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Crystal Rain
By Tobias S. Buckell
Tor, 352 pages, $33.95

Babylon Babies
By Maurice Dantec
Semiotext[e], 526 pages, $23.50

A Game of Perfection
By Elisabeth Vonarburg
Edge, 341 pages, $20.95

Cyborgs. Wild mutations in the human genome. Nostalgia for outmoded technology. Here are three new science--and speculative-fiction novels treating combinations of at least two of these themes, with varying degrees of success.

Crystal Rain is Caribbean-born, Ohio-based writer Tobias S. Buckell's first novel. It's a real swashbuckler, complete with a one-handed, immortal cyborg pirate, who has amnesia.

Events take place on the distant planet Nanagada, a melting pot of human races and cultures, including, especially, a large Caribbean population. We learn that several centuries prior to the events in Crystal Rain, the human settlers were forced to destroy all advanced technologies — nanotech, interstellar transport, telecommunications — in an effort to defeat fierce cyborgs, alien invaders called the Teotl.

Now marooned, the human survivors begin "rediscovering" primitive inventions such as the steam engine, the telegraph and the hot-air balloon. Meanwhile, a few remaining Teotl secretly retreat across the mountains. There, the aliens pose as gods, groom a race of bloodthirsty warriors called "the Azteca," and plot for the day they'll again be strong enough to obliterate the settlers.

When the Aztecan invasion does happen, John deBrun (the immortal, amnesiac sailor/pirate) learns that if he can just recover his lost memories (he's a cyborg too!), he can recover the lost technologies of the "old fathers," or the first settlers, and use them to defeat the Teotl. He leads a hastily cobbled-together mission to the Northern frozen reaches to retrieve a lost, ambiguous relic.

It sounds so scattered because ..... well, it is. This is Crystal Rain's first big problem. The second is that it sets itself up to extrapolate or offer some sort of social commentary on both the human-alien conflict and deBrun's revelation that he is a cyborg, but it never delivers. The final nail in the coffin is that Crystal Rain is almost painfully derivative.

Next is Maurice G. Dantec's Babylon Babies, a 526-page techno-psychological thriller, originally published in France in 1999. This is first time the book has been published in English. Some reviewers claim the prose is wooden and awkward as a result of hasty translation. The prose and the story are both lumbering and deeply paranoid, almost like a long, agitated rant. But the overblown tone and language fit the novel's theme: In the year 2013, renegade scientists, along with a gory hodgepodge of religious cults and mafia groups, have learned that schizophrenics are "the shaman[s] of the 21st century." Schizophrenics are perfectly "pre-cabled for connection to Artificial Intelligences." So, not only is this book about the cyborgs, "machinery of meat," but the rise of the schizophrenic cyborg.

One schizophrenic in particular, Marie Zorn, is at the centre of the action. She's carrying a mutant embryo that will bridge "the contours of the next mutation ..... the product of natural evolution and artificial technology." Like Nietzsche's Übermensch (and Dantec does quote Nietzsche), what comes after Marie Zorn's progeny will change everything.

In the meantime, Zorn needs to stay alive, as rival factions battle to capture or assassinate her. Her protector is Toorop, a grizzled veteran of Sarajevo, a mercenary-philosopher who swears by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. Zorn and Toorop travel from Russia to Montreal, weather a ruthless gang war involving the Hells Angles, the Cosmic Church of the New Resurrection and the 10 Ontario Cyborg Society — to name a few. (In Dantec's vision of 2013, by the way, Quebec has declared itself a "free and independent province.") Toorop also meets "Boris Dantzik," a science-fiction novelist and a prophet who channels divine proclamations about Zorn's future.

The whole thing is as endearingly absurd as it is detailed, staggering between poetic meditations on insanity and schizophrenia, and elaborate crime scenarios and extrapolations about terrorism in the wired world. The problem is that Dantec's vision of the wired world reads as a bit naïve. He sets himself up as a "prophet" through his "Boris Dantzik" persona — but a prophet of what? The long explorations of cyborg software and communications technologies in 2013 don't seem to lead anywhere but in circles. Babylon Babies would definitely be stronger if boiled down from 526 pages to something more manageable.

The third book is Quebec author Elisabeth Vonarburg's A Game of Perfection. It is the second instalment in the Tyranael series, the ambitious, multigenerational epic about Earth's third intergalactic colony on the planet Tyranael. The novel, the English translation of a French text, explores telepathy as the next "mutation" in human evolution. And it features a nostalgic revival of "archaic technologies" such as "steam, compressed air, natural gas, dirigibles."

In the first book, we learned that Tyranael was mysteriously deserted by its humanoid natives centuries before the arrival of the first settlers from Earth. Every two years, the planet becomes partially covered by a mysterious substance called "The Sea." The Sea is not water: It eats all organic material and disables most electric and electronic devices. In the meantime, relics left by the natives seem connected somehow to The Sea and to the handful of the colonists showing telepathic "mutations." But how will the "normals" treat these mutants? Will they see them as a threat?

Book two is about the secretive political machinations of the growing telepath "networks," plus their efforts to learn more about Tyranael's past. Vonarburg has speculated about mutations in the human genome before. Her Maerlande Chronicles (1993), a story about post-apocalyptic matriarch societies, won the Philip K. Dick Special Award. But A Game of Perfection falls short of the imaginative, complex, well-executed Chronicles. The sheer scope of the plot is just too ambitious. Vonarburg also introduces too many "main" characters. The scenarios are interesting, in theory, but the writing is neither artful nor compelling.

All three of these books, Crystal Rain, Babylon Babies and A Game of Perfection read like particularly outlandish episodes of Star Trek. They can be fun, but they very quickly become tedious and overblown.

Kelly McManus is an associate producer at the MZTV Museum of Television in Toronto.