Jumper: Griffin's Story

Steven Gould's novel Jumper: Griffin's Story is tied-in to the recent movie and is not related to his earlier novel Jumper and its sequel.

It is, I suppose, not bad by objective standards of craft, but lord, it isn't good.

Griffin is Davy (the original jumper), with dead parents instead of child abuse, and on his own from much earlier. Also, he sketches. Since he wasn't abused, he doesn't doubt his own worth. Other than that, his personality is pretty much Davy's, and his drive to build a life is pretty much indistinguishable from Davy's.

The book is relatively slim, so the rest of it is taken up with the movie's paladins and their hunt for Griffin. They are implacable, influential, and inexplicable; certainly not human. It's like being hunted by a thunderstorm. I admit to only skimming the last quarter of the book, so perhaps I missed something, but the last quarter of the book is not really the place to start making your villains work.

One suspects that Gould is grappling with problems inherited from the movie, for which he has my sympathy, but not my forgiveness. The paladins are utter fanatics about killing children. They can make the American and Mexican governments jump through hoops without explanation. (And Jumper had it right about the American government; they're going to want to control the power, not kill it.) They have no qualms about making big public attacks. They hate jumpers for their inhuman power, but rely on their members who can psychically sense the location of nearby jumps. It makes no sense.

One problem I can blame Gould for is the way the paladins find Griffin in Mexico: He had a couple of fillings done by a local dentist, and they matched his dental records. I simply do not believe that a local Mexican community dentist uploads dental records anywhere but a patient file in his office, and certainly not anywhere searchable; I also tend to doubt that dental records from age nine are that readily matchable to age thirteen, what with, oh, tooth replacement still going on, plus cavities.

Go read something else that Gould has written. Wildside is a good one.

Posted by Greg at February 26, 2008 9:04 AM