Survival,
Julie Czerneda,
DAW,
$23.95,
401 pp.
(ISBN: 0756401801). |
Julie Czerneda begins a new and intriguing series–Species Imperative–with Survival. At the time of the story, Earth has finally taken its environmental responsibilities seriously. Many areas have been set off limits to human impact. Dr. Mackenzie (Mac) Connor is the codirector of one such area on the northwest coast of North America, where she studies salmon and aims her research at the idea that genetic diversity is good for survival. Yet humanity is hardly Earth-bound, for the galaxy is now theirs as well. And that galaxy is home to many other sentient species–all but the Chasm, where the ruins say life once was, but all is sterile now.
An old friend, Emily Mamani, has just arrived to help Mac for a season. But they are immediately interrupted by a visitor from the Ministry of Extra-Sol Human Affairs, Nik Trojanowski, and Brymn, the first of the alien Dhryn ever to visit Earth. She promptly pushes Nik into the drink but eventually settles down enough to learn that Brymn wants her help in studying a mystery: Various worlds along the travel lane between the Chasm and Earth have been attacked by something strange; whole valleys go lifeless, sterilized. The Ministry is worried that Earth is a target, and when invisible aliens, the Ro, show up, Mac lets herself be drawn away to visit the Dhryn homeworld.
What are the attacks like? Czerneda describes in short vignettes, right from the beginning, a rain of green fluid, the digestion of living things, and the mouths that feed on the result. Are the Ro responsible? Brymn says they are the foe, they may come from the Chasm, maybe they are. But as Mac learns, the Dhryn are curious folk and they too may date their origins back to the Chasm days. It takes a while for her to learn enough to figure out the truth, but Czerneda lays out enough clues for the reader who may well suspect the truth fairly early.
Mac and Nik, Emily and Brymn, these are the central characters of the tale, and Czerneda draws them deftly and convincingly. She drew me in and kept me reading better than many do, and she kept me wondering too. What is the species imperative that names the series? She never says, but Mac’s research emphasis hints that it must have something to do with diversity. On the galactic stage, that may mean that she intends to reach conclusions about the value of keeping intelligent species from dying (as so many did in the Chasm), perhaps by devising preserves like Mac’s research site to encompass whole worlds.
Hmm. This does remind me of David Brin’s Uplift universe, with its fallowing of worlds and even galaxies. And then there’s Brymn . . . Sheer coincidence? Maybe, but . . . If there really is a connection, a reader may enjoy rereading Brin before or after Survival.
Ben Bova concludes his Asteroid Wars trilogy with The Silent War, maintaining Martin Humphries as a classic mustachio-twirling villain but turning good-gal Pancho Lane into something nearly as bad. The tale began with The Precipice (serialized here) and The Rock Rats, introducing Pancho as a jet-jockey who managed to succeed to the chairmanship of a major rocket shop, the Astro Corporation, and then goose humanity out to the Belt, where the rock rats could extract ores for an Earth wracked by the aftermath of climate disaster. Humphries then plots a scheme to take over the Belt. He sets up a competing shop, sends out hired company prospectors, and puts a killer to work scaring off the independents.
Now Humphries is still at it, while Pancho Lane plots deeds just as evil to counter him. Lars Fuchs, whose wife Humphries stole, plots murder. The Yamagata corporation plots to help Humphries and Pancho destroy each other. And a mysterious artifact holds a hope of redemption for all who are willing to admit that they have done wrong. (Guess whether Humphries has any hope.)
The characters are familiar. Bova spends little time on characterization or motivation this time out. The point is plot and scheme, death and destruction, a deliberate metaphor of kids in a sandbox destroying each other’s toys until someone slaps them up the side of the head. As a finale to a series, it works well. As a stand-alone, the reader would surely find it wanting.
If you enjoyed the first two books, you’ll want this one. If you missed the first two, go read them first.
 Scarab,
Don D’Ammassa,
Five Star,
$25.95,
268 pp.
(ISBN: 1594141444). |
Don D’Ammassa has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy at the Chronicle (a news magazine for the genre, along the same lines as Locus) for almost as long as I have been at Analog. He’s also been writing SF, though he only turned his hand to novels in the last few years. The latest such is Scarab, an interesting tale of obsession and detection.
The hero is Sandor Dyle, a wealthy dilettante with a talent for pattern analysis. When the local cops realize he is stuck on Tashista between ships, they beg him to have a look at an aggravating mystery in the city of Soshambe. A killer, nicknamed Scarab because he commits his crimes only in the secant (month) of Scarab, has just slain in most brutal fashion the son of a local bigwig. As Sandor becomes acquainted with the world, the reader sees a social structure that is a satiric take on our own. Tashistans believe that the right and proper way to live is to scramble for money so that one might move up in the world, and every position of any note is for sale to the highest qualified bidder. The local chief cop, or head of prefecture, Marym Dunnis, got her job in just that way when her predecessor, Savram Aras, developed a fatal illness of body and mind. She tells Sandor that Scarab seems to leave no pattern to be analyzed, other than timing, victims drawn from the poor section of town, and the brutality of the deed. She also reveals that Aras had lost a wife and son to killers, and that he had focused his energies quite intensely on the Scarab case. When Sandor visits Aras, he finds him a fair hand at pattern analysis.
And then the pace of the killings picks up. Sandor thinks Scarab may be challenging him, and in due time he discovers the villain. The reader may be well ahead of him, but the tale need not then succeed solely on the strangeness of Tashista and on a prose that seems to echo Conan Doyle a bit, as well as Jack Vance and perhaps even Laurence Janifer in his tales of Gerald Knave: Survivor. D’Ammassa is inventive and ingenious enough to make both hero and villain believable.
Wil McCarthy’s Lost in Transmission continues his saga (following The Wellstone and The Collapsium) of a future humanity grown wealthy and immortal with the aid of programmable matter, 3D fax machines that can restore one’s ideal state of health and youth, and more. Alas, the young–including Prince Bascal of the Queendom of Sol–saw no future so long as their elders hung around. They rebelled, had a high old time playing pirate, and were inevitably brought to heel. The sentence, after suitable retraining, is to board the first colony ship to the stars, the Newhope, and hie off to Barnard’s Star. Most of the thousands of erstwhile rebels are stored as fax patterns, but a few must be present in corporo to run the ship. Here is Bascal, elected king of the new colony, his old friend Conrad Mursk, an architect who is utterly incapable of leaving well enough alone, Conrad’s lover and Newhope’s captain Xmary Li Weng, and more, all companions from youth destined to be founding fathers and mothers of a new world.
Unfortunately, that world is metal-poor. The colonists’ numbers are not enough to maintain a normal economy plus maintain, repair, and build all the gadgets they grew used to at home (things like those 3D faxes). Trouble looms, and immortals die.
Not that the future is all that rosy back home. The book opens with Conrad and Bascal back in Sol System, where Earth has been swallowed in a black hole or something like and household robots have mounted an insurrection. They’ve got a mysterious maguffin to deliver to a nearby city, but the robots are attacking, and . . .
How did they get back home? Lost in Transmission answers that question for Conrad, but not for Bascal. There’s another tale to tell, and perhaps we’ll see it before long.
Heaven,
Ian Stewart
and Jack Cohen, Warner,
$24.95,
343 pp.
(ISBN: 0446529834). |
Ian Stewart is a math professor at Warwick University in England. Jack Cohen is a well-known reproductive biologist and "alien design" consultant. They’ve done popular science, both singly and together, and SF to boot, notably Wheelers in 2001, for which they created a plausible future marked by an intense twenty-first century reaction against technology, especially computers that are smart, but not quite smart enough. Now they give us Heaven, where the computers–especially the ones embedded in ancient Precursor artifacts such as starships–are more than smart enough, but people are being stupid in another way.
On the world of No-Moon, there lives a sort of sentient coral. The males, such as Second-Best Sailor, resemble giant jellyfish and sail upside-down ships on trading missions. The females are reefs, and when they connect up their individually puny brains, they display impressive cognitive prowess. Indeed, when they hear that a Cosmic Unity mission fleet is on its way, they recall what made them flee their original world ages ago, recognize the onslaught of a memeplex that is capable of great evil "for your own good" (think Inquisition), and project disaster. Meanwhile, Servant-of- Unity XIV Samuel is being trained for a place in the church’s hierarchy and exposed to some of the things the church does "for your own good." He doesn’t like them, even when they have a definite perverse logic.
And the Neanderthals (rescued from Earth ages ago; they lack a spiritual sense and are immune to memeplexes), who live as traders and travel on Precursor ships that must be coaxed to do their bidding, are being enlisted by the reef-mothers to carry a portion of their kind to another world, where perhaps they will survive the disaster. Unfortunately, that world turns out to be deadly in two ways, one of which turns out to be key both to making Precursor ships more cooperative and to defeating the Cosmic Unity. The other . . . well, suffice it to say that Second-Best Sailor, XIV Samuel, and the Neanderthals are going to meet before the end.
Stewart and Cohen can write, and Cohen’s aliens are as always quite convincing. But I found three problems that may not be showstoppers–plenty of other writers have committed the same and similar sins–but do interfere with the suspension of disbelief. The first is the Precursor technology, which they deploy far too much like a magic wand, just the ticket whenever the plot needs a boost. The second is the attack on religion; I don’t disagree with it, but I do find it rather heavy-handed. The third is the repeated insistence that life–at least when prone to memeplexes–is a disease on the living, thinking galaxy, which I found too hard to swallow.
As they say in the chatrooms, YMMV (your mileage may vary).
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No Cover Available
A Scholar of Magics,
Caroline Stevermer, TOR,
$19.95,
300 pp.
(ISBN: 0765303086).
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Caroline Stevermer is a charming writer with a talent for spirited heroes and heroines. She earned plaudits for A College of Magics (2002), set in an Edwardian England where magic is a genuine part of the curriculum–right beside rhetoric and decorum–and Glasscastle University can be devoted to magic alone. Being English, Glasscastle is populated by stuffy dons and infested with politics. But there is also a touch of Wodehouse to leaven the elegant drawing-room atmosphere with humor. And then there are mystery, adventure, derring-do, and romance. . . .
It’s all there again in A Scholar of Magics, which brings a sideshow cowboy to Glasscastle, where the researchers of the Agincourt Project need a sharpshooter. Samuel Lambert is an American innocent, wide-eyed before the wonders of Europe and quite enchanted by the magical chanting that wards the university against the perils of the outside world. He thinks that it would be nice to be a student there but is told that Americans just can’t qualify. Not only do they lack the appropriate "quality," but since magicians have trouble crossing water, those who survived the crossing to be colonists lacked magic, and so of course do their descendants.
He is also a practical fellow who patiently puts up with the demands of tea with Amy Brailsford, wife of the provost, and her insistence on reading his palm, feeling the bumps of his skull, and even examining his tea leaves. Both innocence and practicality are tested when the provost’s sister Jane appears from France with a gift for mischief and a message for Nicholas Fell, who has let Samuel share his donnish quarters. It seems that Fell is the new Warden of the West, but he refuses to accept the post.
And who is that bowler-hatted gent who has just fled Fell’s study, leaving the top-secret plans for the Agincourt Device on his worktable? Why is it that no one but Samuel and Jane saw him? Where is Fell himself? Why does Amy’s pendulum point to Ludlow, home of the Earl of Bridgewater? And when Samuel and Jane hare off in pursuit of mystery, where does Jane vanish to?
Samuel and Jane are clearly drawn to each other, but in the Edwardian world, propriety keeps them from doing much about it beyond a few potent glances. That adds a nice tension to the chain of burglaries, kidnappings, and schemes that drives the plot along and ensures that the reader looks forward to Stevermer’s next.
Certainly I will. I enjoyed this one.
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No Cover Available
He Do the Time Police in Different Voices,
David Langford,
Cosmos,
222 pp.
(hc, $29.95,
ISBN: 1592240577)
(pb, $17.95,
ISBN: 1592240585).
The SF Book of Days,
Don Sakers,
Speed-of-C Productions (www.scatteredworlds.com), $14.99,
183 pp.
(ISBN: 0971614768).
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David Langford’s He Do the Time Police in Different Voices is a delightful collection of SF parodies and pastiches. It includes everything in The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two (reviewed here in July 1989) and adds another 40,000 words of good, clean fun targeted at Asimov’s robots, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s house parties, Lovecraft, and of course E. E. "Doc" Smith ("Sex Pirates of the Blood Asteroid"), among others.
There’s no title story, but you should have fun with it anyway.
Don Sakers’s The SF Book of Days doesn’t need much reviewing: It’s there, it offers "a science fiction/fantasy event for every day of the year . . . and for quite a few days that aren’t part of the year," and it even tosses in lists of names for alien months and other names for the days of the week (including ten-day weeks!). Thus Sunday is variously Sunnendei, Senkyeh, Kiriakos, Elenya, and so on.
This one is for fans who just cannot survive without knowing that Wildfire joined the Legion of Super-Heroes and explorer Cogdon Nestor wrote to Edgar Rice Burroughs to report a telegraph in the desert on the same day, June 1, of 2981 and 1916, respectively.
Have fun!
Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century, first published in 1882, now enjoys its first English translation, and with reason. It’s a novel, but it is an astonishing bridge between the older utopian approach and the pseudo-realism of modern SF. Since Robida provided several hundred illustrations for his work, the novel is also a bridge to the modern graphic novel.
Robida’s technology is pretty quaint, but his social projections are eerily close to dead-on. He projects social upheavals at the times when we had two world wars and calls for a feminist revolution, home shopping, a sort of Internet, and a good deal more, all revealed as his protagonist Hélène searches for a profession. His biggest miss is surely that he thought we would have it all by 1952!
The book is an excellent illustration of one of the major hazards of futurism: the tendency to see the future in terms of the present. Thus Hélène winds up quite conventionally married. In addition, although Robida describes a tunnel between France and England, he also expects personal travel to be based on balloons (as if to say, "Whatever we do, the future will do it better"). In this light, it is worth recalling the late Isaac Asimov’s Futuredays: A Nineteenth-Century Vision of the Year 2000, published by Henry Holt in 1986. Asimov’s text accompanied a series of cigarette cards commissioned from Jean Marc Côté in 1899. Here too the technology was quaint, but the balloons had given way to gliders and airplanes with fabric wings (some rather as if the Wright flyer had mated with a bat). Robida is just as fanciful, but because he considered at novelistic length the social impacts of technological and economic changes, he remains more interesting.
Back in 1958, the late Julie Schwartz created Adam Strange as "the thinking man’s superhero" (meaning he outthought the foe, rather than super-strengthed or super-magicked them). The DC Comics strip lasted for years, complete with Schwartz’s technical footnotes about Incas and light-years, spaceships that looked more like submarines, and of course rockets that banked and swooped, not to mention evil geniuses, aliens, mad scientists, and more aliens.
Great fun at the time, and if my mention of those days stirs a bit of nostalgia, you can rush right out and buy The Adam Strange Archives, Volume 1. Have fun!
Speaking of comics, Danny Fingeroth has had a long career in comics, notably as the man in charge of Marvel’s Spider-Man line. Now he teaches comics writing at NYU (among other things) and produces books such as Superman on the Couch.
His basic premise is fairly simple: There must be a reason why superhero comics are so popular. His thesis is that they reflect (and shape) the American mythos. Superman, for instance, was an immigrant who made good. He was also an orphan, so whatever he made of himself epitomized self-reliance and permitted the comic reader to project hopes and dreams onto him without fear of implicit contradiction by prior history. At the same time, he (like most other superheroes) has a dual identity that cannot rationally stand up to cursory examination but aids the reader’s identification with the hero. ("Hey! If he can look like an ordinary schmo but really be super, then I, who really am an ordinary schmo, just might have something super hidden inside me!")
You get the picture. Fingeroth isby no means the first to examine comics with an eye to understanding what they Really Mean. In fact, he cites a number of earlier studies (e.g., Berger’s The Comic Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks, and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves, McAllister and Newell, Comics and Ideology, Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Steinem, Wonderwomen: Feminisms and Superheroes, and more). But though he has genuine insights to offer, his tone is breezy and superficial, and I feel the lack of a more thorough, even academic, treatment of the subject. Fingeroth’s great success lies perhaps in convincing the serious reader that the topic deserves that better treatment.
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