Stephen Palmer
Memory Seed (1996)
Reviewed: 1996-08-07

On a far-future Earth, Kray, the last city left, is crumbling under an onslaught of fast-growing, aggressive vegetation. The remaining people are split into several cultural groups, religious cults, and castes, ranging from the ghoulish revellers to the privileged inhabitants of the Citadel and their elitist rulers. Nearly all characters who appear throughout the book are women. Men are rare in this world, fertile men even more so. The city is a nightmare of continuous drizzle-rain-hail, decaying infrastructure, deadly flora, bizarre denizens, warring factions, and unfathomable networks of semi-biological technology. The final victory of nature over humanity is imminent. Where there is still hope for the future, it is bound to the anticipation of help from the leaders in the Citadel or from various otherworldly entities adrift in a limbo between religious fiction and mysterious reality. The narrative follows a group of people, who try to affect the future with their own hands, through the final months of Kray.

This first novel of British writer Stephen Palmer is a peculiar book. It is rather too long considering the limited plot, but surprisingly there is next to no expository background. The reader has to piece together a picture of the strange setting almost completely from the actions of the protagonists, who of course take their surroundings for granted. Excessive mentioning of street names and quarters invites the drawing of a map (none was provided in my Orbit edition). The computers and automatons are weird, after cyberpunk and steampunk this must be greenpunk. A seed sprouting into a green plant which grows into a metallic memory module? The technical jargon is rich in buzzwords and shares another quality with that of William Gibson: it appears that the author knows little about actual computers. Alas, Palmer is otherwise far from writing in a style evocative of Gibson. In the surreal ending, many mysteries remain unsolved. Is this the intention of the author? Or is the reader invited to speculate along common genre clichés?

Memory Seed is certainly different and will not fit easily into preconceived categories.

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