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Polaris,
Jack McDevitt,
Ace,
$ ?, ? pp. (ISBN:0441012027)
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Jack McDevitt’s second novel, A Talent for War (reviewed here in July 1989), introduced Alex Benedict as an amateur sleuth sifting through the lies and omissions of history to find a treasure. Many years later, after impressive success, McDevitt returns to that character, who is now a dealer in antiquities well known for his skill at finding unique treasures. In this effort, he has the remarkably able assistance of Chase Kolpath. And in Polaris, they face a grander puzzle than any they have faced in the years since their introduction.
The Polaris is a starship, captained by Maddy English. It is carrying six celebrity passengers: Nancy White is a media personality. Garth Urquhart is a one-time politician. Martin Klassner is a cosmologist suffering from a mental deterioration rather worse than Alzheimer’s. Warren Mendoza is a microbiologist. Tom Duninger has dedicated his life for decades to the search for immortality. Chek Boland developed the technology for mindwipes and used it for years on criminals, but he recently decided that it is just another sort of death penalty. And they’ve all been invited to watch as a white dwarf collides with a star. Other ships carry the researchers who are there on business.
When the show is over, the ships head home, one by one. When it is Polaris’s turn, Base receives Maddy’s "Departure imminent" signal, but the Polaris does not show up. A rescue mission soon finds the ship, but no one is aboard. The AI has been turned off and can reveal nothing. The shuttle is in its berth. All spacesuits are in place. There are no signs of violence.
Shades of Mary Celeste!
Sixty years later, despite a great deal of investigation, the mystery remains a mystery. That’s when Survey releases a number of personal items such as jewelry and uniform jackets for sale. Alex and Chase acquire some of them just before an apparent assassination attempt blows up the building holding the rest. Their curiosity piqued, they start poking around and find odd coincidences. Duninger’s lab burned to the ground. A high Survey official vanished. Someone is trying to steal, buy, or at least examine the few artifacts that survived the explosion, and a woman involved looks so much like Maddy that she must be a relative. And then there are the attempts on their lives. . . .
Any aficionado of mystery fiction knows that you just don’t tick off an amateur sleuth! It only motivates him! It is thus not very long before Alex and Chase are pursuing the mystery more intently. They make progress, too, all the way to a long-abandoned space base where the truth is revealed to all those readers who didn’t put the hints together much earlier.
And of course, I can’t tell you what that truth is. You’ll have to buy the book to find out. When you do, I’m sure, you will enjoy the read, for Chase displays all the derring-do McDevitt is famous for giving his heroines. You will also be looking forward to the next, which McDevitt assures me is in the works.
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Peter Watts’s tale of the heedlessness of human greed began with Starfish (reviewed here in November 1999), which posited that an overcrowded, resource-short world could put power-plants on deep-sea rift zones, staff them with people whose psyches are twisted enough (or made twisted enough) to find the depths comfortable, and boobytrap them with nuclear bombs in case anything goes wrong. What went wrong was a mysterious infection, supposedly an ancient denizen of the deep sea, but when the bombs went off they triggered a tsunami that killed millions on shore. But, said the sequel, Maelstrom (April 2002), the bomb didn’t kill all the rifters. A furious Lenie Clarke was walking across the seabottom and through shoals of rotting bodies to seek vengeance. Since she was infected with the Behemoth bug, when she got to shore, that’s all she wrote, folks. Civilization crashed like a row of dominos.
Well, not quite. There were a few struggling to keep things going. And now we have Behemoth: ß-Max, which reveals that Clarke is now part of a rifter community sharing space on the seabed with the remnant refugees of corporate America. They’ve all been immunized against Behemoth. Or have they? People are getting sick, and the rifters are suspecting the corpses of tweaking the bug’s genes in order to get even. Soon the rifters are blowing up Corpse habs, and it’s up to Lenie Clarke, the woman who destroyed civilization to get even, to stop her fellow rifters from getting a little slice of the action for themselves.
Meanwhile, back on dry land, the South Africans are launching biowar with a bug called Seppuku. Desperate troubleshooters like Achilles Desjardins, whom we met in Maelstrom, are holding things in check, but not for long. Watts assures us that Behemoth: ß-Max is only half the third volume of his trilogy. The next will be Behemoth: Seppuku, and it will wrap things up.
Will civilization crumble? Will Achilles Desjardins, with his own dark twists, hold things together? Will Lenie Clarke save her world, and perhaps the larger one as well? There’s no telling at this point, but I think it safe to say that readers will be satisfied.
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The Donor,
Frank M. Robinson, Tor,
$24.95,
368 pp.
(ISBN: 0765310864).
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The biggest problem with Frank M. Robinson’s The Donor is that an experienced SF reader, especially one with a modicum of awareness of recent reproductive-technology issues, will find it utterly predictable. The thriller market, on the other hand, should eat it up.
Here’s the setup: Dennis Heller wakes up in a small San Francisco hospital after a car accident. He recognizes the surgeon as the same one who performed exploratory surgery on him in Boston and supposedly removed his gall bladder. Then he overhears the doc talking in the hall outside his room: ". . . wants us to go ahead–take the rest . . . he’ll die . . . be an anesthesia accident . . ."
So he crawls out of bed and runs. Before long he’s in another hospital and being told he’s minus a kidney. And that gallbladder operation actually cost him a chunk of liver. A kind couple takes him in, and when a couple of thugs come looking for Dennis, they get killed. And we learn that his adoptive parents never wasted any love on him.
Get it?
Meanwhile, back in Boston, Robert Krost, son of billionaire Max, is wondering why Daddy isn’t dying anymore. He was awfully sick, but he went out to San Francisco and came back a new man. And both Robert and Dennis look a lot like Max.
Get it now?
Robert and Dennis are both intelligent fellows. Their motivations are different, but they both want answers to questions. As they start researching, the details of the picture come together for the reader, who wonders why the heck they don’t get it a lot sooner and run away to Australia (as if that might make their lives any safer–Max has a lot of money and no ethics at all). But they don’t, which lets Robinson set up a rather nice shootout in the MASS MoCA art museum in North Adams, Massachusetts. Dennis’s girl friend disappears, and there he is, staring at his grim fate. But Robert, lurking in the shadows, gets it at last, and the situation resolves decisively and happily.
Though there is a hint that the tale will go into reruns.
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Bengal Station,
Eric Brown,
Five Star,
$25.95,
277 pp.
(ISBN: 1594142122).
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You’ll enjoy Eric Brown’s Bengal Station. The title refers to a floating arcology that dominates the Indian Ocean in a crowded future Earth. Its many decks teem with Indians and Thais, among others, and its docks welcome the void ships from the stars. Jeff Vaughan is a telepath (made by surgery and strengthened by implants) whose job it is to vet arriving ships for subversives and stowaways. Except . . . His boss keeps pulling him away from all ships from Verkerk’s World. Suspicious, he asks Jimmy Chandra, a cop friend, to look into his boss’s background. Keep him busy, he says, while I sneak past the guards he posts and check out the next ship.
The boss turns out to have a doctored dossier. The ship has a terrified girl and a mysterious mind-shielded container. The boss and his family commit suicide. The girl is the Chosen One, special to the Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One, and she promptly disappears. The container vanishes. And a friend of Vaughan’s, a street kid, Tiger, dies of a new drug called rhapsody.
A bit of investigation reveals that the Church arose on Verkerk’s World and uses rhapsody to achieve oneness with the divine–or what it claims is the divine. So Vaughan and Chandra are off to Verkerk’s World to learn what is going on.
Meanwhile, Tiger’s sister Sukara has been picked up by a mysterious stranger, Osborne, who takes her to Bengal Station. Sukara is desperate to find her sister, and because of the link between Tiger and Vaughan, she is destined to lead Osborne to the man he is hunting. But Vaughan returns from Verkerk’s World hot on the trail of a massive conspiracy. If Osborne succeeds, millions will die. If he does not, Vaughan may just be able to come to terms with an extraordinarily painful past.
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Hot and Sweaty Rex, Eric Garcia,
Villard
(Random House), $24.95,
336 pp.
(ISBN: 0375505237).
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Ever heard of the Dinosaur Mafia? If not, here’s your chance. Eric Garcia’s Hot and Sweaty Rex is the third in a series of Dinosaur Mafia mysteries premised on the notion that the dinosaurs never went extinct. They just blended in, wearing latex suits so they could look human (and don’t ask what they did before the invention of rubber! or why archeologists have never found any funny skeletons). Like us apes, many are perfectly fine folks, but some–hey, they’re dinos!–have a fierce streak. Perhaps it’s not surprising that some Families turned to bloody-handed crime.
So meet Vincent Rubio, a dino PI and recovering herbaholic (alcohol doesn’t do much for dinos, but basil and cilantro are another matter). Hired to follow Nellie Hagstrom, a Hadrosaur from Florida in LA to talk with the local Raptor Family, he finds himself in a jam when Nellie skips town after a day. Hey, says the Boss Raptor. I paid you twenty grand for a day? You owe me two weeks–off to Florida, and do your job. Since an old lady friend has just showed up, and the Boss will spring for two tickets, Vinnie bows to the inevitable.
Poor Vinnie winds up in the middle of a gang war. The Hadrosaurs are headed by a childhood chum. The local Raptors are headed by the Boss’s dim-witted brother. And they’re after each other’s throats, with the Raptors aided by an unsuspected spy in the Hadrosaur camp.
Unlikely though it be, it’s fun. Light, frothy, peppered with jokes and wisecracks, it is also well imagined and paced. It is easy to see why Garcia is popular.
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John Moore has surely read the Evil Overlord Manual credited to Peter Anspatch and available to anyone who knows how to use Google. Among other things, it abjures would-be Evil Overlords never to give a sucker an even break by, for instance, pausing to gloat before killing captured heroes, using doomsday devices with digital countdowns, or failing to kill cowardly thieves immediately. Lacking an equivalent manual for heroes, he made up the Handbook of Practical Heroics for his hero in Heroics for Beginners to find on a shelf. Then he set the scene–the kingdom of Deserae, whose Princess Rebecca is entertaining suitors such as Princes Kevin Timberline, diplomat, and Black Jack Logan, leader of men and defender of his home realm. Kevin’s got an in with Becky, but when Thunk the Barbarian returns from the Fortress of Doom to utter no more than a cryptic deadline before dropping dead, it is clear that the local Evil Overlord, He-Who-Must-Be-Named, Lord Voltmeter, is now chortling evilly over his potent Ancient Artifact and Diabolical Device and plotting his move.
So the king decides Something Must Be Done, and he who gets it done will get Becky’s hand. He also tells Kevin he can handle logistics while Logan gets the troops and the assignment to get that Something Done. That’s when Kevin snaffles the Handbook and takes off on his own. Except for Becky, of course, who is Really Serious about helping out.
Now Kevin’s a clever fellow, but the Evil Overlord has a Chief Minion and a Beautiful Assistant. Kevin does a nice job of exploring the ventilation ducts, but soon both he and Becky are chained in the dungeon, and the Evil Overlord, with the aid of his pt Mad Scientist, is about to fire up the Diabolical Device and destroy Black Jack Logan and his army.
The happy ending, complete with the right guy getting the gal, is part of the package Moore is sending up, so the Astute Reader should have little trouble predicting the end. Getting there is a good deal of fun, for Moore has a gift for the comic, which means we can look forward to his next, The Unhandsome Prince.
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 Catwoman,
Elizabeth Hand, Ballantine Del Rey, $6.99,
275 pp.
(ISBN: 0345476522).
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It’s meaningless light entertainment, and it’s by one of our best. Elizabeth Hand has novelized the Catwoman script, and it’s good pulp fun, just like the DC Comics original. Shy Patience Philips runs into a weirdness in the research lab of the cosmetics company where she works, flees, and is turned into the bold and powerful Catwoman. Now the evil and the rude must beware . . . So must the cop who is investigating a bit of the evil, though not quite for the same reason.
Have fun!
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The Public Domain Enhancement Act (Eldred Act) was introduced in Congress in June 2003 as H.R. 2601. Its intent was to create a resource to let people find out what properties remain under copyright by requiring that copyright holders who care about maintaining control pay a small fee after fifty years and periodically thereafter. The reason behind it is that historically copyrights have expired after a "limited" time, as mandated under the Constitution, but that in the twentieth century that "limited" time has been extended so often and so greatly as to render it effectively unlimited. The driver is corporations such as Disney, which own intellectual property (e.g., Mickey Mouse) that is still valuable, even though under older copyright law it (or its earliest forms, the first Mickey Mouse was Steamboat Willie) would long since have passed into the public domain for anyone to use as they see fit. Attempts to block these extensions have been fruitless, for Disney and its ilk have the money and lobbyists. The intellectual property industry–not just cartoons, but also music and movies–have also pushed to extend the nature of copyright protection so that many activities which were once legal are now barred. Indeed, downloading music over peer-to-peer networks and cracking copy protections on CDs, DVDs, and games (as well as telling others how to do it) are now felonies carrying larger penalties than those imposed on people convicted of stock fraud, accounting swindles, and other genuinely harmful acts.
Fortunately, the other side has legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, who argues in his latest book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, that American culture is as rich as it is because people have been free to modify preexisting intellectual property (Steamboat Willie ripped off a Buster Keaton film!). Today computer technology has made it possible for millions to do such things, but Disney is saying "As I did, thou shalt not do." Lessig has criticized this development at length in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (reviewed here in September 2001) and The Future of Ideas (September 2003). Now he returns to the fray, pointing out among other things that when technology changes, vested interests may try to quash it, as RCA did when FM came along. When they do not, as in the cases of photography and Japanese manga, the result can be an astonishing cultural efflorescence.
Piracy is a problem. Just the other day, I saw a news story concerning a fellow who used a camcorder to tape a brand new film so he could sell bootleg copies. But is the solution to outlaw all copying? Even copying of old songs that are no longer available as commercial product? That is the position of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has sued even when it had no case and used the threat of legal costs to extort settlements.
Lessig argues persuasively that there is a need for balance. The Public Domain Enhancement Act is one attempt to achieve that balance. Others are the Open Source software movement, the Creative Commons (where creators put their work in the public domain, wholly or partially), and even statutory licensing (which permits musicians to use the songs of others, for a set fee).
Alas, balance does not seem to be in the cards. The Public Domain Enhancement Act remains in committee, and industry lobbyists are trying hard to kill it. It is as if, Lessig says, they fear the existence of the public domain. The industry wants "to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that doesn’t require their permission first. . . . Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs." (italics in original)
The corporate dystopia is a traditional theme in SF. If you want to see it forming in the real world, read Lessig. If you want to stop it forming . . . Lessig suggests that it would be good if we could make copyright terms shorter again, but I suspect that even if we all wrote our congresscritters to urge that, not much would happen. He also–even though he himself is a lawyer–suggests that we should reduce the number of lawyers.
Ain’t gonna happen, is it?
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2004, Tom Easton
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