The Companions,
Sheri S. Tepper,
EOS (HarperCollins),
$25.95,
452 pp.
(ISBN: 006053821X). |
Which is all by way of leading into Sheri Tepper’s latest, The Companions. The Earth Tepper portrays is a sad place. It is so overcrowded–thanks in part to a Law of Return that lets Earth’s colonies among the stars ship all their retirees home–that the iggy-huffos ("In God’s Image: Humanity First and Only!") can say with a straight face that all non-human animal life must go in order to leave more air and food and water for those made in God’s One True Image. Wild animals are already gone. No elephants, no deer, no birds, no fish. Soon will come the edict sentencing all pets to death.
But first . . . Jewel Delis is the protagonist. Her mother once discovered on Mars a cavern containing the bones of humans and dogs, much, much older than any anthropological, archeological, or genetic evidence of the human-dog partnership, with art and inscriptions in the tongue of an ancient alien species. She was able to translate it with the aid of alien scholars. Then she sickened with a strange virus and died. Jewel’s brother is an extraordinarily obnoxious twit with a genius for linguistics; he is often engaged to figure out the languages of new alien species. Jewel herself . . . well, she ran into dogs some years back and soon found herself working with the arkists, who are trying desperately to save all of Earth’s creatures they can, buying worlds of little value, terraforming them, and settling birds and mice and so on in new homes. Serving as her brother’s assistant and whipping girl, she has also proved unusually observant, making personal contact with the Phaina through her willingness to engage the living world, and earning a role as a spy for Gainor Brandt, head of the Exploration and Survey Corps.
She also married an upper-crust Mama’s boy. When Mama found out, she was livid. Jewel was not good enough! So sonny was shipped off on a survey crew to a new world, Jungle, where he promptly vanished. Jungle was one of three living worlds in its system. Another, Moss, proved to have an apparent native species with a tendency to dance in front of the explorers’ camp. A message scrawled on bark has appeared. There is a linguistics problem to be solved, and who better to hire than. . . ?
Right. Jewel and her brother soon arrive. With Jewel is a corps of gengineered dogs, able to talk. And before long she uncovers several vast and ancient conspiracies that threaten not just humans but every intelligent species in the galaxy.
The heart of the problem is that the iggy-huffo attitude–Us Only!–is by no means uniquely human. Intelligence and egotism seem to go together as a sort of species-level solipsism. Yet some species get past that to a life-engaging wisdom. They value and protect biodiversity, and they value and protect those members of younger species who share that wisdom.
So those of us who take animals–such as greyhounds–as companions are wiser and larger of spirit than those who don’t.
I knew that.
That’s why I’m marrying milady.
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Skyfall,
Catherine Asaro,
TOR,
$24.95,
319 pp.
(ISBN: 0765306387).
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Catherine Asaro returns to the roots of the conflict between the Skolian Imperialate and the Eubian Concord with Skyfall.
Not that she goes all the way back to 4000 BC, when aliens abducted humans to the world of Raylicon, nor to the era (3600-2800 BC) of the star-spanning Ruby Empire and its marvelous psibernetic technology, nor even to the time when the Ralicons regained interstellar technology and built a new empire under the leadership of the ancient Ruby Dynasty–noble telepaths and empaths all–nor yet to the time (1866) of the Rhon gengineering project that created the variant-Ruby monsters who found joy in the sufferings of empaths and created the Eubian Concord or Trader Empire most of whose citizens were property. The saga Asaro has been telling over the last few years (The Last Hawk, Primary Inversion, The Radiant Seas, Ascendant Sun, Sperical Harmonic, The Quantum Rose, The Moon’s Shadow, Catch the Lightning, and the forthcoming Triad) has centered on the Ruby clan that alone can operate the psiberweb and nominally leads the Imperialate, but in actuality is ruthlessly manipulated by a more-or-less democratic Assembly. The background has been an ongoing war with the Traders and the interplay of loves and marriages and children that must end in some sort of rapprochement. That war had a beginning, when the Skolians and Traders faced off over the Platinum sector, rich in ore essential to both civilizations, and in Skyfall, the Assembly is facing a vote on whether to go to war.
Roca, daughter of the Imperialate’s founder, mother of Kurj, a powerful warlord who craves the war and will stop at little to achieve his end, and herself the Minister of Foreign Affairs, plans to be present to cast a deciding vote against the war. But she finds that she has been decoyed into a situation that will keep her away. Desperate to return, she maneuvers a ride to the world of Skyfall, where she plans to hop another ship in a couple of days. But when the local chieftain or Bard Eldrinson Valdoria appears, her Ruby empath’s mind reacts profoundly. When he swoops her onto his steed and gallops off to his castle in the mountains, she protests but feebly, though she does extract his promise to get her back to the port in time.
Alas, a blizzard closes the trail. She is stuck in the arms of a man who, she soon realizes, has all the appearance of being a Ruby descendant and a very fit mate for a woman of the Skolian ruling clan. While the romance proceeds apace, politics rage on. Kurj gets his vote, even as he searches desperately for any hint of where his missing mother has disappeared to. Troops appear outside Eldrinson’s castle; he has a rival who wishes nothing more than his death. And finally . . .
Kurj finds his hint. Tragedy seems imminent. Roca and Eldrinson must separate forever! But Asaro is an old hand at romance. Everything must work out.
Besides, readers familiar with the series know everything did. The pleasure is in the details, and there is a great deal here to please those readers.
Tinker,
Wen Spencer,
Baen,
$21.95,
352 pp.
(ISBN: 0743471652). |
It’s got elves and magic and ley lines, but it feels more like SF and it’s a fast-paced, sexy Pittsburgh adventure.
As Wen Spencer’s Tinker opens, ratty, eighteen-year-old hypergenius Tinker is shuffling wrecks around her scrapyard. Suddenly a pack of wargs chases an elf over the fence, and when she has finished off the monsters–which turn out to be foo dogs in disguise–she recognizes the badly injured elf as Windwolf, whom she saved once before and who said there was a life debt between them. Unfortunately, the power’s off–it happens once a month, when Pittsburgh bounces from Elf-land back to Earth for a day–and she can’t call for help. Fortunately–remember, she’s a hypergenius–she has devised a storage battery for magic and has just enough on tap to power a healing spell until she can get him to the elven medics at the end of the day.
What’s going on? Well, here comes a pack of red-headed thugs out to kill Tinker. A highway pile-up reveals a mysterious smuggling operation–truckloads of high-tech gadgetry! The NSA reveals that scientists who understand the gate science are vanishing and/or dying. A recovered Windwolf says he likes her a whole lot and would she willingly accept this gift? When she naively accepts, he kisses her forehead, leaving his mark, and before long he is running a powerful, intricate spell, culminating with a passionate deflowering, that turns her into an elf. A high-caste one, too, for Windwolf is the local viceroy.
What has she gotten herself into? Does Windwolf think they’re married now? Well, "Doh!" as Spencer has her characters say from time to time. And now here come the thugs again . . .
But . . . Pittsburgh? How the heck did Pittsburgh wind up in Elf-land? Blame it on Tinker’s dad, who devised an interdimensional gate only to be murdered and have the plans stolen. Somehow–and Spencer tells you how–the plans wound up in China, which put a gate in orbit over the South China Sea. Pittsburgh was a side-effect, and the bouncing between Earth and Elf-land was the result of an agreement to turn the gate off for one day a month.
Remember that Tinker’s a hypergenius. She recently applied to college, and the entrance exams revealed that she could understand the quantum theory behind the gate. She might even be "hyper" enough to duplicate Dad’s work. The gate is interdimensional, so Elf-land is a parallel world, surely one of many. The oriental equivalents of elves are the demonic–and red-headed–oni. And there you have the basic elements.
Spencer got off to a great start with the Ukiah Oregon series. Her fans will be happy with this one too.
Mockymen,
Ian Watson,
Golden Gryphon Press,
$26.95,
325 pp.
(ISBN: 1930846215)
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Ian Watson’s Mockymen is both interesting and offbeat, and you’re likely to enjoy it. It begins in Watson’s own England, where a young couple in the business of making specialty jigsaw puzzles is approached by an elderly Norwegian, Knut Alver, to visit the Vigelund sculpture park in Oslo, photograph themselves pressed nude against the statues, and make puzzles of the photos. A thoroughly curious gig, but money is money, even if it does turn out to have a lot to do with Nazis, magic, and induced reincarnation.
The puzzle-makers are out of the story by page 72, when Watson leaps into a future some years after aliens have reached Earth with gifts to bail folks out of ecological and economic crises. Food factories now churn out pap for the masses, and a new drug–Bliss–is available to all, though some of those who take it lose their minds after a year. But that’s okay, because the aliens need mindless folks to accept downloads. They also need masochists to ride the interstellar transmitter as couriers, carrying in their heads the downloads safely protected from transmission agony.
Meet Anna Sharman, an intelligence analyst who is among the few who suspects the aliens may be up to no good. Jamie Taylor comes to her attention when, after his year on Bliss, he seems to lose his mind–but then he wakes up, just fine, thank you. He’s a serious anomaly. Turns out he was born to the female half of the jigsaw duo, tortured while still a baby for "the number," and taken away for adoption.
The number? Remember Knut Alver and the notion of induced reincarnation. Maybe a Swiss bank account? Hmm . . .
The poor boy didn’t have a clue, not as a baby and not later. But when an alien shows up with a gadget which, if you stare into it, awakens memories . . . The alien also has a story that amply confirms all suspicions of nefarious secret agendas. The next step is a risky attempt to learn more, and then to find a solution, preferably one that keeps the benefits the aliens brought with them while warding off any possible disaster.
The biggest problem with the book is that Watson here mixes some very disparate elements from science fiction and fantasy. Some readers may feel that the mix just does not work. I admit that it strains the famous "suspension of disbelief," but the tale has enough momentum and Watson is an old hand at bringing the unlikely to life. Overall, he makes it work very nicely.
No cover available
The Dark Ascent,
Walter H. Hunt,
TOR,
$ ?, ? pp.
(ISBN: 076531116X).
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Fans of Walter H. Hunt’s The Dark Wing and The Dark Path space opera epic will be delighted to see The Dark Ascent. However, those who have not read the earlier books will not find this one welcoming; there is just too much that has gone before.
Recall that humanity’s space empire fought the belligerent zor to a standstill, found a footing in the zor mythology, established alliance and a degree of mutual understanding, provided a human bearer for the zor sword of state, the gyarhu, and lost both gyaryu and Gyaryu’har to the shapeshifting, insectile, mind-warping vuhl. But then Jacqueline Laperriere rose to play the role of Qu’u, a figure out of zor legend, in the quest to climb the Perilous Stair, recover the gyaryu, and preserve both humans and zors from the forces of darkness, the esGa’uYal.
Now, as the forces of Light and Right learn to fight back against the vuhl, the mysterious Stone (the one-time aide to Admiral Marais who walked away from a ship in jump) makes it easy for Laperriere to recover the gyaryu, hints that the zor myths are not what they seem, and indicates that something else entirely is going on. Laperriere starts digging into the legends, finds that the originals are rather different, and discovers that the vuhl are not the esGa’uYal at all. That is something else, so far unknown, and even though she has the gyaryu in her hand, she is nowhere near the top of the Perilous Stair.
As Laperriere acts out the legend of Qu’u, she also acts out as a sort of moral that we must each face our demons alone. Yet on the larger scale, the moral is that there is strength in numbers. Humans have allied with zor to face their shared demons, the vuhl, once thought to be the esGa’uYal. Now we know that the vuhl share the same enemy. Will volume 4 turn the vuhl into allies? Will Hunt reveal the face of the esGa’uYal and tell us how they can be so deeply embedded in the zor spirit/dream world? Will volume 4 even be the end of the tale? Wait and see.
No cover available
That Darn Squid God,
Nick Pollotta and James Clay,
Wildside Press,
$ ?, ? pp.
(ISBN:1592240976).
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If you enjoy send-ups of the classics, try That Darn Squid God, wherein Nick Pollotta and James Clay introduce the hair-brained Professor Felix Einstein as he prowls the London fog with a mummified tarantula as his evil-alarm. Stopping in at the Explorer’s Club to find Lord Benjamin Carstairs getting the hoot for his claim that a desiccated toy boat is Noah’s ark, the Professor adds water. While the assembled explorers gawk, the vessel hydrates and swells alarmingly. And then Felix and Ben are off in hot pursuit of the Dutarian squid god, a bloodthirsty demon that is about to be reborn to the detriment of the human world. Romantic interest is added by the Professor’s lovely niece Mary, who is the curator of the Prof’s International British Museum for Stolen Antiquities.
So here we have the basic elements: the end of the world at hand, a horde of squid-worshipping villains to lay murderous traps in the way of the plot, a mad professor, a cute niece, and a doughty hero, and the last two of course fall for each other instantly. But Mary is no simpering frail; she’s also quite doughty and plucky enough, and though she remains at home while the guys hare off in search of the squid god’s temple and birthing ground, hoping to queer the demonic pitch, she will lead the defense of the museum when things turn dicey a bit later on.
"Dicey" is hardly the word for it. Before Pollotta and Clay are done, literary history will be rewritten (Wells’ Martians actually came from Venus, for one thing), Baker Street will lose its most famous resident, a molluscan blitz will give London a spot of urban renewal, the Man-in-the-Moon will get a face-lift, and the Ladies Auxiliary of the Explorer’s Club will convince you that it is wiser never to deny the supremacy of British womanhood.
I have enough gray hair to remember well when The Lord of the Rings was new. Wildly popular, it created the modern fantasy genre as publishers and writers hopped on the bandwagon, some with quite slavish imitations. It also earned derisive sneers from academia, much as had SF for many decades (it was much too popular to be literature!), but with a little something extra because Tolkien was a quite distinguished academic himself.
As a phenomenon, LOTR posed an interesting question. The new fantasy genre did well enough, as did the careers of some authors, but no single work came close to matching LOTR in popularity. Most of the imitations are deservedly forgotten. Why did LOTR only gain more readers with the years? How on Middle-Earth could it spawn the shelf full of drafts, notes, partials, ancillaries, and so on that gave Tolkien’s son Christopher a career? Why a BBC radio adaptation, the Bakshi movie, and now Peter Jackson’s film trilogy?
Brian Rosebury attempted to address such questions in 1992, when Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon first appeared. Now, with the first two Jackson films fresh in memory, he returns with a revised and expanded discussion. In brief, he says that Tolkien addressed his material in a mode much like that of the realistic novel, with such a wealth of carefully imagined, realistic detail that his world and characters came alive for the readers. He quite explicitly did not try to allegorize the modern world or current events, but nonetheless he provided numerous resonances with myth and history.
Rosebury’s focus is almost entirely on the textual analysis and style of LOTR. He notes the role of World War I as a motivating force for Tolkien and insists that there was no attempt to mirror Hitler and Stalin (among others) in Sauron. Yet, even so, there had to be a powerful resonance for the reader in any tale that involved world-threatening evil (Sauron) while the newspapers were full of similar evils and everyone on Earth lived as much under the threat of devastation as any resident of Middle-Earth. One need not insist that Tolkien put that resonance in LOTR deliberately in order to see a foundation for LOTR’s enduring popularity. Of course, if this were the whole of it, we might expect that popularity to have waned after the end of the Cold War. Terrorism, as frightening as it is, is hardly a threat of the same order. Thus much of LOTR’s popularity must hinge on such things as the opposition of a benign, rural world, rich in Nature, with elementals such as Tom Bombadil still there to be met, with a malign, military-industrial world, rich in smokestacks and poor in Nature.
Part of the benignity of Tolkien’s world, notes Rosebury, is the marked tolerance for diversity of opinion, peoples, and customs. This is an essentially liberal viewpoint, which makes me wonder why conservatives do not inveigh against LOTR as much as some do against Harry Potter (Horrors! It teaches witchcraft!). Another aspect of the benignity is Tolkien’s placing of virtue in creativity and responsibility, such that evil lies in treating "created things and persons as ‘machines.’" This too resonates for the modern reader–whether liberal or conservative–who may feel trapped in a web of limiting rules and regulations.
Rosebury also considers what some of the critics have had to say about LOTR, and he does not spare the rod. Some of those critics have displayed remarkable ignorance and carelessness!
An interesting take on the Tolkien phenomenon. For hard-core fans and academics.
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