Lovelock: Mayflower Trilogy Part I

The narrator of this book plans an incestuous relationship with his own daughter, but murders her when he discovers she will not bear his children. He also throws excrement when he gets mad. He is also nosy, and peaks in on other people's secrets. (From this he is able to discover an incestuous relationship between a teenage daughter and her father.) He works as a servant to an esteemed biologist. The biologist has plenty of problems with her family. Her mother in law is an overbearing, melodramatic rich snob. Her father in law is subservient, but eventually leaves the family for single life (and dies after engaging in hard work.) Her husband has an affair with her friend, but that seems to be more of an excuse to leave the relationship and hide the true affair with another man. It all makes for a great uplifting story, right?

The setting is on a ship set to go on a long interstellar colinizing voyage. The narrator is a super-genius monkey that is trained to be a "witness" to record all the details of his master. He realizes that he has been denied the ability to reproduce and longs for it, thus trying to hatch his own spouse from some stored embryos. His daughter does not do well without a full time mother, and he later discovers there are separate "enhanced" monkeys like himself that are out there.

The ship is divided into groups, such as "Mayflower" and "Ganges" that are extreme caricatures of real life. The biologist and her family are also overly stereotyped. The only moderately believable characters are the children, and they only play a minor role in the story.

The story feels like a first pass at an interesting concept. Perhaps it would have been fleshed out better if the next two books in the planned trilogy were ever written.