Book review: Natural Selection by Dave Freedman

Although this novel had flaws, I decided to post a review of it because after finishing it, I immediately checked Amazon to see if a sequel was out or forthcoming--which means it was pretty enjoyable and I wasn't quite ready to relinquish its world yet.

Natural Selection is the book's premise as well as its title. A group of scientists conducting research about manta rays comes across a new--to humans--species of ray that recently has migrated from the unexplored depths of the ocean and is quickly evolving and adapting to new circumstances. An apex predator, the ray need only encounter new types of prey once to outsmart them, whether they are sharks or dolphins or humans. And the ray isn't content to remain in the oceans; it takes to the air and then to land. Given its massive size, great hunger, and superior intelligence, it naturally poses a growing threat to people, and our intrepid sextuplet of scientists faces the challenge of defeating a predator that no one else believes exists.
My first gripe about the novel is not the fault of author Dave Freedman and in fact may well be something that bothered him too. I hesitate to mention it because it's a spoiler, but that's the problem: The blurb on the back of the novel gives away plot elements that don't come into play until the last hundred pages or later. I HATE it when publishers do this, and it left me wondering whether the person who wrote the blurb had actually read the novel, or if they were just so stupid that they didn't see a problem with killing most of the suspense.

OK, now that's off my chest.

Natural Selection is Freedman's first novel, and it suffers from many typical first-novel flaws. The characters are cardboard, and the technique with which their personalities and interactions are sketched could aptly be called "tell me, don't show me." He has a fair amount of technical information to present to readers, and he isn't sure how to do it. So he alternates between interspersing authorial comments about how evolution works with the CSI-style tendency to present it in dialogue. And like on CSI, this doesn't work so well, because as a reader, I just don't buy someone with a Ph.D. in ichthyology (cool new vocab word--the study of fish) needing to ask a colleague the significance of this predator having a large brain. If I, a person with one college biology class, can figure out why it's a big deal that the rays outsmarted a dolphin, a scientist shouldn't need to ask another scientist what that means. You know?

Granted, it's hard for me to say what assumptions an author can or should make about the general level of intelligence and education of his or her readers. I know publishers regularly insult authors by insisting their target audiences have an 8th-grade comprehension level. (Frankly, given what publishers define as 8th-grade comprehension, I think this is also an insult to most readers, including the 8th graders who actually choose to read books on their own.) Natural Selection is being marketed as a cross between Jaws! and Jurassic Park, so clearly the publisher wants to appeal to a broad readership that doesn't have much specialized knowledge or education. (Whether Freedman also wants that or whether he was forced to adapt an original manuscript along those lines, I don't know.) It's also obvious that the novel is a hopeful contender for film adaptation.

Despite the sometimes clumsy writing and one-dimensional characters, the book works. It didn't give me nightmares, but it definitely kept me turning pages and wanting more. Freedman's drawing of his predatory rays is consistent enough, and he provides enough background about the deep ocean, to make the existence of this type of creature seem perfectly plausible. He does endow the characters with enough humanity that I cared what happened to them. And that, to me, is what matters most in a novel like this: You have to have a stake in the characters' fates, and/or you have to believe in the monster. A novel that can do both is rare and satisfying, and that's why, despite its flaws, Natural Selection succeeds.