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Mars Life,
by Ben Bova
Tor,
448 pages,
$24.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9780765317872
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Mars Life
Genres: High Frontier/Life in Space, Mars,Near Future, Space Colonization
Series: Grand Tour, Jamie Waterman #3
Ben Bova, a former editor of Analog, has been chronicling the exploration and settlement of the Solar System since 1992, and he’s a master. The Grand Tour series is a consistent future history based on our most current scientific understanding of the planets.
In Mars Life Bova returns to one of his most popular characters, half-Navajo Martian explorer Jamie Waterman from Mars and Return to Mars. Twenty years ago, Waterman discovered cliff dwellings on Mars, evidence of intelligent life that existed 65 million years ago. Now Jamie is back on Earth, struggling to preserve the beleaguered Mars program.
The religious right, whose political power is ever growing, feel their beliefs threatened by the concept of intelligent life on Mars—especially intelligent life that predates the Garden of Eden by millions of years. Government support dries up, universities are scared off, private donors stop giving . . . and if Jamie can’t find a source of funding, the Mars program will be canceled and all its personnel recalled.
Meanwhile on Mars, anthropologist Carter Carleton is supervising an archeological dig of an ancient village. When he finds the fossilized remains of one of the Martians, the stakes are suddenly much higher. Forces of science and religion are in conflict for the fate of two worlds, with Jamie Waterman at ground zero.
As the tension mounts, interpersonal problems sprout among the scientists on Mars, and Jamie and his wife head off to the red planet to see what they can do on the scene.
No matter when or where a story takes place—past or future, on Earth or distant worlds—sf always deals with the concerns of today’s world. The tension between religion and science is one of the defining conflicts of our age; with Ben Bova as author, it’s not hard to guess which side ultimately prevails in Mars Life. Bova makes the journey exciting, and keeps the suspense going until the last page. Highly recommended.
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Implied Spaces,
by Walter Jon Williams
Night Shade Books,
272 pages,
$24.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9781597801256
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Implied Spaces
Genres: Far Future/Clarke’s Law, Immortals & Immortality, Singularity/Transhuman, Science Fantasy
Once upon a time, Roger Zelazny took science fiction in a direction all his own. In the ultimate expression of Clarke’s Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,”) he stretched science and technology into realms usually reserved for fantasy. Books like Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, and To Die in Italbar told epic tales of immortals battling one another with bizarre weapons across fantastic universes teeming with amazing wonders.
In Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams very consciously channels Zelazny, and does an excellent job of it.
Aristide is an explorer of “implied spaces”—accidents of architecture in humanity’s dozens of pocket universes. When we first meet Aristide, he’s incarnated as a heroic swordsman in a vaguely Arabian world-construct called Midgarth. Accompanying Aristide is his sidekick, a wisecracking superintelligent cat named Bitsy. Together Aristide and Bitsy (along with various other hard-fighting D&D types, both human and non–) track down and defeat some vicious desert raiders—raiders who are armed with disturbing new weapons far beyond Midgarth’s technology.
Aristide and Bitsy emerge from Midgarth into their real home: a post-Singularity Solar System ruled by the Eleven, ultra-advanced AIs with the power to sculpt reality and open wormholes into custom-designed pocket universes. Aristide is one of the immortal humans who constructed and programmed the Eleven centuries ago, and Bitsy is an avatar of the AI Endora. Evidence they uncovered in Midgarth leads to the conclusion that one of the Eleven has gone bad, overriding its own “Asimovian safeguards” to become a danger to all of humanity and the universe itself.
There follows an adventure worthy of the best space opera, as Aristide moves through different bodies and worlds on the track of an opponent who seems able to outsmart the best minds in all the universes. Aristide is assisted by a delightfully motley crew of associates, soldiers, politicians, and even an ex-lover. Along the way, Williams tackles questions of identity, cosmology, theology, and the ultimate meaning of life.
Dripping with sense of wonder, Implied Spaces is a fast-paced, mind-stretching romp that’s thoroughly fun and totally thought provoking, as well as a worthy homage to one of sf’s greatest masters. Run, don’t walk, to get a hold of this one.
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The Best Science Fiction &
Fantasy of the Year: Volume 2
Genre: Reprint Anthology
Best-of-the-year anthologies have been with us almost as long as sf/fantasy anthologies have been published. “Best,” of course, is a subjective judgment, highly dependent on the taste of the editor. Strahan, who admits to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of short sf & fantasy, seems to lean toward the literary, the fantastic, and the genre-blending. If you remember Judith Merrill’s year’s-best anthologies of so long ago, you have the general idea.
There’s a lot of fantasy here: of the 24 stories in this volume, about one-third are science fiction in the classic sense.
Perhaps the most important thing you need to know about this anthology is that none of the chosen stories came from the pages of Analog. Still, there are some good tales here . . . although few that I’d call great.
Among the sf stories in this collection are Charlie Stross’s “Trunk and Disorderly,” a comedy of manners set in the far-future asteroid belt, and “Glory,” by Greg Egan: a delightful tale of advanced physics and stellar engineering. In Ted Kosmatka’s alternate-universe story “The Prophet of Flores” Darwin is proven wrong and the universe is less than 6,000 years old . . . or is it? Nancy Kress shows us a world after ecological catastrophe in “By Fools Like Me,” and Bruce Sterling’s “Kiosk” is a near-future political fable based in a pre-apocalyptic Eastern Europe. Stephen Baxter gives us an homage to the late Arthur C. Clarke in “Last Contact.” Finally there’s Chris Roberson’s “The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small.” This military-sf tale is set in Roberson’s Celestial Empire universe (The Dragon’s Nine Sons), in which a future Chinese Empire fights across the spaceways with the Aztec society of Mexica.
There are surely going to be other best-of-the-year anthologies out this year; I would wait a while and compare before deciding to purchase this particular one.
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The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume Two
Genre: Original Anthology
Original anthologies have been around even longer than the best-of-the-year variety. In this one, George Mann has put together a good variety of stories, all sf. There’s hard sf, military sf, adventure, sentimental stories, extrapolation, humor, and even modern-day New Wave sf. In terms of sheer bang-for-the-buck, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction is hard to beat.
Among the standout stories are Paul Di Filippo’s “iCity,” a tale of urban design in a world in which all cityscapes are endlessly malleable, and Robert Reed’s “Fifty Dinosaurs,” a post-human parable that raises questions of identity and the meaning of life. “Book, Theatre, and Wheel” by Karl Schroeder is a powerful historical story about the power of knowledge. Neal Asher gives us two tales of “Mason’s Rats,” set on a future farm of robot machinery and intelligent genetically-engineered rats. There’s another Celestial Empire story by Chris Roberson; this one, “The Line of Dichotomy,” is rather unsatisfying and wouldn’t make a good introduction to the universe.
The last and greatest story is Michael Moorcock’s “Modem Times,” and features Moorcock’s madcap antihero Jerry Cornelius tackling the current-day United States. Cornelius is crazy, irreverent, and very much an acquired taste. Either you like him, or he drives you spare. If you’ve never been exposed to Jerry Cornelius, the most helpful comparison I can come up with is vintage Vonnegut. This story (actually, at 70 pages, it’s definitely a novella) is pure Cornelius. Depending on your own taste, treat that statement as either a wholehearted endorsement or a warning label.
There are fifteen stories total in this volume. If you can’t find a few stories that you like here . . . then what are you doing reading Analog to begin with? |
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Physics of the Impossible
Genre: Popular Nonfiction
This book is subtitled “A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel,” and that pretty much sums it up. Michio Kaku is a real physicist, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, famous for helping to develop string field theory and appearing on popular-science TV shows all over the place. He certainly has scientific credentials; and what’s more, his Acknowledgments include numerous colleagues, many of them Nobel laureates.
Still, this is a book aimed at the general public . . . or at least the subset of the general public who watch Discovery or the Science Channel and read popular science books. Analog readers may find this volume a little simplistic. To a veteran sf reader, a lot of this is old hat.
Still, let me give Kaku his due. He is an sf reader—or at least he was, before theoretical physics stole him away. When he draws examples from sf, he doesn’t stop at pop-culture Hollywood offerings like Star Trek, Star Wars, or Spielberg; he alludes to actual writers like Asimov, Clarke, and even van Vogt.
Still, Physics of the Impossible is a fair example of its type, which we might call “Scientist explains the real science behind popular sf/fantasy movies or TV shows.” There have been a plethora of these books in recent years: The Physics of Star Trek, The Science of Star Wars, The Physics of Superheroes, even The Science of Harry Potter. And like its siblings, Physics of the Impossible somehow manages to both misunderstand and underestimate real science fiction.
Kaku, like others, seems to be under the impression that the main business of sf is prediction—whereas we know that prediction is just a sideline. Again and again, his tone sounds a little condescending to the poor creators of sf (who, since they aren’t actually scientists, can’t be expected to get their physics absolutely right). He presents a concept from sf—the Enterprise’s force shields, for example, or faster-than-light travel—and explains how it couldn’t possibly happen the way it’s presented. He then tells us how the creators could have gotten it right, if only they had paid attention to real science and engineering principles. Okay, obviously the Enterprise couldn’t have real shields of force, but the crew could possibly erect an invisible barrier composed of “a combination of plasma window, laser curtain, and carbon nanotube screen.” Of course, even this shield, being invisible, would be incapable of stopping laser beams, so you’d need to add “photochromatics,” molecules that can change their optical properties when exposed to laser light.
Silly sf writers, getting it wrong that way. . . .
Kaku falls into the old chestnut of using “science fiction” as a synonym for “nonsense.” Witness his reaction to the idea of hyperspace travel: “Science fiction? Undoubtedly. But could it be based on scientific fact? Perhaps.”
Kaku divides his impossibilities into three classes. Class I Impossibilities are technologies that don’t violate the known laws of physics; he says that these may be possible “in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form.” These include such topics as Force Fields, Invisibility, Teleportation, Psychokinesis, Robots, Starships, and Antimatter.
Class II Impossibilities are those that “sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world.” If possible at all, these might be “millennia or millions of years in the future.” Kaku counts FTL Travel, Time Travel, and Parallel Universes as Class II.
Class III Impossibilities violate the known laws of physics, and so are actually impossible without “a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.” There are only two Class III Impossibilities: Perpetual Motion Machines and Precognition.
So if Physics of the Impossible is old hat to most Analog readers, who would be a good audience for this book? For one, it would make a nice gift to a bright child who likes sf movies and TV, but doesn’t have a lot of background in written sf. And it might serve as a counter to others—parents, teachers, even peers—who might be trying to dissuade such a child from pursuing an interest in sf. “See, Stargate is based on real science, so it’s educational . . . you have to let me watch it now.”
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Don Sakers is the author of A Rose From Old Terra and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
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"The Reference Library" copyright © 2009, Don Sakers
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