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Cauldron,
Jack McDevitt,
Ace,
$24.95,
373 pp.
(ISBN: 0441015255).
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Jack McDevitt’s Priscilla Hutchins series—Engines of God, Deepsix, Chindi, Omega, Odyssey—has given us a future of wonders. The galaxy doesn’t seem to have many intelligent species around, but there are remnants and ruins (some of them due to the depredations of the omega clouds, mysterious constructs that zero in on collections of straight lines and right angles—cities, in other words—and blast them with lightning). Humanity has managed to ward off the threat once, but, that done, it must deal with its own problems, many of which are environmental in nature. Space exploration is expensive and dangerous. Politicians argue that the money can be better spent at home. Funding for space exploration withers and dies. And by the time of Cauldron, Priscilla’s beloved Academy is dead. Priscilla is a fund-raiser for its heir, the Prometheus Foundation, which still supports a pair of ships. The star pilots who used to run a larger fleet have moved on to other things. Matt Darwin, for instance, is selling real estate.
One of the remaining ships discovers a derelict a billion years old, with an omega cloud bearing down on it. The crew exploring the derelict pushes their luck and the cloud blasts the ship. Nobody dies, but now there is only one ship left for the exploration program and no money to buy more.
The situation is sad, deliberately and poignantly reminiscent of the way we abandoned the Apollo program, turning the budget to more mundane uses, turning society’s focus inward, forsaking the dreams that nourished a generation of scientists, engineers, and science fiction fans, including McDevitt and myself and a fair number of you. Perhaps you have wondered how the situation could be turned around. So have I, and I have seen no real answers that would work in the real world. But McDevitt writes fiction. His answer begins with an alternative to the standard Hazeltine FTL drive. It’s strictly theory, experiments have not been promising, and its developer is dead. But here comes that developer’s assistant, Jon Silvestri, with word that he has been working on the drive, it will be many times as fast as the Hazeltine, and he thinks it will work. It just needs a test.
Alas, the first test is a disaster. But Matt Darwin thinks Jon deserves another chance. He resurrects a lander parked in front of an elementary school, gets Priscilla to help raise funds, and . . . You guessed it. It works. It’s faster by a long shot. And when they install it in a real ship, not just a lander, they can take off on a test run far beyond the bounds of all previous exploration, all the way to the center of the galaxy where in the chaotic swirl of dust and radiation around the central black hole—the Cauldron—lies the source of the omega clouds. They make a few stops—and interesting discoveries—along the way, and when they get there . . . What can I say without saying too much? The omega clouds exist for a reason, but not one that has been mentioned before in the series, nor one that anyone other than Jack McDevitt would come up with. That aside, the case has been made. Star travel is now cheaper and faster. Society’s focus can turn outward once more while the pioneers retire to porch rockers. And the Space Age is safe, at least for a while.
If only there really were a Jon Silvestri. The pages of this magazine have over the years contained a number of stories and articles that said space travel as we know it is expensive and what we need is a faster, cheaper way of getting into orbit and beyond. A number of solutions to the problem (space elevators, anyone?) have been suggested, but none have been built. I would love to believe that if one had, the future of which we have long dreamed would be upon us. But there are indeed many domestic demands—wars, disasters, entitlements—on the budget. It will take a lot more than an improved space drive to get us out there for real.
McDevitt is more optimistic. He is also quite thoughtful and he has not forgotten how to give us a good read. So don’t let this one slip past you.
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Elizabeth Moon introduced Kylara Vatta 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. By Command Decision (May 2007), she had a tiny fleet and a rapidly growing reputation. Meanwhile, the disreputable Rafe, scion of ISC, the company that ran the ansible network, had returned home to find his family kidnapped and both ISC and his world’s government weakened by corruption and treason; house-cleaning was in order, and he had to become a respectable executive even though he would rather be with Ky.
The popular series concludes with Victory Conditions. Ky is now the admiral of a growing fleet, but the pirates are about to raid a shipyard and steal a navy. She is suppressing her pining for Rafe even as she runs into people who think she’s just a girl and therefore cannot possibly be ruthless enough to be admiral. Meanwhile, Rafe is dealing with charges that he is far too cozy with Ky and Vattas are really the ones behind the current disaster. And the pirates . . . Ah, they’re clever fellows who think far ahead. But they can’t outthink or outfight Admiral Vatta. The novel’s real question is whether the fates can keep Ky and Rafe apart!
Victory has all the action we have come to expect from Moon, but where in the earlier volumes the romance was more subliminal, now it’s obvious. And the result is a very satisfactory conclusion to the series.
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Some two decades ago, John F. Carr and Jerry Pournelle created the War World series. Carr is now (according to his web site, www.Hostigos.com) embarked on a series of anthologies putting the various War World stories in chronological order, with War World: Beginnings due soon. Far in the future the Empire of Man faces secession by many worlds, led by Sauron, home of specially bred super-soldiers. There is war in which the Saurons display their talents and bleed the Empire nearly dry, until the Empire mounts a final assault that sterilizes Sauron and leaves one single Sauron ship fleeing for safety. It winds up at Haven, a rugged world for rugged folks (the Empire long used it as a dumping ground for criminals and assorted other scum) that has bred a very tough people, often used as the Empire’s best troops. But the Empire is in decline, and its forces have abandoned Haven to its own devices. It is descending toward a lower level of civilization when the Saurons arrive, bent on quashing all resistance, taking over, and using the local women to breed more Saurons.
In War World: The Battle of Sauron, portions of which appeared in the first two War World anthologies in 1988 and 1989, John F. Carr and Don Hawthorne lay out the final battles, the loss of the Sauron home world, and the heroic innovativeness of Sauron leader Galen Diettinger. It is marred by a few technical gaffes (if you keep accelerating, you do not pull more gees as time goes on; you just go faster), but on the whole fans of action-adventure will not be disappointed. And when the Haveners get in a few good punches at the super-soldiers, the future development of Haven into the War World of the series begins to seem inevitable.
Aside from plot, the novel is marked by a curious ambiguity. It begins by showing the Empire as declining, corrupt, on the verge of civil war sparked by rival claimants to the throne. But those who lead the troops are canny and forethoughtful, loyal in a way that politicians are not, and when Colonel Cummings is promoted to general and sent to Haven to maintain a mere militia as the Empire abandons that world, it may look like a sacrifice play, but there is clearly nobility here, and high purpose. It seems obvious that Cummings must have an important part to play—but not right away, for now the authors focus on Diettinger. His people are ruthless, even cruel by “civilized” lights, but they too are loyal to something higher—not an empire, but the Race—and Diettinger too is a noble soul, a hero in defense of his people and its destiny. These are men of military virtues, and it is not hard to imagine that sometime in the future they must make common cause. But that future is not in this volume, for at its end Cummings and Diettinger are, in effect, glaring at each other from opposite sides of the arena. One is confident that he has won. The other is planning his next blow. Both know the other is someone to admire.
But which one is the hero? We expect there to be one, and we don’t expect authors to suggest that the hero is the one who views ordinary folks as “cattle” to be used as wombs for his race. But Haveners can be pretty bloody-minded too, and neither Cummings nor Diettinger knows that Haven is about to become War World.
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The River Horses,
Allen Steele,
Subterranean Press
(500 copies, numbered),
$35.00,
119 pp.
(ISBN: 1596061324).
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Allen Steele’s Coyote series has proven popular and open-ended enough for him to stop using “Coyote” in the titles (I reviewed Spindrift last November). It began when refugees from Terran tyrants colonized the world of Coyote and began to forge a new life, only to be interrupted when the tyrants, or their successors, came after them. Rebellion soon put a stop to that, and soon the colony was bigger and better than ever, with an alien visitor promising to open the stage much wider. In the nature of such series, much happens offstage, which gives an author the opportunity to write a host of interstitial tales, some of which may even be entire novels (as was Spindrift).
The River Horses is a smaller story, a mere novella. It tells what happened when Marie Montero and Lars Thompson, veterans of the rebellion and now rather given to raising hell, are banished from the colony, given six months to explore the wilderness and—with luck—get their acts together again. With them, as a guide, goes savant (human downloaded into a robot body) Manuel Castro, a leader under the human tyrants, now an object of scorn and hate. Three misfits, a fair amount of anger, and one sad case of testosterone poisoning that soon sends Lars off with a crew of drunks while Marie becomes a pillar of a budding community and comes to realize Manny’s true humanity. The title (and the cover art) has to do with the trouble Lars gets into with his new friends, forcing Marie to come to the rescue.
It sounds good, doesn’t it? But it is not one of Steele’s strongest stories. He goes to great lengths to affirm the values of independence, solidarity, and humane respect. Granted that in a society built on such values there must always be a few who do not share them, I would expect those few to have a difficult time of getting their way. But here they have far too easy a time of it. Marie’s independence is violated, her humanity is not respected, and she is enslaved to a kind of respectability—partly in the name of a different sort of solidarity—that seems quite out of place.
I am being deliberately ambiguous because your mileage may vary and I’d hate to spoil the story for you. |
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According to R. M. Meluch, when Earth got FTL travel, the descendants of the ancient Romans emerged from their secret niches as doctors, lawyers, priests, and all the rest who just happen to know a bit of Latin and hied off to Palatine to found the new Roman Empire, thoroughly elitist, thoroughly tyrannical, and absolute anathema to the U.S.A., which has the clout back home—except for the League of Earth Nations’s (LEN) multicultural diversity nuts, who are absolutely sure that if everyone would just sit down and talk . . .
Well, maybe. But as soon as someone invented the res FTL communications tech, using it turned out to be ringing the dinner bell for the Hive, vast swarms of insectoid space-dwellers that loved to eat everything in sight. So meet Captain Farragut of the Merrimack, who seems to have a talent for surviving Hive attacks and inspiring loyalty and in volume two, Wolf Star, hauled enough Roman chestnuts out of the fire to convince them to surrender to him. As volume 3, The Sagittarius Command, opens, he’s fighting the Hive again, for they have suddenly appeared on a Roman world that was once home to a Roman megalomaniacal genius. Once the Roman patterner Augustus comes back into the picture and the CIA shares a bit of intelligence, that genius is suddenly suspect. He may not be as dead as reports would have it! Is he responsible for the Hive and its attacks? It’s time to go see, and the Merrimack—with enough other ships to make up a task force—is off toward Sagittarius to investigate.
The tale is marked by continuing U.S.-Roman rivalry, an Imperial assassination, Lieutenant Colonel TR Steele’s still-stifled yen for the delectable and heroic Kerry Blue (until . . .), and a whole lot more of Farragut’s down-home brand of leadership.
Still pure space opera, complete with deuses popping out of machines just in time. Still good fun.
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As Mike Resnick assures us in his introduction to This Is My Funniest 2, “science fiction writers like to laugh.” Therefore they write funny stories. Some writers do it often. Some do it rarely. But all of them (okay, most of them) do it.
Resnick took advantage of this truism a few years ago to publish This Is My Funniest, an anthology of stories which various writers assured him were their funniest, or at least their favorite funny. It was enough of a success to justify a sequel, with an almost entirely new roster, including Ron Goulart, Mercedes Lackey (who insists that an alien puppy ate her pickup), Janis Ian, Jack Dann, Gregory Benford, Michael Bishop, Tony Lewis, Larry Niven, and Resnick himself. Some are truly funny, some are no more than amusing, but if I try to put them in lists for you, you will disagree and be just as right as I am, since humor is very much a matter of taste. Sometimes bad taste—as in Tony Lewis’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion on how to handle inner city issues.
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Ever had the feeling that you too could write science fiction? If so, you’ve then wondered what to do next. My own answer is: Read SF, read more SF, and read some more SF. Then siddown, write something, and try to figure out what’s wrong with it by comparing it with the sort of stuff you’ve been reading, letting friends tell you what they think, or even by exposing it to one of the few remaining magazine editors in the field. Pay attention to what you learn in the process. If you follow my advice, you may not need to hunt down the best possible how-to-write-SF book, an impossible task given how many such are out there, every one of them with its fans. You don’t need to worry about the history of SF, or a definition of SF, or a list of all the subgenres of SF.
Which—of course!—is exactly where The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction: Volume One: First Contact begins. So start with Chapter 5, with Wil McCarthy talking about the place and use of technology in SF. Other contributors—of whom Piers Anthony and Orson Scott Card are surely the most famous—deal with world building, plot, clichés, characters, and so on. Despite the book’s beginning, there is good advice here, and it may be useful when you are trying to figure out where you went wrong. Whether you need that advice to start writing SF is a different question.
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Energy Victory,
Robert Zubrin,
Prometheus,
$25.95,
336 pp.
(ISBN: 1591025915).
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According to Robert Zubrin’s Energy Victory, by continuing to rely on petroleum and send great gobs of money to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is financing its own destruction. The money drains the economy and goes to fund the spread of Islamic extremism and terrorism. Despite an early warning with the 1973 oil crisis, the U.S. “political class” has done nothing to stop the process, partly because they are in the pockets of the Saudis. If we could only free ourselves of dependence on oil, we could strike a blow to the hearts of our foes!
Of course, Zubrin has an answer. He argues at length that biofuels (particularly alcohols derived from various crops) combined with flex-cars (which can burn gas or alcohol in any mixture, depending on what is available) will do it. At the same time, a crop-based fuel system holds the potential to jump-start development in many poor countries.
This is sensible enough, but the argument is spoiled by the emphasis on political conspiracy, which makes the whole sound more like a rant than a prescription for change. It is also weakened by Zubrin’s failure to mention “peak oil,” the imminent moment when the oil supply begins to decline; oil-dependence is a time-limited thing, which means that there is another reason to develop alternatives, preferably before the crisis. Another omission is that though Zubrin mentions the unavailability of new farmland, he does not mention the effect of heavy reliance on biofuels on soil fertility, erosion, food supply, and food prices. Other commentators are more thorough, noting that because U.S. farmers can make more money with fuel crops, the price of grain and other commodities is already rising, to the detriment of the world’s poor (see, e.g., Robbin S. Johnson and C. Ford Runge, “Ethanol: Train Wreck Ahead?” Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2007).
Are there other solutions? Zubrin mentions the need for expanded use of nuclear power but ignores the potentials of solar power satellites, which may be expensive but offer additional benefits in the form of expanded presence in space. There is also some interesting work being done in the development of supercapacitors, which offer the ability to store large amounts of electricity more conveniently than do batteries.
Investing in any of these technologies also diminishes oil dependence and reduces the flow of money to terrorist states and groups. It could also provide technological products for U.S. industry to sell abroad, which would strengthen the economy. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2008, Tom Easton
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