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Is fiction about science a kind of science fiction? Carl Sagan’s Contact qualifies, for the kind of science involved (SETI) was pretty SFnal. What about Robin Cook thrillers? There the science (medical) is real enough, but it’s only an excuse for the adventure. In both cases, adventure is an essential component of the mix, just as it is in more ordinary SF. It’s not at all hard to extend the SF umbrella to cover such tales.
What about John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy? There’s a scientist, but there isn’t much adventure. There are no aliens or spaceships or time machines. There is only a puzzle, and a final resolution that qualifies this one as a sort of alternate history novel. The protagonist, Hugh Kellem, has a disordered past that echoes Darwin’s own a bit. He is searching for a path to a career, beginning as a bird counter in the Galapagos and then moving to England, where he decides to investigate Darwin. Luck is with him for he soon finds an old account book whose back pages are filled with the diary of Darwin’s daughter Lizzie, known to most as “the slow one” among Darwin’s kids but soon revealed as clever and insightful and given to unraveling puzzles, including the famous ones of why Darwin suffered so many years of illness and why he took so long to publish his famous theory.
Darnton switches back and forth between Hugh’s efforts and memories of his past, his gaining of an ally and lover in Darwin scholar Beth Dulcimer, transcripts of the diary, and Darwin’s own experiences on his Beagle voyage, which are not all consonant with what we know from history books. Darnton plays freely in the gaps in the historical record. In the process he creates a fully human Charles Darwin, fully equipped with quirks and defects, and a very readable novel.
But . . . American society today is embroiled in a thoroughly irrational catfight over whether to teach in the public schools alternatives to evolution such as “creation science” and “Intelligent Design.” To those on one side of the fight, Darwin is Satan’s sidekick, and anything that lessens his credibility would be very welcome. If only he could be shown to have stolen his theory from someone else! He could be chased off the stage as a scoundrel, and his theory with him. I’m a biologist, and I know that the theory is perfectly capable of standing alone, but that stance would be very much a minority stance in such a case. Darnton would agree, for he actually points out that the theory is such a simple and obvious thing that it must be apparent to anyone who looks at the world with open eyes. But he also paints Darwin as something of a scoundrel, a man who rewrites his own past, a man who lies.
Darnton does not even hint that Darwin’s credibility is thereby damaged. To see such a hint takes a jaundiced eye (a quick search of the Internet says my eye is not unique). And perhaps as a bulwark against such perceptions and the enlistment of the novel in the anti-Darwin crusade (“No!” may cry those of small mind. “It’s NOT really fiction. It’s THE TRUTH!!”) he has revealed Hugh Kellem as a scoundrel himself. If being a scoundrel is enough to discredit a theory, then having scoundrels on both sides may work to achieve neutrality.
No need for that, you say? I wish I could agree, but people are still visiting the sites mentioned in The DaVinci Code and pestering curators with demands to know whether this is the spot where something happened. There is a surprising number of people who cannot seem to draw a solid line between fiction and fact.
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Burn,
James Patrick Kelly,
Tachyon,
$19.95,
178 pp.
(ISBN:1892391279).
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With the news full of reports of suicide bombers, James Patrick Kelly’s Burn seems quite timely. The setting is the world of Morobe’s Pea, whose first settlers stripped it of useful resources and sold it to a wealthy fellow who renamed it Walden, restored the landscape with trees and such, and invited settlers who would live the Thoreauvian life of simplicity. However, not all of the first group settlers left after the sale. Now known as pukpuks, they are setting the new forests of Walden ablaze, at least sometimes using their own bodies as torches.
Spur (Prosper Gregory Leung) is a farm boy who joined the firefighters. Now he’s in the hospital recovering from the burns he suffered when his brother-in-law Vic turned out to be a pukpuk. Bored, he uses the “tell” (access point to something like a wide-scale Internet) to look his own name up and send greetings to strangers among the Thousand Worlds of civilization who might (or might not) be relatives. The only one who will talk to him is a bewildering child known as Gregory L’ung, the High Gregory of Kenning, who before long is breaking every rule of simplicity by coming to Walden and insisting on a tour. But then the upsiders of the Thousand Worlds are precisely the non-simple folk the Waldenites were trying to escape. Bewildering is hardly the word for them, though they do seem to be quite earnest, possessed of helpful, benign intentions, and more than a little sneaky in the way they pursue those intentions.
The world would be a better place if Kelly wrote more. This tale of contrasting philosophies and clashing aims is one big reason why. |
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The Separation, Christopher Priest,
Old Earth Books, $25,
340 pp.
(ISBN:1882968336)
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The World War II of Christopher Priest’s The Separation (first published in England in 2000) clearly occurs in some alternate world, for in it the US suffers no Pearl Harbor debacle. Instead, US troops are marching through Japan and China, aiming at Mao’s communism on the way to Stalin’s. Yet that is mentioned only in passing. Priest’s focus is England, where a historian has become intrigued by the mystery of J. L. Sawyer, a conscientious objector who also flew for the RAF, or so thought Churchill until he learned that Sawyer was in fact a pair of identical twins who rowed for England in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Joe was the CO, Jack the pilot. He’s helped out by a woman, Angela Chipperton, who comes to a book signing and hands him copies of the wartime diaries of a Sawyer, perhaps the one he is interested in. And so his research begins.
At this point, Jack takes over the narrative. He is in the hospital, recovering from a 1941 crash, struggling to recapture his memory of 1936, their Jewish host family with daughter Birgit, competing, meeting Rudolf Hess, fleeing back to England with Birgit hidden in their van, Joe’s marriage to Birgit, flying for the RAF, spotting a pair of Messerschmidts being pursued and shot at by German planes, being enlisted by the government to interview a man who says he is Rudolf Hess come to England via a Messerschmidt to Scotland with a peace offer (whom Jack pegs as an impostor), and in due time Jack’s own affair with his sister-in-law, Joe’s death as a Red Cross ambulance crewman, and the birth of Birgit’s daughter, Angela.
Oddly, the historian can find no trace of the Angela who gave him the papers, and when he begins to read the diary she gave him, it proves to be Joe’s. And he didn’t die; he survived his injuries, albeit with a confusing tendency to delusional episodes, one of which might be his memory of participating with the Red Cross in peace negotiations with Rudolf Hess come via a Messerschmidt that was pursued and shot at by mysterious planes. Part of the negotiations involves solving the Jewish “problem” by handing it to England, which will settle the survivors on Madagascar.
There are documents that indicate Joe’s diary is closer to the truth. But there is a remarkable level of recursiveness to the tale—two Messerschmidts, two brothers, two Hesses, two sets of mental problems (Jack struggling with memory, Joe with delusions). And then there is the problem of the vanishing Angela, which is enough to make one wonder if the historian is party to a folie a trois. Or is it just that Priest is playing with the subjectiveness of history? Sources vanish or are unreliable. Viewpoints morph. Memory and delusions affect the tale. And perhaps he has declared the tale an alternate history so his play can escape the more obvious contradictions inherent in an America turning its attentions toward Asia alone and thereby view the war as a European phenomenon.
Priest is always an interesting, challenging, and cerebral writer. Those adjectives apply here, and if that is enough to make his style of alternate history sound appealing, you will see why the book won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award.
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Prodigy,
Dave Kalstein,
St. Martin’s
(Thomas Dunne Books),
$23.95,
322 pp.
(ISBN:0312340966)
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One of the long-running debates in this field concerns the difference between SF and sci-fi. Some insist there is no significant difference. Some as strenuously insist there is, and they point to the science fiction of TV and film to support their point. There, they say, effect is all, and verisimilitude or technical accuracy is ignored.
For a case in point, consider Dave Kalstein’s Prodigy. Kalstein is a Hollywood writer and director, and it shows. His debut novel begins with “As I was driving down the road in my Telephone, I took a call on my Chevy.” Well, not really, but the truth is just as bad. By page 27, character Mr. William Winston Cooley is downloading drugs from the Internet directly into his bloodstream. “The dopazone molecules rode the electric currents. . . .” presumably surviving the transformations of digital information from electrons to radio waves and photons in fiber optics and back to electrons. Later we learn that the character and his fellow students (from first grade on up) at the elite Stansbury school are fed by being given jars of liquid nutrients with which they load “laser syringes”; the lasers pump the serum directly into veins (and send flavor to the brain). And though the word “pump” does go with the concept of lasers, lasers can’t do that. Nor is even a revolutionary educator such as those that run Stansbury likely to trust a six-year-old (or even an eighteen-year-old) to self-administer injections directly to veins. Double that for the lack of any sign of any mechanism that can disinfect the skin.
These are just the first elements of the story that almost made me bounce the book off the wall. There were more, and I contend that they make the tale much more sci-fi than SF. Kalstein either doesn’t know how things work, or he doesn’t care, on the grounds that in film his strange notions might work, even if they did certainly make SF fans snort in disgust.
So what’s the story? Stansbury was founded as a radically discontented educator’s answer to a failing national educational system. He set up a large boarding school, charged parents very high fees, and designed a set of special nutrients and drugs (all quite legal, of course) that grew strong bodies, focused attention, and by story time (2036) had given Stansbury such a reputation for high-powered results (including cures for AIDS and cancer) that Congress is debating a one trillion dollar yearly grant to its budget. That sum—a significant fraction of the US GNP—is another bounce-the-book moment, but let it pass, let it pass. We can focus our attention instead on the funny business that drives the plot. Someone is killing less-than-high-powered alumni, and it looks like Cooley is being framed as a serial killer. Fortunately valedictorian Mr. Thomas Goldsmith doesn’t buy it.
You think you know what a valedictorian is? Here, he’s the survivor of a brutal selection process who handles the “peer review” component of the disciplinary process; he’s a cold, brutal, manipulative interrogator, and yes, here’s another bounce-the-book moment. But he’s a smart boy—he’s a Stansbury senior, after all—and pretty soon he has some evidence that points to a plot at high levels. He has to survive violent encounters and an impressive flight scene that would look great on screen, but of course he does, and in the end the plotters stand revealed.
If you don’t care about the difference between sci-fi and SF, you may well enjoy this one. It moves well, and it has tons of melodrama to keep the reader’s juices flowing. If you do care, you will not want to waste your money on it.
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Wolf Star,
R. M. Meluch,
DAW,
$23.95,
328 pp.
(ISBN:0756403243)
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In May 2005, I reviewed R. M. Meluch’s The Myriad, calling it “unabashed space opera, and . . . great fun.” That story involved a dashing naval captain, John Farragut, of the Merrimack, who had survived one Hive onslaught and was hot-footing it toward—he hoped—the Hive’s home world. The Hive was what humans called the horde of insectoid monsters who ignored physics, traveling at FTL speeds with no visible means of propulsion, homing on the untraceable res (resonance) FTL communications, and insinuating themselves through and past the shields which kept enemy weapons from reaching into a ship and air molecules from escaping. Once aboard a ship, the Hive monsters promptly devoured everything organic. Farragut got sidetracked by the need to look into a mysterious civilization, but his goal was still hunting down the Hive homeworld.
So here’s the sequel, Wolf Star. Farragut is here again, as dashing and brave and resourceful as before, and he remembers the Myriad. But he has apparently NOT met the Hive before. That is, when his superiors send him out to hunt down the long-distance jump center being built by Earth’s enemies (ancient Rome, emerged from hiding among all the doctors, lawyers, priests, and others who just happen to know a bit of Latin to claim a colony world as soon as that was possible, and since then grown to become a serious rival), and he runs into the Hive, he is quite surprised. Fortunately, an earlier encounter with Roman treachery had led him to equip his crew with weapons which, while dreadfully antique by the standards of the day, are just the thing for dealing with monsters. Soon his is the first ship ever to survive an encounter with the Hive, and Rome turns out to be so desperate that . . .
I won’t say. Like Myriad, this one is grand space opera. You will enjoy it. But if you have read the earlier book, you may wonder what Meluch was smoking when she put her timeline together. Either there are massive inconsistencies, or Earth mindwipes its captains between missions, and Meluch should say so.
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Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives appeared first from a small press (Golden Gryphon) a couple of years ago. I’m covering it late in one sense, but at least now you can actually find it in the bookstore!
If you’re not familiar with Stross’s work, you should remedy that deficit in your character immediately. He has a tendency to put a fresh spin on old material, and he’s not only good, he’s fun. Here his premise is a world where the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft et al. are real. However, they are not mystical things. There are parallel worlds, you see, and mathematics, topology, physics, and computers all have the power to define patterns that can open portals and let various and assorted interested entities through. Some of these entities suck up information and energy, some take over human brains, some . . . You really don’t want to know!
Naturally, there are government agencies whose business it is to prevent disaster, either by stopping meddlers (sometimes by recruiting them) or by cleaning up the mess after the meddling. So far they have managed to keep the genie in the bottle, but like the rest of us they are plagued by bureaucrats and bureaucratic paperwork.
Meet Bob Howard, once a graduate student whose work became meddling, now a computer geek whose usual job at the Laundry is keeping the computers running smoothly. Boring work, which is why he accepted an invitation to do a spot of official burglary designed to stymie another researcher-cum-meddler. All goes well, and soon he is off to interview a Brit the US won’t let out of the country. Mo turns out to be a lovely logician who is promptly kidnapped by nefarious forces. Bob should at that point report in and go home. Instead he tracks her down. After a suitable concussion, he learns that Mo is safe but those nefarious forces just might be ex-Nazis with a yen for revenge on the whole world. Off to Amsterdam, then, Mo in tow, to look at some Nazi records before Mo is kidnapped again, yanked through a hole in the wall of her room. Only the hole remains, sucking air into a frozen, airless Earth. Clearly it is time for a rescue mission.
Magic as science, and as technology of course. Bob has some very interesting tools at his disposal. But as we all now know, technology has a way of enabling some really, really stupid actions. In the book’s second novella, “The Concrete Jungle,” the stupidity involves designing a software package that can be downloaded to any or all of the thousands upon thousands of surveillance cameras that watch British streets and buildings. Once activated, the program emits a gorgon stare that converts a fraction of the carbon atoms in the object of the camera’s gaze to silicon. Think massive release of energy and radiation, along with the silicification.
Why? Well, the official reason is that the nation needs a killer defense against CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, due to go down in 2007. The potential value for stopping invading troops, terrorists, criminals, and even protestors has not escaped notice. But no one thought of hackers.
You may now say something along the lines of “Oh, My Bleeding God!” That’s what gets Bob called out to investigate an extra cow among the eight concrete statues at Milton Keynes. Someone has used the camera software. Pretty soon he is dodging attempts to silicify him and the cop beside him, and the line of evidence is pointing . . .
Bureaucrats hate being robbed of their right and proper prey!
Okay, it’s a variation on “X-Files” and Nick Pollotta’s Bureau 13 tales. But it’s fun and good, and I can’t help but smile at the thought of what Pollotta and Stross might do as a team.
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Heinlein fans, rejoice! The Science Fiction Book Club has released Off the Main Sequence: The Other Science Fiction Stories of Robert A. Heinlein as a hardbound with a trade paperback price. You have seen most of the stories—”And He Built a Crooked House” is here, as are “All you Zombies” and “Destination Moon,” “Universe” and “The Year of the Jackpot,” and many more—in paperback collections over the years. Now they’re all in one volume for you to savor all over again. And of course, if you never read them before, they still hold up quite well enough to enjoy. |
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Instant translation is now available as a Sony gadget, and the military is about to test it out in Iraq (see my blog at http://technoprobe.blogspot.com), so perhaps the time is right to think about Michael Hanlon’s The Science of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The prospects for a real babel-fish are discussed in Chapter 8, though Hanlon has only generalities to offer. He’s a bit more specific when he discusses the production of food with genetic engineering (Ch. 10, “Meat with a Clean Conscience”), but he misses the recent talk about tissue printing. He’s better when he goes on about the history of computers and the prospects for Deep Thought, the chance that we are alone in the universe, or the ultimate questions.
The puff sheet bills the book as “the perfect companion to the long awaited movie release.” If you loved the movie, then you surely want the book. But if you, like me, are of the opinion that the movie was the ultimate bomb, then the book is quite unfairly tainted.
Oh, well. Buy it anyway
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2006, Tom Easton
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