Permits Were Not Required For Mutant Season

In the introduction to Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber's The Mutant Season, Silverberg talks about the history of mutation in science fiction. Mutants as the next step, mutants as the persecuted outsiders, mutants as the consequence of humans tossing atomic weapons around like popcorn. As he's going over all this, I kept thinking he'd mention the X-Men. Sure, this was published in 1989, so the X-Men weren't the film franchise they became in the 2000s, but it was still a serial running for 25 years by then. I guess he wanted to keep his focus to books.

It's around 2017. There have been mutants since the Middle Ages, generally keeping to themselves, interacting with nonmutants as necessary. Finally, in the 1990s they came out into the open, and there was predictably violence. Still, by this point there's a mutant Senator*, and mutant-run corporations gain government contracts, and attend schools openly. Not that it's all wine and roses, there is hostility, on both sides. There are mutants who want to keep to themselves, such as James Ryton Sr., and nonmutants who would be fine with that, such as Bill McLeod. Of course, the children of those two men are dating so they wind up being mirroring situations.

Senator Jacobsen is assassinated, and a Stephen Jeffers (also a mutant) steps into her spot. There are tensions resulting from his more forceful approach to removing barriers against mutants. Meanwhile, Michael Ryton (James' son) is struggling to try and live his life as he pleases, rather than be forced into lockstep with the clan's wishes. That's complicated by Jena, a mutant girl very interested in him, who his parents would prefer he date, in place of Kelly McLeod. His sister Melanie feels completely isolated, as she has the identifying gold eyes of a mutant, but she's a null, no actual powers. Nonmutants look at her as a mutant, with all the downsides of that, but the other mutants look at her as something less than them. There's also Skerry, a relative of Michael's, and a rebel who is apparently really powerful and does what he pleases. Throw some medical research attempts to create mutants, which include covertly harvesting samples from mutants, and abducting people to try them on, and you've pretty much got the story*.

The problem for me was, I kept comparing the characters to X-characters, because the story itself felt familiar enough I wasn't drawn in. Jeffers is Ultimate Magneto with a dash of Mr. Sinister. Skerry is Gambit. James Ryton Sr. was a little trickier, with his general desire to stay separate from nonmutants, but recognizing some (well, one) nonmutants were OK. Maybe regular Magneto in a mellow moment, or Nightcrawler after Storm was depowered**. Could be Xavier, I guess, since he talked big about coexistence, but isolated all his student/soldiers. Michael, with his eagerness to integrate with nonmutants, his general intelligence and work ethic, and his struggle to gain approval from his father, had to be Cyclops. In truth, I wasn't sure of that until he started sleeping with Jena on the sly, while continuing his relationship with Kelly. Yep, that's Scott Summers.

So part of my problem with the book was the feeling I'd seen all this before, which considering I've been reading X-Men comics off-and-on for about 25 years, is not surprising. The other problem was I didn't find myself liking many of the characters. Some of them didn't appear enough to gain a feel for them, several of the older figures are too locked into their separatist ways for me to like them***. I was inclined towards Michael, but then he decided to be unfaithful, and I'll be damned if I'm going to like Cyclops. Melanie and Jacobsen's assistant, Andie, are nice, but they're both kind of dumb at times, so I found myself frustrated with their inability to see they were both falling for guys who were up to no good. I was glad to see Melanie finds a place by the end of the story, but it's based on her hiding from everyone, so a bittersweet success.

Silverberg and Haber do establish a good framework for how mutants get along in the world. There's legislation to prevent mutants from competing in school sports, the mutants tend to set up their own businesses and study genetic research on their own. They're extremely concerned about protecting their bloodline, since it takes two mutants to produce a mutant child, so there's considerable pressure to marry within the clan, with the treat of being branded an outlaw, or potentially being coerced if someone refuses. it's not pretty, but it makes a certain amount of sense if the group is going to be so focused on making sure mutants continue to exist.

The book did read very fast, and there's at least one more book in the series (Mutant Prime, I believe), so if you decide to take a chance on it and it doesn't pan out, you shouldn't lose more than a couple days of reading time, depending on how fast you read. Maybe for someone with less familiarity with the X-Men, it would work better, so something to keep in mind.

* The testing stuff is alluded to, but there are no scenes actually set in the labs, where we see what's going on. There's no specific closure, either. I'm guessing that was left for later books.

** I forget the issue number. It was after the team helps Forge fight off Dire Wraiths (with special guest appearance by Holographic Rom!), and in the aftermath, Kurt's pretty much like "Screw humans, let the FF and Avengers look after them, we'll look after ourselves." It doesn't last long, though.

*** James Ryton reminds me of the uptight dads you see in movies who at some point realizes his kids and their hopes and dreams are more important than his work/status/outdated concepts, and reconnects with them. Except Ryton never does that. Of course, he's deteriorating into madness with the mental flashes by the end of the book, but he never turns that corner.