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David Marusek’s first novel, Counting Heads, is quite interesting, but it has problems. The tale begins in the 2090s, when the world holds some fifteen billion people. That’s a number that would have seemed believable a few years ago, but current demographic projections do not support it. In fact, global population now seems likely to peak at about eleven billion before starting a slow decline.
Some of the technological aspects of Marusek’s future—such as virtual meetings replacing flesh meetings, rapid genomic analysis, and powerful artificial intelligence—seem more likely. The cloning of vast numbers of servants seems much less so. With nanotechnology he follows the high road of assemblers that can make anything, given raw materials, and disassemblers that can turn cities into goo. Some experts in the field, let us note, think these are highly unlikely.
Be that as it may, Marusek’s nanotechnology has made people immortal but—since the advantages as always accrue to the wealthy—has also prompted a terrorist attack that left America with a deadly fear. Cities live under nano-filtering domes, and Homeland Security has released hordes of “slugs” that randomly sample people’s blood in search of rogue nano. Artist Sam Harger is partnering with the wealthy and powerful Eleanor Starke when they are surprised by two things: First, Eleanor gets appointed to high government office. Second, they receive an almost impossible to obtain birth permit. But before their genes are melded to take over a stored fetus (confiscated from an illegal pregnancy), a slug tags Sam as infested. Homeland Security promptly confiscates him, turns him into goo to clean him out, scrubs his genome from everything he has ever touched, and finally releases him as a “seared” person. They don’t trust their own work, you see, and now any of his cells that are harmed, separated from his body, or even too closely scanned will self-incinerate. He also stinks to high heaven. And if he gets PO’d enough, all he has to do is bang his head on a wall to start a major fire.
Someone wants Eleanor to toe a line. The birth permit is a carrot. What happened to Sam is the stick. But there’s no real clue to who that someone is. Forty years later, Eleanor is in a virtual meeting discussing the plans for the Oships (planned to take to the stars colonists who pay for their tickets with land, giving the rich eventual title to Garden Earth; some want them to stay home as habs) when the spaceship she is in goes out of control. It’s not supposed to be possible, but something or someone has infiltrated the ship’s software. The crash kills Eleanor; only the head of her daughter, Ellen, survives, frozen in a safety helmet. And that’s when things get interesting, for Eleanor’s AI or mentar, Cabinet, is captured for probate and when it is released, it is not quite what it was. The head is taken to a clinic but turns out to be a decoy. The real one is found and taken to the same clinic, but revival and regrowth efforts don’t seem to work. Meanwhile, Ellen’s mentar is organizing a rescue effort involving members of the cloned servant class, Sam Harger, and a ragtag few ordinary folks.
What the heck is going on? Marusek never really says. Perhaps it is all due to Eleanor’s political rivals, of which there is no lack. Perhaps the mentars are getting out of hand. Perhaps it is something else entirely. All the reader knows is how the rescue effort turns out, followed by a hasty, vague ending in which immense changes are hurriedly glossed over. I have a feeling a much fatter book was cut in two, the wound was patched over rather clumsily, and we will soon see a sequel.
And Lo, when I check Marusek’s blog, I see that the original book was in fact cut in two, but then it was put back together. There’s a sequel coming, but not for the reason I suspected. He’s just on a roll.
Sean McMullen has given us a sequel to Glass Dragons that is entirely worth reading for its own virtues. And it doesn’t hurt a bit that it contains a double homage to H. G. Wells.
Voidfarer centers on Wayfarer Inspector Danolarian Scryverin, once a prince of Torea, a land destroyed by an excess of sorcerous ambition. He is accompanied by, among others, one Wallas, once a lecherous courtier but now a corpulent cat, and Riellen, a young rabble-rouser fixated on the notion of electocracy. They are seeking an abdicated empress when bursts of smoke appear on the face of the Red Moon, Lupan. A few days later, a mysterious cylinder crashes into the ground, the top unscrews, tentacles appear, and a heat ray zaps anyone unlucky enough to be in sight.
Soon Wellsian tripods are stalking across the countryside, and Danolarian—in between efforts to set his romantic life in order and to stay out of any sort of leadership role that might awaken the self he was trained for in Torea—is doing his best to defeat the foe. The foe falls, of course, but I won’t tell you how except to remind you of the Wells homage in the tripods, which isn’t quite to the point but is nevertheless a clue. The other homage I will only hint at by saying it resembles a bicycle.
Is that too cryptic? Then I must add that you are sure to enjoy this one and look forward to the next in the “Moonworlds Saga” series. The humor is sly and frequent, the pace relentless, and the characters convincing. McMullen has the gift.
Kage Baker has earned praise for her tales of the Company, a future-based outfit that “recruits” throughout time, turns its new troops into immortal cyborgs, and sends them out to fill in the blank spots of history, collect treasures before they are lost, and defend the Company’s interests. Her last novel, The Life of the World to Come (reviewed here in April 2005), dealt with Alec Checkerfield, an engineered tetraploid based on an extinct human species, who just may become the nemesis who accounts for the Company’s apparent demise in 2355.
Alec, however, is but one of The Children of the Company. The focus here is on the factions within the Company’s troops, in particular that of Labienus, who craves to supplant the company’s mortal masters and run the world right. There is also his recruiter, Budu, one of the ancient ones whose mission was to destroy the killer tribes and let civilization take root. He’s still around, not yet put on ice, and he resents being taken off the job. There’s Aegeus, who has captured a few of a human subspecies with a huge talent for invention. And all are busily snatching children from the slaughtergrounds of history, both for the Company’s purposes and for their own, and without much regard for the kids’ feelings. Think of San Francisco, 1906, the eve of the great quake. The Company’s troops are out in force, looting the mansions of the treasures—artwork, rare manuscripts, furniture, chandeliers, wine, cash, jewels—that will be destroyed. And Victor, one of Labienus’s boys, is befriending a laborer and his family so he can sneak into their tenement and spirit away a boy before the building collapses and kills the family.
The mode of the tale is episodic and reflective. It fleshes out Baker’s history of the world and sets the stage for the final confrontation (or so I fondly think). Labienus is ruminating on his plans, thumbing through old files, remembering incidents scattered across time. He helped create civilization in Ur, but he’s not a nice fellow, not at all. In Ur he gloried in his role as lord and master, battening on the labor of mere mortals. Now he’s willing to thin the human herd quite drastically to further his dreams. But though he knows of Alec Checkerfield’s predecessors, clones that displayed their powers in centuries past and then died, of Alec he knows only that a third Adonai exists.
When the two meet—look for the next volume!—there should be fireworks.
Dragons are really quite unlikely, but they are a fixture of fantasy, presumably because people love them. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Mike Resnick should have a little fun—for both himself and his readers—with Dragon America. In his alternate reality, the New World turned out to be infested with all sorts of the beasts. One might have expected such a difference to have created a wildly divergent history, but no. The American Revolution is right on schedule, and George Washington is hard-pressed by the British. Fortunately, he has sent Daniel Boone off to recruit Indian allies. When Daniel doesn’t have much luck, he hares off into the wilderness in search of rumored huge flying fire-breathers he can bring back to aid the war. Meanwhile, closer to home, Washington’s clever New Englanders are turning dragons into homing pigeons.
You get the idea. Not a serious bone in its body, good fun, and a fast read.
Dean Wesley Smith returns to our attention with All Eve’s Hallows. The premise is that dragons, giants, fairies, goblins, unicorns, etc., live among us disguised as butchers, bakers, and lawyers thanks to an age-old treaty enforced by the City Knights. Unfortunately, an evil sorceress is bent on awakening an ancient evil. Fortunately, ex-Marine Billie Stein has just been recruited to the Knights, and she has a load of powerful if untrained magic. As evil creeps into the New York air, she learns fast. It’s a good thing, too, for All Hallow’s Eve is fast approaching, and that is when the stuff is scheduled to hit the fan.
For added interest, her recruiter is a hunk and it seems likely that romance is in the offing.
My attention in this column goes mostly to SF (in line with the nature of the magazine), but if you’ve been following the column very long, you are surely aware that my attention wanders. I have even been known to review poetry! So you should not be terribly surprised if I finally pick up one of Tor’s new line of paranormal romances.
C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp began with Hunter’s Moon a series in which the world is infested with were creatures. There are werewolves, of course, but also werejaguars, werepythons, wereowls, and more. And when Mafia assassin Tony Giodone gets his throat ripped out by a target, he becomes a werewolf. Soon a sexy young thing tries to hire him to kill her, but Sue turns out to be his soulmate, complete with telepathic resonances, including during the obligatory hot and steamy scenes. When Moon’s Web opens, they are living in Chicago while Tony tries to shift from being a lone wolf to being the junior member of a pack. He’s also being asked by an old Family friend to track down a kidnapped lover and bring back the kidnapper’s head, even as he starts seeing visions of other people’s lives and the werefolk call for the all-clan council to meet in Chicago. Life is hectic, and it doesn’t help when his Sue-addiction starts driving her away. Then a body shows up, marked by a mysterious odor, Tony is tasked with security for the council meeting, people start calling him a seer, and more weres are kidnapped amid scuttling shadows and whiffs of that same mysterious odor.
It’s a ripping good read, with enough action and suspense for anyone. If you like romances, there’s enough of that, too, and if you don’t, you can skip the sex scenes without missing much. And I think it’s safe to say there will be one or more sequels.
Robert Buettner’s Orphan’s Destiny (sequel to Orphanage) should satisfy unrepentant fans of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Haldeman’s Forever War, and the like. Buettner posits a horde of sluglike aliens ensconced on Ganymede, from which they bombard Earth with rocks. In the earlier novel, Earth, led by the US, revived moldering space programs, recruited ten thousand troopers orphaned by the bombardment, and sent them out to do their best, which required ramming their transport into the alien base.
Destiny opens with the seven hundred survivors, led by now-General Jason Wander, being picked up for return to Earth, where the politicos want to pat themselves on the back and reassure the populace that the crisis is over. However, Jason isn’t much of a political animal. “Not proven,” he insists, despite threats to career and pension. “They may still be out there. They may come back. We need to be ready.” (I paraphrase.)
Of course, he’s right. The Slugs left behind a number of mysterious objects, one of which has been brought to Earth to serve in due time as the trigger for a renewed crisis. And that’s when Jason must go back to war. Right from Chapter One, the reader feels rather bleak about this, for Buettner introduces Jason with his back against the wall and out of ammo, with the Slugs about to descend. But this is SF in the classic mode. After suitable melodramatics and bafflegab (would you believe The Return of Cavorite?), the chestnuts do get hauled out of the fire.
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Hal Clement died on October 29, 2003. Not long after, the members of Hal’s Pals, the writer’s group he had long mentored, began to discuss doing a memorial volume. The result is Hal’s Worlds, edited by Shane Tourtellotte. Contributors include such well-known writers as Paul Levinson, Walter Hunt (who contributed an original short story), Jack Williamson, Allen Steele, Michael Swanwick, Stan Schmidt, David Gerrold, Ben Bova, Jeff Carver, Joe Haldeman, Michael Burstein, and Julie Czerneda. The contents include reminiscences, reprinted stories that owe something to Hal’s inspiration, a previously unreprinted story by Hal, a Darrell Schweitzer interview with Hal, and a few words from Hal’s widow, Mary Stubbs.
Everyone donated their work. Neither the editor nor the contributors get a dime. All proceeds go to two charities chosen by Mary Stubbs, the Joslin Diabetes Clinic and Milton Academy, where Hal taught science for many years.
The people who made science fiction what it is today are almost all gone now. But they are not and should not be forgotten. Biographies help, but books like this one, created out of and embodying a huge amount of love and respect, fill a very different niche. You don’t have to buy the book to honor Hal’s memory, but go ahead. Do it anyway!
Tachyon Publications celebrates Brian Aldiss’s eightieth birthday with a new collection of stories, Cultural Breaks. The stories go all the way back to 1968 (“Total Environment”) but are mostly recent. The title suggests sudden attacks of cognitive dissonance, and indeed the lead story, “Tarzan of the Alps,” is a perfect illustration of just that. A traveling cinema shows an old movie in the back country, and illiteracy leaps to a remarkable misunderstanding.
Aldiss’s career is well worth celebrating. Buy the book, and blow out a candle.
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The fifth edition of Neil Barron’s invaluable reference work, Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, is now available. If you have used it in the past to look up thumbnail sketches of famous novels or to find out what is available in the way of other reference works, criticism, history, author studies, teaching materials, etc., I need say no more than that the book has been brought up to date, covering not only another decade’s worth of the field’s best but also vastly expanding the coverage of online material (the fourth edition appeared in 1995, when the World Wide Web was very young). If you have not used it before, those sketches of novels fill nearly 400 pages of the book, they focus on what the contributors consider the best (many writers are therefore absent), and they add up to a remarkable overview of the field as well as a 1300-book reading list for anyone ambitious enough to dream of reading all SF of importance.
However, the index is inadequate, for it fails to cover the first 90 pages of the book, which consists of essays on the history of the field. Anyone interested in that material, or wishing to see where entry (e.g.) II-1305 (Zebrowski’s Macrolife) fits into the history will be frustrated.
Highly recommended—warts and all—to anyone interested in the history and scholarship of the field. An essential acquisition for libraries of all kinds.
Since Doug Beason is a familiar name to you, you may be interested in The E-Bomb: How America’s New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Future Wars Will Be Fought. The theme is lasers, microwaves, and force fields (or pain-causing energy beams), Beason is an expert in the field, and he explains the details at a level that should be comprehensible to any educated adult.
If his forecasts are right . . . Just keep watching the news.
Reading an essay in the latest Communications of the ACM, I find the line, “Computer science is one of the most exciting scientific endeavors in recent history,” and I think, “Of course!” Computer science was almost wholly a creation of the twentieth century, the product of a corps of extraordinarily high-caliber thinkers (Shannon, Weiner, Turing, Godel, and more), and it has arguably done more to change our daily lives than any other area of twentieth-century science and technology. (The assembly line and the internal combustion engine may have done more, but these extend back into the nineteenth century.)
The same day’s mail brought an advance copy of novelist and physicist Alan Lightman’s The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science. Lightman’s approach is to discourse intelligently and eloquently on 22 such seminal topics as hormones, DNA, the quantum, special relativity, antibiotics, quarks, and synapses and attaches the original papers that announced each discovery (sometimes abridged). The result is an impressive volume, essential to any educated person’s library.
But where are Godel, Turing, Shannon, Weiner? Lightman restricts his coverage to physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy. Mathematics, information theory, and computer science are quite absent. So, for that matter, is anthropology, which in the 1920s saw the discovery of our australopithecine roots. Paleontology could have had a chapter, with the discovery that a comet or asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs dating only to the 1980s.
Of course, Lightman’s book is already fat, and to be fair, he does claim to cover only some of the great discoveries. If the book sells well, perhaps he will do a second volume to cover a few more. |
