Halfway through Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine, Lemorel, the protege of the all-powerful Zarvora, suddenly abandons her former allies and marches across the desert to another civilization. The blitzkrieg-style war she subsequently launches against her old friends offers the perfect vehicle for McMullen to introduce some nifty gadgets, including a band of metal circling the Earth that was launched into orbit millenia ago as a way to block the sun and thereby counter global warming. But somewhere in the middle of McMullen's inexpert and tendentious narrative of the war, the motivation for Lemorel's desertion is lost. We finish the book knowing more about the machines that McMullen has conjured up than about the characters that seem to be nothing more than plot conveniences.

Lemorel's baffling desertion captures, in a nutshell, what is the central problem with McMullen's novel: it's a story of big ideas and epic ambition, as written by an atrocious writer with little ear for dialogue, character, or plot. In McMullen's world, two thousands years in our future, Earth has already passed its Golden Age, an era where technological advancement was outstripped only by national aggression. The result, of course, was a devastating nuclear war punctuated by space weapons and genetically modified animals. Now, wind engines are the most prominent source of energy, steam power is banned by religion, and electric wires mysteriously burn and melt whenever somebody attempts to create one of the ancients' legendary "electroforce" engines. And there are other mysterious forces at work as well, such as the Call, a bizarre phenomenon that sweeps over the land and lures people mindlessly into the ocean.

McMullen's ideas are wonderful; Souls is punctuated throughout with small revelations about his world, all of them original, bizarre, and yet somehow consistent with his universe and his future history. Take, for instance, the great machine of the title: a computer known as the Calculor whose transistors and circuits are replaced by individual human beings, mostly felons gifted in math (don't ask), who perform the same calculations over and over again in service to a "program" of written commands.

But while McMullen has no trouble coming up with ideas, his execution of those ideas is atrocious. His protagonists are shallow and juvenile, constantly popping out of character with inappropriate actions (one famous military commander, though thankfully not Lemorel, at one point stops to grapple her own breasts) or just plain dumb lines. The characters, in fact, are so badly drawn that when they die (and they do, in the dumbest ways possible), you simply can't bother yourself to care. Sex in his world reads like a hormonal teenager's dream: beautiful lascivious women abound at every corner (McMullen keeps reminding that Dolorian, the aforementioned military commander, has an alluringly massive bosom), men pluck luscious partners from the streets, and even the most powerful woman in the world turns into a simpering courtesan under the ministrations of her strong, quiet partner. And the story quickly outstrips McMullen's narrative abilities: the plot jerks in fits and starts, sometimes jumping a few months (or even a few years) in the space of a sentence, and McMullen finds it hard to write a sustained plot thread, so that the moment interesting builds up, he suddenly concludes it.

I ended up reading Souls as quickly as possible, skimming the painfully silly story in order to find the next revelatory nugget about McMullen's fascinating future history. Unfortunately, those nuggets are so few and far between that, by the time Lemorel abandons her friends, you may also feel that abandonment is the best way to treat this uncommonly inept novel.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu