Billionaire Morgan Goldstein offers an out: Join him as shuttle pilot on a trading voyage to the aliens, hauling bales of pot (for sale as a culinary herb) there and bringing back a cargo of—Goldstein hopes and plans—hypervaluable alien technology. The ship is captained by Ted Harker, who with his wife Emily, was one of the humans who once made the first alien contact (see Spindrift, reviewed November 2007). The crew also includes Ash, a telepath whom Goldstein expects to provide an advantage in trade dealings; since Ash can't stand other folks’ thoughts, he spends a lot of time drunk and/or noodling around on his guitar (whence the book's title). There's also Rain, a young woman Jules finds appealing; according to Ash, she finds him appealing too and if they just had the sense to say something about it to each other...
The trip out goes smoothly and the alien civilization proves quite astonishing enough to satisfy any jaded SF reader. But it wouldn't be much of a novel if the characters didn't run into obstacles. Jules manages to screw things up so badly that the hjadd demand an atonement that—if Hollywood ever bites on this series—will produce as astounding a visual as any movie has ever managed.
Do Jules and Rain manage to get together? You are Astute Readers. I don't have to tell you anything more than that this one should satisfy all fans of the series and draw a few more readers in.
* * * *
A. Lee Martinez has been setting a pattern for himself. He grabs a piece of the SF&F field, identifies common tropes, and then quite lovingly sends them over the top. He's done it with zombies, ogres, and witches, and now it's time for robots and mutants and alien invasions, along with the hard-boiled detective yarn. Meet The Automatic Detective, Mack Megaton, who wouldn't mind a bit if you boiled him in oil, he's so tough! I wouldn't mind it either, if I were built like him. He was designed as a military robot, capable of taking large amounts of abuse and dishing out even more, but then he went and developed a conscience and the Freewill Glitch. Since he lives in Empire City, a battered techno-utopia populated by humans and robots, as well as loads of mutants, thanks to all the mutagens in the local pollution, he's now a probationary citizen (even though if people weren't worried that he could run amok at any moment, he'd be a full citizen with all rights and privileges thereunto appertaining). He works as a cabby, but that is about to end. The folks next door, a human family consisting of Julie (who kindly ties Mack's bowtie for him every morning), Gavin (a not too useful fellow), and a couple of cute mutant kids, April (psychic) and Holt (scales and tail), get abducted, and the only clue is a drawing April hands him. On the back, which he doesn't look at till later, she has written, “Find us.”
And Mack is off to track down and interrogate low-life scum, hook up with Lucia, a genius who keeps him supplied with technical gadgets Batman would love, take enormous amounts of damage, and eventually discover the real reason why Empire City exists and is such a mess to boot. In the end all makes sense, and Mack has done such a great job that he really can't be just a cabby any more. So he pushes his fedora back over his brow, winks at his sexy receptionist, and waits for a blonde to step into the office...
A fun read.
* * * *
Robert Asprin changes pace with Dragons Wild. It's not punny like the Myth books, or jolly like the Phule's Company tales. It is instead a coming-of-age story in a world much like our own, at least on the surface. Meet orphan Griffen “Grifter” McCandles. He has just graduated from college by the skin of his teeth, having preferred partying and playing poker (he wins) to studying. Now it's time to look for a job. First stop: Uncle Malcolm, who paid his tuition and now says that he did so because he felt responsible for Griff's parents’ deaths. Not that he caused them, you understand, but he did nothing to prevent them. And by the way, boy, what do you know about dragons?
Big, mythical, fly, breathe fire, right? Wrong on all but one, says Uncle as he breathes out a flame to light his cigar, and you're one of us. Since your parents were nearly pureblooded dragons, you're even rather special, and there are lots of dragon clans out there that will try either to recruit you or kill you. Want to join up with me right now, or do you need some time to think about it?
This is nuts, thinks Griff, so time it is. And soon thereafter he begins to see what Uncle meant about recruit or kill. Fortunately, a school buddy, Jerome, offers another option. They can collect Griff's sister Valerie from her school and go down to New Orleans, where Mose heads up a bottom-of-the-heap dragon clan, runs a gambling operation, and wants to join (not recruit) Griff. Griff, they think, has the potential to move them up the heap. Well, maybe, if the assassin known as the George, who announces his presence by slipping tarot cards under his victim's door, doesn't kill him first.
From here you can surely see where the story has to go, but there are some things you just can't predict. Dragons are hungry for power and wealth, but Griff's motives seem to be a bit different. As he takes over Mose's operation, he uses wit and a light hand to deal with problems, and before long other gambling ops are signing up with his. By the end we see that his appeal is spreading beyond New Orleans too, and all I will tell you is that you should keep an eye on his girlfriends. Plural, right, and Jerome warns early on that you don't want to get crosswise between female dragons. That's what produced the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, and perhaps—in a future book of the series—Hurricane Katrina (I'm guessing, but New Orleans is intact in this novel; Asprin has to catch up with current events somehow).
I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.
* * * *
Kay Kenyon's A World Too Near, sequel to Bright of the Sky, feels like the middle volume it is. It promises much, but delivers little in the way of resolution.
Bright introduced Titus Quinn, once a starship captain who, with his wife and daughter, was sucked into a parallel universe, the Entire. He alone returned, but his memories were spotty and no one believed him, despite the mystery of how he got from where he disappeared to where he turned up. He became a batty recluse. But his one-time corporate masters learned more and came back to him, believing. They offered him a chance to go back, hoping to find a way to exploit the Entire. It took a manipulative villainess, Helice Maki, to make him agree, but he did. Before long he was learning about the Entire, a universe ruled by the monstrous Tarig who discovered it eons ago and filled it with copies of beings from our universe, the Rose. He learned where his daughter was, and he found a message left by his wife, revealing that the Tarig have built a monstrous Engine that will devour the entire Rose to fuel the continued existence of the Entire. And then he had to flee, bearing the warning homeward.
Now he's going back, armed with an ankle bracelet loaded with nanotech disassemblers designed to put paid to that Rose-threatening Engine. Alas, Helice Maki manages to go with him, and she has her own agenda. Titus makes his first mistake when he does not let her be killed at the start. And then they are off, looking for old friends, wary of old enemies, heading for Ahnenhoon, where the great Engine awaits its fate.
Meanwhile, Titus's daughter Sydney has regained her sight and is gathering the telepathic Inyx herds to plot an overthrow of the Tarig powers. Step one is to use the Inyx powers to discover the truth about who or what the Tarig are and then rat them out in lucid dreams sent to all the sentients of the Entire. She also is angry at Titus for not rescuing her earlier, and now she sends an assassin after him.
Titus's wife Joanna is at Ahnenhoon, where she is now the companion and lover of the Tarig master of the Engine. Yet she prays that Titus got her message and will come to save the Rose. Toward that end she plots and maneuvers.
And Titus is on his way. But as must be expected, he does find old friends, including Anzi, whom he could love in quieter times and if he did not crave Joanna, and new allies. The Entire is a world all its own, as much to be treasured as the Rose, and he is vastly troubled when Helice tells him his bracelet is defective: it will not destroy just the Engine, but all the Entire, strangers and friends, himself and his wife
and his daughter. The choices before him are agonizingly stark. He must choose one world to save, the Rose or the Entire, one set of friends and loved ones or another.
Kenyon tosses at him a hint of other options. Perhaps that is what prompts him to the only choice that allows—nay, demands!—a third volume in the series, when the dilemma will finally be resolved.
* * * *
Peter David's Tigerheart is a thoughtful examination of the classic Peter Pan story. David's tale takes Pan as backdrop; Peter, the boy who never grew up, is The Boy; Captain Hook is Captain Hack; Tinkerbelle is Fiddlefix; Wendy is Gwenny; Neverland is the Anyplace. The tale is told to Paul Dear, a boy whose mother has a baby girl who dies. The tragedy drives Paul's father from the house. Mama withdraws into deep sadness, distancing herself from her son.
And that son conceives a plan: He will, with the aid of ex-pirates living in his town, retrieve and revive Fiddlefix and travel to Anyplace to find a baby girl to make his mother happy again. So off he goes, to discover that The Boy is a supreme egotist and that when one acts out of concern for others, one is well on the way to growing up. The tale is darker than ever was the original, and the authorial voice is intended to make one feel that the author is sitting before you, telling the tale. But that voice feels so self-conscious that it succeeds in only a limited way.
Overall, it's a thoughtful piece of work, as I said. It's amusing, and in the end it is even very truthfully poignant. When Paul discovers that, if one can only accept it, one can have one's cake and eat it too, the reader—the grown-up one, at least, who if he or she is reading this surely retains contact with the child he or she was long years before—nods and smiles in agreement.
* * * *
The Glory that Was Rome has drawn the attention of a great many novelists in SF and fantasy, who have used it for the templates of new worlds and grand adventures. A few have drawn upon those times when the depraved and bloodthirsty Emperors Claudius, Nero, and Caligula ruled. But most have chosen to ignore the later period when the Empire fell, when provinces fell away, when emperors came and went as with the seasons. Theodore Judson goes some way toward relieving that lack with The Martian General's Daughter. The scene is Earth nearly three centuries hence. There is an empire, rooted in North America but capitoled in Mexico City, renamed Garden City. The general of the title is Peter Justice Black, who has risen from sergeant to become one of the staunchest of the empire's supporters. He is accompanied by his illegitimate daughter and amanuensis, Justa.
Peter and Justa are present when the last good emperor, Mathias the Glistening, dies and leaves the empire to his son, Luke Anthony, who combines the worst aspects of Claudius, Nero, and Caligula. Because Peter has a reputation for blunt honesty and loyalty and remains above the many conspiracies that would enlist him, they manage to survive Luke's reign, and even that of his successor. The book is Justa's chronicle of her father's career, of survival in a world overtaken by madness and losing all its technologies to a nanotechnological plague that destroys things made of metal. Toward the end, which begins the book, they are on Mars, and an anti-emperor conspirator is making overtures; because the conspirator brought the plague, they must return to Earth hurriedly, before their spaceships fail. Once there, Black must hurry to fight a pretender to the throne. To tell how he reached this point, Judson relies on repeated flashbacks, telling the tale of an empire in decline due to loss of technology and a plague of emperors and bureaucrats who think only of lining their pockets and indulging their whims for murder and rape.
The tale is one of steadfast loyalty and responsibility in a world to which such virtues have become foreign. The general, says Justa, is the last of his kind. However, she does seem to recognize that a time for such men will come again.
It's a cliché to say that history is cyclical. There'll never be another Roman Empire, though there may be extensive hegemonies such as that of the present-day United States, which is sometimes likened to an empire. It takes no great insight to say that the American empire will not last forever (though saying so may offend some people). We can thus read this novel as an allegorical forecast of the fall of the American empire in part because of the proliferation of venal, self-interested predators. I wish I could say that the allegory is completely unbelievable.
* * * *
Tim Eldred's Grease Monkey derives from an early ‘90s comic that got pitched to TV and film before becoming a graphic novel that is a genuine pleasure to read. The back-story is that evil aliens visited Earth, trashed the joint, along with sixty percent of humanity, and left. Fortunately, another group came along soon after and offered to help us get back on our feet so we could help keep the bad guys from trashing other joints. The help included raising gorillas to sentience, which is where Mac Gimbensky, ace mechanic on the Fist of Earth space station, came from. And ace he is, for Barbara's Barbarians is the space fighter squadron he takes loving care of, and they are number one in the standings.
So meet Robin Plotnik, cadet, just arriving on the Fist of Earth for training as a fighter maintenance assistant. Natch, he's assigned to Mac, and everyone takes pains to get him thoroughly scared of the ferocious ape. Except Mac isn't that bad. He takes his work seriously, he expects Robin to do the same, and if he spoke with a Scots accent, he'd fit right in with all the other classic tropes, some of which are right here, from the fellow cadet who's more interested in making money than in work, to the gal whom Robin can't speak his heart to and therefore loses. And don't forget the admiral, who definitely has a soft spot in her heart for Mac, even if duty does keep interrupting their dates. (If you think there should be rules against cross-rank fraternization, don't say a word. Arguing with one 600-pound gorilla is a bad idea. Arguing with two ... ‘Nuff said, eh?)
Fun stuff. Enjoy!
* * * *
Both Eric Flint and Mike Resnick have edited mystery anthologies, so perhaps it should surprise no one that they have gotten together to do The Dragon Done It. The book leads off with a brand new John Justin Mallory (he of Stalking the Unicorn) by Resnick, and closes with “The Witch's Murder,” by Flint and Dave Freer. In between those two, you'll find seventeen more tales of hard-boiled detectives, dragons, vampires, and many more eldritch heroes and villains by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Ron Goulart, Esther Friesner, Richard Parks, Randall Garrett, Harry Turtledove, and Gene Wolfe. Some of it's played straight, some of it's played for yucks, but how can you not love a book where you can find out the truth about Hansel and Gretel? According to Friesner, the witch is a private eye when Gretel shows up in the office wanting help finding out what's happened to her brother, Gunsel, er, Hansel.
* * * *
Way back in 1991, Mike Resnick published the first of his Teddy Roosevelt stories, “Bully.” The conceit was that TR took seriously a half-joking suggestion by an ivory poacher that he civilize Africa, bringing it Democracy and the American Dream (as of circa 1910). A century's education in post-colonial humility makes the outcome predictable, especially to those readers who did not snooze through the graduate seminar called Iraq, but this was very much Resnick's point. He takes a jollier tack when he sets TR to tracking down Jack the Ripper, hunting Wellsian Martians in Cuba, dispatching a Manhattan vampire, and more. He has taken great delight in imagining TR in various alternate-history scenarios and even in arguing (in the introduction) that it is all quite fitting, for TR was as enormously talented and energetic as many a pulp hero.
So order a copy of The Other Roosevelts. If Resnick stories aren't true, they are true-to-life, or at least true-to-character. Enjoy.
Copyright (c) 2008 Tom Easton
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Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Next month (our November issue) we begin another mind-stretching serial by Robert J. Sawyer, with a cover by George Krauter. In Wake, the term “mind-stretching,” often heard in connection with science fiction, applies a bit more literally than usual, with several minds stretching themse
lves—and each other—in literally unprecedented ways. All minds operate under limitations, which can be overcome by a variety of means; but probably all of those approaches have one thing in common. And the possibilities extend very far out, in ways both exhilarating and terrifying....
We'll also have stories by Paul Levinson, Carl Frederick, Richard A. Lovett, Alan Dean Foster, and Stephen L. Burns. The fact article, “The 3D Train Wreck,” comes from our own book reviewer of thirty years, Thomas A. Easton, wearing his other hat as practicing scientist. The title notwithstanding, it has nothing to do with trains, but everything to do with the social and economic disruption likely to result as “3D printing” becomes an important means of making all kinds of things. But that kind of train wreck, at least in the long run,
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Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
Your commentary on the evolution of “need” in writers’ equipment stuck a chord, and illustrated just how elastic the concept of need can be. In my case, the availability of computers and the Internet had quite an unexpected effect: it played an essential part in enabling me to write publishable fiction at all.
You may or may not be acquainted with the novel 1632 and the writers’ community that grew out of it. There's an active forum on the Baen web server, where techies and writers gather to debate the tech background and beat each others’ stories into shape.
After I read the first three books a year ago, I started following the discussion and thrashing out some of the engineering details for work in progress. (The 1632 universe is the hardest science fiction I've ever heard of, except for the time displacement event that starts it all, every bit of the science and technology is absolutely real.) Well, a few of the crowd started pestering me to write a story or two, and I had no idea at all of how to do that, or any idea that I could write anything besides a technical manual. But they kept after me, so finally I checked a couple of books on writing out of the library, and got an idea for a short-short—which I wrote a draft of and uploaded.
Analog SFF, October 2008 Page 25