Tom Easton 

In Clement’s kind of hard SF, the idea is definitely the story. Physical law sets the stage and defines a puzzle or a problem, and the characters exist to find the solution. Other writers give their characters extensive backgrounds and complex psychologies and flesh out their tales with interpersonal dynamics. Clement largely ignores all that, and if many people consider his characters his great weakness, he replies (perhaps–I’m putting words in his mouth) that his fans read his stories to think, not to feel.

His latest novel fits the pattern. Half Life is set some centuries from now, when a vast proliferation of new diseases threatens the survival not only of humanity but of other species as well. Medicine is advanced, and most of the new prions, viruses, and so on can be promptly identified and treated. But each one claims thousands or millions of lives before it is defeated or stalemated. It’s a losing battle, and there’s a major mystery in where all the illness is coming from–flukes of nature, or terrorist gene-hackers?–and the species is desperate.

The title relates to the story on several levels. When referring to radioactive isotopes, "half life" means the time needed for half the isotope to decay. It means something similar when referring to toxic chemicals in soil or water. Or when referring to a declining humanity. Or when referring to the crew of a spaceship sent off to Titan to look for clues to the origin of life (computer on the fritz? Pound and poke and tinker, and when all else fails, go back to basics–check the plug). Fifty folks are sent, and everyone knows some won’t reach Titan, some won’t survive building the base, some won’t make it past the next milestone, and if the crew’s half-life is long enough, someone will still be there when the necessary discovery is made.

The crew members live in quarantine cells to spare each other exposure to their bugs. They operate jets and labs by teleoperator control. They find a planet where water ice passes for rock, lakes are filled with liquid hydrocarbons, and tarry black patches stud the landscape, waiting to absorb equipment and bodies.

Are those tarry patches alive? Well, perhaps not quite. Do they hold an answer for the threatened Earthlings? Fiction being what it is, you surely have a pretty good notion of what to expect; all I will tell you is that the answer failed to convince me.

But Half Life is still one more dose of Hal Clement for a world that hasn’t had a new fix in years (I think Still River, reviewed here in May 1988, was the last).

 

All of an Instant, Richard Garfinkle, TOR, $24.95, 383 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86617-8).

The hardest thing to imagine is the unimaginable. That may sound trite, but think about it: It is one of those things that science fiction writers have been struggling to do for most of a century.

Some science fiction writers, that is. Most settle for reimagining what others have imagined before. A few actually do a better job of it, or tell a better story on the old foundation. But they’re not doing the hard work, and in this field we hold high those who do–even when they are not really very great writers. It’s hard to explain the adulation received by some of the old-time writers–and some of the new ones–in any other way.

You know what I’m leading up to: There’s a new boy on the block, and he’s taking a solid whack at that hard work. He’s Richard Garfinkle, and his second novel, All of an Instant, is well worth attention.

His "unimaginable" is time as fourth dimension, which if one can only sense, it gives one freedom to move freely across the ages. Or time as more than that, for Garfinkle posits an atemporal, acausal realm, a dimension, the Instant, where any change affects our own realm, the Flux, and our history. In Garfinkle’s words: "The lower half of time where most people live is solid stone, a hard mass of cause and effect confining human life in walls of inevitability. . . . The upper half of time is an ocean of clear water, rippling with tides of action and change. . . . The waters of atemporality follow the tides from past to future. . . . "

One senses the nub of the problem of unimaginability immediately. It is impossible for our temporal, causal minds to wrap around the atemporal and acausal. We are too burdened by our baggage of history, which is precisely Garfinkle’s theme. He tells us that people have found their way into the Instant, each one as a fishlike being with a tail of personal history that propels them through the waters. One’s personal consciousness moves through one’s tail until it comes to the end, and then recycles; memory is scattered and lost, but most people, whose tails are about ten years long, barely notice. The Drum, Kookatchi, whose tail is but a minute long, comes awfully close to an instantaneous consciousness, a true native of the Instant. The Monster of the Deeps, Quillithé, has one a century long and is unique in her talent for long-term planning (even though both "term" and "plan" must be meaningless in an atemporal, acausal realm).

The first man to penetrate the Instant, Dhiritirashta, promptly realized the power he had gained. He could with a flick of his tail redirect the past to create a utopia for his people. Unfortunately, his idea of utopia was not everyone’s. Others followed him into the Instant to attack and destroy and remake the Flux to fit a different vision, and those in turn were followed by more. War raged, and the Flux–if one could only see it as the Instant’s denizens could when they "anchored down"–was a chaotic flickering of alternate histories. Kingdoms, dynasties, and peoples rose and fell in the blink of an eye, and if that seems unutterably tragic to us, bear in mind that to each king and citizen their history was the one and only, forever and ever; memory said so.

By the time of the story, there are thousands of warring factions in the Instant. They each have their own vision of history, they are armed with weapons harvested from all of history, and none can possibly win. In the Flux, the only relatively stable point is that time when the first Homo sapiens were emerging from their predecessors. Everyone wants to control them for here is the birth of history, but they have learned from their raiders and enslavers and are now protected by their own corps of Instant-dwellers, the Ghosts, led by Nir, a War Chief of uniquely adaptable mind.

Now the Ghosts have observed an anomaly, a fragment of Flux floating free in the Instant. Elsewhere, a large zone of the Instant has turned black, opaque. Dangerous change hovers over all, and Nir must go forth to see what is happening. In due time he will enounter Kookatchi and Quillithé and learn a great deal about the nature of both Instant and Flux.

All of an Instant suffers from the oxymorons that Garfinkle cannot escape. It is nevertheless an intriguing tale even on the surface level. It is also heavily laden with metaphor and allegory, and it is perhaps even more intriguing on that level. Garfinkle is saying much about how we each have a typical "time horizon" to our memory and planning, we each have a vision of reality which we struggle to impose on those around us, and we each forget that our visions are heavily influenced by reality. There’s more, of course, but I’ll leave that to you.

 

Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card, TOR, $24.95, 380 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86860-X).

Orson Scott Card’s first novels came out in the late 1970s. He very quickly became a writer to watch, but it wasn’t until 1985 that he became a major figure with Ender’s Game (reviewed here in July 1985), the tale of a child winning a war against the alien Buggers while still engaged in what appeared to be mere training exercises. Later came the rest of the "Ender Quartet"–Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind–as well as the Alvin Maker series and a number of others.

Now Card has gone back a decade and a half to revisit Ender Wiggin’s story. The key is that Ender was not alone. He was but the best of many, the leader, the carrier of humanity’s hope for survival, and he didn’t really know what was going on even though much was implicit in the situation.

Meet Ender’s Shadow, Bean, just a little guy, four years old when the Battle School gets a hold of him, but such a clever little bugger (yes, he strikes some as rather alien) that before the age of one he could escape from an apparent organ farm by hiding in a toilet tank and then survive on the mean streets of Rotterdam by tipping older kids on how to civilize the bullies. He pays attention, he collects information, he seeks patterns, and it doesn’t take long at all for him to see some important truths. Fortunately, he knows how to keep his mouth shut. He can thus play his helpful role in Ender’s career while granting the reader another look, from a different angle, at the events of Ender’s Game.

The reader’s experience is something like rereading an old favorite but with an added freshness–it’s a different story, after all–that doesn’t hurt a bit. And Card’s touch with plot and character, language and pace, have not suffered a bit over the years. This one is a great pleasure to read.

As a sidenote, Card explains in his Foreword that he was toying with the idea of turning Ender’s Game into a shared-world story, letting other writers set their own adventures in its frame. He even "went so far as to invite a writer whose work I greatly admire, Neal Shusterman, to consider working with me to create novels about Ender Wiggin’s companions . . . [But] the more we talked, the more jealous I became . . . I deftly swiped the project back."

Not to denigrate Shusterman, but we can be glad he did.

 

When We Were Real, William Barton, Warner, $6.99, 337 pp. (ISBN: 0-446-60706-1)

William Barton’s When We Were Real shows us a pretty nasty corporate-dominated future and then tears it down to offer a brighter hope.

Meet Darius Murphy, just a kid growing up in a matriarchy that entertains little boys by giving them lots of chances to play gatesy with the little girls, and as soon as they’re out of school traps them into marriages where they are property. Fortunately, Murph’s Dad–though he fell for one of the Mother’s Children and got trapped–grew up in a different frame of reference and sympathizes with Murph’s itch to escape. At the very last moment, he comes up with a starship ticket, and the kid is off.

Marriage and chattel slavery aren’t the only things Murph escapes. Home was Audumla, a cylindrical habitat long abandoned by Standard ARM, one of human space’s major corporations. A bit tumbledown, a bit decrepit, a neglected byway of civilization, the sticks. And the bright lights beckon, with aptitude testing, a slot on a Standard ARM medevac team, Violet–a gengineered fox, very purple, very foxy–and a slaughterous mission that clearly identifies the corporate ethos with that of Nazis and Serbs.

Once he’s out of the hospital–without Violet–Murph is put on indefinite leave and hies off to spend a hundred years exploring the further reaches of human space and perfidy. In due time, he finds that Violet is not dead after all, and they return to duty.

Eventually Earth grows disgusted with the slaughter and mounts a response something like NATO’s response to the Serbs. There is more slaughter, of course, but in the end peace and a chance to revisit origins, close books on the past, and find a deeper, richer love.

Murph is an innocent lost in a sea of blood, every sympathy strained to the breaking point, but he somehow maintains his innocence, saved by the loves of his father and Violet. If you don’t mind explicit sex and violence, you’ll enjoy this one.

 

A Phule and His Money, Robert Asprin with Peter J. Heck, Ace, $6.99, 277 pp. (ISBN: 0-441-00658-2)

The third volume of the series Robert Asprin began with Phule’s Company (reviewed here in February 1991) is now available, and once again, all that’s missing is the laugh track. The titular Phule is Willard, a young mega-millionaire who for some reason joined the Space Legion. When he had a peace conference strafed, his enraged boss, General Blitzkrieg, put him in charge of a company of colossal misfits, which he promptly turned into a crack unit with large doses of money, respect, encouragement, leadership, and of course more money.

Phule’s Paradise took Phule and his crew to a Vegas-like worldlet to save a casino from ruin. They succeeded, of course, and that angered General Blitzkrieg worse than ever. For A Phule and His Money, the mission is to make like a peacekeeping force–on the very world where Phule shot up the peace conference. He’s not exactly popular there, and he doesn’t help matters–as far as the local government goes–when he brings the rebels out of the jungle to turn them into entrepreneurs and build a roller-coaster theme park to compete with the government’s own top-secret effort to make the tourist dollars rain down from space.

Phule is no fool, of course, especially with his butler Beeker looking after his money, and he knows that two theme parks should draw more tourists than one. Or so he hopes. Meanwhile there’s a miniature dinosaur studying his operation to see whether a peace treaty or a war is in order, and–beyond all precedent–three of the galaxy’s top warriors, the feline Gambolts, have enlisted. Not to mention the IRS team looking for rake-offs.

Life gets complicated, and the tale’s the thing. This one’s hardly profound, but it is fun and funny. Enjoy.

 

Satan Is a Mathematician, Keith Allen Daniels, Anamnesis Press (P.O. Box 51115, Palo Alto, CA 94303), $12.95, 165 pp. (ISBN: 0-9631203-6-0)

Poet and chemist Keith Allen Daniels has a new collection of his work available. Satan Is a Mathematician contains over a hundred poems, including fifteen Rhysling Award finalists, and amply displays Daniels’s love of words, sense of humor, and a perverse turn of mind that can imagine Einstein’s brain as catfish bait. The introduction argues that though all the talk of two antipathetic cultures–scitech and the humanities–reflects a genuine problem, many people bridge the gap. Many, of course, are familiar names to science fiction readers.

If you have a taste for science fiction and fantasy poetry, you’ll enjoy this one.

It’s worth mentioning that a change in the publishing industry seems to be developing. Computers and laser printers have reached the point where it is practical to print a book only when a customer orders it, and a number of operations, such as agent Richard Curtis’s E-Reads, are setting up to take advantage of this, complete with sales arrangements through Amazon.com, Borders, Ingram, and other major distributors.

 

Writers are worried that print-on-demand technology may mean that they will never be able to get the rights to their books back from publishers, for the publishers will never declare them "out of print" (because customers will always be able to order copies). But there are ways around that problem. Print-on-demand publishing is coming rapidly–and for the reader, it does indeed hold benefits, such as the ability to find copies of older books.

Actually, it’s already here. J. Neil Schulman’s Pulpless.Com advertises that for its books, paper is optional. You can download a copy, or you can order a paper copy. Recent titles include Piers Anthony’s Realty Check ($19.95, ISBN 1-58445-000-2); Paul Levinson’s Paul Levinson’s Bestseller, a collection of stories and essays, some from these pages ($19.95, ISBN 1-58445-033-9); and a number of classic reprints by Norman Spinrad, Robert Silverberg, Raymond F. Jones, and more. Check it out at http://www.pulpless.com.