Beyond Infinity, Gregory Benford, Warner,
$23.95,
338 pp.
(ISBN: 044653059X) |
In 1990, Gregory Benford published a novella, "Beyond the Fall of Night," to accompany and continue Arthur C. Clarke’s "Against the Fall of Night," but he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result. So he tripled the length, dropped or rearranged the elements of Clarke’s future world, added in the latest theoretical physics about a universe with multiple dimensions, and came up with the thoroughly fascinating distant, distant future, world-ending threat, and fantastic resolution of Beyond Infinity.
The time is billions of years hence, when young Cley is growing up in a communal society. She has many moms and no dads, though she has learned who her biological father is, and that he vanished years ago, which provides her with a mystery and an obsession. Cley’s folk are Originals, meaning not quite folk like you and I, for they carry genetic and electronic enhancements. But they are closer than anyone else alive to our type, whose specs have been long lost in the mists of the eons. Even the Library of Life, where Cley in due time goes to work, has no information. But she acquires a lover, Kurani, a Supra of prodigious evolved and engineered enhancements and lifespan, and learns something of the Earth’s other peoples–sentient elephants, for one!
And then everything falls apart. Strange forces attack Earth, focusing on the Library and hunting down and killing all the remaining Originals. All but one–Cley, of course. She is damaged, almost killed, but a strange being named Seeker, descended from enhanced raccoons, succors her. Soon she is hard at work, salvaging what remains of the Library’s treasures, and wondering what the attack was all about. The attackers seem to have been extra-dimensional beings of some sort, and there is talk of an enormously powerful being, the Malign, which has taken it upon itself to cleanse the galaxy of sentient life. She also hears of the Multifold, which was created in ages past to contain the Malign.
Before long, Cley is chafing under the condescending patronage of the vastly superior Supras. She and Seeker run away, ride a tree to space, hitch a ride on a Leviathan–a living spaceship–and discover that the eons have seen life move from Earth into space, first in engineered form, and then in an explosion of evolutionary adaptation. Benford’s vision is enchanting, but he gives us little time to savor it. Soon it is clear that the Malign is following Cley. It has escaped its ancient prison, and now it’s out to get her, for she is somehow the key to defeating it. Kill her, and all the galaxy is prey to its evil.
There are mysteries here. How can one lonely and immature, unenhanced (relatively) Original human possibly be the key to preventing the End of Days? And just who is Seeker, who seems to know far too much and be far too much in touch with great events for a mere hopped-up raccoon? And–remember the basic rule of fiction: never to put something in unless it will play a later part–just when will Cley’s missing father pop up, and what has he got to do with everything?
If you like hard-SF adventure of cosmic sweep, Benford never fails to deliver. This one’s a must-have, and it may very possibly earn him a third Nebula Award.
Rudy Rucker has a reputation for the weird and wonderful, and if that’s enough to rev your rockets you’ll be delighted to hear that Frek and the Elixir is out. The year is 3003, and things are rather different. Rucker supposes that current worries about corporate patenting of life forms have been fully justified: It is some 350 years since NuBioCom "discontinued" all Earth’s native lifeforms (except for humans). Only NuBioCom’s designed, patented, produced, and approved critters are left. Dogs exist in yearly models. People live in housetrees and eat anymeat, the fruits of the allfruit tree, and the half dozen canonical vegetables in the garden. Every district is ruled by a Gov, which is actually an engineered parasitic worm.
A rather nasty place, eh? But meet Frek, just an ordinary twelve-year-old boy growing up with his mother and sisters. His dad got in bad with Gov the year before and fled to space. Cleaning his room, Frek spots a strange device under his bed. The cartoon characters on the wallscreen tell him a flying saucer has arrived and is looking for him, but before he can make the connection, Gov’s "counselors" show up to interrogate him. They want to know why the saucer is looking for him, where the saucer is, and more. When the poor boy doesn’t cooperate, they threaten him with a "peeker uvvy" (braintap), which tends to do permanent damage.
When Frek finally looks under the bed, the saucer produces a miniature cuttlefish that tells him it’s up to him to save the world. That’s when Gov’s minions stomp in, kill the alien, confiscate the saucer, and slap the peeker on the kid.
But Frek recovers. He flees, acquires an odd friend, and manages to learn a bit about what’s going on: The aliens of the saucer, the Orpolese Bumby and Ulla, want him to designate them as the producers for the Earth show, which is "watched" via hyperdimensional braintap by aliens throughout the galaxy. If he cooperates, they promise, he can have the "elixir" that will restore Earth’s lost biomes. And oh, by the way, Frek’s dad is with another group of alien would-be producers, the Unipuskers. Gotta move fast, boy. No time to reflect. Just say yes and shake on it.
There are complications, of course. No matter what the Orpolese, the Unipuskers, or–later–the Radiolarians say, they are not concerned with Frek’s or humanity’s welfare. But the kid has hidden talents, acquires useful friends, and eventually triumphs. It even looks like he and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Renata just might live happily ever after. But there’s not much of substance here for the demanding reader. The plot and the characters are more suitable for cartoons, and Rucker’s sole serious point–the hazards of cultural monoculture–gets a cartoon level of discussion.
Weird and wonderful, sure, but very light.
L. E. Modesitt, Jr., never fails to deserve praise, and the twelfth novel in his popular Saga of Recluce–Wellspring of Chaos–is no exception. The basic conceit is the nature of magic as the direct manipulation of order, presented here as a matter of fiddling with the little hooks between the particles of air or water or iron (yup, physics and chemistry). Talent is necessary, but much can be learned and taught. Modesitt’s magic is not a matter of incantations and appeals to gods or demons.
So meet Kharl. He’s an excellent cooper in Brysta, whose ruler has a corrupt and vicious son, Egen. One evening, Kharl hears a commotion in the alley outside his shop, intervenes, and saves a neighbor’s daughter from rape by a pair of velvet-clad toffs. A little later he discovers a blackstaffer from Recluce in another alley, beaten and raped, and a scrap of velvet clutched in her fist. Blackstaffers–mages–are from Recluce, and people distrust and fear them. But he takes her into the shop despite the protests of his wife, who thinks doing the right thing is all well and good, but he really should be thinking of the effect on his family and livelihood. A few days later, someone torches his neighbor’s shop. While he is helping to fight the flames, the blackstaffer is murdered.
And Egen promptly shows up to arrest Kharl for the deed. Fortunately, the local judge merely orders Kharl flogged. But his wife is declared guilty and hanged. His sons leave home. The taxman shows up with a monster bill. Kharl must abandon his shop and trade, hide out in the slums with only the blackstaffer’s staff to lean on and manual, The Basis of Order, to study and an urchin beggar for company, and hope to survive until a friendly ship makes port and he can escape Egen’s further fond attentions.
The ship arrives; Kharl becomes a ship’s carpenter and continues to do the right thing. He studies The Basis of Order and discovers a talent. And in due time he becomes an impressive mage. How will he use his powers? He’s never been mad for power or wealth. He’s craved only a peaceful life doing what pleases him–making barrels–and doing the right thing when the need arises. But there is the question of revenge, and he has been told that before he can be happy he must return to Brysta. Since he doesn’t manage to do that in this volume, we can expect another, which is sure to please Modesitt’s many fans.
If the title makes you wonder, by the way, at various points Modesitt says that the Wellspring of Chaos is wealth, order, wizards, Hamor (a country), and doing right thoughtlessly. Perhaps the next volume will add the search for revenge.
The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson, Warner,
$22.95,
394 pp.
(ISBN: 0446533025)
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Nalo Hopkinson’s latest superlative offering is The Salt Roads. It’s fantasy, but as we have come to expect from Hopkinson, it is not conventional fantasy. Her concern remains the African experience in history, rooted in the abuses of slavery and racism and centered on the Caribbean versions of both but reaching here to the France of Baudelaire and the Egypt of the very early Christian era.
The Caribbean component is the most heart-wrenching, for here is the slavery of the sugar-cane plantations of Saint Domingue, as bad as or worse than anything in the American South. Meet Mer, a healer woman; Tipingee, her sometimes lover; and Georgine, caramel instead of black, employed in the great house, eager to assume the airs of greater station, mated to a poor white man, and now in the throes of childbirth. Alas, the babe is stillborn, and the three women must bury the body on the riverbank.
And so is born Ezili "from song and prayer. A small life, never begun, lends me its unused vitality. I’m born from mourning and sorrow and three women’s tearful voices. I’m born from countless journeys chained tight in the bellies of ships. Born from hope vibrant and hope destroyed. Born of bitter experience. Born of wishing for better. I’m born . . ."
Voudoun culture knows Ezili as a loa (here, "lwa") or goddess drawn from a blend of African and Caribbean traditions. She is Virgin, Mother, and Lover, and she represents the transformation of African spirituality in the Diaspora, the blending of Old and New Worlds, African and European, Voudoun and Catholicism. All of these components are visible in The Salt Roads, from the initial Mother, who rides Mer and urges her to find a path to spirituality despite the historical currents leading to rebellion and massacre; to the Lover, Lemer, the Jeanne Duval who is Charles Baudelaire’s mistress, whom Ezili also rides and struggles to impel toward happiness; to the Virgin, Merite, a Nubian prostitute in Alexandria, property of a tavern-owner, who runs away to Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), miscarries on the threshold of the Church of the Sepulcher, turns rather spooky under Ezili’s reins, and thanks to the impressionability of a wandering monk becomes known forevermore as Saint Mary of Egypt, the "dusky" saint.
On one level, the tale is three tales, of Mer, Lemer, and Meritet, each woman moving from pain though struggle toward some measure of happiness. On another level, the tale is one, of Ezili, a goddess learning her trade. She is born in the mid-1800s, proves able to hop about in space and time, encounters other loas such as Ogu, who also wishes to free the Africans but through violence, and learns that the Africans of the Diaspora, the Ginen, are a sturdy, adaptable people whom no blight can cover completely.
At the same time, Hopkinson reminds us through the others around Lemer and Meritet that the tribulations of the Ginen are not for the Ginen alone. Lemer is surrounded by dancers who sell their bodies and dream like her of a marriage to lift them into respectability. Meritet’s friends are tavern whores such as Judah, who dream of freedom; in Judah’s case, there is an uncle near Jerusalem to whose farm he and Meritet may someday repair.
The tale is thus not just for those who share the African heritage of color and abuse. It is for us all, and Hopkinson well deserves the acclaim heaped upon her.
This year’s first issue of Analog had Ramona Louise Wheeler’s "Inherit the Vortex," the latest installment in her long-running series of Ray & Rokey tales. Now she gives us the first Ray & Rokey novel, A Chance to Remember, in which the excitement begins immediately. Shipwrecked, rescued by pirates, and fallen in with Wystan Whytock II, who hunts those despicable meat-hunters who crave the high prices folks pay for dino-burgers, the human Ray Harris and the self-exiled Wozurn noble Lord Rokhmyr soon find themselves having to protect a young sentient species from the illegal pet trade.
If you like Ray & Rokey, you’ll be delighted.
Though surely not as much so as the author’s friend who will find herself happily Tuckerized as a Wozurn spaceship captain.
I loved David Dvorkin’s title for his latest novel. How could anyone resist Business Secrets from the Stars? The bookstores are so full of New Age woo-woo and absurd self-help books that a parody just has to be good for a few laughs, especially since I remember my computerized psychic (closely related to the computerized poetry generator I described in the April 1988 Analog), which tempted me to hook my computer and a speech synthesizer to a 900 line. Fortunately, my sense of shame stopped me . . .
Not so Malcolm Erskine. He’s a midlist writer who quite deserves his lack of sales. He’s also quite jealous of more successful writers, bitterly divorced from a grasping wife who thought "writer" meant "rich," and a whiner. But then he comes up with Lukas of Aldebaran, ancient business magnate in a prosperous empire, who’s just begging to be channeled. So Malcolm cobbles together a load of nonsense, stealing liberally from the seminars he has been forced to endure at Western Bell (where he labors as a programmer) and his own past short stories. And he has his first and only bestseller on his hands.
Whee! But that’s not enough for Dvorkin. He brings in the competition in the form of televangelists, other New Age channelers, politicians, and more, sending up everything in sight. Dvorkin has a savage wit, and he employs it relentlessly.
But not successfully. He’s awfully heavy-handed, and his hero is an extraordinarily unpleasant twit. The basic conceit moves from cute to nauseating long before the book is done.
David A. Hardy is a well-known SF&F artist who has been voted "Best European SF Graphic Artist" and whose luminous work stands up nicely to prolonged examination (see my May 2002 review of Hardyware: The Art of David A. Hardy). But he would also like to be known as a writer. So here is Aurora: A Child of Two Worlds, part of which appeared in 1986 in Orbit.
The tale begins in Blitz-era London, when a strange craft slips in among a line of Heinkels bearing bombs. One of those bombs brings a house down upon a young mother of a crippled son and a baby girl named Aurora. Mother and son are pinned. The baby’s cries cut off. But then a strange figure appears to shift the rubble and help the son to his feet. He can walk now! And the baby? She breathes, she’s fine, but though mother doubts her own sanity, she’s not the same kid.
Fast-forward to the pop-music scene, when a street-kid named Aurora falls in with a wannabe pop group, takes a turn on the keyboard, makes a tremendous hit, and promptly drops out of sight. Same kid, looking like a teen even though she’s really thirty-two. Something funny’s going on.
But Aurora’s getting wise. She gets a fistful of degrees, cobbles a believable background, ducks out whenever she starts striking folks as too young, redates the paperwork, and carries on. Now it’s the twenty-first century, and she’s on the Mars crew. An accident costs her an arm–and it grows back. More funny stuff, and now folks are beginning to wonder. Worse yet, teammate Bryan Beaumont recognizes her from the cover of that old hit album.
But Mars has ghostly lights, and when Bryan tries out his dowsing talent, they find a derelict flying saucer a bit less than a century old. Parts of it still work, its cargo bay is full of pods containing dead babies, and a display tells of a world stricken by disaster.
You get the idea, or at least the major points. Hardy has an effective style with the kind of attention to visual detail one might expect of an artist. The tale has an undeniable charm in a somewhat retro mode. Yet his characters are a bit thin. Even Aurora seems an innocent who falls into events willy-nilly, even into her abrupt marriage to Beaumont. The story happens to her; even though she has a crucial world-saving mission, she has no clue till the very end, by which time all the public hullabaloo surrounding the discoveries on Mars has made it moot.
Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986) started his professional life as an architect. He designed the facade of the Chrysler Building, among other things! Later he became a magazine illustrator and a matte artist for such films as Citizen Kane. In the 1940s, he combined all this with a love for astronomy and earned renown for astonishingly realistic space paintings, including those that in Collier’s made the von Braun vision of space stations and moon bases seem realistic and thereby helped get the US space program started. And then there were the covers for SF magazines, including this one.
The awards given by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists to honor the best illustrations for book and magazine covers and interiors, games and other products, 3D work, unpublished work, and overall artistic achievement have been called Chesleys ever since his death. And now we have The Chesley Awards for Science Fiction & Fantasy Art: A Retrospective, assembled by John Grant and Elizabeth Humphrey, with Pamela D. Scoville. Few of the works reproduced here look like anything Bonestell might have done himself, but overall the book is an eloquent lesson on how rich is the imagery of SF&F at its best and a luscious trove of reminders of books read and loved in years past.
The artists represented here (with biographical bits at the end) include Bonestell, Janet Aulisio, Thomas Canty, David Cherry, Alan Clark, Vincent Di Fate, Bob Eggleton, Frank Frazetta, Frank Kelly Freas, Brian Froud, James Gurney, Jody Lee, Carl Lundgren, Don Maitz, Barclay Shaw, Michael Whelan, and many others.
Treat yourself.
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The Art of John Berkey,
Jane Frank,
Paper Tiger
(US distributor: Sterling Publishing), $29.95,
160 pp.
(ISBN: 1843401223).
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Not all artists win the Chesley award, even though they may do excellent work, have fans, and be deemed worthy of appreciative volumes such as The Art of John Berkey. Berkey’s roots are in the American West of South Dakota and Montana, and his work shows the signs in fishing and hunting scenes, Indian massacres, and Currier-Ivesish Americana. He can do peaceful scenes, but more often he gives full rein to his talent for emotional verve and dash, often rendered in a "dazzlingly evocative neo-Impressionist style." In SF, his signature (insofar as he has one) is organic spaceships that look like tumorous sharks, even to dorsal fins or conning towers that would look more at home on a submarine. I was not amused by his comment that "There are hazards in knowing too much about engineering or technology. It can limit the imagination." I think "looking real" should trump "looking cool," but what the hey. I’m not an artist.
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