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Author L. E. Modesitt, Jr., has been looking at the future in an interesting way for many years now. He hasn’t quite been writing a future history (in some books the galaxy has aliens for humans to interact with; in some it doesn’t), but the themes persist. He splits humanity into those who fail to understand where lack of restraint in breeding and resource use must lead, and those who do; into those who put faith before reason, and those who don’t. Perhaps not surprisingly, he matches up the first members of each pair.
The pattern remains in The Eternity Artifact. This tale’s galaxy has no aliens, which sits quite well with the religious zealots of the Covenant worlds. The Comity, however, is extraordinarily delighted to discover a pair of strange worlds, Chronos and Danann, whizzing through space outside the galaxy. Chronos is a perfect, shiny, high-density sphere. Danann bears what appears to be a city of towers, many billions of years old, immersed in frozen atmosphere. So the Comity converts the Magellan, a huge colony ship, by giving it battleship engines and armament, drafts a crew of excellent if sometimes misfit techs and shuttle pilots (etc.) and a corps of assorted academics. Among the latter is Liam Fitzhugh, a specialist in historical trends possessed of an interestingly useful past. There is also the artist Chendor Barna, whose eye proves astonishingly apt at pattern analysis. For the crew, meet Jiendra Chang, working in a dead-end job because of a talent for breaking fingers, but known to be a very competent shuttle pilot; she has her own kind of pattern analysis skills, and in due time, she and Liam will find each other interesting. And then there is John Goodman, assassin and saboteur, inserted as a weapons tech with orders to build a certain device.
Shortly after the Magellan launches and well before it hits the first of the Gates on the road to Danann, enemy ships attack. If the presence of a saboteur was not evidence enough that groups such as the theocratic Covenanters saw a threat in the expedition, here was enough more to convince anyone. The possibilities—chiefly inconsistency with religion and a sudden infusion of alien technology and power into the Comity—could alarm anyone, and apparently they have, despite the extreme secrecy surrounding the mission. It isn’t long before assassins strike aboard the ship and Liam displays unsuspected talents. More than one force is out to stop them, but look! Here’s Danann now, thousands of towers embedded in the ice and frozen-out air. To the explorers’ dismay, once they break through the doors, they find nothing but empty rooms. The greatest reward may be just the material of which the towers are made, for it is strange stuff indeed.
Or is something else going on? Beneath the ice, power sources are revving up. Heat is being generated. And enemy flotillas are appearing in the distance. Secrecy hasn’t worked very well.
Aboard the Magellan, Liam and Jiendra are . . . They aren’t generating much heat. Their pasts have left them heavily defended. But they are thinking that just perhaps some barriers need to be lowered. Unfortunately, Jiendra is a pilot, and when enemy ships start shooting, she has to be out there, shooting back and exposed to very slim odds of survival.
The book’s an adventure yarn in the BDO (Big Dumb Object) tradition of Reed’s Marrow and Well of Stars (reviewed here last October) and Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. It is also a meditation on what motivates fear of the new. And it’s a low-key romance that is realistic enough to make The Eternity Artifact stand out in the constellations of BDO and hard science tales, whose characters are generally much less alive.
There’s something for everyone here—perhaps even enough to cop an award or two. Enjoy!
It’s been far too long since I had something (Return of Santiago, November 2002) by Mike Resnick to review, but here’s a pair, with more coming. The Widowmaker trilogy will appear as an omnibus from Meisha Merlin, but first we get A Gathering of Widowmakers. You may recall the Widowmaker as a famous bounty hunter who developed a fatal disease. To finance his cryogenic wait for a cure, he had to have himself cloned. The first clone didn’t last long, but the next two were more successful and in due time the original was able to retire with his Lady and try to grow roses. But—it had to happen—the day comes when Widowmaker 3, Jason Newman (he gave himself a new name and a new face when he decided to get out of the family business) stands in Widowmaker 4’s way and gets shot. Sidekick Ito Kinoshita shakes his head and heads back to Widowmaker 1 to say, “Kemosabe, you didn’t finish training 4.”
So the original Widowmaker, or Jefferson Nighthawk, puts down his bag of rose food and ventures forth one more time. He’s lost none of his skills, and once he takes down a couple of supposedly unkillable villains, his clone shows up for lessons. But then Jason Newman gets a call for help from an old friend. Mere days after his newly cloned organs have been installed, he checks himself out of the hospital and saddles up. The other two promptly call him several kinds of idiot and start trying to track him down so they can help. And as it happens, the trouble the old friend needed help with is so serious that it takes all three to save the galaxy.
Resnick is in typical form here, smooth and fast-paced and very readable, with a bit to say on the need even of gonzo bounty hunters for wisdom and restraint. There are shades of gray even in the black and white world of shoot-’em-up space opera.
Mike tells me that his coming attractions include Starship: Mutiny, the first in a five-book series from Pyr (Prometheus). Watch for it!
Mike Resnick shows a very different aspect of his talent in Lady with an Alien, part of Watson-Guptill’s “Art Encounters” series of young-adult fictions about great artists. Here the artist is Leonardo da Vinci, who did a painting called “Lady with an Ermine” long before he did the “Mona Lisa.” Alas, says Mike, the ermine doesn’t look much like an ermine. The reason why is that a time-traveling boy, Mario Ravelli, lost his blue-pelted alien pet, Melody. Leonardo, feeling frustrated at having to paint his patron’s mistress with a wiggly cat in her arms, found it in his quarters and was quite enchanted. And then Mario showed up, wanting it back. The two get along pretty well, considering their times are more than a thousand years out of synch, and Mario (not to mention the reader) gets a guided tour of Renaissance Milan and of Leonardo himself.
It’s a charming tale that amply fulfills its function within the series. Pairing Leonardo with an SF writer is a great idea; other artists lend themselves to the same approach, and I’m looking forward to Resnick’s coming “Art Encounter” with Salvador Dali. He’s also got one coming with Toulouse-Lautrec; the combination seems less natural, but knowing Mike, it will turn out well.
One of the classic plots in SF is the flight from an Earth made intolerable by political tyranny or environmental or technological catastrophe. Like the even more classic Adam-&-Eve plot (last man, last woman, guess who?), it’s been done so often that when one runs into it, one is immediately skeptical. Yet in the right hands, even the ripest of clichés can be made fresh. In Building Harlequin’s Moon, Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper manage this by using the flight from Earth as back-story. The reader never sees it. The runaway growth of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence is mentioned as the reason why the John Glenn and its sister ships fled to set up a new and purely human realm on the world of Ymir. The story is what happened when things went wrong. The John Glenn never made it to Ymir. Crippled by systems failure, it limped into an entirely different system and faced the need to terraform a moon of the gas giant Harlequin, plant a human colony, and grow it up enough to build the infrastructure to refill the John Glenn’s antimatter fuel tank.
Fortunately, they have cold sleep, with a nanotech boost that can physically rejuvenate sleepers. After some 60,000 years, it is time to plant the human colony and get down to business. Unfortunately, the colony has deep class divisions. The top of the heap is the Council of Humanity, the leaders of the escape effort. Next down are the Earth-Born. Then come the Moon-Born, who are viewed as labor, disposable, to be left behind to die when their work is done. And finally, the single AI, Astronaut, who is tightly constrained to prevent Earth-style problems.
It doesn’t take long for a few Moon-Born, such as Rachel, to develop a sense of how badly they’re going to be screwed. She displays great intelligence when being trained to plant and monitor the vegetation that will help make the moon livable. Her mentor, Council member Gabriel, even takes her up to the ship, where she runs into the viciously mission-oriented Ma Liren as well as the more thoughtful Treesa. When she is maneuvered into a twenty-year cold-sleep absence from home that costs her both a lover and friends, she is alienated. But she also remains dedicated to cooperation, even as others are taking more confrontational approaches to the basic issue. Fortunately, Rachel is a rather charismatic figure; she inspires loyalty, and it is in large part due to her efforts that the tale comes to a benign conclusion. Helpful turnabouts among Council members feel rather forced by the authors, but that is not enough to spoil the sense of Rachel as a remarkable woman, nor of the story as a very satisfying read.
Of course, Niven has been delivering satisfying reads, both alone and with various collaborators, for many years.
Enjoy!
As a biologist, I am always happy to see signs that genes make a difference. Carl Sagan was surely a creative genius, and here we have his son Nick being just as creative. He’s a successful screenwriter, and he has turned his hand to SF with the successful Idlewild, and now the sequel, Edenborn. The basic idea is one that feels very real when the news carries reports of Ebola and avian flu and other potentially disastrous plagues. Here the plague is Black Ep, quite incurable and inevitably fatal. Humanity is doomed. Some have themselves frozen in hope of later resurrection. However, there is a frantic effort to find a warmer answer, and the Gedaechtnis company manages to do a bit of gengineering that just may create a generation with immunity. Since there won’t be anyone to raise the kids, the tech wizards must also program a virtual reality that can do the job—kids in vats while their bodies grow, their minds tended by virtual families and virtual schools in virtual suburbs. At age eighteen, dump ’em out and introduce them to cruel reality. Cruel indeed, massive disillusionment, the usual transition writ very large indeed. It’s no wonder the kids turn out to be about as wiggy as they come.
Halloween, disillusioned by having had to kill his one-time best friend, now lives all alone in Idlewild, Michigan. Isaac lives in Egypt, restoring pyramids and raising a non-gengineered flock of kids, mostly boys (heavily medicated to keep Black Ep at bay), to be good Sufis. Pandora, Champagne, and Vashti live in Mad Ludwig’s fairy-tale castle, Nymphenburg, in Bavaria, raising gengineered girls. As Edenborn opens, it is time for an exchange of kids, and we are introduced to the central characters: Penny, 15, sly, manipulative, selfish, scheming, as true a bitch as you could hope to meet. Haji, physically crippled but mentally very able, even noble, a nice foil for the bitch. Both reflect their parents.
And then there’s Deuce, introduced early on but not in a way that tells us much about identity, only that he has Prometheus fantasies. In due time, Sagan reveals all, on the way to playing the fatal attraction card that nearly destroys the last traces of humanity (don’t forget—there’s a sequel, so folks must survive) and nearly aborts the desperate search for a cure for Black Ep and its even nastier successor. I say “nearly” because it’s no secret that the tale goes on; the back of the book includes an excerpt from the sequel, Everfree, due soon from Putnam.
The characters are well drawn. This is a tale that easily absorbs the reader without raising many questions about the credibility of the premises. Yes, there are nasty diseases lurking in the world, and fears of a Black Ep (natural or designed) are not at all unjustified. Genetic engineering and cloning are under development today, and virtual reality has been a science fiction staple for years. Yet there are problems. Even if one grants the success of a last-ditch gengineering effort, the equally last-ditch development of a virtual reality capable of autonomously and successfully raising a batch of kids to adulthood raises my doubts. It has become a truism that major software projects have difficulties both in the development stage and after. They miss deadlines, and they wind up full of bugs. Sagan supposes a supervisory AI named Malachi, but that doesn’t strike me as enough to guarantee success.
You say I should stop with the quibbling already? If you didn’t get the hardcover in 2004, go get the trade paperback now. You’ll enjoy it.
Ken MacLeod outdoes himself with Learning the World. Not that he wasn’t already good (see Newton’s Wake, reviewed here in November 2004), but this is a new step toward the heights. He has not forgotten the Spike or Singularity, but here he steps more than ten millennia into the future. Humanity has expanded outward from Earth, first surrounding Sol with so many greenery-filled habitats that its light, from a distance, seems green. Then it spread to nearby stars and did the same around them. Over the millennia, the number of green stars has grown. Humanity thrives as never before, and if occasionally a Spike happens and a local portion of humanity is devoured by runaway artificial intelligences and the like, the Civil Worlds go on undisturbed.
The tale opens with the words of biologger (blogger) Atomic Discourse Gale, who reports her discovery that her ship, But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is four thousand years old, and her meeting with Constantine the Oldest Man. The ship has been on its way to a new star for centuries, and now it is almost there. Unfortunately, the probes report that it is occupied. Did someone beat them to their destination? Or has humanity finally met its first aliens?
The reader is in no doubt, for MacLeod alternates scenes between the ship and the world, which indeed has its own people, batlike and intelligent, at a technological level roughly the equivalent of early twentieth century Earth. An astronomer, Darvin, spots the ship’s drive flare in the sky and thinks he has found a new comet until he sees it is slowing down. It is not long before he and his friends perceive the truth, nor before the local security apparat claps the lid on.
Aboard the ship, Atomic and her friends want to get on with their destiny, colonizing the system, but they face an unprecedented question: Do they have a right to do so when the system has natives? MacLeod plays out the debate in very convincing fashion, but he is even more convincing in his portrayal of the natives, who are intelligent enough to see what is happening, detect the surveillance mechanisms hidden in local wildlife, and accelerate the development of their technology in directions that are suddenly obvious. They are also sane enough to back away from an incipient war and pull together in the face of the potential threat. In some ways I found Darvin and his friends more alive than the human characters! Certainly, at the end I wished he had given more attention to their aftermath instead of only that of the humans.
But there is room for a sequel or two. With luck, he will deliver them and we will learn more of Darvin’s people. Meanwhile, don’t miss this one.
Adam Stemple is a working musician and has collaborated with his mother, Jane Yolen, on several books for youngsters (including Pay the Piper, reviewed here last October). In the writing world, is he known as just “Jane Yolen’s son”? If so, that may be about to turn around, to the point where Jane is known as Adam Stemple’s mom!
Yes, his first solo novel, Singer of Souls, is that good. The protagonist, Douglas, starts off as a Minneapolis guitarist and junkie who realizes that if he really wants to get the monkey off his back he has to chuck it all, go somewhere else, and start over. Fortunately, he remembers, he has a grandmother in Edinburgh who once issued a standing invitation. And he can just about swing the plane ticket. Grandma turns out to be a no-nonsense sort who is cool enough to be delighted when Doogie says he’s going to make his nut on the streets. Why, he’s a busker! And with the Fringe coming up, he has it made.
Except . . . A strange lady asks him to “sing” her and then rewards him with a vial of white powder he cannot resist, though the powder is not what he expects when he shoots it up. It doesn’t make him high. Instead, he can suddenly see the fey folk who have their own festival in the streets of Edinburgh. And who don’t like seeing him notice them. Now he’s running for his life, discovering evil, and learning that he himself has strange powers. If he can master them quickly enough, he may survive. But that’s a big if. He’s about to be beaten and stabbed and sliced. He will lose what is dearest of all to him. A priest who is a serial killer of elves and goblins will try for him. Elven armies will be after his ass.
It’s a story. We can predict that he will prevail. But I called him a protagonist instead of a hero on purpose, for the ending is quite unheroically bleak.
You’re gonna love it.
Jane Yolen was one of the Guests of Honor at the World SF Convention held last August in Glasgow, Scotland. She is a prolific and gifted woman in whose works one must assiduously search for flaws (with most writers you don’t have to search). She is also charming. It is therefore a pleasure to tell you that NESFA Press continues its habit of honoring Worldcon GOH’s with celebratory books with Once Upon a Time (She Said), a collection of some fifty short stories, thirty poems, and a few articles, including “Oh God, Here Come the Elves,” in which she discourses upon the joys of surrendering to elves (get that out of your mind; dominance-submission fantasies are on the second floor, back right corner).
This one is a pleasure to read and keep. Don’t deny yourself. n
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