Misspent YouthPeter F Hamilton
Macmillan hardback, 358 pages, £17.99
Review by Mike Don (2002)
No space opera this time around, it’s back home to Rutland for Mr Hamilton, and a change of approach; for the first time there is no Greg Mandel or reasonable facsimile thereof taking centre stage. The premise is a classic SF What If…? In this case, what if whole-body regeneration treatment is developed, giving a seventy-eight year old man a twenty year old body. Also, what if the procedure is fabulously expensive, so the selected test subject is a world famous retired scientist? What would be the effect on his family, old friends, and on society as a whole?
In a sense, Misspent Youth skips the bigger issues, since it concentrates on the personal repercussions to Jeff Baker’s life; the wife, once younger than her husband, now significantly older; son Tim, who loses a father to gain something like an older brother; and Tim’s teenage friends, whose attitude to the Older Generation undergoes an abrupt rethink, in view of one very specific aspect of the regeneration. Young, handsome, ultra famous and as randy as a rabbit, Baker happily screws his way through the local female population, including Tim’s voluptuous girlfriend. Given that Tim and his schoolmates seem to spend most of their time in a permanent horizontal haze and zonked to the eyeballs on designer pharmaceuticals, this behaviour seems hardly unusual.
While entertainingly raunchy, the tale itself is almost eclipsed by Hamilton’s speculations on society forty years on. The all-conquering Datasphere (the internet of the future) has destroyed the music, film and book industries (unemployed former novelist Graham Joyce has a cameo role) but electronic tabloid journalism flourishes. Environment legislation has reopened long-abandoned railways; but EU states are still squabbling, still trying to keep out economic migrants. Anti-Europe Brits have become ultra-nationalist thugs . . . all uncomfortably credible.
Probably too SF for a mainstream audience, and too mainstream for SF fans.