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Defender,
C.J. Cherryh, DAW, $6.99, 452 pp.
(ISBN: 0756400201).
Explorer,
C.J. Cherryh, DAW, $23.95, 408 pp.
(ISBN: 0756400864).
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Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, the starship Phoenix, laden with the builders and residents of a planned space station, met disaster. Lost in space, they found a hospitable star and built a station, Alpha, in orbit above a world whose humanoid natives, the atevi, had a technology roughly equivalent to nineteenth century Europe or America. The ship was run by the autocratic and xenophobic Pilot’s Guild, which insisted that Station Alpha would be home. Many of the Stationers, however, thought the world below looked enticing. They rebelled and landed. The ship and its crew departed to seek a way back to Earth’s homely environs.
It took two centuries for the humans to learn to get along with the atevi, for their hard-wired responses to each other and their world were very different. By the time C.J. Cherryh discovered them, Bren Cameron was the "paidhi," whose job was to interpret humans to atevi and atevi to humans. It was a high-stress job, complicated by the hard-wiring differences and two brands of political maneuverings to boot.
Meanwhile, the ship built another station, Reunion, near a sun with no bothersome natives or tempting greenery. Unfortunately, they somehow angered an unknown alien people, who blasted the station. When the Phoenix returned from a journey to discover this, it hightailed it back to Alpha. Fortunately, the far-sighted Captain Ramirez had already begun training two youngsters toward readiness to serve as ambassadors to colonists and atevi. That helped when the ship appeared in atevi skies and began to demand fuel and assistance to ward off a potential attack by the aliens who–says Phoenix–left that other station a lifeless hulk.
Alas, neither the human colonists nor the atevi had space travel yet. Not much help there–but the atevi catch on fast, and it wasn’t long before the station was being repaired, fuel was being produced, and the Phoenix could anticipate being ready to deal with the unknown threat.
That much took four volumes–Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, and Precursor. Now we have Defender and Explorer, and since I am covering them together, be warned that I will surely reveal too much about Defender. As it begins, the Phoenix has been fueled, the construction of the atevi’s own starship is under way, Bren Cameron is fending off family crises back in the colony, the atevi overlord Tabini is putting on a political dog-and-pony show for which Bren must come down from the station (and immediately return), and Captain Ramirez, as he lies dying, leaks the word–where a crewman can hear–that people remain on Reunion station.
Now there is no choice: Phoenix must return to Reunion and try to rescue the people it left behind a decade ago. After suitable confusion, Bren receives new orders from Tabini, as well as a new rank: He will go with the ship as the "Lord of the Heavens," carrying the atevi to new realms. Worse yet, Tabini’s decidedly forbidding grandmother, Ilisidi, will come too, and she will bring Tabini’s young heir as well. Both Bren and Ilisidi will, of course, have their very powerful and competent security staff with them.
Not much really happens. This is a talky ’tween novel, loaded with Bren’s introspections. A placeholder that exists to lead into the next novel, it fails utterly to stand alone. Politics plays large, as well as the layers of lies that the Phoenix’s captains have told their own crew, the colonists, and the atevi. Bren must find his way to truth, preferably before the ship embarks. And Jase, one of those two youths Ramirez once prepared as negotiators, must learn to function as a captain, junior to the prickly and unforthcoming Captain Sabin.
The action picks up with Explorer. As Phoenix approaches Reunion, it becomes clear that the Pilot’s Guild is still in charge. What’s worse, it expects Phoenix to put itself back in its one-time subservient position and follow orders despite long separation and obvious–to Bren!–independence. The Guild means it too, for there is a sign on the fuel lines, warning Phoenix not to touch without authorization, or a bomb will blow. Worse yet, new damage to the station is apparent and an alien ship is lurking in the distance.
It doesn’t take Bren long to exchange a few intelligible messages with the alien ship. No one seems to have thought of trying before, but Bren is a skilled translator of very different cultures. And now he knows: Reunion has an alien prisoner. Soon Reunion also has Phoenix’s senior captain, Sabin, who has gone ashore with most of the ship’s security force and promptly gone silent. Prisoner? Or dead?
And Bren, official (by atevi lights) lord of all the heavens, and Grandmother Ilisidi have their household troops ready to . . .
I really should stop telling all, shouldn’t I? Not that I’ve covered everything–there’s loads of detail a précis can’t touch!–but still . . .
If you’ve enjoyed the earlier titles in the series, even if you agree that Defender is rather too much of a placeholder ’tween book, you’ll love this one. It does a very fine job of capping the series to date, while opening up loads of room for a few more volumes. (Will she write them? Who knows? But Cherryh does have a record of long series.)
No Cover Available
Barnburner,
Sharon Lee, SRM Publisher (P.O. Box 179, Unity, ME 04988), $16.00, 224 pp.
(ISBN: 0972247300).
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Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are well known for their Liaden Universe series, but Sharon also writes on her own. For an example, look at Barnburner, a mystery set in Maine in that dusty, musty time when "going online" meant dialing up a bulletin board service. Remember when? Just ten years ago?
The narrator, Jen Pierce, has come to Maine from Baltimore (just as did Sharon and Steve) to live in the house left by her late aunt and work for a small local paper. Her world is now rusty pickups and winter, beans and cider, laconic locals and back-to-the-landers who are–honest to goddess!–witches. This provokes a local preacher with a history of raving over such things as abortion clinics into a fine fit of frothing at the mouth. But the neighbors rally ’round and are helping Wiccans Merry and Scott with their barn-raising–until the preacher winds up dead. Scott, of course, is trotted off to jail as the one with the motive, and Jen must collect the clues and lead the tale to a quite satisfactory conclusion.
If "regional" fiction is defined by being strong on local setting and local color, then Steve King is a regional writer. So is Sharon Lee, and wouldn’t she be delighted if this novel sold as well as any of King’s? It probably won’t, but Liaden fans will buy it and be pleased with another side of one of their favorite writers. Others will discover a charming story marked by wry humor and a fondness for the Yankee way.
Do you know what "augmented reality" is? It’s not virtual reality, for you see the same old world around you. But it’s annotated. Add that to a world where technology has created wealth enough for all, without any need for actual money. Well, not quite. Nobody works for pay, but everyone earns "whuffie"–credibility or reputation points–according to how much people value their words, thoughts, or deeds. No whuffie? You get a very basic ration and wait forever in the priority queue for anything better. Got lots of whuffie? Jump to the head of the queue and help yourself.
Waiting forever sounds rough, but since people are immortal, they just have to be patient. Not that no one dies–but you can backup your memories and have them downloaded into a new body at need.
Not much new there, even if TOR does blurb it as "cutting edge speculation." The world of science fiction has seen every bit of it before. But Cory Doctorow puts an entertaining spin on it with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. No one needs to work, but there’s still that whuffie carrot, so people form ad-hoc groups (Doctorow’s world is run by the "ad-hocracy") and take on projects such as running Disney World in Orlando. That’s the setting, where century-old Jules, who has learned ten languages and written three symphonies, has moved in. His girlfriend was born to the Disney ad-hoc, and he has joined the effort. That’s when an old friend–his whuffie exhausted–shows up to get ready for his suicide and another ad-hoc moves in with big plans for replacing audioanimatronic presidents with astonishing brain downloads (you really are Lincoln for a moment!). That’s when Jules gets killed. As soon as he’s reloaded, he turns into a loose cannon. He’s sure he knows who killed him, is just as sure something underhanded is going on, and in pursuit of justice, he manages to ruin his reputation, his girlfriend, and his whuffie stock.
Is he right about who’s to blame? Does he get his whuffie and girlfriend back? Is justice served?
That would be telling! Read it yourself. If you’ve been to Orlando (or dream of going), you’ll have fun.
Touchless,
Russell Davis, Wildside, $32.95,
220 pp.
(ISBN: 1592249876).
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With Touchless, Russell Davis gives us a wistful romance that has some charms, but is nevertheless a bit hard to accept. The problem is that the protagonist, Drake Avery, is in his eighties, but does not feel so old to the reader. Mentally, he’s as spry as a forty-year-old, and though the octogenarians I know may feel that mentally young, they don’t strike others so. They’re forgetful, for one thing, and they talk a lot about their various aches and pains.
Not Drake. His fifty-five-year marriage ended in a car crash. With her consent, he had his wife and true love frozen by ImagoTech to await revival and repair. And for the next seven years, he hovered at the side of her icebox, waiting.
Now the folks at ImagoTech are telling him he can have her back for a day as a virtual avatar, after which she will be dead forever. The temptation is real, for he misses her terribly, but he nevertheless refuses to cut off her chances. So ImagoTech offers him a free physical, and then informs him he has but months to live.
The reader need not wonder what is going on, for Davis makes it clear that ImagoTech’s chief is a thoroughly unscrupulous fellow who will stop at nothing to get results that will draw money from investors. He needs success, and he will let nothing stand in his way. Not Drake, and certainly not Mercedes Bond, the suspicious newspaper columnist who starts off trying to use Drake to get at the company and quickly finds him appealing in a very different way. Trouble looms, and of course a solution.
Wistful, romantic, charming. It’s all of that, but I think it would have worked much better if Drake Avery were twenty years younger.
In December 2001, I reviewed Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet, in which William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara documented our obsession with Mars, including the science fictional aspect of that obsession. Now we have Oliver Morton’s Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World, which takes a rather different approach. Morton’s emphasis is on the physical image of the planet, and he covers the historical, the artistic, and the scientific, with loving attention to maps and mapmakers, notably those who turned Mariner and later photographs into portraits of the Red Planet in some ways more detailed than the maps of Earth (which perforce ignore much of the surface–it’s underwater!). A history of map-making is of course also a history of discovery, of image-making and image-processing, of satellites and fly-bys, of landings and dreams of future missions and terraforming, and perhaps above all, of people.
It can also be an invitation to debate. Consider this passage, right at the end as he considers what we may make of that world in our solar system most like Earth, beginning when we sow soil and plants: "Planetary protection be damned, I see [a rose] dropped from the greenhouse to the soil below. There the UV and peroxides will work their dark magic [and] if the greater changes come, then, by and by, the . . . carefully charted constellations of micro-oases will come to life like a vegetable empire. . . ." This seems bound to inflame those extremists who believe all pristine environments–even those that are barren–must be walled off from human impact.
Morton is a gifted writer with a host of credits. He tells the tale cleanly and elegantly, even rising to the poetic at times, which makes his history a very engaging experience. He is also a visionary who dares to say what some do not.
Sometimes I wonder why a book doesn’t get advertised in the SF magazines. For a case in point, look at TechTV’s Catalog of Tomorrow. It has a wondrous array of short essays on new techno-gimmicks that just might (or might not) redefine our lives in a decade or two. There are smart clothes, smart cards, smart roads, smart houses, and smart appliances. There is gene tech in medicine and food, artificial intelligence and artificial life, nano and quantum and biochemical computing, nanobots and robots. There are prospects for education and energy, architecture and transportation, and a great deal more.
Each topic gets a glossy essay by a researcher or writer, complete with suitable diagrams, drawings, photos, and a few thought-provoking questions. The tone is bright and optimistic, just a bit like those 1950’s articles that promised a helicopter in every garage and electricity too cheap to meter, but tempered by some judicious caveats and cautions.
I find the book particularly interesting because I started teaching a course in emerging technologies in Fall 2002, using material from recent issues of Technology Review, The Communications of the ACM, and a few other magazines. Much of what I covered in the course is also here, so the book is about as up to the minute as possible. Will it stay so long enough for me to use it in another run of the course? I hope so!
Meanwhile, here’s a glimpse of the possible future in a very readable format. SF readers can use it for edification, entertainment, and checking out the pipe dreams of their favorite writers. SF writers . . . well, they’re already heading for the bookstore.
What does a career look like?
With many or even most elder writers, the answer has to be something like "a pile of books and magazines." If you insist on pictures, then you can spread out the covers for the cover and interior art. Only rarely do you have a writer whose prolificity, popularity, and gift for image have led to anything like Jerry Weist’s Bradbury: An Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor.
Weist has been a Bradbury fan for three and a half decades. He began a long and friendly correspondence in 1968, and throughout the years he collected artwork associated with Bradbury, including drawings done by Bradbury himself. In due time, Weist did some research and wrote this biography. It begins typically, with Bradbury’s childhood, with photos of the writer-to-be and one of his childhood homes accompanied by reproductions of book and magazine covers, magazine interiors, comics ("Buck Rogers," of course!), and movie posters and stills that influenced the boy. There is the early Bradbury artwork for fanzines; early poetry; the first pulp stories, with their illustrations; the shift to the slicks (Maclean’s, Esquire, and The Saturday Evening Post, all in 1950), and artwork of a very different flavor from that of Hannes Bok and Kelly Freas. The books are here too, in a host of editions. So are radio and TV and the movies (complete with portions of the journal kept by Francois Truffaut while filming "Fahrenheit 451") and theater. And if you want to know how Bradbury handled seeing his stories ripped off by EC Comics, that too is here. So are Cliff’s Notes on Bradbury’s Works and a generous sampling of Bradbury’s own artwork.
Weist has provided sufficient narrative to tie the various parts together, but the bulk of the book and most of its continuity are provided by the vast array of illustrations–quite enough to provide the answer to my question, "What does a career look like?" and more than enough to justify the book’s title.
They also provide a very nice nostalgia trip through one’s memories of meeting Bradbury’s work and favorite Bradbury stories and books for the first time, as well as through the bulk of the twentieth century’s experience with SF.
Eat at home next Saturday night. Spend the money on this. You’ll be glad you did.
Bradbury began writing about the same time that the "hard SF" tradition was getting its start in the 1930s. Perhaps fortunately for him, he was never an exponent of hard SF. His career blossomed and bloomed while hard SF lost whatever centrality it had in the SF genre in the 1940s.
Yet hard SF did continue. In The Ascent of Wonder (reviewed here in December 1994), David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer surveyed the history of the tradition from Poe onward, saying that, "Hard sf is about the beauty of truth . . . the emotional experience of describing and confronting what is scientifically true. . . . Because hard sf is a literary form demanding of both its writers and its readers significant amounts of scientific knowledge as well as previous reading in the genre, it has continued to yield a disproportionate number of the central images common to all forms of science fiction. . . . [H]ard sf is the core of all science fiction. . . ."
They could say this about a portion of SF that had been out of favor for fifty years? Well, by the 1990s, hard SF had become both popular and fashionable once more, espoused by the likes of Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Nancy Kress, the late Charles Sheffield, Allen Steele, and many more. Since then the subgenre has flourished enough to deserve a book for its recent history. That is, it deserves The Hard SF Renaissance.
Are there differences between the new hard SF and the old? The science has of course moved on, but there are more profound differences to consider. Hartwell and Cramer remind us that the old hard SF tended to be rather right-wing, pro-military, adventurist, and human supremacist. Much of the new leans more to the left and is thus more critical in its stance toward politics and the uses of technology. Yet it remains adventure-oriented, and there has been something of a merger of hard SF (shifting away from the problem-solving approach of Hal Clement and his ilk) and space opera (shifting away from the formulaic hackwork that once defined that term).
Do such discussions give you the pip? Never mind, then. The book remains a massive compendium of stories from the last fifteen years. You’ll love it–and if you bought Ascent of Wonder, this one is an essential companion.
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