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Infinity Beach, Jack McDevitt, Harper, $25.00, 384 pp. (ISBN: 0-061-05123-3).
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Are we alone? We’ve been scanning the skies for years for radio
signals from distant civilizations. There’s a program to enlist
folks with old satellite dishes in the search. SETI@ home (http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu) has even turned the processing of picked-up signals into a home
PC screensaver.
And we haven’t found squat. Among the several possible reasons,
we have to consider that we are in fact alone. That would comfort
some people, who fear the Cannibals from Eta Carinae, but it would
disappoint some as well. Surely the latter group includes most
science fiction writers and readers, for whom Jack McDevitt wrote
Infinity Beach.
The time is centuries hence, when humanity is spread across a
number of terraformed worlds. Kim Brandywine, trained as an astrophysicist,
works as a fundraiser for the Seabright Institute, a research
outfit dedicated, among other things, to searching for aliens,
or "celestials." They haven’t had any more luck than we have,
however, so despite a sense that humanity is retreating from its
frontiers and growing content just to sit on the porch and rock,
they are setting up an unmistakable billboard to announce our
presence: they’re blowing up half a dozen stars. The tale opens
as they trigger the first nova.
Kim had a sister, an older clone, named Emily, who vanished right
after the return of a failed exploratory mission. Other crew members
died. A mountain blew up. A town was abandoned, and there are
rumors that ghosts wander the deserted valley. One of Kim’s old
professors urges her to look into the ghosts, and–very reluctantly–she
does.
As soon as she gets thoroughly spooked, the Astute Reader is pretty
clear on just what the ghosts must be. It is no great surprise
to learn that the log of Emily’s ship has been tampered with,
or that the son of one of her crewmates has a model of a very
strange-looking starship. The resistance Kim encounters as she
delves into the mystery is more surprising, and that is surely
the thrust of the tale: Why the resistance? Why the coverup? Why
does her lover have to die? And can the ancient dream be fulfilled
at last? Can humanity be revitalized?
In her investigation, Kim is much luckier than she has any right
to expect. She is intelligent and resourceful, and she has the
help of friends, but her society is not nearly as paranoid as
our own. Otherwise she would hardly be able to steal a starship
(not once, but twice!). We can put that down to centuries of peace,
or we can just refuse to worry about it, for her escapades keep
the story moving briskly, and she is an easy protagonist to identify
with. McDevitt has produced another very enjoyable novel.
Bios, Robert Charles Wilson, Tor, $22.95, 208 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86857-X).
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Forty years ago in these pages, Harry Harrison’s first published
novel appeared. Deathworld (a trilogy before the decade was out) dealt with a human colony
on a world whose life-forms were quite ferociously out to get
the intruders, who defended themselves with guns and walls. The
operative metaphor was that of being at war, under siege. The
resolution involved learning to compromise, cooperate, to live
at one with the alien nature.
Robert Charles Wilson’s Bios is a modern Deathworld. There is a political backdrop–an Earth dominated by Families
with the ethics of the Mafia, opposed by independent, freedom-loving
Belters (but Kuiper, not Asteroid). There are high-tech ftl transportation
(Higgs launchers) and communication (resonating particle pairs)
whizmoes. But the key element is Isis, an alien world whose life
never had its evolution disrupted by cosmic impacts and the like.
Cells are highly evolved, complicated and fierce–and predaceous,
and human visitors must be protected by bioproof armor and multilayered
shelters. On the surface, it looks a bit like Harrison’s vision,
but the operative metaphor is more that of the plague lab, of
Hot Zones and containment and avoidance of contact. Which makes
sense–if an Isian bug gets to you, you bleed from every orifice,
your flesh liquefies, and you die.
Enter Zoe Fisher, the last survivor of a clone group that went
through hell. She was equipped as an infant with heavy-duty immune
system boosters. She has a new high-tech protective suit to test
on Isis. And she is eager to get out in the bush and get a close
look at the indigenous Diggers, who live in underground burrows.
First, however, she must get something going with one of the local
researchers, Tam Hayes. A distant research station must fail as
Isian life penetrates its seals. When the evacuees reach the orbiting
command station and are quarantined, Isian bugs must slip past
the barriers and begin to claim lives. And the research station
that holds Zoe and Tam must feel its seals going. Isis is learning
how to penetrate the barriers that protect humans.
And off Zoe goes to see the Diggers and be dragged into the burrows,
where her suit is stripped from her. Will her immune enhancements
protect her? Memory of Harrison’s Deathworld and its resolution in cooperation led me to think that they would,
that they would provide a better answer to Isis than interminable
barriers. But modern writers are less optimistic or more realistic.
Wilson says one cannot cooperate with such ferocity (I deliberately
do not call it mindless): One needs better armor, more powerful
defenses.
You’ll enjoy this one.
The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus, Harry Harrison, Tor, $23.95, 269 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86934-7).
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Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat, a thief and con artist who
likes to keep his hand in even though he does now work for a secret
law-enforcement agency, has been with us since 1957. Indeed, a
Rat story was Harrison’s very first sale to this magazine! Since
then, the Rat, AKA Slippery Jim DiGriz, has roamed the galaxy,
collecting boodle, tripping up villains, and generating novels
and laughs.
Is The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus the last in the series? It ends with "THE END?" for Slippery
Jim is getting old and his lovely wife Angelina insists that it’s
time to retire. But he’s still in fine fettle even if he does
take a few more lumps than usual and Angelina is held in durance
vile to make him serve a villain’s wile.
It all begins when a picnic is interrupted by an onslaught of
robot cops. Jim and Angelina blow them away until, down to their
last shots, they await the end. What appears, however, is Imperetrix
Von Kaiser-Czarski, alias Kaizi, the richest man in the galaxy
and forty thousand years old to boot. He wants to hire the Rat–for
a princely sum–to solve a rash of bank robberies. Jim quite naturally
agrees, and soon, with the aid of his son’s supercomputer, he
has learned that the only factor shared by all the robberies was
that the circus was in town.
Heigh-ho, then. Learn a spot of magic and sign up under the Big
Top as it opens on the world of Fetorr, where the milk of human
kindness soured long ago and there are far too many kinds of cops.
A bank is promptly robbed, and Jim is framed, Angelina captured,
and Jim instructed to rob the hitherto unrobbable.
He’s in a bind. If he doesn’t obey Kaizi, Angelina dies. If he
does obey, he commits ingenious crimes–without profit!–and in
the end, surely, they both die. He must obey, he must save his
and Angelina’s lives, and he must bring Kaizi down.
How he succeeds makes an entertaining light adventure.
 The Silk Code, Paul Levinson, Tor, $23.95, 319 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86823-5).
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When Paul Levinson’s "The Mendelian Lamp" appeared in these pages
(April 1997), I thought his take on Amish farmers as genetic engineers
quite interesting. Firefly bombs are a bit of a stretch, but we
really are learning that some quite wondrous things might be done
with biological technologies and that the basic ideas don’t demand
high-tech labs to implement. With little more than insight, understanding,
and patience, one might use very traditional selective breeding
to accomplish marvelous things.
Levinson is guilty of a few more stretches in The Silk Code, and there’s a lot of bafflegab as well, but overall it’s a grand
story with an eye to the vast sweep of time that reminds of Poul
Anderson. The tale begins with that "Mendelian Code," which told
us the good-guy Amish are fighting a biowar against fake Amish
who have for centuries been working evil against the mass of humanity.
The grand unanswered question was the reason for the war, and
that is precisely where Levinson found his novel.
Part two drops back to eighth-century ad Xinjiang, where a man
named Gwellyn is trying to find out why everyone insists on utterly
destroying the occasional bodies of "singers" (whose thick bones
and bulging brows immediately make the reader think of Neandertals).
In his wanderings from Asia to Africa and Europe, Gwellyn learns
of a people who communicate only in beautiful song. In due time,
he finds the cave paintings of Spain and a people who can bring
them to life to tell a tale of a happy people (Neandertals) slaughtered
by newcomers (Cro-Magnons).
Back to the present, and New York City detective Phil D’Amato
has a puzzle on his hands: a Neandertal corpse that carbon-dates
as thirty thousand years old. There’s another in London, another
in Toronto. There are genetic anomalies, and a link to silk. And
the investigators working on the scattered cases are dying! The
war the Amish fight goes waaayyy back, and it is by no means over.
A biologist must criticize that Levinson makes his ancients far
too knowledgeable about things–e.g., viruses–that require technological
assistance to see and manipulate. Genes can be understood and
manipulated bare-handed, so to speak, but not as genes. Selective
breeding deals with phenotype, the visible features of the organism,
and with long-lived creatures such as humans it must take such
an inordinately long time as to destroy an essential component
of the tale.
A chemist must object to the idea of a virus that can transmute
carbon-14 to affect carbon dating. But the same chemist might
still save the story by suggesting that transmutation is hardly
necessary; all that is needed is a biochemical process that differentiates
between lighter and heavier isotopes (and there are such things).
A non-scientist will ignore such matters. Levinson slides deftly
along, his characters quite interesting enough to arouse the reader’s
sympathies as lurking assassins await their chances, and the reader
finishes the book feeling nicely satisfied.
Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle, Roc, $21.95, 275 pp. (ISBN: 0-451-45763-3).
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Just when you think that Peter S. Beagle has a pattern (see, e.g.,
The Innkeeper’s Song, reviewed here in April 1994, and Giant Bones, reviewed here in December 1997), he goes and does something
different. His latest, Tamsin, is still fantasy and still excellent but is much closer to real
life.
If, that is, you believe in ghosts.
The tale begins in New York City, where narrator Jennifer Gluckstein
deals with life as the misfit teen daughter of divorced parents.
Her father Nathan (stage-named Norris Groves) is a second-rank
opera singer. Her mother Sally is a vocal coach and piano teacher
who has something going with Evan McHugh, a British agricultural
biologist. Natch, Evan proposes and Jenny’s life turns upside
down: a new Dad, two brothers, school and friends left in the
dust, and a decrepit old Dorsetshire farm for a new home.
The farmhouse–a minor manor dating from the seventeenth century–of
course has hidden rooms, strange noises (including voices under
the tub), boggarts in the kitchen, and the Wild Hunt itself overhead
on stormy nights. So much, Evan assures all, is just about normal,
and he tells old folktales of pookas and the like. But Jenny soon
finds there is a ghost as well.
I don’t mean the ghost cat that quite enchants Jenny’s Mister
Cat. The one that matters is Tamsin Willoughby, who has lingered,
waiting for release, for over three centuries.
What is her story? What does she await? What does it have to do
with pookas and the Wild Hunt? Jenny does a bit of research and
learns that in Tamsin’s time, Dorset was the scene of a carnage
to rival modern Bosnia. A rival claimant to the English throne
had found adherents there, and when the battle was lost and the
rival fled, King James sent George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice
of Wem, to preside over what became known as the Bloody Assizes.
Jeffreys delighted in agony, guilt was irrelevant, and the locals
were hung and drawn and quartered and their parts mounted on pikes
all over the shire.
And he dined in that minor manor, saw Tamsin, was smitten, decided
that of course they were fated, and never mind that she loved
another.
Enough, or I will spoil it for you. Beagle gives us here a marvelous
tale of ancient evil, ancient love, eventual justice, and a witness
who must somehow fit all the stuff of ancient superstition into
a modern world. He is, of course, entirely successful and I hardly
need to add that I recommend this one heartily.
Kaspian Lost, Richard Grant, Avon Spike, $24, 313 pp. (ISBN: 0-380-97672-2).
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Richard Grant dwells very clearly on the literary side of the
science fiction landscape. Not for him the hard-edged stuff of
Hal Clement or Greg Benford, nor the adventures of Frederik Pohl
or Jack McDevitt. He’s perfectly willing to be a social critic,
but his mode is metaphor and image and pose.
One of his targets in Kaspian Lost is modern education, its purported failure, and the rhetoric
of privatization that claims to respect each child’s autonomy
while strait-jacketing them with counselors and medications to
fit a very corporate view of conventionality. The title character,
Kaspian Aaby, is a classic innocent, a stalking horse through
which the author can make his points.
The stalk begins with Kaspian, whose raving conservative fundamentalist
stepmother has reacted to his attempts at autonomy by punting
him into a remedial summer camp to prepare him for the American
Youth Academy ("an exciting private-sector alternative to the
failed public school system") in the fall. He promptly gets fed
up and walks into the Maine woods, sees a light, meets three evil
leprechauns and a beautiful girl who may or may not do strange
things with his body. He wakes up four days later and sixty miles
away. Before the camp retrieves him (with his stepmother–full
of guilt-inducing reproaches–in tow), he meets an aging hippie,
her gay son Malcolm, and Weeb Eugley, an over-the-top investigator
of alien abductions.
Poor Kaspian is now raw meat for the counselor Thera Boot who,
like Eugley, strives to fit everything and everyone into preconceived
patterns. So do Jasper Winot, the entrepreneur behind the AYA,
and his politician friends. Success at fitting things into boxes
means one is in control, one knows what one is doing and where
one is going. Success in selling new sets of boxes to others means
power and wealth. Things that don’t fit are clearly problems in
dire need of fixing.
Kaspian doesn’t fit, doesn’t want to fit, and doesn’t want to
be fixed. Yet he must live in a world that insists on fitting
and fixing. Is there some resolution of the essential conflict?
Perhaps not, says Grant. The future cannot be controlled, and
we are all, to some degree, misfits. To know that is to be either
insane or blessed.
Unfortunately, though Grant has interesting things to say, he
does not show here the ability to hold the reader’s attention
well. The tale develops slowly, the most intriguing aspects (to
an SF reader) turn out to be mostly red herrings, and the characters
are not much more than lifeless postures.
Amy Thomson’s Through Alien Eyes (the sequel to The Color of Distance) is a simple, straightforward tale marred by pedestrian prose.
I have read more exciting newspaper articles.
Through Alien Eyes, Amy Thomson, Ace, $13.95, 328 pp. (ISBN: 0-441-00617-5).
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Juna Saari, while exploring the world of Tiangi, had had her life
saved by the apparently primitive but biologically sophisticated
natives, the Tendu. Now she is on her way back to Earth, accompanied
by her adopted son, a juvenile Tendu named Moki, and the elder
Tendu Ukatonen. She believes both species have a great deal to
learn from and a great deal of benefit to offer each other. Unfortunately,
there are hidebound, conservative xenophobes at home who want
nothing to do with aliens. When Juna’s ship arrives in Earth orbit,
it is kept in quarantine until she manages to unleash the power
of the press. Only then can she return to the bosom of her loving
family and demonstrate the healing powers of the Tendu. She also
discovers that–thanks to the Tendu having undone her contraceptive
protection when healing her, and to an unprotected lover–she is
pregnant, and births are rigidly controlled in order to reduce
the human population below crisis level. She must defend herself
in court to earn the right to have her child.
Meanwhile, Moki is being a child, learning everything in sight,
being jealous of the baby, and so on. Ukatonen is working with
physicians and ecological restorationists; in both cases, his
Tendu talents stir tremendous excitement. In due time, that excitement
gets Juna and the Tendu kidnapped by pro-natalist terrorists,
but they manage to escape and all is well in the end.
Both Tendu characters are as innocent as Grant’s Kaspian. Thomson
is thus able to comment on many of humanity’s foibles as they
explore our ways, making a great many friends and a few deadly
enemies. Unlike Grant, she also realizes that the very features
that create problems for us are also strengths for which the Tendu
can like us.
Yet as heroes go, Juna Saari is not a very compelling or memorable
character. Indeed, every one of Thomson’s characters is little
more than a passive speaker of scripted lines, lacking all passion,
verve, and life.
The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein, Tor, $23.95, 269 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-872453).
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Robert A. Heinlein of fond memory was more than a seminal science
fiction writer. He also wrote a number of wonderful stories for
Astounding and Unknown Worlds, which were collected in a pair of old books. The stories in
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1959; Berkley, 1976), containing the title story, "The Man Who
Travelled in Elephants," "All You Zombies," "They," "Our Fair
City," and "And He Built a Crooked House," dealt in such things
as the fourth dimension ("House"), time travel ("Zombies"), and
sentient whirlwinds ("City"). The first of those in Waldo and Magic, Inc. (Doubleday, 1950; Pyramid, 1963) is also clearly SF; in fact,
it gave us the term "waldo" for remote manipulators. But the second
is the quintessential rational fantasy, magic as engineering.
Why lump all these stories as The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein? Perhaps it’s just they were a bit out of his usual territory,
a bit less connected to the rational world of engineers and space
travel and so on. But it hardly matters, for they are now available
once more. If you–like me–have them only in the form of tattered
paperbacks, rejoice, for you can now put a durable hardbound on
your shelf. If you remember them vaguely or–worse yet–never heard
of them before, order your copy immediately. You’re going to have
fun.
Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, Paul Levinson, Routledge, $27.95, 226 + xiv pp. (ISBN: 0-415-19251-X).
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Media theorist Marshall McLuhan was once a byword. When television
was still young, he declared that the medium was the message,
announced the coming of the Global Village, measured the temperature
of radio as hot and TV as cool, and–just before his death in 1980–promulgated
four laws to govern transitions between media. Yet he was criticized
for speaking in inchoate metaphors ("loose, shaggy buffaloes"
in the words of one critic), and he said himself that he didn’t
explain–he explored. As a result, says Paul Levinson in Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, he was much misunderstood.
Or was he perhaps a man ahead of his proper time? Wired magazine declared him its patron saint, and it is Levinson’s
thesis that "the digital age is both well explained by McLuhan
and helps bring McLuhan’s ideas into sharper focus–i.e., McLuhan
makes more sense when reconfigured for the digital age."
It seems unlikely that anyone is better suited than Levinson to
do that reconfiguring. He met McLuhan when he was getting his
doctorate as a media theorist and has written much on the man
and media theory since then. He strikes me as quite enamoured
of McLuhan but still willing to criticize and reinterpret as appropriate
to explain the grip the Web has upon us and to sketch some future
possibilities. In the process, he makes a good case for his thesis
even if he can’t quite bring himself to kill off all of those
loose, shaggy buffaloes.
The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes, Dick Riley and Pam McAllister, Continuum, $19.95, 216 + xii
pp. (ISBN:0-8264-1116-9).
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It has long been noted that science fiction readers tend to be
fond of Sherlock Holmes stories. The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes, by Dick Riley and Pam McAllister, is therefore worth calling
to your attention.
Besides short summaries of every Holmes story, the book contains
biographical material on both Conan Doyle and Holmes, essays on
parodies, pastiches, artists, and Sherlockian societies, background
on Holmes’s Victorian world, quizzes, maps, puzzles, a crossword,
and more. If you’re a Holmes fan, you’ll love it.
Nota bene: The authors have also committed The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie, available from the same publisher.
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"The Reference Library" copyright 1999, Tom Easton
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