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Time’s Child,
Rebecca Ore,
EOS,
$14.95,
327 pp.
(ISBN: 0380792524).
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The last book by Rebecca Ore was The Outlaw School (reviewed here in May 2001), so we have been without her unique view and considerable talents for too many years. But here at last is Time’s Child for your delectation.
The time is 2308. Earth has been ravaged by plagues that have left cities depopulated, nations fragmented into rival city-states, and the survivors wary of travel and travelers. But the Philadelphia National Archive has been given a time scoop by someone (or ones) in the future. They find that they can remove people from the distant past, but only if they disappeared in a battle or natural disaster or just went missing. Benedetta, a young woman in a Milanese artillery crew who knew Leonardo da Vinci well enough to borrow his gadgets to make toys for her young son, is scooped from a battle just after watching her husband die. Confronted with figures that claim to be angels, she won’t have it. After all, who ever heard of an angel with a scab on a knuckle? Soon she knows the truth: The archivists want to pump her about the past and then keep her in a genteel captivity that is nonetheless captivity. Again, she won’t have it. She’ll take her chances with the vaccines and remnant diseases outside, thank you, and when Jonah—a twenty-first century hacker and troll who stepped outdoors in a blizzard and now claims he thinks he’s been revived as a character in a computer game—offers to help her escape the Archive, she grabs the chance. Thanks to knowing someone in her own time who dreamed of the future, she catches on fast. It helps that the political situation—rival city-states—is familiar from her original time, as well.
Ivar is a young Viking scooped from the sea off Iceland. He too catches on fast, and before long he and Benedetta are copying the time machine (with help, of course), listening to conflicting advice from future heads that pop out of windows of blue haze (“Don’t bring back the Templars!” “Oh, do, do!”), and concluding that what they do will determine which future becomes actual. Which hazy head should they listen to? Never mind, for Benedetta has a pretty firm idea that there are a great many past people that deserve another chance, and she and Ivar (and others) start bringing them up. The result is a larger population, cultural and genetic diversity galore, and a forming culture that is actually quite interesting.
Where will it all go? Ore doesn’t say, but she doesn’t have to. What she does say is enough, for her point seems to be that when people escape dire straits (as do those scooped from the past), they are very appreciative of the second chance, especially when it comes with modern conveniences. There are tensions between old and new, but overall there is a remarkable amount of good will. Old enmities are set aside, new friends are made, and it’s time to enjoy life.
If we must speculate on the future of Ore’s future, we might reflect on how well people forget. Perhaps it will be less than a generation before those old enmities are remembered, or new ones discovered. And at that point, well, some of these folks from the past are pretty bloody-minded. Or perhaps Ore set her tale in Philadelphia for another reason than the fact that that is where she currently lives. It is after all the City of Brotherly Love.
I think you’ll enjoy it.
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Empire,
Orson Scott Card,
Tor,
$24.95,
351 pp.
(ISBN: 0765316110).
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I don’t seem to live in the same world as Orson Scott Card. As he explains the genesis of Empire in his Afterword, he was asked to create a novel that would become the storyline of a video game centered on a near-future American civil war. Since he sees a great polarization in America, along the blue state-red state lines the media made familiar in the last election, he then found it fairly easy to imagine how such a civil war might develop. Where do his world and mine differ? I see the polarization, but I don’t see it as so dramatic a thing. The difference may be because I live in a part of the country that often seems (at least to me) more reasonable than others. We have Olympia Snowe for a Senator, after all! Or it could be that Card has been bashed by both Left and Right and thereby felt the polarization in a very personal way.
But it doesn’t really matter whether Card and I live in the same world. Empire is a cracking good read. It opens with a demonstration of Captain Reuben Malich as an honorable soldier. He does well in a difficult mission, is promoted to Major, and is sent to Princeton to hone his intellect. There one of his professors, Averell Torrent, talks a lot about how Rome achieved its true greatness when the Republic gave way to the Empire at a time when civil war loomed and a strong man could bring order out of chaos. Before Malich leaves, Torrent feels him out about his willingness to accept “a covert assignment to help hold this country together.”
Before long, Malich is working out of the Pentagon, carrying out missions apparently ordered by someone in the White House. One of those missions involves studying Washington and figuring out just how terrorists could successfully assassinate the President. He assumes the idea is to find holes and promptly plug them, does his usual good job, and hands in his report.
Coleman is assigned to Malich’s office as an aide, but finds that Malich is never around. When they finally make contact, it is on an overlook by the Potomac, just in time to spot Malich’s plan under way. They do their best, but though they interfere with the plan, it is successful enough to kill the President and others. They are heroes, though Malich expects to be attacked—blamed!—as soon as they find out the assassination plan was his. Before long, Coleman is being invited to join a military coup. He refuses, but it is looking more and more like pre-Empire chaos is setting in. Indeed, a force of Progressive Restorationists, armed with some quite science-fictional weaponry, is now taking over New York City, killing anyone in uniform (cops and firefighters and doormen), and liberal enclaves around the country are rushing to recognize the Progressives as the true U.S. government.
Civil war, anyone? And where’s Torrent? He’s getting the position of vice-president and looking very presidential as he coordinates the battle of the elected government against the Progressives. He’s using Malich and Coleman, sending them out to stymie the foe and eventually announcing that he has tracked down the Progressive headquarters, where the evil mastermind must be hiding. Except that there are signs that the Progressives and the assassins are not the same group.
Meanwhile Malich’s wife Cecily is getting very suspicious, for that mastermind as well as far too many other foe figures turn out to have been students of Torrent’s.
Is Torrent some sort of master conspirator? That is never clear in the novel, and I have no idea whether the game ever resolves the question. But it doesn’t really matter. Card has constructed a very nice conspiracy thriller that is satisfying in its philosophical-historical rationale, the technical ingenuity of the Progressive technology, and its level of derring-do and heroism. In some ways it follows the standard pattern; in at least one way it does not, for a very important character gets killed long before the climax. If you like good characterization, you’ll love Card’s treatment of Malich, Coleman, and Cecily. Secondary characters are less well developed, but that’s pretty standard. Overall, you’re gonna love this one.
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Emperor,
Stephen Baxter,
Ace,
$24.95,
302 pp.
(ISBN: 0441014666).
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With Emperor, Stephen Baxter begins the “Time’s Tapestry” alternate history epic. The tale begins in Britain, 4 b.c., when a babe is struggling to be born and his mother suddenly begins babbling in Latin. Fortunately, one on hand is able to write the words down, and they are clearly a prophecy of events to come as the Romans invade and emperors come and go. However, the last few lines, though they are blatantly familiar to the reader, are mysterious to the characters, for they talk of self-evident truths and human rights.
The babe, one Nectovelin, is full-grown when Claudius invades and shatters what the locals thought was might. His cousin Agrippina winds up going to Rome and her descendants carry the prophecy forward through the centuries as Hadrian’s Wall is built and, later, as Constantine tours the western provinces, comes near death, and another babe labors to be born.
So the book is a tour of ancient British history, and as such quite well done. The reader smells the stink and dust and sees the towns and walls and camps when they were new, not ruins. But the prophecy is a mystery that demands explanation. It refers to time’s tapestry, thereby inviting the recipients of the prophecy to call the source the “Weaver,” and wonder who that man or woman, and what their motives, might be. Is the aim to change history? In what way? Baxter has his characters speculate, but strangely he ignores the prophecy’s last line, “O child! Thou tapestried in time, strike home! Strike at the root!”
Nor does he call Nectovelin the Anti-Christ, though the coincidence of timing of his birth, and his location at the opposite end of the known world of the time, could easily warrant that. Instead the characters focus on the birth and development of Christianity, which this volume takes up to about the time of Augustine and the setting of the authoritarian pattern that persists today. But is it this whose root the prophecy calls for striking? Is the change the Weaver seeks religious, or political, or philosophical? Indeed, what would the world be like today if the ideals of the American Declaration of Independence had become established a thousand years ahead of time?
We’ll have to wait to see what Baxter’s up to, but so far the signs are good.
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Unity,
Steven Harper,
Tor,
$25.95,
319 pp.
(ISBN: 0765316064).
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Now I know why I don’t like Battlestar Galactica. The premise never convinced me, and the details—machine people that can get pregnant from humans? C’mon!—actively offended my sense of reality. But I picked up Steven Harper’s Unity anyway.
I wish I hadn’t. The very first line—“A trio of Cylon raiders dipped and swooped through space like silent bats on razor wings”—is one of the oldest gaffes of space opera. Not that I need to tell Analog readers, but you don’t swoop in a vacuum! A bit later on (p. 100), it became clear why the Galacticans are having such a tough time licking the Cylons: They proudly admire repairs on the wings of their fighters—repairs made with solder. You don’t solder things that have to stand up to strain! Solder is weak. Welding works much, much better, and I am not inclined ever again to pick up a book in this series.
With that all said, what is Unity all about? The fleet is at rest in a system where they can pluck from a living world gobs and gobs of algae goop for food and medicines. The Cylons attack and are fought off, leaving an escape pod behind. In the pod is Peter Attis, a pop music star who has been a captive of the Cylons since shortly before their initial attack on the Colonies. Despite suspicions, once he has been checked for any viruses or bacteria the Cylons may have loaded him with, he is accepted. Before long, he gives a concert to a massive audience, and shortly after that people start falling ill with something a bit like Mad Cow Disease. Victims start twitching, speak in tongues, lapse into coma, and finally die. The frantic search for a cure is complicated by religious nuts who decide Peter is the prophesied Unifier and the disease is a blessing. But of course the search is successful; we know that from the git-go since right at the beginning of the book it says the tale takes place between two episodes of the TV show.
There are all the usual soap-opera details, of course. Not one of them does a better job of convincing than using solder on strain-bearing wing cracks.
Bah.
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The Secret City,
Carol Emshwiller,
Tachyon,
$14.95,
217 pp.
(ISBN: 1892391449).
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Carol Emshwiller has been earning praise for a long time, and at 85 she’s not done. Her novel The Secret City is a charming take on the “aliens among us” trope that begins when a homeless man is arrested. His primary offense is snoring under a bush in an old lady’s back yard; his secondary offense is rather bruisingly resisting arrest. He’s a beefy fellow, you see, and it takes but a few pages for his interior monolog to reveal that he is an alien. His parents were tourists come to Earth to gawk at the pitiful natives. Their disguise was flowered shirts and shorts and cameras beyond which the natives just wouldn’t look to notice the bulky bodies and brow ridges.
I suppose that could work, as long as the tourists weren’t too different from us, and these weren’t. In fact, they looked pretty human, or at least Neanderthal (those brow ridges, right?), so they could pass. But when they weren’t retrieved according to plan, they had a problem. Mostly they kept on wandering the landscape dressed like tourists, though the flowered shirts got pretty tattered once they ran out of money. A few retreated into the mountains, where in an isolated valley they built a kinda-sorta reminder of home. They had to keep the profile low to escape notice from planes and satellites, but they could build an urbanish architecture that—they hoped—would keep the kids connected to home. And they clung to the hope that someone would show up to rescue them.
Our vagrant, Lorpas, escapes and, looking for his possessions, winds up befriending the old lady who ratted him out. Alas, when the rescuers arrive, they kill her. He runs, heading for the mountains, searching for the rumored Secret City. In due time, he finds it, as well as the last three of his kind, one of them a young woman, Allush, with whom he is quickly smitten, as is she. Alas, one of the others is a bloodthirsty nutcase who thinks Allush should be his. The third is a wise old woman who had been a peasant.
Does that matter? The rescuers show up again and snatch Allush away. She soon learns that it matters indeed. Home is a strange world where the food and water taste weird and appearance matters greatly. Can she go home again? Which world is home? Is there a place for her and Lorpas on either one?
That last is a question Lorpas is working on, too. The answer is perhaps inevitable, but Emshwiller does a very nice job of developing it. Her characters are quirky and genuine, and the tale is a warm one punctuated by death and loss. I enjoyed it greatly, and I think you will too.
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One does not have to do a Ph.D.-equivalent of research to realize that the superhero comics have long reflected the concerns of the real world, from fighting Nazis and Communists to racism and feminism, nor to realize that both heroes and the villains they fought were nuts enough to make a violent ward look sane. Does this mean someone should turn a shrink loose on them? In Superman on the Couch (reviewed here in October 2004), Danny Fingeroth spent as much time psychoanalyzing the reader as the heroes. Minister Faust is more to the point in From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, in which Eva Brain (the echo of Eva Braun is surely deliberate, given her tendency to coin Germanically polysyllabic hyperbafflegab at the turn of a page), official shrink for the Fantastic Order Of Justice and its FOOJsters (which I persist in reading as FOO Jesters!) attempts to induce Omnipotent Man, Flying Squirrel, Iron Lass, Brotherfly, Power Grrl, and X-Man to conquer their Secret Identity Diffusion, mortiquaeroticism, Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis, and so on to achieve psychemotional wellness and cut out the infighting that threatens FOOJ’s continued existence. Unfortunately, Hawk King, ancient master of superherodom, dies in his sanctuary and thus awakens a perfect storm of conspiracy theories, backbiting, and even rebellion.
I suspect Faust grew up on superhero comics and retains a certain fondness for them. But that hasn’t stopped him from writing a biting, over-the-top send-up of the genre, self-help pop-psych, celebrities, and more. Unfortunately, he chose Dr. Brain as his narrator, with the result that much of the book is as unreadable as the self-help pop-psych he parodies. Yet for those who make it to the end, there is a very interesting volte-face that suggests that Faust has his own conspiracy theory to explain what has been happening in Washington over the last few years.
But that’s not enough to make me look forward to his next.
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Lou Anders offers Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge in the spirit of Damon Knight’s long-missed Orbit anthologies of original fiction. He lives up to that spirit, too, for he has picked twenty-one excellent pieces by Mike Resnick and Nancy Kress, Gene Wolfe, Robert Charles Wilson, Kage Baker, Elizabeth Bear, Ken MacLeod, Paul Di Filippo, and more.
I hope Anders has the chance to continue this series for many volumes. So will you when you get a taste of it.
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Things Will Never Be the Same,
Howard Waldrop,
Old Earth Books,
312 + xii pp.,
tp $15.00
(ISBN: 9781882968367),
hb (300 copies only)
$45
(ISBN: 9781882968350).
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Howard Waldrop has been writing SF a bit longer than I have and is quite justly many times as well known. His marvelously quirky “The Ugly Chickens” alone is enough to make a writer famous even if that writer never penned another tale, and Waldrop has sprinkled tales just as marvelous and just as quirky by the dozen on his devoted admirers. It is thus a tragedy that he is not as wealthy as, say, Stephen King, or as bedecked with medals, awards, and other honors as a Ruritanian prince. He says about as much in his introduction, but of course Waldrop being Waldrop, you are never sure how much of what he says with such a straight face you should believe.
Be that as it may, his stories have a tendency to make you see the world in new ways. Indeed, the title of his new book has a definite aptness, so order Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Science Fiction, 1980-2005 right away. You’ll get a bunch of Hugo nominees (more tragedy—someone always seems to beat him out!), of which the latest is “The King of Where-I-Go,” which is so sure to make you unsure of your own past that Waldrop might as well hit you in the forehead with a croquet mallet (that’s a clue, Bubba). I also quite loved the Runyonesque “The Sawing Boys,” in which Prohibition-Era gangsters meet country music, as contaminated by early radio. Sixteen stories altogether, and not one you’ll be sorry to have read.
Enjoy! |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
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