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Halting State,
Charles Stross,
Ace,
$24.95,
351 pp.
(ISBN: 0441014984).
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Recent years have been marked by periodic alarums concerning the parlous state of Internet security. In April 2007, for instance, the word (www.computerweekly.com/
Articles/2007/04/24/223399/hackers-could-dent-economy-us-warned.htm) was that hackers could undermine U.S. economic competitiveness. In May 2007, Estonia suffered a massive denial-of-service attack (www.pcworld.com/ article/id,131945/article.html). In September 2007, there was a report (www. foxnews.com/story/0,2933,298320,00. html) that hackers could crash the U.S. electricity grid. It’s no surprise that Homeland Security, Defense, and other agencies are vitally concerned about the prospects of cyberwar, partly because a cyberattack is so cheap to mount that it need not come from sources traditionally recognized as enemies. Some tiny little nation or even a private group with a mad on could do the job. And of course a mad-on is hardly needed as motivation. Hackers are famous for doing things just because they can, showing off and scoring points for their prowess. Meanwhile, computer wonks are discovering that some tasks are not best done by computers alone. People can be enlisted to carry out small tasks—solving CAPTCHAs, answering questions, analyzing images, and more—that add up to large ones, such as digitizing old documents (news.bbc.uk/1/hi/technology/ 7023627.stm) or running search engines (www.chacha.com/info/about).
Science fiction writers, of course, are way ahead of the news, and the latest in this context is Charles Stross, whose Halting State is a grand read, fast, entertaining, provocative, timely, and maybe even prophetic. The scene is Edinburgh, 2018, and Sergeant Sue Smith has just been called in on a bank robbery. Unusually, the bank exists only in an online game; it stores treasure accumulated by players, and the robbery was carried out by a band of orcs. The robbery was called in by an employee at Hayek Associates, a new dot com that makes its nut by stabilizing the economies of game worlds. It’s in trouble, for the robbery was for lots of treasure. Now Hayek’s insurers want to know what’s going on, and they’re sending a crack team of auditors, including Elaine, a forensics specialist who does a bit of gaming as a hobby. She thinks they need someone on the coder side as a “native guide,” so the call goes out for a skill set that turns out to match Jack, a game programmer who’s just been laid off. So everyone descends on Edinburgh just in time to run into the team of crack security specialists from the EU, discover that whoever’s responsible has hacked police communications and can listen in on anyone anywhere, and learn that a classic LARP (live-action role-playing game) is actually a government intelligence scheme, relying on volunteers who pay for the privilege of following instructions and playing secret agent in the interstices of real life.
Of course, it turns out that both Elaine and Jack are players of that LARP. When the game turns real, they learn that there are major international issues at stake, one of which is the vulnerability of critical infrastructure. The story, however, gains much of its life less from infrastructure problems than from quite traditional human greed and stupidity. Hackers are involved, but there is a non-hacker villain with very classic motives. There is also a tangled web of incidents and themes, supported by the well-developed characters of Jack and Elaine, of just the sort we have come to expect from Stross.
Don’t miss this one. |
The H-bomb Girl, Stephen Baxter,
Faber and Faber,
$20.45 (£9.99),
268 pp.
(ISBN: 0571232809)
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Poor Laura. She’s just fourteen. Her parents are separating. Her mum’s old boyfriend is moving into the house. Dad works at the airbase, where everyone’s on alert because it’s 1962 and Kennedy and Khrushchev are toe to toe over the Soviet missiles in Cuba. And Dad’s given her a key to keep with her at all times; in case of dire events (like nuclear war) she’s to call a certain number, say she has it as well as the codes, and someone will come get her and keep her safe.
Laura hasn’t a clue what the key really is. But at her new school, in a Liverpool where the Beatles are just starting out, one of her classmates recognizes it as belonging to a Vulcan bomber. Her teacher, Miss Wells, who looks alarmingly like a much older version of herself, hints that a very important Saturday is coming up in two weeks, on October 27 (hint: look up the Cuban Missile Crisis). And at a local basement club, the waitress, Agnes, carries a book that looks like a battered version of Laura’s diary.
By now you’re 50 pages into Stephen Baxter’s The H-bomb Girl, and you already have an inkling of what’s going on. Yup, time travel. But what are the time-travelers after? The Cuban Missile Crisis was a cusp moment in history. It could have led to nuclear war very easily, and at the time it seemed that there were two forms the war could take: preemptive, which might minimize the total megatonnage exchanged, or total. Either would do an immense amount of damage, but the tolls would not be the same. Nor would the societies that developed afterward. There could easily be three factions of time travelers on hand for the story: one to maintain the status quo, one for preemptive war, one for duke-it-out war.
Fourteen is another cusp. Like most teenagers, Laura is faced with a multitude of decisions that will shape her future life. Baxter reifies some of those choices by confronting Laura with her future selves and forcing her to make decisions that will affect not just her personal future, but that of the entire world.
Since most teens think they are the world, and their decisions are just as important to them, the result is a novel that young adult readers should be able to get involved in very easily. At the same time, they will learn a bit of history, including what it was like to grow up in a Britain for which World War II was a recent memory (with some of the bomb damage still to be repaired), under adults some of whom remembered the war fondly, as their youth, their time of excitement and glory.
To Laura, her time is normal. It’s all she knows, really. But it also feels rather weird, in a way that easily matches the weirdness of fictional fantasy worlds. And that’s before the crisis looms and the time travelers show up.
Order this one from Amazon for now. With luck, a US publisher will have it out before long.
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Rafael Abalos is a Spanish lawyer who has discovered a talent for writing adventure tales. With the aid of translator Noel Baca Castex, Delacorte Press brings you his first novel for young adults, Grimpow: The Invisible Road.
Grimpow is a boy who has fled an abusive uncle to live with Durlib, thief and scalawag. One winter day, he stumbles across the body of a man in the snow. In his possession is a wealth of coins and jewels, as well as an odd stone that Durlib promptly passes to Grimpow, saying, “From now on, this stone will be tied to your destiny.” And so it is, for it grants Grimpow the gift of reading any language before his eyes, and when they move into the nearby monastery for the winter, it lets him fit in as a student of the library monk and remain even after an inquisitor in search of a fleeing Templar (guess who the dead man was) arrives, Durlib leaves, and the abbot is murdered. Before long, the stone proves to have additional talents, a knight arrives, Grimpow signs on as squire, and the two are off on a quest for the secret of the Templars even as war against the last remnants of that banned order takes form.
Grimpow is one more of the rash of Templar novels following in the wake of The Da Vinci Code. The style is accessible to younger readers without being too simple for adults, but adults may find the plot predictable. In addition, readers accustomed to the way many novels lead the protagonists from frying pan to soup pot to oven to fire may find their progress here less than satisfying. The threats remain mostly offstage, while Grimpow collects puzzle clues that reveal themselves with unseemly ease to culminate with a noble call to high aspirations. The tale is thus charming enough, and educational in a light vein, but it lacks tension and suspense.
Fortunately—perhaps because he wrote in Spanish—Abalos manages to avoid bad jokes of the sort that often infest fiction for younger readers. At the monastery, there is a “cook monk,” but this individual does not anticipate the invention of chips and is not cursed with the label of “chip monk.” |
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Graham Sharp Paul has the background to make the military side of The Battle at the Moons of Hell: Helfort’s War: Book 1 reasonably convincing, but in his world-building he tends to sprinkle 15 kilometer high mountains around a bit too easily. He also contradicts himself from time to time, as when he calls an “elongated black egg” a “formless blob.” But such things are quibbles. Overall, Battle is a fun read, from the beginning when Federation space cadet Michael Helfort is on the carpet for apparently taking unseemly chances with a planetary heavy lander (when he was really saving the day after scumball d’Castreaux turned off the automatics) to the dastardly scheme of the religious nut—but very un-Friendly—worlds of the Hammer of Kraa to hijack a ship and enslave the passengers (including Michael’s mother and sister) to the deft invasion of Hammer space to recover ship and passengers and Michael’s heroic survival of an all-odds-against encounter with Hammer forces.
Fun, as I said. But even my brief description is enough to make it clear that Paul has chosen to build a cartoon world using tried and true components. His religious nuts are evil. Few of his villains have any redeeming qualities at all, and the one in charge of the Hammer worlds at the end has none. Michael (as well as his family and friends) is noble and true. The action scenes are impressive but the outcomes are never in doubt. There is no real suspense—though there might have been if Paul had written Battle before instead of after so many similar tales—and the tale is really pretty predictable.
Read while riding a plane or commuter train.
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Space Vulture,
Gary K. Wolf and John J. Myers,
Tor,
$24.95,
333 pp.
(ISBN: 0765318520)
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Gary K. Wolf, creator of Roger Rabbit, and John J. Myers, currently the Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, grew up together, discovered science fiction together, and both still love the genre. The doggonedest people are fans! And they get up to the doggonedest things—the book that turned them on as kids was Anthony Gilmore’s Space Hawk, but when they took another look at it as adults, they realized that its appeal, let us kindly say, was limited. So they decided to redo it right—old-style pulp adventure, purest evil villain versus noble hero, fair maiden to be rescued, and so on. And now you can get your hands on Space Vulture, named for the villain: arrogant, egotistical, greedy, self-indulgent, power-mad, and super-intelligent to boot. The hero is Galactic Marshall Captain Victor Corsaire.
As the tale opens, Gil, a scalawag desperate to pay off his bookie and regain his eye and arm, is stealing Verlinap’s valuable mushroom crop (they grow in permafrost, of all things) when Corsaire captures him. Unfortunately, Space Vulture shows up eager to capture Corsaire and grab Verlinap’s small population—including the lovely widow Cali—to sell as slaves. Fortunately, Cali’s two small boys hide successfully and join up with Gil when Space Vulture releases him. Unfortunately, Gil has no time for kids. Fortunately, the boys win him over, and they hie off hoping to rescue Mommy (and get the mushrooms back). Unfortunately, Gil’s ship fails. Fortunately, they manage to get the life pod to a planet and find an abandoned ship. Unfortunately . . . You get the idea. Certain doom is endlessly delayed while a conspiracy of coincidences gathers momentum.
Overall, it reminds me of the television serials—endless strings of fifteen-minute installments, always ending on a cliffhanger—that were common when I was a kid. Even for that, though, it’s over the top as only two long-time fans with fond memories can achieve. I suspect the tale’s charms won’t appeal to younger readers, but older readers who remember when will read it with a smile—even if they can’t possibly claim it’s great literature.
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Set some 1,500 years after Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, The Dreaming Void is a massive and intricate opening salvo for Peter F. Hamilton’s new trilogy. Multiple plot threads wrap around a central theme: The galaxy contains an area known as the Void, which does not permit human entry. Ships that fly in are never heard from again. Yet it does contain a single settled world, and a fellow called Inigo, known as the Dreamer, has dreamed of life on that world, of someone known as the Waterwalker, and of the Skylord and shared those dreams with the collective consciousness mediated by the gaiafield created by the omnipresent gaiamotes, apparently some sort of nanotechnology-based telepathic Internet. One result is a cult known as the Second Dreamers who are planning a grand pilgrimage of their membership to the Void despite warnings from the ancient aliens, the Raiel, who have long studied and guarded the Void, that the pilgrimage may trigger one of the Void’s periodic expansions, or devourings, and doom the galaxy.
Aliens demand the pilgrimage be stopped, but humanity, though it is dominated by the Matrix-like ANA into which everyone who wishes is downloaded, treasures its independence and freedom to make mistakes. No one has the power or influence—or if they do, they do not care to exert it—to stop the Second Dreamers. Indeed, they don’t seem to think the disaster can happen, and they certainly aren’t worried about the alien warfleet on the way to stop the pilgrimage.
Not that everyone agrees. There are factions within humanity and within ANA, and they have set their representatives to collecting information. One is even looking for Inigo, who vanished long ago. When it appears that there is another dreamer putting dreams into the gaiafield, the Second Dreamers mount a massive hunt, soon narrowing the target to a single world and city. They plan to annex the world, invade with troops, and seize the dreamer to enlist his or her aid in making sure the pilgrimage goes as planned. Others are hunting too, of course, and the alien warfleet is getting closer.
Meanwhile, meet Araminta. She is still young, still early in her expected centuries of life, recently escaped from a bad marriage, and striving hard to make a go of buying, renovating, and selling real estate. She is romantically involved with Mr. Bovey, a “multiple” with thirty or so bodies, and she is having strange dreams. Meet the creature that floats on gossamer wings between the stars, who just might deserve the name of Skylord. Meet Edeard, a country boy with a powerful talent for shaping embryos into useful creatures and as powerful a telekinetic “third hand.” His village destroyed by bandits, he travels to the canaled city of Makkathran, where he signs up for training as a constable, is endlessly frustrated by the blatancy of the local gangs, grows stronger, and when a gang flees by gondola, pursues to grand and wondrous effect.
There is a great deal here to enjoy, especially if you like your SF novels big and fat, with the promise of more just as big and fat. Hamilton pushes the technology to and beyond the limits we are accustomed to and saves the expository lumps for the historical and social background. Those lumps may not be avoidable, given the depth of the past behind the story and the lengths of the characters’ lives, but even those who have read Hamilton’s earlier novels may appreciate the prompts to memory. Those who have not may wish for even more extensive background briefings.
Overall, a good fun read with promise of two more fun volumes just as worth your time.
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If you like stories that feel like you should be able to remember them from your childhood Mother Goose and other fairy tales, try The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. Cat Rambo’s “A Key Decides Its Destiny” is a mordant tale of a malign wizard and a dreamy but ultimately practical apprentice. His “Three Sons” is a nice biter-bit tale. Jeff Vandermeer’s “The Farmer’s Cat” is a very satisfying tale of ogres and a farmer who has had quite enough. “The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Cafe,” by M. F. Korn, D. F. Lewis, and Vandermeer, displays a wondrous and frightening menu. Rambo and Vandermeer are jointly responsible for the title tale, in which a medical student is only partially successful at reanimating the dead, albeit with lasting effect.
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Are Analog’s science fact articles too short for you? If so, you may want to get a copy of Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible. Kaku begins by noting his childhood (and continuing) fascination with science fiction and its technologies. He repeats the familiar line about SF stimulating budding scientists toward their careers. He notes that many modern technologies were once considered impossible, on a par with phasers and replicators and FTL travel, and he argues that physics has reached the point where we can divide “impossible” technologies into three categories: Class I impossibilities are those that may seem impossible today but violate no known laws of physics and might be realizable in the relatively near future; examples include force fields, invisibility (which has already been demonstrated in a very limited way), antimatter engines, robots (which hardly seem impossible with robot cars having just—last weekend, as I write this—proved capable of navigating city streets in the DARPA Urban Challenge), and even a kind of telepathy (in the sense that a suitable machine, perhaps based on MRI, could read thoughts). Class II impossibilities require science out at the edge of current theory; they include travel through time, hyperspace, and wormholes. Class III impossibilities violate known laws of physics; to become real they would require significant change in our understanding of the universe.
In his final chapter, Kaku recognizes that some things really are impossible. But the history of science—of physics in particular, for that is his field—abounds in examples of the impossible proving possible after all. And today there are new theories, new experimental approaches, and great and eager anticipation of the future. “There will always be things that are beyond our grasp . . . But the fundamental laws, I believe, are knowable and finite. And the coming years in physics could be the most exciting of all . . . We are not at the end, but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us.”
Very Analogish. Go get a copy. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
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