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Sandra McDonald’s The Outback Stars introduced a far future colored by the imagery and mythology of Australia. Earth is limping in the aftermath of environmental collapse, but humans have gone to the stars via a hyperdimensional highway—the Alcheringa—discovered near Mars. Once out there, they found that many worlds had huge egg-shaped domes; if you entered one, a ring in the shape of a snake or ouroborous would appear and take you on to the other worlds of the Seven Sisters. In Outback, Lieutenant Jodenny Scott and underling Terry Myell fought problems, were attracted to each other, and discovered that the domes made a great many more than seven worlds available through what was not a highway, but an immense transportation network. Myell also discovered himself of interest to a Rainbow Serpent and other figures out of the Australian Dreamtime, possibly representing the aliens who built the network.
In The Stars Down Under, Scott and Myell are married. Both have been promoted, but Myell is taking some heat for not coming up through normal channels. He doesn’t want to have anything further to do with the domes, the transportation network, or the maybe-aliens behind them. It’s all a bit moot, anyway, since the system has stopped working. People step in and nothing happens, and the crews that had been sent out to explore the network are lost. But when he and Scott are pressured just to step into a dome and see if it responds to them—that’s all, honest! they are told—they give in. An ouroborous appears, of course, and Myell discovers that “honest!” is something his employers just cannot be. He’s drafted, and off he goes, part of a team hunting for lost explorers. Before long, they reach a world inhabited by Australian aborigines, who promptly haul them off to a village. Feather-cloaked aliens with too many teeth—the Roon, or Bunyips—are also there, as well as a number of other characters who conspire to inform Myell that the Roon are up to no good and that he is crucial to events. His mother didn’t call him “Jungali” for nothing. The aliens who built the network are gone, their heir is in sad shape, and the system needs a helmsman.
Meanwhile, Jodenny Scott is on her way to Earth under another name, being kept from interfering with Myell’s draftee mission. When she gets there, alien ships are in orbit, computers are dead, and soon she’s in a lifeboat crashing in the Australian outback. Myell’s there too (don’t ask how!), and resolution is at hand.
The late Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology must look like magic, so it may not really be fair to say that McDonald is writing science fantasy more than science fiction. She takes great pains to keep things consistent and working with the technology of domes and ouroborouses she has imagined. She brings in addition loads of mythical aboriginal imagery but insists that it is all part of her alien superscience. It’s not magic, not fantasy, no matter how it looks to the bemused reader, and no matter how a climax of human sacrifice and elevation resonates with the mythical side of the modern mind.
Overall, a satisfying novel that holds great promise for McDonald’s future.
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Implied Spaces,
Walter Jon Williams,
Night Shade Books,
$24.95,
265 pp.
(ISBN:9781597801256)
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Walter Jon Williams’s Implied Spaces begins with a swordsman, Aristide, accompanied by a talking cat, Bitsy, walking across a desert of Midgarth to a crowded caravanserai, where caravans huddle in fear of bandits on the trail ahead. He takes a dip in the Pool of Life so that if he must be resurrected he will not have lost much memory, leads them onward, defeats the bandits (or Vengers), and discovers that their fanatical masters, equipped with magical balls that suck people away to some other realm, are a threat to the multiverse.
We soon learn that Aristide is centuries old and once had a part in creating the modern civilization in which a ginormous AI can have an avatar named Bitsy. Ten more such AIs orbit the sun, using their huge computational powers to create pocket universes in which people can live and or play. Some, like Midgarth, were made to suit the preferences of hardcore gamers (their descendants are stuck there). Some are vacation worlds. All are wondrous and crowded with a humanity that never dies, thanks to nanotechnological resurrection with backup in Pools of Life. People can even have themselves copied so they can live in several worlds at the same time.
Aristide’s self-appointed mission has long been the study of “implied spaces”; features of buildings or worlds never deliberately designed by architects, but there nonetheless because something else was designed. Think of a drop ceiling installed to hide plumbing pipes and heating ducts. The ceiling is designed, and the ducts are designed, and many a writer has sent heroes crawling through those ducts. But there is also space outside the ducts, implied by the existence of the ducts.
Any technology that permits turning people into bitstreams implies that it can edit those bitstreams. Several writers have played with this notion, most recently Charles Stross (Glasshouse, reviewed here in November 2006), but there are further implications as well. Such editing would require immense computational power, such as only those big AIs have. And when it turns out that the Vengers are at work in other worlds as well, turning people into slavish adorers of the master Venger, Vindex, and plotting assassinations and coups, the war is on. Which of the AIs has gone bad, and why?
There’s action and high-tech blow-ups enough for everyone. There are revelations of cosmic scope, including the identity of the villain of it all (keep an eye on those implied spaces) and the villain’s motive (what does the anthropic principle imply?). You’ll enjoy it, and perhaps you too will hope that Williams will soon bring us more.
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The Stone Gods,
Jeanette Winterson,
Harcourt,
$24.00,
209 pp.
(ISBN:9780151014910)
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Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods stars Billie Crusoe (and yes, another character is named Friday) as an environmentalist in a world surrendering to environmental catastrophe. But the world is not Earth, despite similarities of culture and politics. Call it Orbus, note that red dust is blowing on the wind, and listen to the space explorers as they talk about a white world of ruins and a Planet Blue just waiting for people to move in. Of course, there’s the problem of those pesky dinosaurs, but an asteroid can take care of that.
Billie’s life is complicated by bureaucratic harassment, among other things. In due time, she is pressured to join an exploratory mission to Planet Blue, along with Spike, the very expensive Robo sapiens that was supposed to be dismantled after the last mission. She and Spike develop a relationship, and when the asteroid plan goes wrong and war breaks out back home, they die in each other’s arms with the comment that, “This is one story. There will be another.”
Jump to Easter Island, 1774, and another lesson in environmental carelessness and consequence. Now Billy’s a guy, and after a contretemps with the natives, Captain Cook sails off without him. Spike, now Spikkers, is a marooned Dutchman. It’s not the environment, they find, but human folly, and in due time they too die.
And now it’s our turn. Billie’s a woman again, but Spike is a mere robo-head, and it is her job to train it toward sentience. An open door tempts her, and the two are off to explore a post-war England with the aid of a manuscript found on the Tube, titled The Stone Gods. The world is a mess, with the only sign of sanity the mutant low-lifes in a neglected enclave, and both its damnation and its salvation lies in the tagline, “Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.”
Thoroughly post-modern, self-referential, and cyclical, with a touch of mysticism. Not the sort of thing to appeal to hardheaded rationalists. But there’s a genuine point that deserves attention even from those hardheaded rationalists: If we don’t pay attention to our mistakes, if we don’t learn from history, we make those mistakes again and again and again. The point is marred, however, by what can only be taken as predestination. The first segment of the book, on Orbus of the red dust, is certainly history in the sense of prior event, but not in the sense of recorded event. The later Billies can have no inkling of that past and hence cannot possibly learn from it. They are thus doomed to repeat the past, with no hint that they are done repeating at the end of the book. “This is one story. There will be another.”
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Sean McMullen returns to the world of the Moonworlds Saga with The Time Engine. The previous volume, Voidfarer (reviewed here in March 2006), had Wayfarer Inspector Danolarian Scryverin, once a prince of Torea, a land destroyed by an excess of sorcerous ambition, and his companion Wallas, once a lecherous courtier but now a corpulent cat, dealing with an invasion of Wellsian tripods while turning the enthusiastic Constable Riellan, inventor of electocracy (democracy) loose on a monarchical world. As Engine opens, things are just getting back to normal when a rather insane glass dragon comes looking for ex-lovers, and even would-be lovers, to destroy. Danolarian is trying to protect one such (Wallas) when a stranger appears, a line of red light destroys the dragon, and after an interlude chatting with the gods of his world, he awakens in the distant future. An enthusiastic descendant of Riellan has invented a time machine, and her daughter has collected him to exact justice of some sort. He escapes and finds a library, where he learns that electocracy has triumphed and the world is a mad, mad exaggeration of our own in certain ways. Once things are sorted out, it’s time to go home and use the time machine to boost the villainous Pelmore into the past to undo the romantic curse that keeps Danolarian’s lover from loving.
And that’s when things start going wrong. A bit of damage to the machine, and Pelmore escapes with it, leaving them marooned to face a horde of naked, barbaric horsemen. There’s some work to do before Danolarian can escape again, this time into the very distant past, some three and a half million years back, to find people who look human, but whose culture cannot help but make one think of what Wells’ time traveler found in the future. When he returns . . .
Ah, but it’s all a bit of a game. The gods make sport of mortals, all is illusion, and the world remembers its past. The result is a tying up of loose ends and a packing off of characters onto a new line that may or may not lead to a sequel or three. The potential is there, but the Moonworlds Saga is satisfyingly complete now.
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Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath are back in Jack McDevitt’s The Devil’s Eye, which opens with a pair of mysteries. The first, mere prologue, has to do with one Edward Demere, a resident of Salud Afar, a world so far out on the fringes of the galaxy that its night sky contains but a single bright star, Callistra, also known as the Devil’s Eye. He is watching the broadcast of the dedication of a monument installed on a distant asteroid, some 36 years out, when the broadcast suddenly cuts off. The second begins with Alex and Chase showing their Mute (Ashiyurrean) friends, Selotta and Kassel, around Earth, including a trip to the ruins of Atlantis. This gives McDevitt a chance to remind the reader that Mutes and humans generally find each other repulsive and that the Confederacy and the Ashiyurrean Assemblage are glaring at each other over their daggers. Keep an eye on this, as it plays a major role later on.
When they are finally on their way home, they find in their mail a message from Vicki Greene, renowned horror writer. She asks for help and adds, “God help me, they’re all dead.” Later attempts to contact Greene are fruitless, for she has had her mind wiped, though not before sending Alex a sizable check. Investigation reveals that she had recently returned from Salud Afar, where she apparently learned something someone did not want her to repeat. The mysterious someone performed a memory-block, and that was apparently so distressing that she opted for the mind-wipe.
If you’re familiar with the series, you know Alex can’t leave it at that. He and Chase promptly fire up their ship and head for Salud Afar, where they attempt to retrace Greene’s movements, hoping to discover whatever got her in trouble. Among other things, they discover that some years before, a number of houses were blown up and their residents, including an Edward Demere, killed. But they have not quite succeeded in putting the pieces together when they are kidnapped by supposed representatives of the local security forces. They manage to escape before the memory-blocks can be installed, and soon thereafter they realize what is going on.
It’s politics, of course, mixed with human greed, driven by an astronomical catastrophe. Stars from time to time blow up, blasting waves of hard radiation into space. If you’re close enough, you’re fried. If the explosion is big enough, “close enough” can mean many light years away. If you’re lucky, you can see it coming and—because the radiation blast can’t travel any faster than light—have enough time to get out of the way. If you’re not lucky, well, it’s hard to evacuate a world, especially if the Confederation refuses to send a fleet to help out because it needs the ships in case the enemy Muties decide to start a war.
But Alex and Chase have friends . . .
Chase has other friends too. She likes guys, and she’d be happy to have a long-term relationship if only they wouldn’t get bent out of shape over her long trips away with Alex. The answer seems obvious, and McDevitt provides a hint or two that maybe they will see it. But we’ll have to wait for another book to get the clinch.
As usual with McDevitt, I recommend this one highly.
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Odd Girl Out,
Timothy Zahn,
Tor,
$24.95,
381 pp.
(ISBN:9780765317339)
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Timothy Zahn began an interesting series with Night Train to Rigel (reviewed here in December 2005) and The Third Lynx (March 2008). In its future, the stars are linked by FTL passenger trains run by the robotic Spiders, who work for a rather timid sort of aliens known as the Chahwyn. There is also a species of symbiotic coral, the telepathic group-mind known as the Modhri, created as a super-weapon by a long-extinct alien species and now bent on ruling the galaxy. The Chahwyn recruited ex-military agent Frank Compton to help fight the Modhri and gave him Bayta, a human-Chahwyn hybrid, as a sidekick. She comes in handy when she uses her telepathic link to the Spiders to make train reservations (etc.).
Odd Girl Out, the third in the series, begins when Compton is returning to New York after the Adventure of the Stolen Sculptures. As he walks into his apartment, he is greeted by a young lady with a gun. She introduces herself as Lorelei Beach and says her sister is in trouble on the colony world of New Tigris and Compton is the only one who can help. The guy’s tired, so he says something like “Fiddlesticks,” tosses her out, and goes to bed. Unfortunately, it’s still the wee hours when the cops wake him to say she’s been killed. With his gun. And he’s under arrest for murder.
A nice classic setup dating back to the days of the hard-boiled detective yarn. The obvious next step is to get him bailed out and on his way to New Tigris, where he and Bayta find the Modhri eagerly hunting for an Abomination who seems to be none other than the late Lorelei’s kid sister, Rebekah. Pretty soon the bullets are flying, the bodies are piling up, and Compton, Bayta, and Rebekah are heading for a mysterious refuge.
But there’s more going on than that. The Chahwyn are timid, as I said. They shudder at the mere thought of doing violence to others, and their creations the Spiders aren’t much better. But when faced with a deadly foe, they are capable of taking steps. They hired Compton, didn’t they? They made Bayta what she is, and she doesn’t just make train reservations. It should be no surprise that they have other irons in the fire, even at the risk of changing their very nature and perhaps destroying the benign institution, the Quadrail, that galactic civilization is utterly dependent upon.
That should be vague enough. If you’ve enjoyed the earlier volumes, you’ll find this one a very satisfying read. You’ll also be happy to see the clear signs that Zahn isn’t done yet.
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Bruce Coville is an utterly charming writer who focuses his efforts on younger readers and on running Full Cast Audio, a publisher of audio books (featuring multiple voices rather than just one). The New England Science Fiction Association honored him as a special guest for the February 2008 Boskone, and as is NESFA’s wont marked the occasion with a book, The One Right Thing.
It’s a collection of stories, some of them over two decades old but reading as fresh as anyone could ask and all of them quite sure to appeal to kids. After all, he throws in enough boogers and farts! Not to mention “The Stinky Princess,” who began life as a perfectly normally fragrant child. But she thought nice smells were boring, and when the smelly envoy of the goblins came to court, she found him quite interesting. So interesting, in fact, that when he left she stowed away in his saddlebag, and his steed—a giant frog!—didn’t rat her out because she bribed it with June bugs. Eventually, of course, she was discovered, but by then the goblin stink had rubbed off on her and she could not go home.
My favorite was “The World’s Worst Fairy Godmother,” Maybelle Clodnowski, whose best efforts have a way of going bad. But her heavenly boss, Mr. Peters, is willing to give her one last chance, with the world’s best fairy godmother, a bit of a prig, as backup. Her assignment is a little girl who thinks she is just too, too perfect, for which everyone hates her. And there’s an imp who, it is early revealed, long ago sabotaged Maybelle’s wand. He is chortling with delight as his assistant finds out Maybelle’s assignment and he schemes to mess this up too. But . . .
There’s always a but. Coville’s stories come to satisfying and instructive ends, but the morals are never so blatant as to oppress his young readers. Love is important, tolerance of difference is good, and sometimes you just have to take the bitter with the sweet.
If you haven’t discovered his work, remedy the lack on your next trip to the bookstore. His books are perfect Christmas presents. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2008, Tom Easton
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