|
|
Ken MacLeod has the knack of writing exciting fiction with a strong socialist/anarchist bent. His latest novel, The Execution Channel, saves that for the punch line. Leading up to it, he gives us a world where 9/11 happened in Boston and Al Gore led the nation into war, as if to say the mess that is the current war on terror is too situational to blame on Bush. That said, MacLeod’s extensions of the war on terror look far too likely for comfort. The US has declined economically, but still wages war wherever terrorists are to be found. Surveillance is omnipresent, and security agencies spend an enormous amount of time spreading disinformation via the blogosphere, something that should sound familiar if you’ve been paying attention to the news.
So here is Roisin Travis, a peacenik spying on an airbase in Scotland, now owned by the US. Her brother Alec has blogged that something funny has been going on in the ’stans. She is taking pictures as a plane lands and disgorges a mysterious device. Shortly after she leaves the scene, an enormous explosion turns the landscape bright as day. Scotland has apparently been nuked! Meanwhile, her father James, a British patriot who has been serving the French as a spy, has got the word and hit the road to find a hiding place. Unfortunately, the highways are blocked, and all too soon explosions are setting off refineries and bringing down bridges. Surveillance reveals that Roisin is near one site, and James near another.
What is going on? Was it a nuke? Strange tech that blew when someone goofed? Stolen tech with a remote switch? Does it have anything to do with the Chinese and Korean cities that have just been roofed over with Fuller domes and equipped with what are rumored to be anti-missile defenses? Is Armageddon at hand? Everyone wants to know, and the Travises look suspicious as hell. Soon Alec is being brutally tortured. Roisin is being pursued in hope that she will lead the troops to her dad. And an American blogger is trying eagerly to sort through the documents that have been “leaked” to him. Sure it’s disinformation. Mark Dark knows that, but there’s a pattern, and as he puts things together he discovers that the world is deep in “WTF” territory. When those domed Chinese and Korean cities are replaced by smoking holes in the ground, he announces the advent of “Battlestar America.”
But he’s wrong, in a way that will both delight and frustrate everyone who remembers the work of James Blish. The frustration has a lot to do with the punch line I mentioned above, but if I go into detail, I will frustrate you in another way. So I won’t. If you want to know what the heck I mean, you’ll have to go buy the book. You’ll enjoy it.
|
|
Kay Kenyon begins her “Entire and the Rose” series with Bright of the Sky, and it looks like her readers will have a good ride despite a few “waitaminnit” moments. There’s superscience, hypercosmology, and adventure galore, and the characters are sufficient to maintain the reader’s interest.
In Kenyon’s future, humanity travels the stars in Kardashev (hyperspace) tunnels maintained by the Minerva Corp. Unfortunately, ships are being lost, and as the novel opens, a space station is in trouble: Its artificial intelligence has apparently dived into its navel and stopped maintaining life support. Some of the crew makes it into the escape capsules in time, but not before young and ruthless Helice Maki grabs a data dump which, when analyzed, reveals that the AI had detected and promptly focused on—to the exclusion of all else—evidence of a parallel universe.
Jump to the home of Titus Quinn. Years before, he was on a ship that vanished in a K-tunnel. A bit later he turned up on a distant planet, claiming to have been in a parallel universe and to have lost his wife and child there. However, his memories were full of lacunae and no one believed him, despite the mystery of how he got from where he disappeared to where he turned up. He became a batty recluse. But now a Minerva rep and old friend, Lamar Gelde, has arrived to say he can be believed after all, and the bosses would like him to go back. With the K-tunnels failing, a way to travel from hither to distant yon via a parallel universe shortcut may be just the ticket. He could investigate, negotiate, and bring home the bacon.
It takes a while, and Helice Maki has to display a nasty talent for exerting pressure, but eventually he agrees. Maybe he can find his wife and daughter and recover the missing memories. And soon he is learning about the Entire, a universe that tunnels through our own and is ruled by the monstrous Tarig who discovered the Entire eons ago and filled it with copies of beings from the Rose. That’s our universe, so called because Earth has roses and the Entire does not, and here is the first waitaminnit—the Tarig can copy people but not plants? But never mind. My objection is hardly crucial when the author’s point is art and it works pretty well on that level. More important is that the Tarig do not remember Titus Quinn fondly. He needs allies and disguise if he is going to get anywhere, and since this is Book One, the reader can be confident that he will find those and make rapid progress. And so he does. He even learns where his daughter is—blinded by the Tarig and sent off to the land of the Inyx, telepathic herd beasts who crave riders but insist that they be dependent on their steeds’ senses. He is even well on his way to find her when a friend finds a message left by his wife—who may or may not be dead—reporting on a colossal danger to the Rose. He must, if he can, stymie it. But long before he can do that, he is fleeing for his life, back to the Rose with neither daughter nor wife in hand. Memories, however, he has in plenty.
The shape of the next volumes seems clear. Titus Quinn must return. The threat to the Rose must be removed. The daughter must be found. Friends must be reconnected, especially the one who seems to hold some promise of romance. Questions must be answered: Will the Entire devour the Rose? Will the Rose try to conquer the Entire? Peace or war? And is Titus’s wife alive or dead?
|
|
|
|
|
Hydrogen Steel,
K. A. Bedford,
Edge,
$19.95,
367 pp.
(ISBN: 1894063201).
|
K. A. Bedford is an Australian writer who has received considerable attention in his native land. Judging from his latest, Hydrogen Steel, he has a little ways to go before he has complete command of his material—but only a little ways. Keep an eye on him. He’s already good and should get much better.
Hydrogen Steel begins with retired police detective Zette McGee telling the reader that her dad was fictitious. She is, you see, an android or “disposable” who woke up and became fully conscious. She doesn’t know what or who she really is or where she fits into the human world around her, and she agonizes endlessly over her existential plight. To me this is an example of Bedford lacking command, for if he had cut back a bit the book would have been much more readable. Be that as it may, she gets a message from a Kell Fallow, who says he is accused of killing his wife and kids, he didn’t do it, he’s on his way to her, stowed away in a cargo container, and oh, yes, he knew her back at the factory.
Zette enlists the aid of old friend Gideon Smith, a man of intriguing past and spookish capabilities, and they get to the spaceport just in time to learn that Fallow had a bomb in his guts and has blown up. Immediately thereafter, Zette’s home is trashed, and her security system doesn’t react because it thinks she’s the trasher—at least till “she” sets the place on fire. When Zette and Gideon take his Victorianized spaceship to go to Fallow’s home world and investigate, an infowar attack overcomes the ship’s military-grade defenses and nearly kills them. And that’s only the beginning.
What’s going on? It’s hard to tell, for Earth has been destroyed, the “Silent” have been parked in human space ever since humans destroyed an intelligent species in order to claim a colony world, war is no longer permitted, and the “tubes” (wormholes) used for interstellar travel are vanishing. Disposables apparently have the capability of waking up. But the villain is neither alien nor android. Soon a visitation from Hydrogen Steel, a firemind—an artificial intelligence escaped from human control to live on vacuum energy—reveals that something very strange and powerful is involved, although it seems constrained to play by something resembling human rules of engagement. The scene is complicated with the entry of the remnants of Otaru, another firemind that went to the stars and returned with news it thought humanity should have, even though it knew the at-home fireminds like Hydrogen Steel would immediately try to kill it. Now McGee and Smith have a fighting chance to track down the reason why Fallow and his family were killed.
And so they do. Unfortunately, there remain so many loose ends that Bedford feels obliged to wrap everything up with twenty pages of exposition as dry as a lecture. Some other writers would have used those loose ends as the excuse for a sequel or two, so Bedford’s approach has its points. But better command of material—leaving out the Silent, the vanishing tubes, and most of the existential angst—would mean a sharper focus, fewer loose ends, and less of a slog to wrap things up.
I know. Reviewers aren’t supposed to tell writers how they should have done it. But sometimes . . .
|
|
|
Sandra McDonald’s first novel bodes well for her future. The Outback Stars is space opera with a bit of a fresh flavor, for while Earth is in sad shape, Australians discovered a spur branch of the highway to the stars—the Alcheringa—out near Mars, and now the colony worlds, known as the Seven Sisters, bear names like Kookaburra and Waipata. Each of the Sisters is marked by clusters of strange domes, apparently built by the same mysterious and ancient aliens that built the Alcheringa. Huge ships named after Earthside environmental disasters ferry goods and colonists, and sometimes . . .
Lieutenant Jodenny Scott is on Kookaburra, getting over the bad case of twitches she picked up when the Yangtze blew up. She also picked up a medal, for when things went bad she displayed considerable competence and guts. Now she’s eager to get back into space, and when she has a chance at a slot on the Aral Sea, even though the ship is not a happy one, she grabs it. She soon finds out what’s wrong with the ship, for her department is a thorough cock-up, her underlings are miserably motivated, and there appear to be some pretty crooked schemes running in the background. It doesn’t help when a fellow from the science section comes to her with a wild-eyed idea: It wasn’t a separatist bomb that did the Yangtze in; it had something to do with the aliens! But Jodenny Scott doesn’t want to hear it. She has a department to knock into order, and she has a powerful attraction to fight. She is drawn to one of her underlings, Myell, and there are rules against fraternization.
But of course events conspire. That attraction just cannot be resisted. She and Myell are drawn inexorably together even as the schemes become more obvious, death threatens, the alien domes step front and center, and figures from the Dreamtime invade Myell’s head with advice. That struck me as a bit much, but there are hints that this tale will be followed by more. Certainly there is more to be told. If sequels do follow, I suspect those Dreamtime figures will turn out to represent the aliens. And the Alcheringa will have enough extensions and branches to let McDonald write an epic series.
And since she’s already good, she will only get better. Right?
|
|
|
Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald are New Hampshire-dwelling Yankees, so it is perhaps no surprise that when in Land of Mist and Snow they posit a Confederate ship powered by magic, it is a dark and bloody magic indeed, and the Alecto’s scuppers run with blood and her wood reeks of the slaughterhouse. Yankees, as all right-thinking people know, are a kinder people, though they have a flinty sternness born of their stony land that brooks no compromise. Thus we get William R. Sharpe, a magus who convinces Cornelius Vanderbilt to fund and the U.S. government to authorize a secret project that quite deliberately reminds the reader of the Manhattan Project of nuclear fame. Details are scarce, but when Navy Lieutenant John Nevis is sent to frigid Thule with cannons forged of virgin brass and Miss Columbia Abrams is enlisted for the sake of her virgin virtue, we begin to gain an inkling. In due time we learn that the ship Nicodemus is powered by an elemental of the air. It can achieve great speeds with neither sail nor steam, and soon it is off to play its part against blockade-runners and other Rebel ships.
But there are reports of the Alecto and soon the Nicodemus has a special mission. Meanwhile, the Rebels are hearing reports of the Nicodemus and plotting their own nefarious attacks. The result must be a magical duel on the high seas, and since virtue must triumph, the Alecto is doomed.
But Yankee virtue is hardly pure. The spirit that animates the Nicodemus is as thoroughly enslaved as any Southern plantation worker. It hates its captivity even though it is forging a bond with Miss Adams (as is John Nevis, of course!), and in the end that bond will be tested.
Doyle and MacDonald do an excellent job—as they generally do—of delivering character, plot, suspense, and excitement. Any reader with a taste for magical adventure will enjoy this one.
|
|
|
You like superheros? Game developer Austin Grossman must too, for he serves up a world positively infested with them, as well as supervillains, and everyone seems to have more neuroses than Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker combined. Soon I Will Be Invincible begins with Doctor Impossible, locked away in his twelfth maximum-security cell, taking advantage of a momentary lapse to bust loose and begin once more on his grand ambition, to conquer the world. This time, however, his arch-nemesis, the hero CoreFire, is missing and the Champions, the premier heroes’ league, must reform to hunt him down and—they hope!—lock him away someplace really secure. However, it will take more than that to stop the Doc from scheming.
The backstories are familiar—laboratory accidents, mutant bug bites, aliens, ancient fairies, surgical interventions. Some of the heroes used to be villains, and vice versa. You can’t tell who’s on what team without a scorecard, and perhaps this is Grossman’s point. Heroes and villains are equally bizarre and driven, and it is perhaps no more than an accident of fate that puts them on one team instead of the other. Or maybe it’s a matter of how one defines “conquering the world.” The villain wants an emperor’s crown and a chance to go mwa-ha-ha-ha! The hero wants applause and a kiss from the appropriate guy or girl.
|
|
Fantasms,
Len Bailey,
Tor Starscape,
$17.95.
299 pp.
(ISBN: 0765309823).
|
Len Bailey has a taste for the zany and bizarre that would stand him in good stead writing for Nickelodeon. Instead he gave us Clabbernappers, and now the sequel, Fantasms. As it begins, Danny Ray, rodeo cowboy (junior division), has just been tossed and now must suffer the taunts of Billy Whitehorse as he takes Caroline Robertson, last year’s rodeo queen, off for a soda. Hanky the Clown tells him “some days you’re a cowboy, some day’s (sic) you’re a clown,” and points him toward the magical mystical doorway to the kingdom of Elidor where the Princess Amber has been stolen away by the evil and wicked fantasms and must be rescued. So what’s an adventurous kid to do but say aw, shucks, dust off his cowboy hat and chaps, twirl his magic blue lariat, and hie off with Prince Blue, the devil Tuk, and Princess Amber’s bratty Traveling Maiden Cherry Quiggs to board a bishop and sail off with the treacherous Commodore Mumblefub and Captain Giddyfickle across the checkerboard sea. In due time they meet up with an incompetent magician, a dragonfly maiden, a fairy queen, and masses of giant bloodsucking whiners. Danny collects a few necessary magical tokens and disappoints a stinky girl or two. As for the Princess . . . Of course she winds up safe!
Devils and monsters, evil wannabe overlords, a world that doesn’t make much sense (a checkerboard sea sailed by gigantic chess pieces? C’mon!), a maiden to rescue, and a bit of derring to do. Just the thing to feed a young boy’s dreams, and a suitable gift for my nephew when I’m done with this review. Suitable as well for your young kin, who will be pleased as punch with your gift.
|
|
|
The Arkham Alphabet Book for Children,
Darrell Schweitzer,
Zadok Allen:
Publisher
(send money to Darrell Schweitzer, 6644 Rutland St., Philadelphia, PA 19149-2128),
$4, 32 pp.
(ISBN: none).
|
If you have any taste for the Cthulhu running joke as maintained by Darrell Schweitzer, you will love The Arkham Alphabet Book for Children. Not that it’s really for the kiddies, of course. In these enlightened days, even the Arkham-Dunwich School District, the chairman of whose Board of Education penned the introduction, must surely gibber in fear of parental lawsuits if they put it where the little blighters could reach it. But suitable adults must bare their teeth in ivory rictus at anything that begins “A is for Arkham, B for the book, a Curious fool from the library took. D for the demon, which filled him with dread. Eldritch, of course, it bit off his head. . . .”I think I will give this to that nephew I mentioned. He has a little sister, you see, and even though his parents will surely admonish him not to share this delightful tidbit with Marian, he will, oh he will, and her screams in the dark of night will delight Yogge-Sothothe. |
|
|
|
|
|
"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
Home | Address Change Form | What is Analog? | Forum | Submissions |Links | FAQ Page | Contact Editors | Privacy Policy | Advertising
Copyright © 2010 Dell Magazines, A Division of Penny Publications, LLC
Report problems on this site to Webmaster
|
|
