Jul 31 2010
Bitter Seeds
Ian Tregillis’ debut novel Bitter Seeds was not what I hoped it would be. It has a cool idea, and the praise from George R. R. Martin made me hopeful that this would be my kind of SF yarn. Unfortunately, the novel has some fundamental problems that undercut my enjoyment early on, and I was never able to get past them.
Bitter Seeds is an alternate history take on World War II. Germany has developed a new weapon, one that might change the course of history and lead to the Third Reich’s domination of Europe. A group of children have been turned into technologically enhanced supermen, capable of incredible feats of power. Pyromancy, invisibility, telekinesis and precognition have been drawn out of these children through Nazi experimentation. Against them, England turns to the only power it can find that match Germany’s new weapons: warlocks.
English warlocks vs. Nazi supermen, all wrapped in the package of a spy novel? A premise like that should give an author plenty to do, even if the idea is a little silly on its face. If you wanted to write something fun, you could get that, or if you wanted something dark and terrifying, you could go there, too. While Bitter Seeds tries its hand at both of these things, it doesn’t actually succeed at either.
Of the three main characters – Marsh, the spy; Will, the warlock; and Klaus, one of the Nazi super soldiers – only Will comes across as close to a fully developed character. Marsh’s motivations are clear, but he’s so defined by his role as a Spy Who Gets the Job Done that he never quite gels as a sympathetic lead. And I never was able to figure out what drove Klaus to do anything. He’s painted as wanting to please the Nazi doctor who is their tormentor and leader, but the story never gives us any reason why.
A lot of this may have been due to the other significant problem I had with Bitter Seeds: Gretel, the precognitive Nazi super soldier with questionable loyalty to her masters. Gretel never, ever becomes a character. She’s a plot device, and a frustrating one at that. Her abilities are both faultless and limitless. She knows when everything is going to happen, how it will happen and what specific consequences will arise. So the entire story, and every character within, is basically a puppet under Gretel’s control. It’s impossible for anyone to do anything that she doesn’t know about, and there isn’t anything she knows about that she doesn’t subvert.
It’s difficult to stay invested in characters that have no agency, that are at the mercy of some omniscient, manipulative child who is a poorly developed character in her own right. It’s not that the idea of the story isn’t interesting, it’s that the story never grows organically out of those ideas. I have logical problems with how much damage five super powered children are able to do in a war that involved millions of men, and the fact that they all seem invulnerable to everything except when Gretel wants one of them to die strains credulity.
What could have been a tense and enjoyable alternate history spy novel never allowed itself to build up momentum. Bitter Seeds is apparently the first book in a series, but I doubt I’ll read beyond this one. I have some suspicions of what kinds of things we’ll see in the second novel, and I don’t know that I’m interested in them. At the very least, I stopped caring what happened to the characters halfway though the first book, and that’s not something easily won back.
