I cannot believe I've not read anything by Kate Wilhelm until this recently. She's a grande dame of Science Fiction and an Oregon treasure, and apparently many of her thriller/mystery novels are set in the Pacific Northwest. I recently read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, about cloning and the nature of humanity, and last night finished Death Qualified.
Death Qualified is a Barbara Halloway mystery (she's written a baker's dozen, I believe) published in 1991. At 25 years old, it is in many ways a period piece: the use of floppy disks, the lack of easy communication, the reliance on land lines, the science gaps (at one point a mathematician dismisses the possibility of reliable weather predictions), the villain's motivation, all set it clearly in a bygone decade. That said, it is damn well written and quite compelling, and if people can read novels set in WWII with glee there's no reason not to read something set in the decade I graduated from high school.
Strengths
Sense of place. This was in part because this is set in my home state, not far from where I live, so I could see many of the places she refers to. That's always fun. But she went deep into the SENSE of important settings, both the sensory input for the character and the emotional resonance that character felt for that place, and that worked at a very deep level.
It uses chaos theory, which I find fascinating, as a metaphor and plot device. Hell, I'll read almost anything that has fractals in it.
One thing I thought was a weakness was the lack of transitions in some places, but now that I've thought about it a bit, I realized that in the beginning, there were long gaps of time without clarity, intended to make the reader feel what the "lost" character was feeling. Years-long gaps in the narrative slowly became shorter and shorter until we were month by month, then day by day, then meal by meal, and finally in the hair-raising last few pages, second by second.
At the halfway point, I looked at how much book was left and said, "how?" but Wilhelm took the plot in a slightly different, and finally darker, direction than I expected. I had by that point correctly figured out who the killer was (not tellin') which of course makes a nerdbody feel good. I gulped that entire last half of a 440-page paperback in one evening, and that pacing is largely to "blame."
She created compelling to reasonably compelling characters, all of whom felt true to me as someone who's lived in this state for most of my life. Because of the plot, she created some evil academics, but balanced them with good ones, and the rural characters are all for the most part real people, which I appreciated. The far-off college campus and the academic realities of the bad folks seem tissue-thin, however.
Reveal: Wilhelm sets nearly all her hooks at the beginning, instead of the usual "set one hook, pay it off, set another hook" plotting, although new hooks got added here and there. There was *so much* hidden from the readers at the beginning that some readers I know would have dropped the novel, but I love that interlaced depth. Everything was unknown, including the opening POV character's real name, because HE didn't know who he was, where he was, who he could trust. And as it went on, the mystery around why he'd been kept essentially a prisoner and never discovered deepened. (This is also a weakness; I had a lot of trouble believing that they could change his name and keep him on the same campus and NOBODY would notice, but that detail doesn't become clear until one is so far into the novel that it's easy to slide on by).
Weaknesses
Some of the science feels weak, but that's an age-of-book thing (and a "I wasn't aware of that" thing --- apparently there is a theory about object boundaries and brain injuries I didn't know about).
Bad guys not fully fleshed out: One villain is painted clearly, but his/her (not tellin') motivation is muddled, and not strong enough to justify the crime/s committed. Perhaps that's also a 25-year difference in culture, but I think it's more a 25-year difference in what the reading public would *accept* as a reason for murder. In that glaring error, the book has aged very badly. Can't even explain that without ruining it, but let's just say LGBT readers might that aspect upsetting. Motivation for someone else is unclear and that character *is* a cardboard villain.
What I can learn for my own writing
Relax and take my time. This may have been published 15 years ago by an established author (she first published in 1963, and she's got more than 50 novels to her name), but the pages of detail she lavishes to build that world painted those characters, created that sense of place.
If I want that depth of richness in my own prose I need to quit pushing short-story brevity into novel-length works.
Make your villains 3-D and not just heroes in their own minds but acceptably comprehensible at some level to readers. As in, "wow, that is screwed up rationalization, but I get how she got there" instead of "who thinks like that?" or worse, "Uh, no. That's not happening. S/he is too sane for that." Which, you know--I can't grok why anyone sane who isn't a neo-Nazi would vote for Trump, so--maybe I should expand my definition of acceptably comprehensible. Real life, however, is not an excuse for flimsy fiction.
That sense of place and emotional evocation of place (and people, for that matter). I might do that exercise where you copy a few pages of someone's fiction and then rewrite a scene of my own in an attempt to get the same feeling/style. Need to do that with James Lee Burke and NK Jemisin and Bradbury and LeGuin.
I'm not going to write much about Where Late The Sweet Bird Sang because while it is a classic, and I'm very glad I read it, it has not aged as well. I should also be honest that short books that leap generations annoy me. I spend all that time with an initial cast of characters and I turn a page and now they're all dead and I'm supposed to instantly care about their offspring because, "humanity?" *boots book out airlock* Yeah, I'm not a fan of that concept.
There's a message about the reality of plans to survive climate change which I find very apropos despite the book's age. It feels like an entirely different style than the book above -- it's nice to see that in an author's collection of works.
But it also reads like a book that wouldn't get published today, and I'm not sure why. I'm certainly not qualified to say that, since I've read so little of what's coming out, but ... just reading it evoked my middle-school library, where I checked out so many of the sci-fi books I binged on and then forgot I'd read. There's a bright through-line in a lot of that fiction that's not character but idea; idea excitedly explored. You have to handwave so many variables to buy into the premise that the only thing you can do is cling to that idea and hurtle along with the author to his or her conclusion.
Which is the novel's sole weakness; its strengths are many--description, concepts, sense of place, emotional evocation among others. So what could I learn from it?
To make generation-spanning fiction work for me it has to be obvious from the get-go that's going to happen.
Again, taking some of the sections of emotional evocation of place and dissecting the text for what works.
Tone and style matter. And I need to learn more about how to use and create both.
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