The Ganymede Project
by John Morrison
The Ganymede Project is John Morrisons’ first book. I think it is also one of the most ambitious books of it’s genre that I have read in a long time.
It covers many genres at the same time, these consist of science fiction / faction, horror, conspiracy, and adventure novel all at the same time. I like all those genres, so I thought in theory I should have loved this book.
For me there was one problem with it, which was that Russian Cold War politics bores me more than anything else on the planet. Russia plays a quite a large part of the story in this book, and that detracted me from it quite a bit.
The book starts well, getting straight in to setting up the main two characters, which are - FBI Agent Yuri Sverdlov and Russian Embassy woman Katrina Fontanova. It doesn’t just start with them early on in the action, though, you see most of their active intelligence careers, or so it feels. This does have the bonus of letting you get to know the characters and really understand them and their motivations, but it takes so long for this to happen that at times it feels it isn’t worth it.
You must perservere though, because once the background is set up the book really gets moving.
Towards the end I had the feeling that The Ganymede Project was more of an educated persons X-Files, it covers the same kind of conspiracy theory stuff, and some of the scenes feel slightly familiar to me as a fan of the early series, but nothing that could be called a direct take off from it.
I say educated because this book is based more in real life, and whilst I can pick holes in some parts of the X-Files, I found it hard to nitpick this book in areas of my expertise.
Considering Morrison is an ex Air Force Intelligence Officer, and has degrees in systems engineering and psychology, you would expect him to get his facts right!
The horror elements of this book (and yes, I call someone being eaten alive by a huge pack of rats horror) read quite like some other books. Perhaps the similarity is that he likes writing about things eating people, but I think that the reasons behind the rats in Morrisons book a lot more sinister.
There are some amusing moments in this book - Yuri is involved in most of them - when he is trying (and failing) to spy on Katrina it often feels like more of a comedy.
I’m not sure if it’s just my perception, or if it’s meant to be like that, but whichever it is, it works. A light hearted break is necessary every now and then in to give you a break from the heavier parts of the story.
The development of the relationships between the two main characters is handled carefully. There was always a possibility that the two characters could become a cross between Romeo and Juliet and Mulder and Scully - people on opposite sides working to a common goal who end up falling in love, but nothing so corny happens, which was pleasing to see for me.
I would have liked to have seen more of some of the other characters such as Jafri and Deke (the UFO watching conspiracy nuts) and also to explore Chandra a bit more. His position at the heart of the project was an interesting one, and his paranoia over others becoming involved in the project was something that I would have like to see a lot more of. I can’t say too much without giving a step by step account of the book, but I do feel that if more time were given to this side of the story than to the setting up it would have been a good thing.
I must say again that this is a very ambitious story. Considering that it is Morrisons’ first book, he pulls it off very well. Once it got started I found I enjoyed it a lot, but it took a lot of work to get into it.
I feel that other people that show more interest into the Russian Cold War would have been more intrigued by the beginning and found the background information quite useful, but it wasn’t so for me.
The Ganymede Project covers a huge number of genres, and it’s hard to keep everyone happy all of the time. Still, this is a well written book, and I think it has a huge target audience out there even if I am not a big part of it.
If Morrison ever writes a book that doesn’t cover the Cold War era, I hope I find out, because I really like his writing style.
I’d recommend this book to any X-Files fans, and those who like a good hi-tech spy novel with a dark twist. But fans of standard horror probably wouldn’t appreciate it as much.