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| The Reference Library |
by Don Sakers |
Real-word science is always stealing the best disciplines from science fiction. Selenology, robotics, genetic engineering, gravitics, xenology . . . all taken from science fiction. And not only did they steal psychohistory from us, but they got it wrong. In twenty thousand years, Hari Seldon will be spinning in his grave!
At least there are some disciplines we can still call our own . . . although it’s just a matter of time before science comes in and starts ruining them too. So let’s enjoy them while we can.
The field that’s on my mind today is xenopsychology—the study of how alien minds work. It’s been a concern of science fiction and SF writers since the field’s very beginning. Readers and writers alike are reasonably familiar with various techniques for imagining and portraying alien biology, but there’s much less discussion of how writers handle alien psychology.
The most basic way is to have aliens be primarily just like Humans. Give them a different language and some unusual customs, and you’ve got your aliens. We might call this the “aliens as foreigners” strategy—just like the French, Chinese, and Zulus, we’re all essentially the same under the skin (or feathers, scales, or whatever).
Don’t pooh-pooh this technique as simplistic or unimaginative. It can produce some pretty effective science fiction. Many of the aliens in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle (for instance, those in 1974’s Hugo winner The Dispossessed), fall into this category—and it’s the formula behind some of the most powerful episodes of the original Star Trek and The Twilight Zone.
A step further are aliens who are psychologically Human, but even more so. They might be more moral (like the Sorns in C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet), intellectual (Star Trek’s Vulcans), immortal (The Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End), or any number of other desirable characteristics (the eponymous Doctor from Doctor Who deserves special mention here). Or they might go in the other direction, being like Humans but worse—think of H. G. Wells’ Morlocks (from The Time Machine) or the evil Mesans from David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. Star Trek’s Romulans and Cardassians are also examples of this type, as are Isaac Asimov’s Gaians from the Foundation series.
The late Hal Clement, who had several excellent alien races under his belt, used to joke that when he wanted bizarre yet comprehensible aliens, he just made them behave completely rationally and logically.
Moving further in the same direction are aliens psychologically defined by a single Human characteristic. These range from fairly complex warrior races like Star Trek’s Klingons or Larry Niven’s Kzinti to simplistic, almost mindless examples such as H. R. Giger’s Aliens and the Bugs from Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. One of the difficulties with this kind of alien is the question of the society behind such single-purpose species. A functioning advanced society needs farmers, bankers, shopkeepers, educators, and even traffic cops. (The late Amanda Allen called this the “Klingon Meter Maid Problem,” and appeared at conventions in a stunning Klingon battle-dress costume as “Ri’tah the Klingon Meter Maid.”)
Another way to deal with alien psychology is to throw out all the stops and abandon comprehensibility altogether. This is a lot harder than it looks, because readers can only stand so much unexplained mystery. Arthur C. Clarke was a master: he gave us many incomprehensible aliens. The unseen race that supervised the aforementioned Overlords, the folk who constructed the monolith in his 2001 series, and the race that built Rama (Rendezvous with Rama and sequels) spring to mind immediately. The Caliban in C. J. Cherryh’s Forty Thousand in Gehenna are quite successfully incomprehensible, as is the title character(?) in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. An outstanding recent example is the Ariekei from China Miéville’s Embassytown.
Surely the most interesting examples of xenopsychology, though, come from an entirely different approach. Here, the author begins with specifics of alien biology and environment, and works from there to develop and deduce psychology. Some of the most satisfying alien races in science fiction have emerged from this technique. The behavior of Larry Niven’s Puppeteers derives from their biological origins as an intelligent herd creature. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethenians (The Left Hand of Darkness) periodically change gender; the psychology of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragons stems from both native biology and genetic engineering; Alan Dean Foster’s Thranx act just the way you’d expect of intelligent insects. The aliens in Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves are a stunning example of biology determining psychology. And surely, biology and environment are perfectly reflected in the psychology of one of SF’s most beloved aliens, the Horta from Star Trek.
Finally, there’s one last category of xenopsychology, and that’s aliens based on ideas from psychology itself. The earliest example is probably L. Ron Hubbard’s Xenu. Vernor Vinge’s Tines (A Fire Upon the Deep) are the ultimate in multiple personalities. Some of James White’s aliens embody various psychological conditions. Forbidden Planet introduced a whole generation of SF fans to the concept of the id. And of course, we mustn’t forget Douglas Adams’s Marvin the Paranoid Android.
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Bowl of Heaven
Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Tor, 412 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2841-0
Series: Bowl of Heaven 1
Genre: Alien Beings, Bigger Than Worlds, Hard SF |
Bowl of Heaven
Among other things, Bowl of Heaven features a fascinating alien race of the last type.
Gregory Benford and Larry Niven are surely familiar names to Analog readers. Both have a reputation for the kind of hard SF that frequently appears in these pages. Both are bestselling, multiple award-winning authors. And both have written before of Really Big Things—Benford in his Eon series and Niven in his Ringworld books. (I talked about the subgenre called “Bigger Than Worlds” in the October 2011 issue.)
In Bowl of Heaven, the first of two books, interstellar colony ship SunSeeker encounters a Really Big Thing—in this case, a solid hemispherical shell around a red dwarf star. This Bowl, also called Shipstar, dashes through relativistic space by magnetically manipulating the star’s plasma into a powerful jet.
Well, of course SunSeeker is in trouble, and of course they change course to intercept and explore the Bowl. (I mean, who wouldn’t?) A landing party encounters the Folk, the Bowl’s enormous, birdlike dominant race. Half of the Humans escape, while the other half is taken into captivity. The rest of the crew orbits the star in SunSeeker, trying vainly to help.
The Bowl is well thought-out, and watching the escaped Humans explore it is part of the fun . . . but the real meat of this book is the Folk. They’re a fascinating race with an unusual life cycle. They’re born male, and aren’t considered fully complete until a midlife change to female. The key to their psychology is that they have full awareness of the operation of their unconscious minds (which they call underminds). This gives them tremendous psychological stability, as well as enormous cognitive abilities.
The Bowl has been underway for millions of years (you’d think they’d have reached cruising speed and been able to shut off the plasma jet by now, but never mind that). In the course of this journey, the Folk have met, and integrated, countless other species both sapient and not. But in all their travels, they’ve never met creatures like Humans, disconnected from our own underminds.
If you like hard SF with mind-stretching ideas—both physical and psychological—then you definitely want to read this book. Be warned, this is the first part of the story. Bowl of Heaven raises a lot of questions that will (one hopes) be answered in the second book, Shipstar. My advice: Buy this volume and put it in your reading queue. Then when the next one comes out, sit down and savor both of them together.
Trouble is, you’ll have to wait to read a Benford/Niven collaboration. If you can do that, your willpower is much stronger than mine.
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Sky Dragons
Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey
Del Rey, 368 pages, $26.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-345-50091-5
Series: Dragonriders of Pern 25
Genre: Animal Companions, Beloved Worlds, Dragons, Other Worlds |
Sky Dragons
When Anne McCaffrey passed away in November 2011, she left us this gift: her last collaboration with her son Todd, one more visit to Pern—the most beloved world in a science fiction. (Her final solo Pern book was in progress when she passed away; its fate has not yet been announced.)
Sky Dragons picks up where the previous book, Dragon’s Time, ended. The dragons, defenders of the planet Pern, are recovering from a plague that vastly reduced their ranks. Now the Red Star is making its third Pass, bringing in its wake the voracious Thread that threatens to destroy Pern’s civilization. And there are too few dragons to effectively fight Thread.
The answer lies with the dragon ability to travel through time. A colony is sent into the past, between Passes, to breed and train enough dragons to save Pern. When the new generation of dragons and riders mature, they will return to the present.
The young woman in charge of this colony is Xhinna, who has already made history as the first female rider of a blue dragon. Xhinna and her dragon Tazith lead the colony into the past, where they set up Sky Weyr on an isolated island. Xhinna knows that she and her colony must avoid changing the past, lest they alter their own time.
Things go according to plan for a while, then unforeseen tragedy strikes, endangering the colony’s mission. A strange girl named Jirana, who has the power to see possible futures, offers a way to salvage everything . . . but only by traveling still further into the fragile past.
Dragons, time travel, adventure, a wonderfully realized world, human characters we care about, and the fate of a planet in the balance . . . the McCaffreys deliver in spades. This latest chapter of the Pern story is a true winner. |
Railsea
China Miéville
Del Rey, 432 pages, $18.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $11.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-345-52452-2
Genre: Classics Revisited, Literary SF, Other Worlds
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Railsea
China Miéville is not to everyone’s taste. His books are multilayered, metafictional narratives that clearly owe their ancestry as much to the literary SF tradition as to John W. Campbell, Jr. There’s so much going on, on so many levels, that readers can easily feel they’re missing something important. As with Samuel R. Delany, I always come to the end of a China Miéville book with the dread suspicion that the author is much smarter than I am.
This isn’t meant to be as discouraging as perhaps it sounds. You don’t get the feeling that Miéville is trying to put anyone down or intimidate the reader. Think of the conversations you’ve had with really smart people—people so secure in their intelligence that they feel no need to prove themselves. You might feel overwhelmed, but also stimulated and somewhat flattered that these people would consider you as their equal. That’s how reading a Miéville book feels.
Railsea is set on another world—far future, distant galaxy, whatever. The dusty landscape is crisscrossed with rails, endless trackless networks of them, and everything in the world wheels along these rails. Off the rails, the waste spaces are dangerous—there are any number of horrid predators, and giant moles are apt to surface at any point, leaving death and destruction in their wakes. Derelict hulks and ruined machines litter the world, some filled with treasures of advanced technology. The skies are closed, property of enigmatic and incomprehensible aliens.
Across this landscape rides Medes, a moletrain bearing among its crew one Sham Yes ap Soorap, an orphan just coming of age. Medes is commanded by a haunted woman on an obsessive search for an ivory-colored mole who years ago took her arm. In the course of this pursuit, Sham goes along on a mission to explore a derelict. He finds some mysterious pictures that reveal a powerful secret.
And of course, everyone wants the pictures. Pirates, rival trains, seedy scavengers—Sham’s sleepy, routine life suddenly becomes much more interesting.
On one level, yes, this is a revisiting of (or, perhaps, meta-commentary on) Moby Dick. On another level it’s a coming-of-age adventure story. On another, a dystopian parable. On yet another, a meditation on security, freedom, and the nature of change. On still another, an audacious and joyful romp through one of the most outrageous settings in all SF. On a completely different level, it’s the big crossover bestseller that everyone’s going to be talking about.
Railsea is all these, and more. It’s the kind of book you can re-read every ten years or so, getting something different out of it each time. Do me (and yourself) a favor: no matter what you think when you read Railsea, keep the book around and revisit it in seven to ten years. I think you’ll thank me. |
Energized
Edward M. Lerner
Tor, 336 pages, $27.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $14.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2849-6
Genre: Hard SF, Near Future, SF/Thriller
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Energized
You all know Edward M. Lerner is a good storyteller. If you need convincing, just look over the last few years of Analog—you’ll have no trouble finding his excellent short fiction.
Energized is near-future speculative SF in the Ben Bova tradition. In 2023, the end of the Petroleum Age comes sooner than anyone expected, with a spasm that leaves Mideast oil fields contaminated with radioactivity. The Middle East is in chaos, Russia and Venezuela are suddenly superpowers, and everyone is desperate for energy.
With an asteroid heading for a near-Earth encounter, any Analog reader could, in his or her sleep, tell America what to do. For a wonder, America does—intercepts Phoebe and captures it into Earth orbit. With this raw material, NASA engineer Marcus Judson intends to make solar power satellites, the way we would have done in the real world forty years ago if people were paying attention to SF, thank you very much.
Ahem. Well, you can see where this is going—Judson has bunches of obstacles to overcome, and he sets upon them with all the will and ability of the aerospace engineer. It’s a magnificently fun romp, complete with espionage, international cabals, sabotage, and lots of amusing political commentary. For anyone who likes Analog, this is a no-brainer.
I just wish politicians would listen, this time.
(And while this is hardly the place or time to start a discussion about high prices of e-books—perhaps in a future column—I just can’t pass up the chance to wag my finger at Tor. Fifteen dollars for an e-book? Really? As I write this, readers can pre-order the hardcover from Amazon for just a dollar and a quarter more. With a great product like Energized, you’d think they’d want to . . . I don’t know . . . sell some of them? Talk about incomprehensible alien psychology. . . .)
(Readers, please don’t take it out on Lerner. He doesn’t set prices. If you can’t stomach paying that much for an e-book, bite the bullet and buy the hardcover. The man is one of us.)
With that rant, I’m out of space. Come back next time, and meanwhile try to avoid psychoanalyzing any aliens you run across.
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With that rant, I’m out of space. Come back next time, and meanwhile try to avoid psychoanalyzing any aliens you run across.
Don Sakers is the author of The Leaves of October and A Voice in Every Wind. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
"The Reference Library" Copyright © 2012, Don Sakers |
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