|
|
|
|
|
The Myriad,
R. M. Meluch, DAW,
$23.95,
310 pp.
(ISBN: 0756402794).
|
It has been over a decade since R. M. Meluch last earned plaudits for her work here, and I have no idea what she’s been doing. But now she’s back with The Myriad, the first volume in a new action-adventure series, "The Tour of the Merrimack," and it should appeal to anyone who enjoys resurgent Romans, ravening aliens, a noble and inspiring captain, a head-scratching puzzle, and an off-the-wall paradox.
Here’s the back-story: As soon as Earth got FTL travel, the descendants of the ancient Romans emerged from their secret niches as doctors, lawyers, priests, and all the rest who just happen to know a bit of Latin and hied off to Palatine to found the new Roman Empire: thoroughly elitist, thoroughly tyrannical, and absolute anathema to the USA, which has the clout back home–except for the League of Earth Nations’ (LEN) multicultural diversity nuts, who are absolutely sure that if everyone would just sit down and talk . . .
Well, maybe. But as soon as someone invented the res FTL communications tech, using it turned out to be ringing the dinner bell for the Hive, vast swarms of insectoid space-dwellers that loved to eat everything in sight. So meet Captain Farragut of the Merrimack, who has survived one Hive onslaught and is now hotfooting it toward–he hopes!–the Hive’s home world. Augustus, an engineered Roman patterner (who processes vast amounts of data very quickly), has just boarded. And suddenly there’s a globular cluster off the flank, with a minefield and three unusual, inhabited worlds right over yonder. Just as they’re making contact and spotting the puzzle–an inscription that matches one, found on another world, that has been dated to be older than the universe–a LEN ship shows up to scold the clumsy, bloody-handed military for hashing things up as usual, not to mention for their barbaric hunt for the Hive. And then they use their res.
So it’s up to Farragut and his doughty crew–as well as Augustus, natch–to save the day. They succeed, of course, and that’s when the paradox heaves into view.
It wouldn’t be too hard to take this one apart if one wanted to be picky about science or logic or clichés, but what the hey. It’s unabashed space opera, and it’s great fun. Enjoy!
|
|
|
 Schism,
Catherine Asaro, Tor,
$25.95,
398 pp.
(ISBN: 0765309513).
|
A year ago, with Skyfall, Catherine Asaro stepped back to the beginning of her Skolian saga to show how Roca met Eldrinson Valdoria. Roca was the daughter of the Skolian Imperialate’s founder and mother of Kurj, a powerful warlord who craved war with the slave-trading, empath-tormenting Aristos. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Roca planned to cast a deciding vote against the war, but her son maneuvered to strand her on Skyfall, where Eldrinson saw her, was smitten, and spirited her away to fall in love. The result was a political disaster, but Eldrinson proved to be of the same genetic stock as Roca’s own Ruby Dynasty, and Skolia needed Ruby genes, for only Ruby empaths could operate the ancient, star-spanning cyberweb that gave Skolia its chief advantage against the Aristos.
In due time, Roca and Eldrinson produced ten children–Keldric, Althor, Sauscony or Soz, Eldrin, Del-Kurj, Chaniece, Havyrl, Denric, Shannon, and Aniece Dyhianna. The names are familiar from the earlier books of the Saga, set later in time, when they play major roles. But at the time of Schism, they are yet young. Althor has gone off for Jagernaut training, and Soz yearns to follow him. But their father has other plans, which do not include letting her go. When she goes anyway, he pulls a classic "Never darken my doorstep again!" routine, which he soon regrets but cannot–pride forbids!–retract. So Shannon runs off to seek the Blue Dale Archers he is said to resemble, and distraught Papa hies off to chase him down, only to fall into the hands of an Aristo infiltrator.
Meanwhile, Soz is discovering that half-brother Kurj, now the military leader or Imperator of Skolia, has designated her and Althor as candidate successors. She finds it disturbing that he would set them against each other, but she still manages to blaze a fast track–loaded with demerits–through the Jagernaut academy. And when disaster strikes, Kurj displays a human side she and her family had not suspected.
Some disasters work out. Some do not. But if I give away too much, I will spoil your fun. Asaro has once more produced an entertaining yarn with a stronger emotive content than one usually sees. The fans she has won with her previous Saga volumes will be pleased, and even though this one is part of a series, it stands well enough on its own to bring more fans to the bookstore counter. Watch for it, and for the rest of the "Triad" subsaga it introduces.
|
|
Can an author who cannot be bothered to check basic facts be trusted to deliver a decent story? In Hostile Takeover, Susan Shwartz offends the knowledgeable by insisting that treating radiation poisoning, as by exposure to a solar storm, involves swallowing potassium iodide pills (KI) and undergoing a decontaminating shower. However, the shower does one any good only when one has been exposed to radioactive material that can be washed off, and a solar storm’s radiation is dangerous because fast-moving particles damage cells inside the body. The particles will hit other things too, of course, and perhaps transmute ordinarily safe materials into radioactive ones, so the shower just might help a little. But most of the damage will be internal, where the shower can’t reach. KI is used to protect the thyroid gland, which is very effective at glomming onto iodine in the blood and concentrating it in the gland, by flooding the body with nonradioactive, safe iodine, thus preventing radioactive iodine (I-131), such as can escape from a leaky nuclear power plant, from being concentrated.
Then she tells her reader that new arrivals at Vesta have their retinas scanned and recorded for identification purposes, and a few pages later, it’s a corneal scan that unlocks a door. This might be no more than a typo which will disappear between the proofs I saw and the books that will appear in the store, but still . . .
At any rate, if you can get past the gaffes, you will find an interesting, exciting tale. Earth is dominated by heartless corporations and a "company store" economy. If you can’t keep up with the interest on your debts–for college tuition, cosmetic surgery (gotta look good to get or keep a job!), health care, etc.–you either get frozen and shipped out to the colonies in the Belt and beyond, or you go into the spare parts bank. Heroine Caroline Cater (CC) Williams has clawed her way out of the underclass to a position as a hotshot financial analyst. Now she’s on her way to Vesta to pin down a suspicious pattern of trades, leaving her fiancé behind and hoping furiously to do well, get a raise and a bonus, and keep from falling behind on her debts. There’s a handsome military type, Marc, who’s supposed to be giving her a hand. There’s a mysterious bogey she spots while on a training exercise outside the ship. There’s a hush-hush rendezvous. And once she reaches Vesta, the financial pattern points damningly at an old, old friend.
What’s a girl to do? Well, she spots an equally old and quite treacherous rival sneaking through a door. When she gets an opportunity, she investigates. Pretty soon, she has a sore head, some very interesting pictures, and the cat is clawing its way merrily out of the bag.
And in the end . . . Shouldn’t the guy ask first?
You’ll have to read it to find out what that means.
|
|
|
Crux,
Albert E. Cowdrey, Tor,
$24.95,
349 pp.
(ISBN: 0765310376).
|
Albert E. Cowdrey has been chief of the Special History Branch of the U.S. Army. His previous books have dealt with the history of military medicine, environmental history, and foreign policy. He has published short SF in one of the magazines. Now he gives us his first SF novel, Crux, with excellent results.
The basic notion is that some three centuries before the story, Earth erupted into global war–nuclear and bio. Almost all humans were killed. But there were colonies on the Moon and Mars, so eventually Earth was resettled. The new World City is Ulanor (in the vicinity of Ulan Bator), population is hugely shrunken compared to today, and the rulers of Earth–and the hundreds of colony worlds–are quite Stalinist in attitude and methods. Dissent is dealt with by extreme torture in the dens of the secret police. Freedom of speech is unheard of. And some people are unhappy about the situation.
So when the word gets out that Ulanor scientists have invented a machine that can send one back in time, a group called Crux sends an agent, Dyeva, to Earth to steal the machine and go back to prevent the "Time of Troubles" and thus stymie the birth of the present world. But, says Cowdrey, "The Great Tao loves irony. It loves to give people the exact opposite of what they’re trying to achieve. It’s a mean, laughing son of a bitch." It is therefore no surprise when Dyeva only ensures the Time of Troubles, while Stef, the agent sent back to stop her, gets posthumous hero’s laurels. But the tale is by no means over, for now the government must decide to protect its roots in time and form an elite squad of timesurfers (the traditional Time Patrol). Hastings Mak applies, survives training, and must in due time stop another plot to change the past, as well as cope with schemes and conspiracies at home before finally discovering just how interconnected everything is.
And don’t forget the Great Tao. It ain’t done yet.
Cowdrey is a deft writer with a talent for characterization and a good feel for what history does to a society. I’d like to think that we are no longer capable of Stalinist atrocities, or that we will soon grow beyond them, perhaps even by the end of this century, when Cowdrey sets the Time of Troubles. But disasters such as the Time can undo much progress. Let’s hope it never happens.
|
Irish writer Oisin McGann’s first novel, The Gods and Their Machines, is a heartfelt indictment of the way developed nations treat their less developed neighbors. It resonates particularly with the England-Ireland and Israel-Palestine conflicts and warns of what might happen elsewhere (e.g., US-Mexico). It also resonates with all those tales where a boy on one side of a conflict meets a girl on the other side, and then . . . There is as well a reminder of Barry Longyear’s Enemy Mine, in which two foes meet and must depend on each other for survival.
McGann’s developed world is Altima. It has wealth, industry, airplanes, and it occupies a plateau high above the "Fringelands," nations such as Bartokhrin whose people must suffer strip-mining, toxic waste dumps, and other side effects of the "high" ones’ wealth. The arrogant Altimans see their neighbors as superstitious and primitive, good for naught but menial labor. The Bartokhrins see the Altimans as oppressors and send suicide warriors–saddled in a strange rite with the ghosts of those who cry out for revenge–into the Altiman cities.
Chamus Aronson is a teen-aged student of flying, the son and grandson of men who design and build planes for the Altiman air force. He lives to fly and dreams of fighters and bombers. He suffers a setback when a Bartokhrin terrorist kills the rest of his class, but he is soon in the air again. Unfortunately, he runs out of fuel over Bartokhrin and must set down in a field. Little does he know that a terrorist camp is nearby, or that the girl he runs into will turn him in.
But the girl, Riadni Mocranen, rebels when she learns that the terrorists will kill Chamus. Together they flee, with her acting the guide much like the Ariadne of myth. Meanwhile, the plots on both sides continue, while flashbacks reveal in Chamus’s memories enough hints to create in the reader a sense of horror at what the Altimans plan to do to their neighbors. Unfortunately, what we think is about to happen is not quite what is about to happen, and the final clues are presented in a rush that makes Chamus’s sudden shamuslike realization a bit of a surprise. Of course, he makes the right moral choice, commits himself to doing the right thing, and then . . .
Well. Many stories in this vein end with boy and girl in each other’s arms and a promise of happily ever after, at least for them and perhaps for their families and nations. Not this time, though McGann has shown himself suspiciously fond of punning on precedent. So when at the very end Riadni gasps and cries, "Take me higher!" he may be playing one more round of Joycean double-entendre.
Recommended.
Home | Address Change Form | What is Analog? | Forum | Submissions |Links | FAQ Page | Contact Editors | Privacy Policy | Advertising
Copyright © 2011 Dell Magazines, A Division of Penny Publications, LLC
Report problems on this site to Webmaster
|
|
|
Dog Warrior,
Wen Spencer,
Roc,
$6.99,
306 pp.
(ISBN: 0451459903).
|
Wen Spencer just keeps getting better. Dog Warrior is the fourth installment in her Ukiah Oregon series. The backstory is that centuries ago, the alien Ontogard arrived on Earth, planning to infect local life forms and replace their cells with their own. The result of such an infection is a "Get." This is the perfect disguise for an invader. But among the Ontogard was a mutant rebel, Prime. He sabotaged the mission, killing most of the invaders. Before he died himself, he infected a local wolf who became Coyote and in due time infected enough humans to form the Pack, dedicated to warring against Hex, the surviving standard-issue Ontogard villain, and his numerous evil Gets. He also sired on a local woman of the Cayuse tribe our hero, Ukiah Oregon. In Alien Taste (reviewed here in February 2002), we learned that Ukiah had been a wolf child until caught in a trap and adopted, that he had the ability to detect and analyze DNA the way we might a pungent odor, that when he is injured, lost blood or bits of flesh turn into small animals, and that he can recover from thoroughly mortal wounds. He also doesn’t remember his origins, since memories run away with lost blood or flesh. He recovered some long-lost memories in Tainted Trail (December 2002), when he and his mentor/partner, Max Bennett, took their PI business, specializing in tracking missing persons, to Oregon. He gained more in Bitter Waters (October 2003), when he learned that the aliens had brought with them several strange machines, one of which created a drug–Invisible Red or Blissfire–that could force Ukiah into a breeding frenzy and another of which could manufacture a virus that would destroy humanity, that the Ontongard had stashed them, and that a murderous cult had captured them and was bent on destroying everyone whose blood could form mice–including Ukiah.
Dog Warrior opens when a stranger–Atticus Steele–sniffs blood in a highway rest stop and discovers Ukiah’s body stuffed into a car trunk. Strangely, he feels he knows Ukiah, and soon all know that they are the same person, hacked into two long, long ago, healed back to wholeness, and gone their separate ways. But he doesn’t know what Ukiah knows about the backstory. He and his lover Ru are just looking for an Invisible Red drug deal, and before long they are right in the thick of a war among the Pack, the Ontongard, and the cult, with the bodies piling up in the wings whenever they don’t scurry off on little mouse feet. Since it’s pretty hard to kill Ukiah, he’s there too.
Ukiah’s FBI-agent lover, Indigo, makes only occasional appearances. This one’s for the guys (yup–that means Ru too). It’s fast-paced and bloody, punctuated with gunfire, explosions, and fires, and it’s even more of a page-turner than its predecessors.
It might even be the end of the series, but don’t worry. Spencer is working on the sequel to Tinker (April 2004), and she doesn’t seem about to quit.
|
|
|
 Coyote Rising,
Allen Steele,
Ace,
$23.95,
385 pp. (ISBN: 0441012051).
|
Allen Steele’s Coyote posited a US that had fallen prey to right-wing ideologues who had rewritten the Constitution, done away with the Bill of Rights, renamed the country the United Republic of America, given a Department of Internal Security the powers of East Germany’s erstwhile stasi or the Soviet KGB, and interned dissident intellectuals (DIs), meaning any scientist, university faculty member, or educated person who dares to question the party line. The tyrants said they had brought America back to its roots, its true self, but a few folks decided to bail. They swiped a starship, the URSS Alabama, and hied off to colonize Coyote, a large moon of a gas giant. They were making a go of it too, despite problems, but then a new ship from Earth appeared in the sky. The good news was that the URA was gone. The bad news was that the replacement wasn’t any better, and the Matriarchy expected the colonists to cooperate.
Considering their history, that wasn’t very likely. But the Alabama colonists didn’t have the wherewithal to fight. So they packed up and moved. The sequel, Coyote Rising, tells what happened next: Now the Matriarchy colony is having its own problems of overpopulation and unrest. Now it’s trying to invade the Alabama folks’ new territory. At the same time, freedom fighters and terrorists are coming into play, and in the end . . . Well, what do you do when you are truly free? Some people just need to be told what to do!
As usual, Steele tells an interesting story with a strong leavening of social commentary. Recommended.
|
|
SOMETHING DIFFERENT . . .
The other day I received a package of three audio books that may not be about to go anywhere. The publisher, Mike Segroves of Paperback Digital, says the idea is to make more science fiction, fantasy, and horror available in audio format than has been possible before by using MP3 compression technology to fit the massive audio files on just one or two CDs instead of six. So here are Charles de Lint’s Spirit in the Wires ($14.95), John Ringo’s and Julie Cochrane’s Cally’s War ($28.50), and Eric Flint’s and Andrew Dennis’s 1634: The Galileo Affair ($19.95). You can order the disks from www.paperbackdigital.com or download them (45 minutes IF you have a cable modem) from either paperbackdigital.com or fictionwise.com.
Unfortunately . . . Where do most people listen to audio books? My wife does it in the car, and I suspect that the in-car market is significant. But MP3-CDs can be played only in an "MP3-enabled listening device such as a desktop computer or a portable MP3 player such as an Apple iPod." I tried one in the car, and it wouldn’t play. The laptop and home desktop–it worked. The office desktop–nope. A portable CD player–nope. So it’s chancy, and I don’t see many people getting an MP3-enabled device just to listen to the disks (they haven’t bought e-book readers, either). Nor do I see iPod users buying the disks–they’re music folks, right?
Call me an old fuddy-duddy who can’t see the wave of the future if you like, but I think this one’s a bust.
|
|
"The Reference Library" copyright 2005, Tom Easton
|
|
