Behemoth: Seppuku

Rating:
Summary: Exciting finale
Review: Five years ago amphibious cyborg Lenie Clarke unleashed the microbe Behemoth on an unsuspecting world, killing ten million in North America. Lenni and her fellow cyborgs escape the devastation in the ocean depths and are at war with the VIP's who fled to the underwater city of Atlantis. The people of Atlantis and cyborgs make peace when Behemoth finds its way into the underwater city. For the first time in five years Lenie journeys to land accompanied by Ken Lubin to find a way to keep Behemoth out of Atlantis.

Although a vaccine for Behemoth exists, it is in scarce supply so more people die from the microbe and the plagues that follow in its wake. Watchers guard against anyone breaking out of quarantine and many countries want to eradicate North America and thus destroy Behemoth. A new deadly microbe Seppuku is launched as a cure for Behemoth but when it kills the microbe it also infects the host. A watcher, Achilles Desjarding know that Seppuku will eventually die out before killing the host but he doesn't tell anyone because he wants to keep all the power he gained. Lenie and Ken can stop him but it might mean their deaths.

BEHEMOTH: SEPPUKU is the last of the Lenni Clark books and it is just as action-packed and exciting as STARFISH: MAELSTROM and BEHEMOTH: B-MAX. This is a dark gritty speculative fiction novel with the survivors grimly determined to rebuild civilization if Behemoth is eradicated. Lenie knows she can never find redemption but she does her best to save what is left of the North American population. Desjarding is the archetype villain who everyone will love to hate. Peter Watts is writing excellent cutting edge science fiction.

Harriet Klausner


Rating:
Summary: Deeply disappointing, a major creative misstep
Review: Unlike his excellent debut, Starfish and its first sequel, Maelstrom, this conclusion is a disappointing creative misstep on the part of its author. The chief problem with BEHEMOTH: SEPPUKU is that in spite of setting up Lenie Clarke as the heroine of the story, Clarke herself is entirely passive throughout the book, making no real decisions or actions on her own, being led by her sociopathic-but-honourable comrade Ken Lubin. She never achieves any great insight and becomes a bit player in the story.

This book feels as if the author had become so preoccupied with his Hard Science Fiction ruminations that he had forgotten that his characters had been complex, dimensional characters in the previous books, and were now merely cartoonish chess pieces wandering through a thin narrative. There are also the deeply disturbing scenes in which the villain rapes and mutilates a sympathetic supporting character that eventually feel like a gratuitous exercise in writing snuff porn with a Science discussion interweaved in them, especially when that subplot no longer links up with the main story and never reaches any real resolution.

The first two books in this series brilliantly married the Science with the complexity and pain of its damaged characters, but this book has degenerated into a dystopian cartoon that feels too much like a wallow in the [...] of sexual sadism and social pessimism. There have been brilliant dystopian Science Fiction novels in that past that earned their pessimism, like John Brunner's THE SHEEP LOOK UP. Alas, BEHEMOTH: SEPPUKU does not belong in that league.