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Many of us were early exposed to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his visions of a Mars inhabited by sword-wielding, egg-laying barbarians riding thoats, where human John Carter could commit great heroic deeds, win the love of a princess, and (despite the egg-laying bit) have kids. It was a crock then (the interfertility was way over the top, even at the time), and it’s even more of a crock now (since we know what Mars is really like). But Burroughs knew how to keep a story moving so well that he still has readers. He also has admirers who crave to rationalize his Mars, so meet S. M. Stirling, who gives us an alternate universe in which both Mars and Venus are pretty much the way Burroughs imagined them. Mars is old, dry, dying, and inhabited by sword-wielding folks descended from the same ancestral stock that we are, for 200 million years ago aliens terraformed Venus and Mars and some 200,000 years ago transported early humans to new homes. On Mars civilizations rose and fell, eventually culminating in the reign of the Tollamunes, the kings of In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. Technology is weirdly biological, with people bred to their destiny. The Tollamunes have their own distinctive genome. The Thoughtful Grace caste are Coercives, soldiers, guards, and mercenaries. And Teyud za-Zhalt is a hybrid, banned for theft of the Tollamune genome even though she is the last to carry a sizable chunk of it. When the current emperor dies, there will be chaos. That death is anticipated, and several factions are mounting hunts for Teyud. High prices will be paid for her capture, her head, or just her ovaries (since that would be enough to breed compliant carriers of the Tollamune genome).
Into this world comes Jeremy Wainman, archeologist, tall for a Terran and thus nearly a match for the Martians. His mission is to search out a long-abandoned city, and toward that end he hires Teyud and a land-ship. However, it is soon clear that they are being pursued. At the city they have time—despite battles with feral biotech monsters in underground caverns—to find treasures, including one of vast importance to Teyud, before the followers attack. They win, but then new pursuers arrive.
Meanwhile, back in the City that is a Mountain (Olympus Mons), the emperor decides it’s time to recognize his daughter as his heir. This puts the enemy into overdrive, and . . .
So you’ve got rationalized Burroughs, and an archeologist with a tendency to heroism (though he does insist that he’s not the guy with the bullwhip). The ending cannot possibly be in doubt. The route to it is great fun, and the coda opens up the stage for an expansive future, and perhaps for sequels.
It is worth noting that Stirling waxes very cute in his prologue. It doesn’t have anything to do with the story, but it is bound to gratify old-time SF fans. The scene is the 1962 Worldcon, and a number of SF writers—Bob, Fred, Arthur, Poul, Spreggie, Beam, Isaac—are gathered to watch the first Mars landing on TV. Gratifying, yes, but also rather wistful. If only . . .
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Hunter’s Run,
George R. R. Martin,
Gardner Dozois,
and Daniel Abraham,
Eos,
$25.95,
303 pp.
(ISBN:9780061373299)
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George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham have conspired to commit a contender for the next round of awards. It even has movie potential! It’s Hunter’s Run, the tale of Ramon Espejo, a man who seems to have very little potential for heroism or nobility. But . . . The tale opens in blackness. He awakens, but he cannot move, hear, or even feel. He’s not even breathing. But he has a few shreds of memory. He’s a prospector on the colony world of São Paulo, one among many humans schlepped along by the alien Enye to develop industry and trade (when humans hit the starways, they found them occupied). There’s a lady he lives with when he’s in town, but he had sneaked out early one morn once his van was repaired. If he was in a bit of a rush, well, there was a bar fight, a dead ambassador from Earth, and the cops wanted him. He would, he thought, get out into the wilderness for a while, until the fuss died down.
So he went out a bit further than usual, hoping to make the big strike that would turn his life around. He made camp and spotted a mountainside with something a bit funny about it. He set a coring charge (for taking samples), touched it off, and watched the side of the mountain fall off, revealing a wall of metal.
He was just beginning to imagine how rich he was about to be when a hole appeared and a flyer emerged. A beam blasted his camp and van. He shot back. And the next thing he knew was the blackness.
That’s when he is decanted. Goopy fluid drains away. He hacks his lungs clean. And the aliens tell him he is a pretty defective sort who must now help them hunt down the man who saw it all and fled. To make sure he will cooperate, they attach a living leash to his throat and demonstrate the incredible pain it can deliver.
Now Ramon is not a very nice guy. Not a forgiving sort. Very much a get-even fellow. He swears that he is going to get free of these alien SOBs. He is going to kill these alien SOBs! Not that he can do much along those lines just yet, but just wait!
And they’re off, hunting for . . . Forgive me, for here is a bit of a spoiler. Hunting for himself, for when the aliens blasted him, he lost a finger. That finger went into a vat, and three days later they decanted poor Ramon-on-the-leash to hunt down free-Ramon. Their intent is to remove an incompatibility with their vision of reality, in which they are not known to be hiding inside the mountains. A bit of backfeed through the leash tells Ramon why: Some long time ago, the aliens had contact with the Enye, and one day the Enye landed and began to devour them. Ramon sees the dying babies and the flight of the alien ships. He realizes that the Enye are still hunting their prey, even using humans to winkle it out of dens. And the Enye ships are in São Paulo’s sky now.
If he can escape, if he can pass the word, he will be avenged.
But . . . Why did he kill the ambassador? Memory is returning slowly, and there are hints that the man deserved killing. Why? That’s part of this novel’s punchline, and you should remember what I said about Ramon being an unlikely prospect for heroism or nobility. He’s a real man, though, and one of the things a real man does besides get drunk and brawl is protect women and children.
The tale comes to a satisfying ending, but it leaves unresolved the nature of the Enye and what, if anything, can be done about them. This could be the meat of one or more sequels, even a saga, and if the authors are so inclined, their much-pleased readers will be legion.
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Return to the world of Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter with The Dragons of Babel, which begins with the crash of a dragon in a country village. A dragon, of course, is not what you think. This one has fuel tanks, a control room, and a pilot. It’s a war craft fighting in a great war between realms, one of which is centered on the ancient Tower of Babel. But at least at first, the war is beside the point. The dragon’s pilot is dead, but the dragon, for all that is a machine, is possessed of a mind and a voice and no good will at all. It immediately proclaims itself lord of the village and grabs young Will for its spokesman and lieutenant. This is good for neither the village nor Will, for Will must do cruel things though he resists most temptations to abuse his power. In the end he manages to kill the dragon, but his reward is exile, and just in time, for now he can embark on his true path, accompanying a swarm of refugees leaving a zone due to be destroyed in the war. On the way to Babel he learns that for some unknown reason the witches who are the realm’s political police are searching for him. He falls in with a con man, Nat Whilk, who decides it would be great fun to set him up to pose as the heir to the absent king. And then he spots a lovely lass riding a hippogriff who flashes her tits and flips him the bird. He is smitten.
If the setup makes you suspicious, feel free. If parts seem familiar, well, they’ve appeared in anthologies and magazines over the last few years. But don’t worry. Everything has been assembled with grand care, and along the way to the inevitable denouement, Swanwick’s patented blending of modern technology with the people and magic of fantasy provides a rich and wondrous reading experience. Don’t miss it.
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Invasive Procedures,
Orson Scott Card
and Aaron Johnston,
Tor,
$25.95,
351 pp.
(ISBN: 076531424X)
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Orson Scott Card’s “Malpractice” appeared in this magazine way back in 1977. More recently, with “the help of a brilliantly talented young writer, actor, and comic named Aaron Johnston,” he has been learning the film industry, in part by letting Aaron troll through his old stories to see what might be adaptable to the big screen. When Aaron liked “Malpractice,” the result was first a screenplay and then the novel Invasive Procedures.
As one might expect from anything Card is involved in, the novel has some interesting ideas. Plotting and action are excellent, and the characters engaging. The basic idea is that scientist George Galen has developed a way to repair genetic diseases by tailoring a virus to fix defective genes. The virus has to be designed to match each patient; if others are exposed to it, their flesh instantly begins to bubble and flow; they die quickly. (Such instant effects are of course impossible, so that the virus immediately gives the novel a major technical flaw.)
Galen has a corps of aides known as Healers. They roam the urban streets dispensing Band-Aids and Neosporin. They also locate people with diseases Galen can treat. Alas, the virus sometimes escapes control, which brings the Biohazard Agency (BHA) into the picture. But first . . . As the novel opens Galen and his Healers are collecting a handful of homeless people, promising them a warm place to sleep and a square meal. It is soon clear that he is kidnapping them, as well as a thoracic surgeon (with her son as hostage for her cooperation). Galen is not a nice guy.
Meanwhile, Dr. Frank Hartman is hard at work at the Fort Detrick Level 4 Biohazard Containment Facility, developing a countervirus (drug plus weakened virus to serve as vaccine) for a nasty bug supplied by the BHA. The countervirus works in monkeys, but before he can even begin to plan human tests, the BHA shows up to draft him to their team. They have human specimens infected with the virus, and he can test his treatment on them. Fortunately, it works. And when he is shown a small book by Galen in which he writes of a prophet and a Council of Prophets who all look like younger versions of himself, as well as of a plan to improve the human species, he begins to get a sense of what he is really up against. So does the reader, who already knows that Galen is not a nice guy.
That’s the point where Jonathan, one of Galen’s kidnappees, fresh from surgery, flees and winds up creamed on the highway. The autopsy reveals a fresh kidney transplant and a strange memory-laden electronic implant in his head. What’s going on? Frank will find out when he falls into Galen’s hands, and so will you since I’m not saying much more.
Card and Johnston push the budding technology of genetic repair far beyond its current level, though the date of the story seems not far from now. This makes it difficult to believe it could happen. And it doesn’t help that they are too willing to wave a magic wand to move the plot along. Instant virus attacks are one such wand. Another is literally a wand, for the BHA uses a “contaminant rod” that detects biohazards when waved over a suspect spot rather like an airport guard’s portable metal detector. How it does so is not described (I suspect it emits microwaves that are absorbed by hazardous genes and then reemitted at specific frequencies, but it can’t be that because if it were, a simple tweak would make it able to destroy the genes and there would be no need for counterviruses, and hence no story). But I’m quibbling. Such things probably won’t bother many people, while the breakneck pace, gore, and derring-do will keep them turning pages late into the night.
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A War of Gifts,
Orson Scott Card,
Tor,
$12.95 (hb),
126 pp.
(ISBN: 0765312824)
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Is Santa Claus (a.k.a. Saint Nick and Sinterklass etc.) a religious icon or a cultural icon? Most folks don’t worry much about this question, but some people can get quite worked up over it, seeing the Big Guy in Red as a distraction from the main event, even with malign intent (since Santa is an anagram of Satan, he just has to be a snare and a delusion, right?).
In A War of Gifts, Orson Scott Card looks at the question through the lens of his Ender world. Zeck Morgan is the son of a Bible-thumper who rants that Santa equals Satan. He takes Daddy’s messages seriously, despite the scars he bears of Daddy’s switch, and when he gets drafted to Battle School, he refuses to play war. Peace is his game. And when one Dutch kid puts out his shoes for Sinterklass and another puts a silly poem in one according to Dutch custom, he rats them out as violating the School’s ban on religious observances. This leads to considerable ill feeling, rebellious exchanges of small gifts, and exposition of Santa as cultural icon and not religious, until in the end Ender brings adult-level insight to the problem.
A nice warm fuzzy. It was published for Card’s fans in fall of 2007, but fall 2008 is coming up fast, and if you want a Christmas story for the kids, this could do nicely.
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I didn’t read Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania, The White Tyger, and The Tourmaline, so the concluding volume of the series, The Hidden World, really needs the bits of recap Park offers. Here’s the gist: Miranda is a young lady of Massachusetts until the world takes a magical turn and she and her best friends, Peter and Andromeda, find themselves in a Roumania where Miranda is a princess of the old regime. The old regime itself has been supplanted by puppets of the Germans, and the Turks, aided by African technology, are battering at the borders. Miranda also turns out to be an incarnation or avatar of the mythical white tyger that appears at need to defend the realm, so she has a way of shedding blood in considerable quantities. One of her victims is Nicola Ceausescu.
As The Hidden World opens, Peter is in the trenches, fighting the Turks. Andromeda is meeting with the wife of the dictator, Bocu, and—alas for the wife—they are about to be caught. Miranda is in a mountain refuge with her mother, Peter’s mother, and the Condesa De Rougemont, one of the roots of the magic that has afflicted her and brought her to the aid of Roumania. She is also contemplating the magical tourmaline that lets her pass back and forth between the living world and the hidden world that lies hard by the land of the dead. She is unaware that Bocu has sent a squad of thugs to assassinate or arrest the women, though when they arrive the white tyger sees to it that they retreat in disarray. Afterwards, however, Miranda goes to the hidden world and loses her tourmaline, without which she cannot return to her body. Alas, the jewel has been seized by the spirit of Nicola Ceausescu, who can now reanimate in Miranda’s flesh. Miranda must hope that her late Aunt Aegypta Schenck can recover the stone, even as she in the hidden world and Peter in the real world both pursue an African superweapon that has been lost in a train wreck near the village of Chiselet. Since the weapon sounds a lot like an Ebola dispenser, their mission is urgent. However, there are serious obstacles to overcome in both worlds, one of which involves getting Nicola Ceausescu to let go her grip on Miranda’s body.
In this series, Park offers a rare, rich blend of reality with magic with alternate history. Lovers of Avram Davidson, R. A. Lafferty, and John Crowley will enjoy themselves immensely.
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Kendall Evans’ In Deepspace Shadows: A Dramatic Poem in Two Acts is a brief oddity that is interesting enough to warrant a brief review. As the title says, it’s a two-act play in verse, with stage directions. And it could only be SF, if only because the two acts are separated by more than a dozen millennia! The scene is the sail-powered starship The TransAtlantic Tortoise, whose robot crew, captained by Gael-All-of-Metal, has been programmed to search for new habitable worlds. However, the captain has other ideas, while the crew wants to go home. Mutiny is in the offing, even as the ship approaches a mysterious dark-matter structure, a maelstrom.
The dialog is a bit heavy on dramatic posturing for my taste. Since I say the same thing about most modern drama, it may suit you fine. The plot is nicely structured, and as a whole the tale is a marvel of conciseness. If you like poetry, order a copy.
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In Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, Mark Brake and Reverend Neil Hook fail to prove their title case. Using an annoyingly breezy style (perhaps because Brake, though he is a professor of science communication, has experience writing for TV and radio), they make it clear that science—sometimes in the form of the speculations and dreams of scientists—influences the form, content, and message of science fiction, some of which is of course written by the same scientists. But when they try to say that science fiction precedes the actual science, it doesn’t wash. True, some scientists have been turned on to science, even particular areas of science, by childhood exposure to science fiction. But they do not hold up for inspection a single example of something begun only in science fiction leading to actual science or technology. If science leads to science fiction, which later leads to more science, the link is really from science to science, through an intermediary that gets the word out. That intermediary they recognize as science communicators, among whom they count Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and many more.
If we call this a fault of the title more than of the text, there is much to admire here, for they provide a history of science fiction set in a context of the development of modern science. The two have indeed grown up together, to the point that we may indeed suggest, as do Brake and Hook, that SF is the soul of science. Unfortunately, as they see that soul, it is riddled with guilt and alarmism. When they discuss biology, they see that “a history can be told of the hopes and fears for biology; a story that spans all ages, from the Age of Discovery [1500-1800] to the Frankenstein century [the current period]. It is a story of the ongoing relationship between science and the cultural skepticism of its fiction” (p. 218). That is certainly true of much SF, but not of all, for there is a component of the field that deals more with “cultural celebration.” And though they do hint that that component exists, they pay it very little attention.
One valuable use for this book might be in the teaching of high school science. Because of its approach, it links classic SF to scientific ideas, and it often names movies or TV shows that could be used to illuminate lessons. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2008, Tom Easton
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