New life forms, new challenges

UNTIL his long-dead father phones him from a cemetery watchman’s shack, Errol Porter is just another African American down on his luck in Los Angeles, like one of the characters in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries. Porter’s wife has left him; he has lost his computer job. He lives in a garage and does menial work for his landlady and for an arts collective. Just as Porter’s gloom begins to lift -- he meets an attractive Jamaican potter at the collective -- the phone starts ringing at night, and the voice on the line spooks him.

The caller sounds like his father and knows things about him that no crank would know. Porter is drawn to the cemetery. The naked man he finds there looks like his father but is younger than Porter, leading him to wonder if his father had a second, illicit family.

The truth is much stranger in “The Wave,” Mosley’s third trek into the realms of science fiction, after “Blue Light” and “Futureland.” “The Wave” refers to microscopic life forms deposited deep in the Earth by a giant meteor a billion and a half years ago. Very, very slowly, heeding the call of a cosmic being, Farsinger, they have worked their way back to the surface, appropriating the DNA of dead animals and humans, including Porter’s father. GT (for Good Times) -- Porter’s name for the naked man -- isn’t really his father but has appropriated his father’s memories and feelings.

Those feelings include paternal love, and Porter responds to this. His experience has made him sympathize with underdogs -- and what could be more under than the spores that have oozed from the rocks to compose GT? Porter clothes the naked man, shelters him and tries to feed him, though GT eats only sand. From GT, Porter learns some unsettling family secrets. Before long Porter is arrested by the Department of Homeland Security, which has discovered other GTs and views them as a threat to the human race.

The government effort is headed by David Wheeler, a fanatical Army general who used to be a plastic surgeon. He equates the spores with disease germs and aims to eliminate them by any means necessary, including secret prisons, torture and assassination. Fortunately, Porter has a way with women. He sleeps with Wheeler’s disaffected wife, who helps him escape from a compound in the Simi Valley. GT leads him to a mountain cave where the wave exists in its original form: a sticky black sludge endowed with a collective consciousness that puts humans’ selfish, violent, fear-ridden outlook to shame.

It’s probably significant that the sludge is black. “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” the title of Mosley’s 1998 short-story collection, might describe all his mainstream writing, in which white power presses down on black people’s lives like the inversion layer on L.A. smog. No wonder he experiments with science fiction. It lets him imagine forms of radical goodness -- the blue light in “Blue Light” and now the wave -- that reverse the usual polarities of power or even make power irrelevant.

But if something is gained by the switch in genres, something more important is lost. Typically for Mosley, “The Wave” is a short, sexy, action-packed story with hardly a wasted word. But when he writes about the Los Angeles he knows -- in this case, Porter’s life up until the visit to the graveyard -- his lean prose suggests much more than it says. This isn’t true when Mosley writes about things he doesn’t know. Like any other science fiction writer, he has to imagine them from scratch. The action in the latter half of the book moves so fast it blurs, the settings and characters are thinly sketched, and the result is that these pages seem more like an outline or a film treatment than an actual novel.

Michael Harris, author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon,” is a regular contributor to Book Review.