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Dark Crusade, Walter Hunt,
TOR,
$25.95,
416 pp.
(ISBN: 0765311178).
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The fourth volume in Walter Hunt’s "Dark" saga (following Dark Wing, reviewed here May 2002; Dark Path, July/August 2003; and Dark Ascent, April 2004) is Dark Crusade, and it is a worthy continuation of the tale, although, as before, if the reader is not familiar with the earlier volumes, it will be tough going.
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 (Gyaryu’har) for the zor sword of state (the gyaryu), 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—which is not the vuhl. That may be something mysterious called the Or, and then there is the mysterious Stone, who can use a rainbow bridge to walk away from a ship in jump, has helped Laperriere recover the gyaryu, dropped hints that the zor myths are not what they seem, and indicated that something else entirely is going on.
What is that something else? Hunt still isn’t telling. But Stone is back, helping an AI modeled on Niccolo Machiavelli gain full sentience and take over the Guardians, trained by Owen Garrett to spot the vuhl shapeshifters when they try to get close to the emperor. Meanwhile, John Smith, an ex-guardian with a strange origin, has teamed with Owen Garrett to form Blazing Star, a paramilitary group with a talent for countering the vuhl psychic attacks and even paralyzing their fleets. Blazing Star aims to exterminate every last vuhl, and when it combines with the fleet, it soon becomes clear that it cannot possibly quit when the vuhl are gone.
What will the next target be? Recall how it all began, with Stone manipulating events to exterminate the zor. There are still ominous signs in the zor dreamland, the Plane of Sleep, although ancient guardians have been awakened. There is something out there that wants to destroy humans, zor, vuhl, and all. There is a hint that the target is "meat creatures," but I suspect—given Hunt’s talent for red herrings—that there is something else behind it all. First, however, Gyaryu’har Laperriere must put herself at risk to forestall the imminent catastrophe. If she can survive the final debacle . . .
Well, of course she does, even if she does wind up stuck waaayy out in the galactic boonies. She has a long, long voyage home ahead of her, but perhaps she will gain a clue or two on the way. Or maybe Stone will kindly provide another hint or two.
And of course there will be another volume—or two, or more—to look forward to. The total really should add up to seven, so that Walter "Salome" Hunt can tear aside the full complement of veils.
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 Human Resource, Pierce Askegren, Ace,
$6.99,
280 pp.
(ISBN: 0441010792).
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Graphic-novel author Pierce Askegren’s prose debut, Human Resource, is a very readable romp through a future corporate dystopia. Governments are bankrupt, so the Moon’s Villanueva Base is owned by a consortium of five corporations that supposedly do not compete—different product lines and all that—but in reality watch each other very closely. And when Erik Morrison arrives as EnTek’s new Site Coordinator, everyone is very interested in his past as a "troubleshooter." Right from the start, he’s being hit on by everyone in sight, beginning with Doug Stewart, annoying snack food sales rep. Before long he’s being told he really has to meet Wendy Scheer, over at the government-run SETI project. And when Wendy comes on stage, she immediately displays a quite inhuman talent for making people like and cooperate with her.
Inhuman? This is only the first volume of the "Inconstant Moon" trilogy, and we soon learn that a missing prospector, Ramirez, had found something mysterious before he vanished. What’s more, the sample he left behind is a bit of uninformative hardware. Pardon me if I leap to the conclusion that aliens are involved, and even that Wendy is one of them!
Not that Askegren reveals any such a thing, though by the end Ramirez does turn up and we learn just what it was that he found, as well as how thoroughly topsy-turvy the status quo ante is about to turn. If Wendy is not human, we won’t know till the next volume, or perhaps the next. For now, we must be content with a very smoothly done puzzle story that leaves us more than willing to give the next a try.
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Mindscan,
Robert J. Sawyer,
Tor,
$24.95,
273 pp.
(ISBN: 0765311070).
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Robert J. Sawyer’s Mindscan is a disappointment. The premise is intriguing enough: The Immortex company has developed the Mindscan process to copy a human mind from a living brain into a computer installed in a robotic body. It’s expensive, at least at first, so it’s being offered only to the elderly wealthy. It leaves the meat body and brain intact, so once the meat or "shed skin" signs all property and personhood rights over to the robotic copy, off the meat goes to a retirement home on the far side of the moon, there to fade away without further contact.
Hero Jake Sullivan, heir to a beer fortune, is rich enough, but he’s not elderly. Because he has a birth defect that puts him at risk of sudden death from irremediable stroke, he signs up anyway. Once installed in his new body, he waves good-bye (mentally—new and old aren’t allowed to meet) to his old self and heads home to pick up his life again. Unfortunately, his mother rejects him, his girlfriend doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, and his dog doesn’t recognize him. Mentally, he’s the same old Jake, but there’s something about the meat, or at least about the way people perceive it. The dog is easy to understand—robots don’t have the right smell. So’s the girlfriend, especially if she held any dreams of procreation. But Mom? She insists that he is no longer her son. The flesh of her flesh is on the far side of the moon, waiting for his stroke.
Fortunately, Jake has met an elderly woman, Karen, who made pots and pots of money as a famous writer. Fortunately for the meat Jake, modern medicine comes up with a nanotech cure for what ails him. Unfortunately, the meat Karen dies (she was old, after all) and Jake’s doctor passes the word to the folks on Earth. Unfortunately, Karen’s son decides that since she’s dead, and a robot can’t possibly really be her, her pots of money should be his. He rushes off to court to have her will probated.
And that’s where the story bogs down. There are side elements—meat-Jake decides he wants to go back to Earth now that he’s cured, and he tries to force Immortex to let him; silicon-Jake is holding weird conversations with quantum-entangled duplicates; silicon-Jake and silicon-Karen, despite the difference in meat-ages, are having a very nice romance—but the bulk of the novel is a tedious courtroom recounting of arguments for and against regarding Immortex’s robotic copies as real persons. Sawyer makes it clear that they are, but the US has continued down the conservative road.
What’s the upshot? Sawyer breaks a fundamental writing rule when he tells, not shows. He just jumps a hundred years down the road to let Jake report the long-ago verdict and say, in effect, "So we emigrated." It’s a logical enough punt, with plenty of historical precedent, but it’s not very satisfying.
Or maybe it’s just too hard to sympathize with rich characters whose problems (other than age or hereditary defect) are so far removed from those of the rest of us.
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Spin,
Robert Charles Wilson,
Tor,
$25.95,
364 pp.
(ISBN: 0765309386).
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It’s a safe bet that Robert Charles Wilson’s latest, Spin, will be on the next round of award ballots. The premise is simple, albeit a bit bizarre: One night, the stars go out and satellites come tumbling out of the sky. A barrier has been erected around the Earth. The Sun, or a facsimile, shines through, and astronauts who hover above it for weeks come down only seconds after it went up. The reasons are entirely mysterious, but it seems to many that it is a fair presumption that aliens—soon known as the Hypotheticals—are involved.
The characters are more complicated. Tyler Dupree is just ten when it happens. He is in the yard of the Big House with his friends Jason and Diane Lawton. His father was once the partner of Jason’s Dad—E.D.—in an enterprise aimed at commercializing aerostats as communication platforms. After he died in a highway accident, E.D. invited Tyler’s mother to become the Lawtons’ housekeeper and live in the guesthouse on their estate. Jason, a genius at science and engineering even when young, is being groomed to be his father’s heir. To E.D., Diane is entirely secondary, but to Tyler, she is something else. At ten, he hardly understands what that "else" might be, but he knows there is a bond. Their mother, Carol Lawton, is an alcoholic.
The loss of comsats with the Big Blackout means no telephone, no Internet, no global TV. But E.D. Lawton’s aerostats are the ideal replacement. Soon things are up and running again, and E.D. is wealthy and powerful. Research reveals that the barrier involves time, and the universe outside is spinning merrily along. Earth is caught in a bubble of slow time, a day passing for every hundred million years outside, and it is soon apparent that it will be no more than a few decades before the Sun expands to roast its planets and dies. E.D. gets a research effort going, with Jase in charge, utterly obsessed with understanding and if possible solving the mystery. Diane turns to religious extremes. Tyler goes into medicine, and in due time he must do his best to help both Jase and Diane deal with severe illness.
What could one do if one day’s effort produced a hundred million years of result? One answer is to take advantage of the expanding Sun and its warming of Mars. Send bacteria and plants and animals and finally humans. Take a couple of years to do it all, and then send up a satellite to contact the new civilization. Do they have answers? Do they have answers that Earthly humans can or will use? Different questions, and if we have some idea that answers exist because of the way Wilson has chosen to tell his story—a few days at the very end interspersed with prolonged recollections—we don’t know the specifics until the last few pages.
All I will say about those specifics is that they are as grandiose in scope and sweep as anyone could wish. They unify everything, they impose structure on time, space, and fate, and Olaf Stapledon (SF’s first cosmic visionary) would have loved Wilson’s vision.
Don’t miss this one.
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Reflex,
Steven Gould,
Tor,
$24.95,
380 pp.
(ISBN: 0312864213).
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A dozen years ago, Steven Gould’s Jumper introduced Davy Rice, who discovered in a moment of stress that he could teleport. Neat trick and all that, and the novel played at some length with the implications. By the end, he was helping out the NSA as a very special sort of secret agent. He also had Millie, who was already getting used to being jumped from hither to yon. Breakfast in Paris, lunch in Tokyo, a walk on a Tahiti beach in between.
But the secret agentry has brought him to the attention of the wrong people. As the sequel, Reflex, opens, Davy is meeting his handler at a little restaurant. Moments later, Davy’s drugged, Brian is racing down the street with Davy over his shoulder, and bullets are flying. Then Brian’s dead, Davy’s being bundled into a stolen ambulance, and Millie, stuck without her teleport in the Aerie, a Southwest cliff house accessible only by rockclimbers (or teleports) is wondering why Davy isn’t returning from his meet.
Eventually, being a resourceful gal, she breaks out the rockclimbing gear and rappels over the edge of the cliff. And when the rock comes loose, she discovers that she too can teleport.
Meanwhile, Davy is discovering that he’s stuck. His mysterious captors have chained him to a wall; since when he jumps, he takes with him anything fastened to him, and the wall’s too massive, he can’t go anywhere. He can, however, jump around the room, dragging the chain with him.
His captors have also done a spot of surgery, implanting a device that, if they push the button or he gets outside the range of a signal, triggers massive vomiting and so on. They’re using it to condition him to obey orders.
Meanwhile, Millie is busily trying to find him with the aid of secret agents and street people. Unfortunately, the NSA agents are getting called off the case, quite as if their superiors don’t want Davy found. But Millie is intelligent and persistent, a few helpful clues fall into her hands, and the FBI is still on the case.
Davy, of course, is doing his best to confound his captors, in the process learning that the seductive villainess has the same scars he now bears. He is in the hands of a brutal outfit that has enlisted some very effective technology to ensure loyalty. And it is an open question how many layers of the hierarchy extend above the seductress. If they go far enough, Reflex will have to have at least one sequel.
When the physicist studying Davy has him try bouncing back and forth rapidly between two spots, in hope of seeing a portal, he tries again in private and discovers that he can almost literally be in two places at once, and the portal will let air or water flow through it. This later proves very useful, though Gould forgets that when Davy is chained he cannot jump any distance. If you forget too, the ending will be immensely satisfying. If you do not, your disbelief will abruptly lose its suspension and come crashing down.
You may also wonder why it is so difficult for a wife to find her husband when she can teleport to any scene or location she has memorized. Logically, she should be able to imagine him as a scene and jump directly to him. Is the problem that the location must be fixed? Well, Davy showed in the earlier book that he could quite easily jump to a moving target (a thug dropped from high in the air, and retrieved after a frightening drop). Perhaps this is a new wrinkle for Gould to develop in the next book.
Have fun, but keep an eye on those chains.
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In Speaking of the Fantastic II, Darrell Schweitzer presents fifteen interviews (conducted between 1983 and 2002) with well-known SF&F writers. The interviewees are Peter Beagle, Octavia Butler, Philip Jose Farmer, Charles Harness, Michael Kandel, the late R. A. Lafferty, Jack McDevitt, Tim Powers, the late Charles Sheffield, Susan Shwartz, Michael Swanwick, the late Evangeline Walton, Gene Wolfe, Jane Yolen, and George Zebrowski. In each case, Schweitzer elicits illuminating comments on how the writer got started, on the ensuing career, and on the writing process. If your interest in these writers extends beyond their works, this is a nice book to have.
Note that the production values are much improved over the previous Speaking volume.
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David E. Nye brings a keen eye to the history of technology in the United States. I used his American Technological Sublime in classes for years. I may well use his latest, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings, too.
The thesis of the earlier book was—in extreme brief—that in America technological wonders—from railroads to the nuclear bomb—evoked the same emotional response as natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon. This response was the blend of awe and terror and wonder that had long been called "the sublime." There was, to me, a clear connection to the sfnal "sense of wonder" that helped explain why twentieth-century science fiction was predominantly American.
He actually mentions science fiction in Second Creation, but not till very near the end. Here his thesis is that the history of technology in America has been marked by a series of "foundation narratives." During the colonial era, the dominant technology was the axe, and the foundation narrative told how one man with an axe could clear the land for a homestead, and an ample supply of men and axes advanced civilization into the wilderness, taming it, subduing it, and putting it to its divinely ordained use, indeed putting the finishing touches on the first creation. Later technologies were mills, canals, railroads, and irrigation. Each had a narrative in a similar vein, emphasizing the power of the technology to put the barren wilderness to human use (as of course defined by white males of European origin), to expand the realm of civilization, and to enhance prosperity.
Similar narratives have been the preoccupation of science fiction since its start. Space travel, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and a great deal more, all have been about expanding the human realm, boosting prosperity, and so on. Much of it has read much like the boosterism of land agents selling farms in areas opened up by the railroad, or in arid zones made fertile by irrigation. In recent decades, there has also been a more critical line of thought in SF, with writers paying attention to side effects of new technology. This has tempered the hype with a healthy dose of realism. The lack of this tempering is a large part of what makes some older SF seem unreadably naive.
Nye notes that from the beginning the foundation narratives have been opposed by "counter narratives." These narratives did not come from the boosters, but from those hurt by the technology, or from those possessed of more critical thinking skills. The axe displaced the natives and created environmental problems. The mill, seemingly benign when scaled to a village, created wage slaves, poverty, oppression, labor unrest, and of course environmental problems when enlarged. Railroads led to monopolies, oppression of small farmers, and destruction of wildlife and natives, as well as deforestation. Irrigation lead to more monopolies, more oppression, and more environmental disasters. Yes, says Nye, technology can do marvelous things for us. But it gets out of hand, it gets turned to less than noble ends, and it has side effects that deserve attention. Those side effects came to be recognized during the twentieth century, but even today many people cling to the untempered foundation narratives and use them to justify such proposals as drilling for oil in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and stripping protections from rivers and national forests in order to enrich loggers, farmers, and ranchers (yes, I’m referring to the Bush administration’s latest moves). "The vision of second creation . . . has become a national myth of origin." If we are to avoid the problems and move toward a sustainable society—as we must—"Americans [must] embrace new stories that move beyond second creation."
Has Nye turned from the history of technology to environmentalism? It may seem that way, but environmental impact is only one of the side effects he discusses. There are also economic, social, and political inequities that have played major roles in the history of this country. What he has done is to look at the impacts of technology—both the intended, hyped impact and the actual impacts—in a dispassionate, even-handed way that must encourage skepticism whenever we hear another booster. If science fiction writers read the book, it may well affect their approach to their fictions. If the readers read it, they may become more discerning or critical. Either way, SF would benefit.
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2005, Tom Easton
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