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The saga of doughty Kylara Vatta keeps getting better! Elizabeth Moon introduced her in Trading in Danger (reviewed here in March 2004) as the sturdy, independent, spirited daughter of a major trading clan. Booted in disgrace from the military academy, she hied off with a decrepit spaceship only to become a privateer when, in Marque and Reprisal (January-February 2005), most of the Vatta clan back on Slotter Key was destroyed and the interstellar communications network of ansibles crashed. In Engaging the Enemy (September 2006), she tried to form a force that could fight the pirate fleets, but with only partial success. Now we have Command Decision, in which Kylara’s tiny fleet must rearm at a station that views the rest of the human universe as scum to be exploited, while Rafe, scion of ISC, the company that owns and used to maintain the ansible network, returns home to find out what has gone wrong, cousin Stella does her best to revive the Vatta trade network, boy genius Toby improves the ansibles, and Aunt Grace takes over Slotter Key’s defense department.
They don’t know it, but the pirates haven’t got a chance. It doesn’t take long for Rafe to discover that his family has been kidnapped and to mount a rescue effort. One of Grace’s first moves is to repair the local ansible, something that ISC does not allow (only authorized service representatives are allowed to touch the devices; anyone else gets visited by a punitive fleet). Rafe winds up in charge of ISC, though before he can do anything productive he has to weed out the bad guys. Ky drops into a system where pirates are attacking Mackensee mercenaries, intervenes, repairs the local ansible, and sets the stage for a convergence of Mackensee reinforcements, more pirates, and an ISC punitive fleet.
Everything works out, of course, and the next volume will see Kylara one step closer to being the Grand High Admiral of the Space Patrol. The big question is Rafe. Kylara keeps thinking of him, and he keeps thinking of her. Will they ever get together?
Moon definitely has the gift. Engaging characters, great plot, great action, great pacing. I look forward to each new installment in the saga.
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Horizons,
Mary Rosenblum,
Tor,
$24.95,
316 pp.
(ISBN: 0765316048).
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Mary Rosenblum’s Horizons is a very readable tangle of schemes and deceptions that begins when Ahni Huang, daughter of a major Taiwanese Family (in an age when familiar corporations seem to have been replaced with Family organizations), travels up the space elevator to New York Up (NYUp), a huge habitat or “platform” ruled by the North American Alliance. Her mission is simple. Her half-twin brother Xai has been killed, the World Council has granted her Family the Right of Reply, and she is hunting the killer. To help her out, she has a host of internal enhancements and she is a Class 9 empath capable of reading intentions. And she needs it all when assassins prove to be waiting for her.
When she flees, she winds up in the platform’s greenhouse, where she meets Koi, an odd-looking kid who doesn’t seem truly human, and Dane, the agronomist in charge of the plants, who assures her that Koi and his family are really quite human, just a new evolutionary branch busily adapting to the zero-gee environment. No, he insists, he has NOT been tinkering with human genes, which is the sole remaining death-penalty offense. And please don’t talk, or someone will jump to the wrong conclusions. Humanity is not very good about dealing with difference.
That’s when the thugs show up and kidnap Koi, leaving a hotel room key behind. Ahni grabs the key and rushes off to rescue Koi, and soon she is facing . . . her brother? He’s not dead? Something strange is clearly going on, and it doesn’t become any clearer when she returns to Earth and her mother says she shouldn’t tell her father Xai lives. So she doesn’t, but she must still fess up to not killing Xai’s killer and then bear the accusations of letting down the family honor.
Meanwhile, Dane and the NYUp administrator, Laif, are facing a rising tide of resentment against Earthside control and talk of secession. When things get a bit rough, the media are inevitably on hand, and soon voices in the World Council are clamoring for military intervention to quell the “riots”; an independent platform society is only to be feared, for it could threaten Earth with rocks from space. There are strong hints that agents provocateur are at the root of it, but there is no clue to why. Rosenblum helps the reader out by showing Xai meeting with Li Zhen, the chief of the Chinese platform, son of the Earthside Chinese leader and perhaps a man with ambitions to empire.
And down on Earth, Ahni can’t stop thinking of Dane. Soon she is on her way back up, just in time to get right in the middle of everything, discover that Li Zhen has a son a lot like Koi, see Dane arrested for illegal genetic engineering, and . . .
Well, most of what I have mentioned so far isn’t much more than sideshow. The real scheme is something else again, and while it is reasonably impressive, it is not foreshadowed. The book is readable, the characters are well handled, and the plotting and pace are very satisfying. But when that real scheme flies out of the blue, the reader may feel cheated. Up to that point, Rosenblum’s plot is entirely capable of carrying the weight of the book by itself. In a sense, the addition invalidates much of what went before.
This is one of those books you can save money on. It’s readable, but flawed. Wait for the paperback.
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Alan Dean “Variety” Foster refuses to be typecast. He has written SF&F, detective, horror, western and historical fiction, popular science, scripts, and novelizations. So what should you expect when you pick up Sagramanda, A Novel of Near-Future India? Well, it has a bit of SF, some detective, some thriller, and a great deal of the colorful, chaotic bouillabaisse that is India, a crowded, resource-poor realm of immense economic contrasts.
Yet even though it is very readable, I found it deeply flawed by Foster’s decision to play coy with the reader. The heart of the tale is that of Taneer, a scientist who has stolen from his company some magical secret. Now he wants to sell it for very big bucks. But what’s the secret? It’s some sort of technology, and Taneer was involved in creating it, but Foster doesn’t even identify the kind of business Taneer’s employer is engaged in. Nor does he say why Taneer is stealing it. Is the guy just a greedy crook? But he seems such a nice fellow, fallen in love with a beauty of the Untouchable caste and thereby disgraced in his family’s eyes. He doesn’t seem like thieving scum. Was the company planning to kill the project? Was he being robbed of credit? Or is the girl the point? He’s stuck on her, he wants good things for her, but she’s stuck on him and is not demanding wealth. If he is bent on giving her the economic Moon anyway, he is not as rational as he otherwise seems.
Is Foster pretending to be more of a journalist? Saying it doesn’t matter why, just that this is what is happening? But he spends much more time on the internals of the psychotic Kali devotee who is killing residents of and visitors to Sagramanda, city of one hundred million, the police detective who is hunting for her, Taneer’s father, who has come to Sagramanda intending to murder his son and his slut, the shop owner who is contacted by Taneer and is delighted at the prospect of a three percent commission, the secret agent and sometimes assassin who is hunting for Taneer to return him to his employers, and even the massive tiger who has emerged from the jungle to discover that people are tasty. There are loads of good stuff here, and the reader is quite confident that there will be a juicy climax that brings all the disparate pieces together, but I found the refusal to identify the macguffin and to motivate Taneer so maddening that I actually peeked at the last few pages way ahead of time.
No, I won’t tell you what the macguffin is. But I will say it is indeed one that would be valuable to society and to certain businesses, while other businesses might want to suppress it. And despite Foster’s coyness, he is such a deft and evocative writer that Sagramanda is a good read anyway. Enjoy it.
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Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms fits best that literary category known as magical realism. The setting is modern and the tone is rationalist, but there are fantastic events in plenty and at the tale’s heart there is a folk tale with a historical root.
The setting is the Caribbean islands of Dolorosse and Cayuba. Calamity (born Chastity) Lambkin is burying her Dadda, whom she has tended through his last two years of illness. There is grief and love and doubt, for her mother vanished years ago and no one is sure that Dadda did not kill her. She meets Gene, an old protégé of Dadda’s and takes him home to bed. But Calamity has long had a problem of temper, so soon Gene is running home and she is getting blind drunk on the beach. When she wakes she finds a toddler enmeshed in seaweed, speaking no known language, a bit blue of skin and webbed of finger, and before long she is herself enmeshed in a desire to foster the kid.
Meanwhile, the local Zooquarium is having a problem with its seal inventory. Some days there are too many, some days too few. At this point the experienced reader begins to wonder about selkies, and now I must shift the topic to Calamity’s daughter Ifeoma, sometimes estranged, sometimes not; Ifeoma’s dad, once a teen on whom Calamity was stuck when he announced a preference for boys and she challenged him to test that idea with her (no wonder she seems so homophobic, except she’s not phobic; she’s just real pissed); and finally Charity’s past record as a “finder,” someone with a gift for finding lost things. Quite strangely, Calamity is now getting tinglings and hot flashes. The doctor says it’s menopause, and she wishes it was, but every blessed time the flash is immediately followed by a long lost plate, toy truck, or teddy bear falling out of the air. And that’s just the beginning, though Calamity’s Mama doesn’t show up (if you’re familiar with the tales of the seal-folk, you might guess what does).
Meanwhile, Hopkinson is interpolating short passages about a slave ship on its way across the Atlantic. One of the prisoners is a woman of power who is desperate to escape. In due time, an opportunity will arise, a creature will swim past the ship, and a future will be born of the new moon’s arms.
The pieces fit together in a remarkably satisfactory way. Calamity and her friends are characters of the sort we see more often in regional fiction than in SF&F, rich with folksy humor, raunchiness, and complications. They live, they enchant, they entice, and the reader’s world is the richer for this marvelous book. |
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Last Flight of the Goddess,
Ken Scholes,
Fairwood Press,
$25.00,
108 pp.,
250 copy limited edition (ISBN: 0978907809)
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Ken Scholes is one of the better writers you’ve never heard of. Or perhaps you have, if you read small press mags such as Talebones, in which case you may still not know he has a book (admittedly thin) out. It’s Last Flight of the Goddess, and it begins with “I shed no tears when I put the torch to my wife.”
That’s a nice hook, and it’s a great entree to the tale of an old man who was once a fantasy hero in the familiar Conanesque mold. And Andro Giantslayer, exiled King of Grunland, Finisher of Fang the Dread, and Founder of the Heroes League of Handen Hall, is still a hero, worthy of the admiration of Andrillia, a young bardess in search of a saga that will win fame and fortune.
The tale alternates reminiscence with Andro’s adventures as he seeks to return his wife’s ashes to the sky from which she fell so many years before (Oingeltonken’s Flights of Fancy Winged Shoes were never terribly reliable). It is warm and loving, and a very enticing invitation to look at any future item with the Scholes name on it.
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Another Fairwood Press title you may find worth a look is Human Visions: The Talebones Interviews. Between 1996 and 2006, Ken Rand (I reviewed his Dadgum Martians Invade the Lucky Nickel Saloon! two issues ago) interviewed a wide variety of SF&F authors, from Spider Robinson to Ben Bova to C. J. Cherryh to Roger Zelazny and twenty-six more. The Spider interview focuses on his fiction and fails to mention his stint as Analog reviewer, but what the hey. He’s made more people read by making them laugh than he ever did by telling them about good books, and Rand does an excellent job of drawing him out. Ditto the rest, and this is one that deserves a place on every fan’s bookshelves.
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The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror,
John Clute,
Payseur & Schmidt (www.payseurandschmidt.com),
$45.00,
165 pp.,
500 copy limited edition
(ISBN: 0978911407).
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A curiosity that has come my way is John Clute’s The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, done up as an artful hardbound with a decorative sash, an accompanying pamphlet containing an interview with Clute, and a pack of thirty postcards bearing the artwork from the book. The book serves up a series of essays on terms—aftermath, vastation, revel, infection, sighting, thickening, and more—that arise in viewing horror with the eye of a literary critic, which Clute is par excellence. The discussions refer frequently to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy by Clute and John Grant. (The publisher’s website mentions a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Horror, so perhaps the material will appear again in that volume.)
It is worth noting that the book is not only a lexicon. As Clute dissects the terms he has chosen to address, it becomes as well a taxonomy of the horror genre and thus of considerable interest to horror fans.
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For over twenty years, David Nye has been writing trenchant analyses of the relationship of technology to society. Among his many books are his consideration of the way technological constructs (from railroads to dams and skyscrapers to electric light) have supplanted the classic sublime of nature (see The Technological Sublime, 1994) and his thoughtful study of the stories we tell ourselves about technology and national identity (see America as Second Creation, 2003). His latest is something of a summary of his thought to date as well as a compact review of the state of thought about the area of technology and society. It is worth mentioning here (as Nye’s work often is) because the Analog audience is concerned with the same area, albeit usually in a less abstract, academic sense.
The book is Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, and among the questions he addresses is the classic one of who’s in charge here. Does technology push us around? Does it shape our behavior and our social arrangements? Or do we shape and control technology? Many critics of technology insist on the former view; we are at the mercy of our technologies and we have little say in the way they are chosen or used. Yet, says Nye, technology matters because it is at the heart of what makes us human. And there are a number of examples to show that we can choose how to use technologies. One of those examples involves oil and automobiles, which dominate the US partly because our early choices led to a massive infrastructure that is very difficult to change. Some European countries have chosen differently. Denmark, where Nye lived and worked for many years, gets a large amount of its energy from wind and remains a very bicycle-friendly place. And in most of Europe, cars are much smaller than in the US, per capita energy usage is about half that in the US, and the standard of living is comparable.
This issue is only one of ten that Nye takes up in turn. He begins with whether we can define technology and moves steadily through the predictability of technology; whether it encourages cultural uniformity or diversity (Levittown, PA, has long been cited in support of the former, yet a visit to Levittown reveals that people—enabled by technology—have layered their own diverse preferences atop the uniformity of mass-produced housing); sustainability; the impact on jobs and work; whether technologies should be chosen by the market or (somehow) the people; whether technology makes us more or less secure; and whether it adds to our awareness of the world or removes us from equally legitimate (older) modes of understanding. The questions are important because they imply that we have a choice of futures, some of them surely more benign than others, and Nye frequently cites science fiction for its explorations of how things may turn out. The answers are perhaps another matter, for there are examples to be found to support more than one. The point, again, is choice, and “the burden of my argument has been that there is no single, no logical, and no necessary end to the symbiosis between people and machines. For millennia, people have used tools to shape themselves and their cultures [with] many unexpected and not always welcome consequences. . . . For millennia we have used technologies to create new possibilities.” The lack of pat answers leads Nye to quote Rilke that “we must ‘try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.’” Only thus can we preserve our choices.
I teach science, technology, and society courses (among others). This book may well find a place on a future syllabus, which will ensure that my students read it. You I can only urge to read it. It’s worth your money, time, and thought. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
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