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The Reference Library

Don Sakers

Prisons have been an element in science fiction ever since the evil goddess Issus tossed Dejah Thoris into that revolving jail cell at the end of The Gods of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1918). More often than not, prison is a plot device, another obstacle that the protagonist must overcome on the way to the happy ending. The Good Guys are thrown in prison, where they must band together with other inmates and find a way to escape. (No, this isn’t why science fiction is called “escape literature.”) Escape from prison played a major role in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. In the movie Escape From New York and similar tales, getting out of prison is the whole story.

In other stories, prison is part of the background, a deliberate element in the author’s worldbuilding, with a specific impact on the shape of the story. This is often where we find the fine old concept of the “prison planet”—a sort of Australia in space, where criminals and dissidents imprisoned for life make a society, usually one that’s superior in some fashion or another. In Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Moon is a prison planet that breaks away from Earth in a parallel to the American Revolution. In Frank Herbert’s Dune universe, the Empire’s harsh prison planet Salusa Secundus is a breeding ground for the Emperor’s personal guard, the most vicious and feared fighters in the galaxy. Alien and THX 1138 are both movies in which prisons, one way or another, are part of the background. The classic TV show The Prisoner was set almost entirely in one of the most bizarre prison communities ever conceived (and no, I didn’t understand the ending either).

Then there are those rare sf stories that deal with prison as a concept, usually in the larger context of the moral nature of crime and punishment. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, for example, juvenile delinquent Alex accepts psychological conditioning as an alternative to prison time as punishment for his crimes. In “Coventry,” Robert Heinlein had antisocial citizens given a choice between psychological adjustment or exile to an anarchist region separated from the rest of the country by an impenetrable force field. Robert Silverberg’s story “To See the Invisible Man” (the basis for a 1986 Twilight Zone episode) substitutes psychological imprisonment for physical, having convicts treated as if they were invisible to others; similarly, in Melissa Scott’s The Kindly Ones those who transgress the law are declared “dead” and become socially-invisible “ghosts.”

Science fiction has come up with a number of other innovative ways to handle prisoners. Instead of a prison planet, one can play tricks with time: exile prisoners to the distant past, accelerate their personal time so that a sentence of many subjective years lasts only minutes or days objectively, or do the reverse and suspend their personal time by freezing or other form of hibernation (this last has been practiced everywhere from Star Trek to Lost in Space). Prisoners can serve their sentences in virtual worlds, robot or android bodies, or some high-tech variation of solitary confinement. In the Red Dwarf episode “Justice,” convicts suffer whatever harm they did to their victims.

Interestingly enough, the inmates in science fiction prisons are usually not the habitual criminals and incorrigible psychopaths that we imagine occupy present-day prisons. Oh, there are exceptions, truly bad people who usually get their just deserts by the end of the story—but most characters one encounters in sf prisons don’t really belong there. If they aren’t innocents herded into concentration camps, they are prisoners of war, political prisoners, or just plain malcontents jailed by an establishment that wants them out of the way. If they were actual criminals, they have usually reformed during their time in the slammer. On a prison planet or other prison colony, those who survive are deemed to have proven their moral worth by virtue of that survival. The hapless hero unfairly thrown into prison can always count on finding other unjustly imprisoned individuals as friends and allies. In fact, frequently the hero manages to organize these noble souls into a mass escape or rebellion against the powers that be. The heroic interstellar rebels of Blake’s 7 met on board a transport to the evil Federation’s prison planet.

Why don’t we see more hardened criminals in sf prisons, or stories dealing with prison-as-punishment-for-crime? For one thing, many science fiction stories implicitly accept the convention of advanced societies in which criminal behavior is regarded as a symptom of mental illness, which is treated or cured. This idea is made explicit in the classic Star Trek episodes “Whom Gods Destroy” and “Dagger of the Mind,” in which two prison planets hold the mere handful of criminally insane inmates who have not yet responded to rehabilitation treatment. Contrariwise, a repressive or totalitarian establishment can usually just execute hardened criminals or wipe their brains and set them to work in the mines (any respectable dictator always has a few mines around). Once you cure (or otherwise eliminate) all the true criminals, what you have left as prisoners are people who, one way or another, don’t fit into your enlightened (or repressive) society.

Viewed in this light, the whole matter of prisons and prisoners can be seen as another expression of one of the overarching themes of science fiction (and, for that matter, much of American mundane literature): the individual’s place in society, and the tension between the two. Here the prisoner (like the alien, the psionic superman, the gifted genius, and the time traveler) is yet another manifestation of the Outsider. Unfairly separated from a society that doesn’t accept or want him, the Outsider can flee that society altogether (escape from prison), integrate into the society (work for rehabilitation), attempt to overthrow the society (lead a revolution), or craft a version of society more to his liking (seek independence for the prison planet).

This month I have for you two books that deal specifically with prison, another that features themes of imprisonment, and a graphic novel that includes a prison planet.

The Prisoner,
by
Carlos J. Cortes

Bantam Spectra
$7.99,
416 pp.(paperback)
ISBN:
9780553591637
Genres:
Psychological/Sociological SF

This near-future thriller plays with the concept of suspended animation in prisons. By 2060, the prison system is contracted out to Hypnos, Inc., a company that markets safe and virtually flawless cryonic hibernation. Inmates are frozen and stacked in Hypnos detention centers known as “sugar cubes,” to be reanimated when their sentences are completed.

As far as Congress and the public know, that’s all there is to it. But Laurel Cole learns that there’s more to the picture: undocumented prisoners who don’t appear in any records, and who have no release date. Prisoners who have come to Hypnos without trial, political dissidents whose only crime is challenging the status quo. When Laurel finds that one of these inmates is reporter Eliot Russo, missing for eight years, she also learns that Russo has information that could expose both Hypnos and their secret government partners.

Aided by an oddball assortment of co-conspirators, Laurel enters the Washington, DC sugar cube as an inmate. Her first mission is to locate Russo and break him out.

But escaping from a maximum-security installation is only the first of Laurel’s challenges. Once she has Russo, the race is on to bring down Hypnos its partners, and to do so before Laurel and her team find themselves permanently on ice.

As conventional as it sounds, The Prisoner is a gripping near-future adventure story, and the science behind it is well researched and nicely presented. The pages fly by quickly, the characters are compelling, and the ending is quite satisfactory.

The Eternal Prison,
by
Jeff Somers

Orbit,
$12.99 (trade paperback),
406 pp.
ISBN: 9780316022118
Genres:
Adventure SF
Series: Avery Cates 3

If you’ve met Avery Cates in his first two adventures (The Electric Church and The Digital Plague), then you won’t be surprised that someone throws him in prison. In fact, you might think it’s the best place for him.

Avery is a scary man . . . but he lives in a scary world. In this noir-flavored cyberfuture, Earth is ruled by the System of Federated Nations, policed by the dreaded System Security Force (SSF). Avery, an unwilling conscript in the SSF, is good with guns and has a droll sense of humor (one hears echoes of Sam Spade). After surviving killer cyborgs and bioengineered disaster, Avery now runs afoul of the wrong cops and winds up in Chengara, an inescapable prison with zero survival rate. So first Avery has to escape, then he needs to find out why people he’s killed keep coming back to return the favor.

Avery Cates is foul-mouthed and violent, but somehow he manages to be likable as well. His friends and enemies are delightfully strange. And underneath all the blood and guts, the shooting and swearing, the holographic avatars and downloaded brains . . . one gets the distinct whiff of satire, and realizes that no one, least of all Avery Cates, is taking any of this entirely seriously.

A fusion of noir thriller, cyberpunk, and military sf, the bottom line is that Avery Cates is just plain fun. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is the right place.

Destroyer of Worlds

by
Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner

Tor,
$25.99 (hardcover),
368 pp
ISBN: 9780765322050
Genres:
Alien Beings, Bigger Than Worlds
Series: Known Space; Fleet of Worlds 3

Prisons come in all sizes and shapes, but they share the same features: you’re there against your will, and you want to escape.

Some decades ago, the alien race that humans call Puppeteers found out that they didn’t want to be in the galaxy any longer. The galactic core had exploded, and in a few tens of millennia the wavefront will reach Earth’s neighborhood, wiping out all life. So the Puppeteers (who call themselves Citizens) decided to escape. Fortunately, Puppeteer technology is perfectly capable of moving whole planets. Gathering up their homeworld and five agricultural worlds, the Puppeteers left their sun behind and headed for intergalactic space.

All of this is old news to anyone who remembers Niven’s classic Ringworld. What we didn’t know then, and found out only in the first book of this trilogy (Fleet of Worlds), is that one of the agricultural worlds is populated by the descendants of human castaways that the Puppeteers found centuries before. These humans are essentially Puppeteer slaves, working the fields to provide food for the Citizens.

In Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds, Kristen Quinn-Kovacs and her associates discovered Earth and the rest of humanity, and led the human agricultural world (now christened New Terra) to independence. New Terra continues to accompany the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds in its exodus, while Kristen and her people act as explorers to make sure the way is clear of threats.

But now, ten years after Juggler of Worlds, a new threat has arisen: an alien race fleeing the same galactic disaster, leaving whole planets devastated in their wake. These newcomers are headed for the fleet, and it’s up to Kristen to deal with them.

If you like Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, you’ll find plenty here to enjoy. There are bizarre aliens both old and new; there’s more advanced technology than you can shake a neutron star at; there are ideas to make your head spin. Characters? Nobody reads Larry Niven for character depth and development—if you want to read about well-rounded characters dealing with complex human problems, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want interesting aliens, planet-size and larger threats to overcome, and stirring space adventure, then you should give this one a try.

Of course, this is the third book of a trilogy, and as with any other Niven book, you’re expected to do your homework first. You’ll probably want to have read the other two before you dive into Destroyer of Worlds. And while an encyclopedic knowledge of Niven’s Known Space milieu is not absolutely required, it wouldn’t hurt.

Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds

by
Geoff Johns, George Pérez, Scott Koblish

DC Comics,
$19.99 (hardcover),
176 pp
ISBN: 9781401223243
Genres:
Alternate Worlds, Graphic Novels, Superheroes

In addition to being top pre-Golden Age science fiction writers, Edmond Hamilton and Otto Binder both worked in comics. A bit more than fifty years ago, the two of them had a hand in creating a science-fictional team of superheroes that has survived to this day.

The Legion of Super-Heroes (LSH for short) exists more-or-less a thousand years from now, in the 31st century. In a universe of starships, aliens, and an interstellar government called the United Planets, the LSH is a team of (originally) teenagers, each with a different power or ability. Often they are offworlders whose people developed these abilities to cope with alien planets—for example, settlers on the planet Braal genetically engineered magnetokinetic powers to deal with the hostile metal-boned creatures that inhabit the world, while all inhabitants of Durla are shape-shifters.

Over the decades the LSH (in the fashion of all comic-book teams) has grown increasingly detailed and more and more baroque. There have been several mutually exclusive versions of the team, as their universe was “rebooted” to attract new readers with a fresh start. But one thing has remained constant: the LSH has always been set in the future, and has always used the tropes and concepts of science fiction: alien beings, other worlds, time travel, alternate universes; they are even inextricably linked to that other science-fiction-based superhero, last survivor of doomed Krypton: Superman. As a boy, Superman traveled into the future and had many adventures with the Legion.

And Legion they are: various incarnations of the team have had dozens of members.

In Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, writer Geoff Johns pulls out all the stops to bring all the previous versions of the LSH together in a space opera like no other. And legendary artist George Pérez is right there with him, his intricately detailed pages teeming with literally hundreds of characters.

The plot is fairly straightforward. A powerful, malevolent entity known as the Time Trapper desires to wipe out the Legion, and finds a perfect weapon: an evil version of Superboy from a universe that no longer exists. The Trapper brings this Superboy Prime to 31st century Earth. The boy—whose unimaginable powers exceed even those of the mature Superman—learns of the existence of a Legion of Super-Villains and liberates them from the prison planet Takron-Galtos. This evil Legion heads to Earth for a final battle with the good Legion.

The LSH calls in Superman from the 21st century, but they know even his power will not be enough. They turn to Brainiac 5, whose super-power is his “twelfth-level intelligence.” Brainy summons two alternate versions of the LSH from other realities; he also resurrects some heroes who died fighting Superboy Prime in the present day. For good measure, the outer-space Green Lantern Corps enters the fray.

It’s good Legions vs. evil Legion, with the all-powerful Time Trapper manipulating time to his benefit, until Brainiac 5’s machinations bring about a deliciously over-the-top ending that proves, once and for all, that there’s still fun left in comics.

If you haven’t experienced the Legion of Super-Heroes and their fantastic future universe, you owe it to yourself to give them a try. Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds is a great way to get acquainted with the team that Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton created, all those years ago.

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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