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Charles Stross’s Family Trade series continues strong with The Clan Corporate, but though ace investigative reporter Miriam Beckwith, now revealed as heiress to a world-walking transdimensional Mafia clan, continues to leap from frying pan to broiler to fire, the tale is no longer quite what it was.
What was it? The world-walker Clan has grown wealthy and powerful by carrying high-value, small-volume goods such as drugs around borders by ducking in and out of their parallel world. Miriam is a woman of modern Western culture. She is tough-minded, independent, and competent, and when she sees an opportunity to revamp an economically unstable enterprise (drug-running collapses if anyone wises up enough to put drugs on a legal prescription basis) by importing modern inventions (such as brake pads) into a primitive world, she grabs it. But the Clan is highly hierarchical, part of a very traditional culture where women just aren’t independent beings. She must be brought to heel, married off, and set to making Clan babies. She ran head on into the situation in Book 2, The Hidden Family (reviewed here last January-February), but until near the end of that book she seemed to have things well in hand. But then treachery was revealed. Matthias, a highly placed aide who had been conniving with an estranged branch of the Clan, vanished.
She doesn’t have anything in hand at all, now. The political situation is messy, people tell Miriam. That’s why you’re being kept close to home. But the situation is a lot messier than the Clan thinks. Matthias vanished to our world, where he promptly started talking to cops, who as promptly started raiding Clan depots and catching drug-runners. What’s this? screeched Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, NSA, et al. World-walkers? Who can pop out of nothing anywhere they like? Even inside the White House? And now the feds are looking for ways to invade the Clan’s world and put a stop to a major national security threat. They’re not playing nice about it, either. While the research boffins are working on a techy way to hop the worldlines, the troops are making do, forcing captured Clan members to carry soldiers across on their backs. Infiltration is under way.
Meanwhile, the marital machinations have progressed to where Miriam is about to be betrothed to the King’s brain-damaged younger son. The morals-damaged elder son is cooking up a coup. And it all comes to a head in Clan Corporate’s crash-bang finale.
But as I said, every time Pauline—oops, Miriam, though she seems to face as many perils as ever did the famed melodrama heroine—jumps out of a hot pan she lands in another hot spot. The pattern holds, and the next volume has to be a “Now what?” installment. If I may be allowed to guess, Miriam has had a run-in or two with the local representative of the estranged branch of the Clan, one James Lee. She has even flirted with him, so—unless Stross is being just too subtle—there is now a great excuse for him to come to her rescue.
Watch for it.
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In the future America of Kit Reed’s The Baby Merchant, it is difficult to be a mother. Fertility has fallen, and the supply of babies waiting to be adopted is much reduced. In fact, there are baby mills (much like puppy mills!) and even clone farms. What’s more, the U.S. government has passed laws requiring that babies be implanted with ID chips without which access to higher education, airports, and decent jobs is denied.
The situation provides an obvious opportunity to Tom Starbird. Rejected if not neglected as a child, he has a strong drive to rescue other such kids. He therefore looks for “unwanted” babies—with “unwanted” defined as unchipped, neglected, yelled at, abused—kidnaps them, and delivers them to childless couples he thinks will make good parents. He vets his “product” (the kids), the “suppliers” (their parents), and his customers quite carefully. He is doing good, he tells himself, doing major favors for all concerned, and if he charges his customers major bucks, well, he has major expenses.
Now meet Sasha Egan, unwed mother, ready to give up the baby as soon as it’s born, at least until the cad who knocked her up tracks her down and demands his parental rights. Why, he’ll even marry her, and they can live off her rich grandmother for the rest of their days! But Sasha doesn’t want anything to do with either him or “Grand.” She runs.
Meet a Boston couple, Jake Zorn the muckraking journalist and his wife Maury. They want a kid bad, but though they have plenty of money, they’re a bit old for the adoption agencies and Maury has spent a bit of time in the rubber ward. They’re desperate, and then Jake finds out about Tom, digs into his past, and threatens him with exposure of his rejecting mother unless he comes through.
Tom’s pretty sure this customer is not a good choice, but what’s he to do. He should just cut and run. There’s plenty of money in his Swiss bank accounts. He has the plane tickets. But what about Mom? Sure, she was rejecting, but parenting is a major life-stress, and besides, she’s Mom!
Speaking of stress, there’s plenty to go around. Sasha is hurting, but please don’t anyone dare get between her and her baby! Maury Zorn had a breakdown. So did Tom’s Mom. Now Tom has to come face-to-face with the pain he causes and the conflict between that and the delusion that he’s been doing good all these years. Can he make it all right? How?
Reed has taken the angst that we can see surrounding parenting in today’s world, exaggerated it with the aid of market demand, and produced a starkly obsessive denouncement of all those who would exploit mothers, children, and the desire for children. She is an extraordinarily skillful writer, and The Baby Merchant is very much worth your attention and the awards it is bound to win. But be warned, it’s not an easy read. It may even make you wish for a dose of Prozac.
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Skybreaker,
Kenneth Oppel,
Eos,
$16.99,
369 pp.
(ISBN: 0060532270).
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Kenneth Oppel’s Skybreaker (sequel to Airborn) is a young-adult novel that quite nicely echoes the tone of Jules Verne. The basic idea is that the age of zeppelins never died, the airplane never got off the ground, and 15-year-old Matt Cruse can make himself a hero by fighting off air pirates and then, despite poverty and lack of schooling, enroll in the Airship Academy of Paris. Skybreaker opens with Matt on a training cruise aboard a decrepit airship, the Flotsam, trying to get around the Devil’s Fist, the near-permanent typhoon over the Indian Ocean, when they spot an ancient derelict far above them. It’s the Hyperion, famed for the wealth it carried, and when the captain plunges madly toward its 20,000-foot altitude, the crew quickly succumbs to anoxia. Matt barely makes it home alive, bearing with him the memory of the Hyperion’s coordinates.
Folks are interested in those coordinates. Kate, his feisty, wealthy, young companion in the previous adventure (whom he moons after like any love-struck teen) wants to go salvage the treasure and knows of a “skybreaker” ship that can function at extreme altitude. But she’s not alone. Matt is lured to a hotel room by desperadoes who try to talk him out of the coordinates. When he refuses and flees, they pursue him across the rooftops of Paris until the fair young gypsy lass, Nadira, helps him escape. She, of course, has the key any salvagers will need to salvage anything at all, and soon Matt, Kate, Nadira, and Hal Slater, the suave captain of the Sagarmatha in whom Kate seems far too interested (while Nadira seems rather interested in Matt), are off. Alas, there are monsters in the sky—squidlike creatures with electrocuting tentacles (this is Earth?). But they prevail and reach the Hyperion. Unfortunately, the desperadoes are hot on their heels and an insanely dramatic finale is essential to bring all safely home again.
If you have a teen who’s been enjoying Verne and might like a bit more retro tech, unlikely zoology, and thorough melodrama, get this one. If the teen’s a budding feminist, it might not go over quite so well, for the major hero is the boy and the girls do tend to get sidelined at crucial moments. But then, that’s part of the classic mode, isn’t it?
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Crystal Rain,
Tobias Buckell,
Tor,
352 pp.
(ISBN: 0765312271).
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Tobias Buckell grew up in Grenada, the US, and the British Virgin Islands. He lives in Ohio now, but his background has given him a sense of the Caribbean ambience that is serving him well as he begins a promising career as a novelist. His first novel, Crystal Rain, is the sort of thing that will have readers watching for more.
The back-story is perhaps as crucial to the novel as the tale itself. According to Buckell, when Earth reached for the stars, it found folks already there. The ensuing debacle sent human refugees hunting desperately for worlds without aliens. One group—a mixed bag of Caribbeans, Aztec wannabes, French-speakers, and others—succeeded. But hot on their heels came the Teotl. The ensuing war destroyed the wormhole through which all arrived, as well as technological civilization, and in the centuries since the Teotl have cultivated Azteca bloodlust and prowess. Now they’re coming across the mountains to the land of Nanagada to capture, enslave, and sacrifice all the rest of the planet’s human population. And the wormhole, once damaged to prevent the onslaught of Teotl hordes, appears to be healing. Soon, in a century or so, it will be a doorway to horror once more.
There seems little hope. But a mysterious fellow named Pepper has appeared. He has superhuman abilities, and he is looking for an old friend who never misses carnival. Meanwhile John deBrun, who washed up on shore years before with no memories of his past, is preparing to go to carnival with his wife and son. One of the dread Teotl is ordering an abject spy, Oaxyctl, to hunt down deBrun and get from him the codes to the Ma Wi Jung, apparently a superweapon left from the old days.
After his wife and son are off to town for carnival, John lingers at home to pack. He knows the Azteca are coming and they must leave. But before he can do so, they arrive. He is a prisoner, and the priest is waving a bloody knife in the air. Fortunately, Oaxyctl shows up.
Meanwhile, at Capitol City, folks are desperately trying to prepare defenses. They are helpless before the hordes coming their way, plagued by traitors within the city’s walls, and sure that they cannot spare the resources to hunt for the Ma Wi Jung they have discovered lies hidden in the icy waste that now covers what was once known as Starport. But here come John and Oaxyctl, the latter awaiting his chance to torture and interrogate. Here comes Pepper, knowing what John has forgotten. Here come the Azteca hordes. And finally Capitol City must face the fact that the desperate chance is their only chance. John and Oaxyctl—and only the reader knows what other traitors—and Pepper are on their way.
Starport? The reader may well suspect that the Ma Wi Jung is a spaceship. If it is armed, it could well be just the superweapon needed to defeat the Azteca and the Teotl. Even if it is not armed, though, it should be quite useful, for its drives could vaporize airships, its weight could crush armies, and perhaps it could even ferry refugees out of harm’s way. But the exact nature and powers of the Ma Wi Jung are not revealed till late in the tale. As for the codes that John supposedly knows, he has lost his memory, remember? How can he give up those codes, or use them? And never mind that he is progressively more damaged, wounded, gangrenous, delirious, and near death.
The reader patiently awaits the inevitable climax when all is revealed and the chestnuts emerge from the fire. Buckell does not, however, make the mistake of saying everyone will live happily ever after. The Azteca are defeated (for now), and that wormhole is healing. A nasty future awaits. But the people of Nanagada must deal with that when it comes.
Will there be a sequel? The package gives no hints, but there’s room, and the back-story has the potential for prequels. Buckell has displayed a gift for imagination much greater than one book can hold. Sequels would surely please many readers, but if he imagines as thoroughly in new and unconnected novels, they too will please.
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Over the last few years, James Gunn published a string of novelettes in this magazine. The basic idea (see “The Giftie,” September 1999) was that a rocket scientist found in a remainder bin a UFO-nut book that had in its back pages diagrams that seemed to describe a genuine, workable starship. After suitable investigation and negotiations, the starship became real and the intrepid crew was off to visit the aliens who had sent the designs. The tale is now in book form as Gift from the Stars, with the last two sections, “Uncreated Night” and “Strange Shadows,” somewhat different from what appeared in the January/February 2005 Analog.
The tale is not complex. Much of the progression from finding the book to building the starship is omitted, and the progression thus seems far too easy. The aliens remain offstage, and the resolution owes far too much to the deus that pops up in the machine. But the ideas are interesting, and if you remember the individual stories fondly, you surely want the book.
Enjoy!
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One Million A.D.,
Gardner Dozois, ed.,
Science Fiction Book Club, $13.99,
399 pp.
(ISBN: 0739462733).
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The Science Fiction Book Club keeps sending me books that aren’t quite the traditional book club sort of thing. They are priced affordably, but they’re not special editions of books from other publishers. They’re SFBC originals, and that makes them fair game for this column.
The latest is One Million A.D., edited by Gardner Dozois. The gimmick is stories set much, much further into the future than usual. For the occasion, Robert Silverberg (“A Piece of the Great World”) revisits the world of At Winter’s End, when the rain of comets is finally over and folks can finally emerge from the burrows; folks are not human, however, for genetic engineering and evolution have long since, and more than once, replaced our kind. Robert Reed in “Good Mountain” visits a colony world where civilization has grown upon a mass of floating vegetation, which periodically disintegrates. Nancy Kress’s “Mirror Image” gives us a galactic civilization centered on QUENTIAM, an omniscient supercomputer that resides in the brane of reality; normally it enables people to slip in and out of bodies and perform quite extraordinary tasks, but something is going wrong, worlds are dying, and all-knowing QUENTIAM isn’t even aware of the problems. Alastair Reynolds’ “Thousandth Night” involves a clone clan that roams the galaxy collecting experiences and periodically meets to share memories; at this reunion, there is a murder mystery. Charles Stross’s “Missile Gap” peels Earth like a grape and spreads it across an infinitesimal fraction of an accretion disk with a great view of a Milky Way that looks like it has been engineered. The new world has wide oceans and numerous continents, on one of which explorers find ruins of Earth’s cities, quite as if the peeling is a repeated event; if you choose to call it a murder mystery, don’t expect a happy ending. Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile” considers just how an immortal couple might go about deciding to call it quits, and how long they would take to do it.
A stellar lineup and excellent stories whose greatest defect is surely that they are so understandable to our present-day minds. Their characters are familiar in thought and pattern, despite the obvious departures, motives are familiar, and the story situations are not beyond our grasp. With my tongue slightly in cheek, I cavil that so far in the future there should be more—and more fundamental—differences.
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Trilobite Dreams or, The Autodidact’s Tale, A Romance of Autobiography,
Robert Reginald,
Ariadne,
$14.95,
128 pp.
(ISBN: 1572411333).
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Robert Reginald (pen name of Michael Burgess, professor and librarian) is well known in the SF&F field for his scholarly endeavors, for running Borgo Press for many years, and most recently for such interesting novels as The Exiled Prince. Most folks, however, are unaware that in the summer of 2003, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. During the recovery period he eased up on his workload and began concentrating on what he loves best, his writing. That has included a number of reflective, autobiographical essays that reveal a thoroughly likable Type A fellow, review his life from childhood on, and comment at some length on just what surviving a heart attack does to you. Since many of us may face a similar crisis at some point (my own father wasn’t much older than I am now when his heart gave out), Trilobite Dreams or, The Autodidact’s Tale, A Romance of Autobiography has a certain relevance quite aside from the author’s eloquence, which is more than enough to make the book very readable.
If you have any interest in the people behind your favorite literature, you have a shelf full of biographies and autobiographies. (I do!) Add this one to the collection.
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The US is remarkable for the life that remains in the religion-based delusions that the world (the universe, even!) is only 6,000 years old and that evolution is “just a theory.” In all the developed world, only here could we have school districts seriously trying to put creationism (currently known as Intelligent Design, or ID) into the curriculum or to remove evolution from tests (so that teachers who teach to the tests will skip over it). Even geology and astronomy, insofar as they deny that 6,000 years, are under attack.
Fortunately we also have judges who can laugh the creationists out of court, referring to their arguments as “breathtaking inanity.” Unfortunately, that is not enough to shut the other side down. Their agenda—mooted amongst themselves if not in open court—is to revive theistic supernaturalism; their strategy is to defeat materialism by cutting it off at its source, in science.
If I sound a bit extreme, too bad. I’m a scientist and a materialist, and I was very happy to find Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement in my mailbox. Editor John Brockman invited sixteen scientists and other scholars (including Leonard Susskind, Daniel Dennett, Tim White, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Lee Smolin, Stuart A. Kauffman, and more) to contribute to “a thoughtful response to the bizarre claims made by the ID movement’s advocates, whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages.” The resulting essays explicate evolution, dissect the ID movement and its real intent, discuss consciousness, SETI, and complexity, and in general defend the bastion of science against the barbarian yahoos. I found them pungent, cogent, fascinating, and illuminating, and so may you.
Unfortunately the book is a perfect example of preaching to the choir. I find it hard to imagine that a creationist or ID-ist would read it.
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If Tom Kidd’s artwork has a recurring theme—other than considerable talent and wit—it is Laocoonian entanglements. Again and again, his paintings include statues and wall paintings showing heroes wrapped in snakes and dragon tails or maidens wrapped in snake-like veils. What this says about the artist’s psyche I leave to those more qualified than I, for Kidd himself is silent on the matter, if not on many more. In Kiddography: The Art and Life of Tom Kidd, he deploys a pleasantly self-deprecating humor to display in both text and art his past, his id, his profound horrors, and more. As usual with such a book, the experienced reader is reminded of past pleasures. If those pleasures included a book’s cover as well as its content, they are enhanced by revelations of the thinking and influences that went into the artwork.A distinct pleasure and essential to anyone who pays attention to SFF art. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2006, Tom Easton
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