Alt-Media: Ancestor

2006, Empty Set Entertainment

At the beginning, what I wanted was a light thriller, horror or scifi audio drama. What I got was more akin to an audiobook, which I have never actually listened to before explicitly -- a read-through of the novel by Scott Sigler. No, not quite that. Sigler is a bit of an empire builder, a pathfinder, having been doing audio drama podcasts for over 15 years. This started as one of those, a serialized podcast in 2006 and has since been published as novel. Also, from the brief amount of the podcast's 2010 Q&A I listened to, he is prone to tweaking and rewriting his stories to tie them all together, update them, etc.

I think this was added to Spotify in 2023, where I listened to it.

I said, at the beginning. In the end what I ended up getting was a hate-listen to something that enraged me as much as it intrigued me. He's got a solid grasp on pacing and structure and how to depict apparently realistic scientific terminology and "action". What he cannot do is write people. In all my decades of watching B and Z grade movies, and reading trashy novels, I am quite aware of writing cardboard characters. And for the most part, I accept them as they are meant to be. And even enjoy a lot of them. But this book had zero characters I actually like, and only a couple I ended up enjoying. Each character comes across as the worst of the worst of cardboard stand-ins for real people, like the most terrible character in an Uwe Boll movie.

And he persists in doing "the voices" of the characters, even the women. Nothing can break me from the immersion than him switching into a "funny voice" because every single one of his fucking characters has to have a distinct accent or voice. A few he can pull off, but most just ended up grating on my nerves, furthering my dislike for many of the characters. 

And furthermore, I expect its partially because he has an audience (white male machismo mongers), what can we expect from the female characters? If the male leads are cardboard, the female characters are vastly stereotypical blow up dolls.

OK OK, so it was terrible but why did you keep on listening, and even, almost, briefly, consider listening to / reading his prequel "Infected" series?

Again, for a scifi thriller, its not bad, more akin to the B-scifi & horror I watch.

Essentially, a biotech company intent on creating surrogate creatures for human-matching organ harvesting instead ends up creating monsters, monsters that get loose and eat everyone. Its up to a couple of scrappy "heroes" to survive and kill the monsters before they get loose.

The story opens, setting things up. After the events of the Infected trilogy where something got loose in Detroit and ended with the government nuking much of the city, the President sets up a new taskforce, something mostly off the books, to monitor and stop scientific situations before they "blow up". It was  this premise I was onboard with, and somewhat disappointed it ended up only being the B-plot. But it establishes the kind of pressure the Bad Guys, a biotech company called Genada, are under.

The Genada story starts on Baffin Island, where we establish the characters: PJ Colding - head of security, his asshole security guards made up of ex-military goons - OK, Gunther is not that bad a guy, considering he is writing vampire romance novels in his spare time, a bunch of asshole scientists -- Jian is less asshole, more an utterly broken genius plagued by hallucinations and racial stereotyping. But that act ends soon enough due to sabotage. The owners of Genada, the Paglione Brothers, fly out the remaining team on a modified C5 plane to a remote island in Lake Superior. That is where the real story takes place.

Scientist Liu Jiandan, or Jian, has invented a powerful computer system that can model evolutionary traits with almost magical speed. With it she has brought a few species back from extinction but its primary purpose is to create animals capable of producing human-compatible organs via xenotransplantation. Except, she's suffering from paranoid delusions and ends up creating something less passive organ host, and more uber-predator.

As the small island is cut off by a massive winter storm system, the implanted cows used for the experimentation start showing signs of being dangerous. But of course, the asshole scientists have already ignored all the warning signs. Dante Paglione, one of the heads of the biotech company and a raving muscle-headed psychopathic military type, shows up to make sure things go well, and if they cannot, wipe out all signs of the work -- because B-plot still is there, somewhere, in the background.

The cows begin giving birth after an aborted attempt to escape the island. And they are massive, quickly growing, bigger than ever conceived, land-sharks. They eat everything in sight: their cow mother's corpses, people, other cows, their own dead. They do so quickly, violently, consuming everything even bones & hide. Our few sympathetic character survivors have to survive not only the monsters, but also the human monsters working for Dante. Not a lot do.

Again, decent pacing and good description of the action allowed me to stick to the story even as almost every character, even the sympathetic ones, grated on my nerves. The monsters are scary, and I have always enjoyed a good science-gone-wrong story, I just wish the B-plot had played more of a role, but it was more tacked on as part of Sigler's world-building reboots. I can respect his alternative approach to fiction building, and rebuilding, even if it annoys me.

Normally I would now go back, in the writing of this post, and add in the actors, or voice-actors, for each of the characters, and while I was attempted to amusingly do a -- Clayton Detweiler (Scott Sigler) -- for each character I mentioned, I resisted the urge. Probably for the best.

Wimp. But don't forget to mention that the fandom for this writer is likely to come commenting on your less than favourable (catch phrase of the month) writeup, much like the "fans" of "Tomorrow When the War Began" used to.