major I found the explanations to be hand-wavy and often wrong, but I can forgive that in the context of a good story*.

As for book two, The Hiding Hand, I’ve just started it and it seems to address many of my concerns above and after 50 pages I can’t put it down. I’m loving it so far and I’ll have a review of it as soon as I write up the other two books that I completed on Holiday.

* I HATED Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress for it’s completely flawed use of Applied Cryptography. I can’t forgive that one since the story was terrible too.

UPDATE: I finished the second book in this series as well and never got around to writing a review. Overall the second book “Hiding Hand” was at least as interesting and much better written but also completely different in overall structure from the first. If you enjoyed the first one, you’ll likely enjoy this one as well.

Tagged as: aliens, consiousness, evolution