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| The Reference Library |
Don Sakers |
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We read science fiction for a lot of reasons. SF can be inspiring, educational, exciting. Science fiction can exercise the mind, stir the spirit, tug at the heart, and stretch the imagination. Science fiction can make us laugh and bring us to tears; it can lead us to question our firmest beliefs or to see our familiar world from a different perspective. Science fiction can be funny, tragic, even transcendently sublime.
And besides all this, SF can be fun. This time around, I have a selection of books that are fun in a number of different ways.
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Catalyst
by Anne McCaffrey and
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Del Rey, 256 pages, $26.00 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-345-51376-2
Series: Barque Cats 1
Genres: Adventure SF, Animal Companion
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From Andre Norton’s Beast Master to Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx stories, faithful animal companions (often telepathically linked to their owners) have a long and illustrious history in science fiction. Heinlein’s young adult books featured a veritable menagerie of flat cats, bouncers, and a Star Beast named Lummox. And there are mice, from Frederic Brown’s Mitkey (“The Star Mouse,” 1942) to Daniel Keyes’s Algernon (“Flowers for Algernon,” 1959). Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Hawkmistress (part of her Darkover series) features a relationship between girl and hawk. Andre Norton’s Catseye gives us a whole pet store full of unusual animals. Harlan Ellison famously explored the bond between A Boy and His Dog. Superman has his Krypto and Doctor Who his robot dog K-9. And by far the most beloved animal companions in all of SF are the dragons and fire lizards in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books. (Oddly enough, one doesn’t often see my favorite animal, hamsters, in science fiction.)
Animal companions can usually be distinguished from intelligent aliens by their relative lack of autonomy. While the animals can (and do) act independently of their human owners, it’s still obvious who’s in charge. Animals that evolve sapience on their own don’t really fall into this category. I’m thinking here of the intelligent dogs from Clifford Simak’s “City” stories, of the bears in Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” of Cordwainer Smith’s animal-derived Underpeople, and (of course) of the primates in the Planet of the Apes universe.
Which brings us to cats.
Now, I believe in revealing my biases and prejudices right up front, so let me get this out of the way at once: I am not a cat person. I am violently allergic to cats (a state which I blame entirely on them) and cats know it. In fact, they revel in their dastardly power. However, even I can’t deny that cats have a unique hold on the imaginations of science fiction writers and readers.
Maybe it’s their aloofness, their independence of thought and action, the way that they stand outside the rules and strictures of society. Cats are free spirits, deciding for themselves what they like and what they don’t, and so are science fiction people. Or at least that’s the way we like to see ourselves.
Stories involving cats are legion. Heinlein gave us Pete in The Door Into Summer, Pixel in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and assorted felines in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Cats pop up all the time in Andre Norton’s books. Cordwainer Smith had cats defending starships (“The Game of Rat and Dragon,” 1955) and even planets (“Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons,” 1961). In Alan Dean Foster’s Cat-a-Lyst, cats were the guardians of the galaxy. Tara K. Harper’s excellent Cat Scratch Fever gave a new take on the “telepathic cat companion” story. Star Trek’s resident android, Data, had a cat named Spot, and in Alien Ripley very nearly sacrificed everything for Jonesie. Schrödinger’s Cat may or may not be relevant here; we’ll never know until we open the box.
And I’m not even going to get into the many cat-derived alien species like Niven’s Kzinti or Cherryh’s Hani.
In Catalyst, McCaffrey and Scarborough introduce us to the Barque Cats: essential crewmembers on every interstellar spaceship. Assisted by their human partners, called “Cat Persons,” the Barque Cats eliminate vermin, test environmental conditions, and basically keep the ships humming. Barque Cats are part of a carefully maintained lineage that goes back to the legendary Maine coon cat Tuxedo Thomas, the first cat to save an endangered spaceship.
The narrator of Catalyst is Chessie, Barque Cat and companion of a human named Janina. Chessie is pregnant—and a Barque Cat’s kittens are extraordinarily valuable. Valuable enough, in fact, to tempt an old spacer called Carl Poindexter into the terrible crime of catnapping. He spirits Chessie away from the vet’s office, and the chase is on.
Things get more complicated when Chessie’s kittens are born. All Barque Cats are special, but Chessie’s litter are exceptionally so—for they, at last, have the ability to form true telepathic bonds with their Cat Persons. One kitten, Chester, promptly forms such a bond with the old spacer’s son.
But wait . . . there’s also a pandemic that hits animals on many different planets. Suddenly, the government is talking about seizing all Barque Cats, possibly to destroy them. Throw in an alien cat with great powers, and it becomes a mad scramble for the Barque Cats and their human friends to save the day.
In the hands of lesser writers, this story—narrated by the cat, remember—would quickly get too cutesy to bear. But McCaffrey, ably assisted by Scarborough, is an old hand at this sort of thing . . . you know she’s not going to let you down. Catalyst turns out to be a fun, madcap adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Even this non-cat-person liked it. We can only hope that more tales of the Barque Cats are forthcoming.
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Brain Thief
by Alexander Jablokov
Tor, 384 pages, $24.99 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2200-5
Genre: Cyberpunk, SF Mystery
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Bernal Haydon-Rumi has a crazy boss. And he likes it that way.
Muriel Inglis is an ex-socialite who “made her money the old-fashioned way: she divorced it.” She’s also extremely intelligent and utterly eccentric. Muriel uses her enormous fortune to fund scientific projects that no one else would touch: repopulating the Great Plains with genetically reconstructed mammoths, urban reforestation, sculpting abandoned ICBM silos.
Bernal is Muriel’s executive assistant, the buffer between her and a world that doesn’t necessarily appreciate her ideas. Muriel produces the dreams, and Bernal labors to bring them to reality. Bernal likes his job, and he’s very good at it . . . but he has to admit that Muriel keeps him hopping.
One day, Muriel disappears without warning. Bernal sets off after her, and the trail leads to a lab where Madeleine Ungaro is at work on another one of Muriel’s projects: a prototype AI space probe, one designed to carry on an autonomous search for life in the cosmos.
The probe, code-named Hesketh, is missing. And just to make things more bizarre, corpses are showing up here and there with their brains removed. As Bernal searches for Muriel and Hesketh, he learns more about Ungaro’s design. The probe’s artificial intelligence, it seems, was modeled after the human brain . . . and apparently Hesketh needs more models.
Brain Thief is a zany near-future romp through a landscape of unusual characters as only Jablokov could imagine it. Definitely a lot of fun.
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Post-Apocalyptic novels can be profound, meaningful, terrifying, depressing, awesome, even inspiring . . . but they are seldom fun. Two that spring to mind are Edgar Pangborn’s Davy and David R. Palmer’s Emergence, and even those weren’t strolls through the park.
Get ready for Total Oblivion, More or Less.
Sixteen-year-old Macy had a normal life in suburban St. Paul, a dysfunctional family that drove her crazy, and the usual concerns of a midwestern teenager. Then her cell phone stopped working, the cable TV failed, and the Scythian horsemen rode into town to murder and pillage.
The Scythians are just the beginning. Various barbarian tribes from ancient history turn up all across North America, and half the country is ruled by “the Empire.” Cities are ravaged, populations murdered, plagues spread. With time gone wacky and the world gone insane around them, Macy and her family find themselves in a refugee camp. They decide to board the good ship Prairie Chicken on its pilgrimage down the Mississippi in search of safety and sanity.
There follows a surreal journey through an ever-more-bizarre landscape as Macy’s family dissolves around her. Over the next year, Macy’s coming-of-age leaves her stronger, wiser, and a lot more accepting of her new world.
As a particularly fun post-apocalyptic story, Total Oblivion, More or Less is a success. As a parable of ordinary people confronted with changes beyond their understanding, it is superb. Reading this book will give you an insight into the experience of all your non-SF-reading friends and neighbors as they confront the onrushing future.
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The Science of Fear
by Daniel Gardner
Dutton, 339 pages, $24.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-525-95062-2
Genre: Popular Nonfiction
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Over the last few decades, while the rest of us were paying attention to astrophysics, biochemistry, and genetics, the science of psychology has been up to quite a bit. In particular, psychology has discovered a lot about the mechanisms by which we experience fear . . . and how we misunderstand the whole process.
In The Science of Fear, journalist Daniel Gardner takes us on a fascinating guided tour of the way irrational fears result from human tendencies to miscalculate risk. He opens the book with an analysis of the American public’s fear of flying in the wake of September 11, 2001, a fear that prompted many to drive instead of taking a plane. The problem is that mile-for-mile, driving is much riskier than flying. In the year it took for travel patterns to go back to normal, there were 1,595 “excess” deaths from automobile accidents. Nearly 1,600 people died because of fear.
Gardner reviews recent findings in evolutionary psychology that explain why we have such trouble accurately assessing risks. The human brain consists of two separate systems of thought. One, based in the midbrain and underlying structures, is intuitive, quick, and emotional. The other system, based in the frontal cortex, is calculating, slow, and rational. Gardner calls the two “Gut” and “Head.” Brain scans show that Gut’s reactions are instantaneous and automatic, while Head is much more deliberate. Head can override Gut, but only with difficulty.
Thus, we have innate automatic fear (or fear’s relative, disgust) of things like falling and rotten meat. With a good deal of conscious effort, we can overcome that fear/disgust and even, over time, eliminate it.
Identifying a few simple rules that Gut uses to evaluate risk, Gardner takes us through the worlds of e
conomics, advertising, politics, crime, and terrorism (among others). Along the way, he reveals various delightful non-intuitive results, such as why people can be terrified of nuclear power but oblivious to the threat of Tunguska-like impact events; why we insist that marijuana is a dangerous drug but alcohol merely an amusing indulgence; or why Europeans can demonstrate against the imagined health risks of genetically-engineered food while chain-smoking cigarettes.
Gardner maintains a completely rational viewpoint throughout the book, but he also presents his subject with compassion and welcome humor. If we’re all genetically inclined to be irrational, then Gardner is right there with us, and he offers techniques to help Head do a better job of overriding Gut. This book could be dreary and depressing; instead, it winds up being a lot of fun
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The Lives of Stars
by Ken Croswell
Boyds Mill Press, 72 pages, $19.95
(hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1590785829
Genre: Popular Nonfiction (ages 10–14)
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Long ago, when the world was young and I was a precocious pre-teen proto-SF-reader just discovering Tom Swift and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, I had two favorite nonfiction books: All About the Planets by Patricia Lauber and Life in Other Solar Systems by Frederick I. Ordway III. I checked both of those out from the library so often that my parents were forced to buy me copies of my own. Both books had a very strong influence on my developing interest in astronomy, science in general, and science fiction. The fact that I remember them more than forty years later shows you how much of an impact they made on me. I’ll bet you have a book or two like that from your own childhood.
If you have a similarly precocious pre-teen in your life, you might want to give them a copy of The Lives of Stars. This is a big, beautiful, full-color book chock full of gorgeous Hubble images and in-depth text that should be easily accessible to any bright third– or fourth-grader. The book discusses (and illustrates) the life cycle of stars, from nebulae to main sequence to nova, neutron star, or black hole. This is all the latest state-of-the-art information, as up to date as any book can be.
The Lives of Stars doesn’t shy away from hardcore science: it explains the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, Cepheid variables, and the origin of elements, and is full of all sorts of interesting facts (for example, the Milky Way galaxy gives birth to about ten new stars per year, and tin is primarily formed in red giants rather than supernovae). In addition, there are a few chapters that lead nicely into science fiction territory, discussing extrasolar planets and extraterrestrial life.
Ken Croswell is a Ph.D. in astronomy who has written other astronomy books for kids; your precocious pre-teen will be in good hands. But before you give this book to the kid (or kids) in your life, take some time to look through it yourself—you’re sure to enjoy it, and you will probably learn something you didn’t know. Much fun indeed.
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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 © 2010, Don Sakers
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