Saturn,
Ben Bova, TOR, $24.95, 413 pp. (ISBN: 0312872186).
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First things first. In Saturn, Ben Bova picks up the tale of Precipice and Rock Rats, in which villainous Martin Humphries destroyed the founder of Astro Manufacturing and Pancho Lane moved from astronaut to Chairman of the Board. Finally Pancho has been able to thaw and cure her kid sister Susan. Unfortunately, freezing wipes memories. Susan had to be raised all over again. Now she is Holly, and she is all starry-eyed about Malcolm Eberly, an ex-con who is now the head of Human Resources for a space habitat named Goddard, which is about to haul a few thousand assorted misfits and dissidents out to Saturn to study the life on Titan and set up permanent housekeeping. Holly’s going too, and she has grand romantic dreams.
Alas, Malcolm is a manipulator. All he wants is absolute power, and his masters are the same fundies who have taken over Earth. They don’t want even misfits and dissidents to escape their control forever. They’ve been forced to agree that the folks on the Goddard will be able to write their own constitution and form their own government, but they have their people–including a couple of notable thugs–in place. They plan to control the constitution-writing process so that even though it may be a very liberal document, it will contain an "in case of emergency all civil rights can be suspended" clause. They also plan to get their own people (that is, Malcolm) elected to power, and it won’t be long before an emergency is declared.
Poor Holly. Panting so hard after such a scumbag, right there listening when they talk about their plans, and not getting it. But she develops other friends–even romantic ones–and she does have some intelligence. A friend dies unexpectedly, and she finds a hint that it was murder. She says as much, and now she is a hunted woman.
Bova insists that democracy must prevail because tyranny is unstable. Considering how long some tyrannies have lasted, how many have ended only at the hands of annoyed neighbors or when the tyrant died of old age, and how few have actually collapsed under their own weight or because their masters have overreached, he is not convincing. He would have been well advised to omit such philosophical justifications for his story in favor of saying that when you send incompetents to do a job–whether it is building a Moonbase or setting up a dictatorship–the job doesn’t get done.
His villains are incompetent? They are caricatures, obvious villains, as cartoonish as Martin Humphries (whose mustachios were visible even if nonexistent). Real villains hide their evil natures better.
Still, Saturn is an interesting reminder of what can go wrong in the constitution-writing, government-forming process. We can hope that it all turns out as well for Iraq.
It is also a reminder that even in an established democracy, people who care more about power and control can proclaim emergencies to limit or suspend civil liberties, as indeed seems to be happening here in the name of Homeland Security.
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Extremes,
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, ROC, $6.50, 374 pp.
(ISBN: 0451459342).
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The last time we met Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s "Retrieval Artist" series, it was with The Disappeared (reviewed here December 2002). In her future, humanity has forged treaties with a number of alien societies, agreeing that if humans offend against alien laws, on alien turf, they are subject to those laws. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and if penalties seem draconian or bizarre, that’s just too bad. So there are "disappearance agencies," which will, for a fee, help one leave an old identity behind–career, money, property, name, loved ones, history, and all–in order to start afresh, presumably beyond the reach of alien justice. There are also Retrieval Artists, who seek the Disappeared when legacies or other important matters arise, and Trackers, who hunt them down for the offended aliens. The Disappeared wound up with Miles Flint, a police detective on the Moon, becoming a Retrieval Artist.
And now Rusch gifts us with Extremes. The title has immediate meaning, for the opening scene is the Moon Marathon, run outside the dome in spacesuits. The initial viewpoint character is Coburn, a partner in an extreme sports travel agency, well started on the course until he rounds a boulder and stumbles over a body. Now bodies are common enough in the Moon Marathon. But most aren’t dead. And this one is his partner and one-time lover, Jane Zweig.
Meanwhile, Tracker Miriam Oliviari has infiltrated the marathon’s medical teams. She’s looking for a mass-murderer named Frieda Tey, who years before unleashed an engineered cold virus on a dome full of people. Her excuse was that she was sure that in sufficiently dire emergencies, people would rise above themselves in order to survive, and in an alien-dominated universe, it was necessary to learn how to make sure this happened. Unfortunately, everyone died and Tey Disappeared.
Miles Flint, just two weeks into his new career, gets a visit from a representative of a major law firm. It seems that one of their people died of a virus after supposedly finding Frieda Tey.
Noelle DeRicci gets the chore of dealing with the body of Jane Zweig. It doesn’t take long for her to see that it was murder, start telling people not to leave, and begin the investigation process. And the runners finishing the course are developing the sniffles. In fact, one just died.
What’s going on? All is not what it seems, but DeRicci is clever and insightful despite her reputation as a troublemaker, Flint is clever and persistent and able to move fast when the time comes, and Oliviari has suspicions about those sniffles and tries to communicate them. The hunt for truth and the struggle for survival move at a brisk pace and come to a bang-up conclusion. Once again, Rusch delivers a very readable and thought-provoking novel that satisfies the reader in just about every possible way. Buy and enjoy.
There is also, of course, that resonance with current events. SARS is a disease with a very discomforting kinship to the Tey virus. It is probably a perfectly natural variant; no one has seriously suggested that it owes its existence to a rogue "Tey" in some quiet lab. But . . . Natural or not, it must be dealt with in similar fashion: containment or quarantine, followed by a frantic search for an effective treatment. If that search succeeds, please note, it may also give us a treatment for the common cold and other viruses.
Callahan’s Con, Spider Robinson, TOR, $23.95, 288 pp. (ISBN: 0765302705).
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It’s been just over three years since the last time Spider Robinson let us share the rollickin’ good times of Callahan’s Bar, that home away from home for the misfits and the weird, their wild punning contests, and their assorted adventures in world-saving. Callahan himself had to leave to save other worlds. Bereft, Jake Stonebender tried to revive the bar, but that lasted barely long enough for him to become the father of hypergenius (thanks to an internalized AI) Erin. In Callahan’s Key, he led the crew on a wild exodus from Long Island to Key West, where they saved the world–heck, the Universe!–once more and promptly settled back down to enjoying life, good booze, and bad puns.
But trouble never ends. It merely takes a break, just long enough so we let our guard down. And as Callahan’s Con opens, Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl walks in, an emissary bureaucrat from the Florida Department of Education, there to check on the home-schooling of hypergenius Erin (who has been left to her own educating for the last dozen years, and has done quite well at it, thank you). She is clearly related to Jake’s Long Island arch-enemy Jorjhk Grtozkdaheckwiddit, determined to declare Jake and Zoey unfit parents and remove the child.
Not that that would have been easy. After all, the kid can teleport and time-travel and think rings around just about any adult that has ever lived.
Which is a good thing. Because the next disaster is Tony Donuts Junior, a goon the size of a mountain with a brain the size of a molehill and a moral sense even smaller. He doesn’t like your face, you don’t have a face anymore. And if you don’t take his protection racket seriously, you don’t have anything to protect anymore.
Fortunately, he’s ambitious, and when he sees Erin age 20 . . . age 16 . . . age 12 . . . age 6, he’s ready to believe in Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth. Or "Ute," as Tony says it.
And if you want to see this con in action, you’ll have to buy the book. As usual, good fun, a good read, and for a bonus you find out about District Attorney Tarara Buhm.
That’s right. Tarara Buhm, D.A.
There’s only one Spider.
It’s probably just as well.
Blind Lake,
Robert Charles Wilson, TOR, $24.95, 399 pp.
(ISBN: 0765302624).
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With the spring term over, it’s time to reflect a bit: This time I got to teach physics for the first time, and I was reminded anew when we reached quantum theory how terribly bizarre that can seem. I actually had one intelligent fellow crying out, "No! No!"
That, of course, gave me the chance to point out that Einstein felt much the same way.
It also lets me segue into Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake, whose premise is that when the space-based telescopes started losing the images of distant worlds they had been built to catch, the O/BEC quantum computers designed to improve the fuzzy images kicked in–with a vengeance. Not only did they do their job, but when the telescopes failed entirely, they kept right on doing it–better!
And if that isn’t quantum-bizarre enough, the O/BECs actually zoomed in on two planets to give detailed surface views. One wasn’t terribly interesting–just water and muck and algae. But the other had cities and aliens, and the human scientists were utterly delighted. They could actually follow a single subject around to see what it saw, what it did, what it ate, and so on. An anthropologist’s (xenologist’s) dream.
The first O/BEC observatory was Crossbank, which focused on the first world. When the second entered the crosshairs, the Blind Lake National Laboratory was built in Minnesota, a dedicated community centered on the O/BEC units, peopled by administrators, researchers, and support staff, and surrounded by a security fence.
As Wilson’s tale opens, three writers are approaching the fence. They are Sebastian Vogel, a retired academic who had the poor taste to write a popularly successful book titled God & the Quantum Vacuum, Chris Carmody, whose own book drove a well-known academic to suicide, and Elaine Coster, an acerbic journalist. They are there on behalf of a magazine, tasked to provide three takes on the O/BEC phenomenon. However, only moments after their arrival, the security lid goes on tight. Day workers are not even allowed to go home. Phone and email service stops. (Even cell phones? Sat phones? Never mind . . . )
Marguerite Hauser is a researcher who believes that intelligent species share enough concerns for their behavior to be understood. Her ex-husband is administrator and Grade-A prick Ray Scutter, who believes that intelligent species cannot possibly understand each other and that life is actually a stain on the Universe. Her daughter Tess has been cursed with an imaginary companion, Mirror Girl, and is having problems fitting in. When Chris Carmody is assigned lodging in Marguerite’s basement, Ray throws a jealous fit.
And is that a hint that the subject, fifty light years away and presumably just as far in the past, is aware that it is being watched?
There is no clue to why the lab was sealed off from the outside world. But there is something funny going on. We know from the cover blurb that this is "a compelling thriller of alien contact," and so it is–but perhaps the aliens are not the obvious suspects.
Meanwhile, Chris and Marguerite are developing a great deal of interest in each other. They are both interesting characters, and they help the novel’s appeal.
I enjoyed this one greatly. Go see why.
Dark Ararat, Brian Stableford, TOR, $16.95, 352 pp. (ISBN: 0765305968).
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Brian Stableford’s Dark Ararat is a disappointment.
The premise is interesting enough. In the twenty-first century, the global population and environmental crisis is threatening to destroy humanity. In earlier entries in the series–beginning with Inherit the Earth (reviewed here in February 1999), Architects of Emortality (March 2000), and The Fountains of Youth (October 2000)–Stableford described a gengineered plague of sterility, a technological solution, the development of nanotech and biotech modes of life extension, and their impacts on humanity. But before the ultimate crisis, several colony ships set out for the stars, carrying colonists in suspended animation, tended to by generations of crew. We met one such ship, which never managed to get out of the Oort Cloud, in The Omega Expedition (April 2003), set centuries later.
The Hope was more successful. It reached the world of Ararat (or Tyre, so named for its purple vegetation) in 2814 and began putting colonists ashore. Unfortunately, Ararat is not quite a clone of Earth. The local life can be processed into edibility, but its genetics is not based on DNA; indeed, it seems to have a dual genetic system. Individual life forms seem to be chimeras of multiple cell types, and there is no sign of seeds, eggs, or young on the entire planet. Is Ararat compatible with human life? Some think so, but others don’t, and there is vigorous debate over whether they should all go back into suspended animation until the crew can find a better world. However, the crew’s aims have diverged from those of the colonists. No way will they come back on board! And those still on ice will go down as soon as possible.
Finally, a research team has discovered the ruins of an ancient city. There are no signs of intelligent natives on the world, but the possibility only adds to the arguments for packing up and moving on. Worse yet, Bernal Delgado, the ecologist on that research team, has just been murdered with a weapon just like those the vanished natives made in their day.
Who did the dirty deed? One of Delgado’s coworkers? An alien? The crew thaws out Delgado’s backup, ecological prophet Matthew Fleury, and a detective, Vince Solari. Their mission is to figure out the crime and unravel mysteries. Once they’re on the ground, Solari makes short and inconspicuous work of his part of the job. Fleury, however, used to be a public figure. He’s used to center stage, he’s an arrogant egotist, and he’s smart. He’s also an obnoxiously mouthy narrator, whether he’s talking to other characters, himself, or the reader. He is Stableford himself in full lecture mode, which makes the book almost impossible to read.
The lectorial approach can work, but it needs to be broken up with much more action than Stableford provides here. Indeed, there is very little excitement before the last quarter of the book. That excitement is appropriate and it leads to a suitable conclusion, but it is far too long delayed.
As I said about The Omega Expedition, if you crave action, you probably won’t enjoy this one. It’s not a thriller.
The Green Ray, Jules Verne, Wildside, $35,
124 pp.
(ISBN: 1592240356).
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I’ve noted before the explosion of activity in the Print-on-Demand (PoD) area. One of the major players here is John Betancourt’s Wildside Press, which has provided a new outlet for collections, anthologies, and even novels the major publishers didn’t want, brought new life to the backlist of living authors, and made available a torrent of older, public-domain titles. Sales are not huge for any one title, but they appear to be steady. In the last category, many are to libraries seeking to replace tattered shelf copies but individuals can buy too (of course!).
Are you a Jules Verne fan? Here’s The Green Ray (1882), minor stuff, but Verne for all that, a quest for the green flash of light that occasionally accompanies the sunset and according to Highland legend has the power of dispelling falsehood.
Verne is more famous for many other tales, including From the Earth to the Moon, which is my way of saying that people have been fascinated by the Moon for a very long time and segueing into Dana Mackenzie’s The Big Splat: or How Our Moon Came to Be. Mackenzie reviews the development of astronomy and lays out the history of our ideas of how the Moon was formed: Fission from a madly whirling Earth? Charles Darwin’s son George liked that idea. Capture of a stranger passing in the night? Blame Thomas Jefferson Jackson. See, who was something of a scalawag. Joint coalescence from the primordial dust cloud? From Laplace to Chamberlin and Moulton and Safronov. And finally . . . God does like the odd game of billiards.
Some fifty million years after the Sun’s fusion engine ignites, Earth is 90 percent of its present size, and another world, Theia, about a tenth the size of Earth, is orbiting nearby. But then the orbits intersect. Theia plows into Earth and disintegrates. Its molten iron core rains down on Earth, and the remaining rubble–including a fair-sized portion of Earth’s surface–forms a ring in orbit. Within a short time, that rubble has coalesced to form the Moon. A hundred million years later, Earth has cooled down enough for rain to happen. In due time, life will appear, including life capable of looking up and asking, "How did that thing get up there?"
And if you have ever shaken your head over the nuts who claim we never really went to the Moon–it was all a fake, all special effects and lies–or had to argue with them, you’ll be happy to see the appendix, where Mackenzie points out that the lunar rocks so fluently tell the tale of the Moon’s fiery origin that they could not possibly have been faked. "They tell a self-consistent story with a complexly interwoven plot that’s better than any story any conspirator could have conceived."
A very readable little book.
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