There are three viewpoint characters, but the search for answers starts with Jerry Culpepper, who is not a professional digger-out-of-secrets like Alex Benedict, but head PR flack at a very-near-future NASA. By 2019, the Agency Culpepper is representing is considered less and less relevant, its glory days of manned missions long gone and its very existence threatened by budget restrictions and waning public interest. Culpepper spends his time presiding over weekly press conferences or, as the novel begins, smallbeer events like the opening of an exhibit celebrating the glory days of manned spaceflight and moon landings. But when a tabloid finds a copy of an anomalous radio transmission from one of the moon-orbiting Apollo flights, the official version of the first lunar landing is called into question.
The more Culpepper tries to explain why this is a non-issue, the more silly-season play the story gets, mostly at his expense. But to billionaire Morgan ‘‘Bucky’’ Blackstone, who would like to ramrod a private-enterprise return to space exploration, it’s something worth following up in a more serious way. Blackstone is a captain of industry who started out as Hugh Heffner and ended up as a cross between Howard Hughes and Donald Trump (though without the long fingernails or bad hair), with a big dose of Heinlein’s D. D. Harriman (and maybe Jubal Harshaw as well). So he starts looking, too – and also decides that the lunar expedition he has been mounting might be able to find some answers when it lands on the far side of the moon. Meanwhile, President George Cunningham decides he would like some answers as well, since even with access to all manner of government secrets, he can’t figure out what might or might not have happened a half-century ago, and why nobody told him about it.
The puzzles just keep getting more puzzling – an excellent trait in a narrative driven by puzzles. It’s clear early on that (despite initial uncertainty on the part of some characters) odd things really did happen on a couple of pre-Apollo-XI lunar missions and that all records of such events were thoroughly and deeply buried. Thus the questions pile up: not only ‘‘Were there early, secret moon landings?’’ but ‘‘What was found out there?’’ and ‘‘Why was it all kept secret?’’ and ‘‘Where are the answers hidden?’’ The suspense remains nicely suspended across the story’s long, gradual arc, while we watch Bucky Blackstone act out his Man Who Sold the Moon ambitions as Culpepper digs and digs and President Cunningham does the same from his end, and with considerably more powerful tools.
It’s a rather old-fashioned story, with a feeling not unlike the Heinlein-homage of Apollo’s Outcasts, and it resolves in ways that Readers of a Certain Age will recognize immediately on Page Last. (And that are designed to surprise readers of the short story version.) Despite the potentially history-changing nature of the secrets, there is a distinct lack of melodrama: there are no villains in the cast, and the pace is leisurely as we make our way through the everyday operations of bureaucracy, politics, journalism, and even the nosebleed levels of wildcat capitalism. That said, I found myself turning the pages as quickly as I could, even though there was nary a dead body or superweapon or car chase to be found. And that’s an interesting trick in itself.
•
The collective voice of Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner has become a familiar one, thanks to the series of novels that began with Fleet of Worlds and continued through Juggler of Worlds, Destroyer of Worlds, and Betrayer of Worlds. This sequence has served as both prequel and sequel to Niven’s solo Ringworld series: the Fleet novels begin two hundred years before the events of Ringworld and eventually surround that book and its immediate Nivenian sequels with deep backstory and behind-the-scenes action that also encompass large chunks of the entire Known Space future history and even the multi-collaborative Man-Kzin Wars spin-offs. I had thought that the fourth volume, Betrayer, was the Fleet-sequence wrap-up (though with a few loose ends), but now we have Fate of Worlds, a fifth and (according to the jacket copy) final entry in this collaborative meta-series. Niven never does tie up every loose end, though, so we’ll see about that.
And for readers who have yet to start the series, or who have read only the first volume or two, the paragraphs that follow will try not to give away too much, but if you have enjoyed the way Niven (with or without collaborators) has built and rebuilt and spackled and repainted and redecorated Known Space in, say, Crashlander, you really should go read the first four Fleet books now, for their expanded description of the society and character of the Puppeteers and the presentation of new alien viewpoint characters from among the aquatic Gw’oth and the ferocious Pak – as well as for the usual ingenious intrigues and space operatics.
But even for those who have read the earlier books – how to review the finale of a series that, like The Cassandra Project, is built around puzzles and secrets? Much of the story depends on characters and whole species being kept in ignorance of or being deceived about important facts, and some of these secrets are withheld from the reader as well. But other secrets are only being kept from characters inside the story, and these can be discussed in front of the Spoiler Curtain: the deceptions and manipulations the Puppeteers (who prefer to call themselves Citizens) have practiced on other species, notably obstreperous folk like humans and kzinti; the shameful nature of the Puppeteers’ deception and domination of a client population of human ‘‘Colonists,’’ now free and in charge of their own mobile planet, New Terra; or the fact that the Puppeteer government is ruled not by the Hindmost and his cabinet but by an alien Gw’oth collective intelligence acting through a computer-generated Puppeteer persona, a reversal of the situation the Citizens have imposed on other species.
This volume’s plotline jumps back and forth in time, setting up its rather spread-out present action and explaining even more pieces of backstory. Much of the activity arises from the aftermath of the Fringe War, a low-grade multispecies conflict for control of the Ringworld and its technologies. That conflict evaporated when the Ringworld vanished at the end of Betrayer of Worlds, which means the freed-up armadas can turn their attention to the Puppeteers’ Fleet and get some payback for past offenses. On New Terra, professionally and personally paranoid security operative Sigmund Ausfaller is in retirement and disfavor with an isolationist regime that would just as soon not have any contact with or knowledge of the main body of humankind. On Hearth, the current Hindmost is caught between the maneuverings of his sociopathic rival, Achilles, and the orders of his secret alien masters, while Achilles promotes enhancements to the powers of Proteus, the Gw’oth’s unique artificial intelligence, as part of his plan to regain leadership.
Even readers who have kept up with the series will need a program to follow the players – and one is thoughtfully supplied at the front of the book, along with brief timeline and a graphic mapping the major areas of action. It’s a story full of flashbacks, explanations, connections and reconnections, and general cleaning-up on the way to hash-settling and happy endings, but it also has some very nice features all its own, particularly the sections dedicated to the Gw’oth multiplex mind and the evolution and ambitions of Proteus. By the last page, large portions of the story have literally flown off in all directions, and that situation leaves open some interesting possibilities. So, as I said, we’ll see.
–Russell Letson
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRIENNE MARTINI
Year Zero, Rob Reid (Del Rey 978-0-345-53441-5, $25.00, 372 pp, hc) July 2012.
Merge/Disciple, Walter Mosley (Tor 978-0-7653-3009-3, $24.99, 288pp, hc) October 2012.
Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea, Kage Baker & Kathleen Bartholomew (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-464-5, $35, 176pp, hc) December 2012. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519;
Shift, Kim Curran (Strange Chemistry 978-1-908844-04-0, $9.99, 302pp, pb) September 2012.
‘‘Dying is easy,’’ fictional actor Alan Swann said in My Favorite Year. ‘‘Comedy is hard.’’
Audience m
embers, whether they be readers, movie-goers, etc., shouldn’t notice just how hard it is to be funny. Comedy should appear effortless. Look at Douglas Adams, long the SF/F comedy gold standard. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feels almost weightless, as if it frothed fully formed from Adams’s head. I’ll bet you a green piece of paper that the hardness of its birth is inversely proportional to how easy it feels.
You can feel how hard Rob Reid is working in Year Zero. His devotion and work ethic are mighty indeed – but the story and his jokes never find that bubbling life that makes the funny work. The premise is promising: two aliens, Carly and Frampton, show up in Earth lawyer Nick Carter’s office looking to negotiate a contract for rights to all of the planet’s music, which they’ve been pirating for more than 30 years.
Complications ensue. Reid runs through pop culture, attempting to skewer everything from reality shows to the UN. A few bits land, like one about a loathed Microsoft character and another about Alanis Morisette, but most feel aspirationally antic rather than truly satirical. Like this bit from a waiter describing the day’s menu:
Tonight’s special is a grass-fed, free-range Wagyu petite filet. It’s sourced from an agrarian cooperative that’s run by differently abled ranch hands. Waitstaff will bring you some Hopi blue corn piki bread shortly. Meanwhile, you may wish to examine our butter list.
Your mileage may vary, of course. What’s fall-down funny to one reader can be largely meh to others – which is part of what makes comedy so hard because so little is universally funny. But for this reader, Year Zero wasn’t (pick one) satirical enough or nuanced enough or silly enough to find its own momentum as a story, not even a not-funny one.
•
Walter Mosley is arguably best known for his crime fiction featuring hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, but he writes SF/F, too, every now and again. His science fiction novel Blue Light was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998. Given that, it’s hard to figure out why these two short stories, which have been published in the old Ace double style by Tor, are an unintentionally thin parody of what science fiction ought to be.
In Merge, our hero is Raleigh Redman, a recent lottery winner who is visited by a ‘‘magical’’ stick that turns out to be an alien lifeform. In Disciple, the hero is Hogarth Tryman, who receives ‘‘magical’’ IMs from what turns out to be an undersea alien lifeform. The two men have a lot in common; both are African-American, lonely, powerless and sexually inadequate.
The stories differ slightly, once the initial alien encounter begins. Tryman’s alien Bron convinces him to perform seemingly small tasks, like taking a certain cab and praising the driver, that work like a butterfly effect in order to save Bron’s brethren. Redman’s alien wants him to bring him fruit and, then, have sex in order to save its brethren. Ultimately, Redman’s alien transforms into his dreamgirl Cylla, whom he acrobatically penetrates whenever time permits. Redman is her Adam, he points out. ‘‘I was the mud and muck from which she arose.’’ Oh, and eventually, Redman winds up in Gitmo.
There could be something intellectually engaging in these stories – about feminism, colonialism, race relations, power – if they weren’t so silly. Perhaps there is more going on than first appears; these are the middle two in the six-story cycle called Crosstown to Oblivion. If you read the other four – The Gift of Fire and On The Head of a Pin were published in May 2012, Stepping Stone and The Love Machine will be published in April 2013 – it may grow into something profound. But these two stories seem like too thin a ground for nearly any plant to thrive.
•
A few years before her death, Kage Baker introduced another set of characters into her Company world, which she’d been developing since 1997’s In The Garden of Iden. The women who work at Nell Gwynne’s, a Victorian Era-ish brothel that services Britain’s most powerful men, are in league with the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, which will eventually morph into the Company itself. In Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea, the ladies decided to take a holiday to the seaside. But trouble, of course, is not far behind them.
The Lady Beatrice, Mrs. Corvey, et. al., spot an odd underwater ship out at sea. An American, Mr. Pickett, seems to be up to something. Each woman puts her special skills to use and a cozy novel unfolds. Baker’s sister Kathleen Bartholomew finished On Land based on Baker’s notes. The result is perfectly fine but seems to lack the seemingly effortless charm and earthy emotion that Baker’s best had. It’s nice to visit these women again, yet it is, at best, bittersweet. There’s never a moment of doubt about who will triumph in the end but it is fun to fall into Baker’s world, despite (or, strangely, because of) her death.
•
Sixteen-year old Londoner Scott Tyler, protagonist of Shift by Kim Curran, is a lot like that Potter kid who discovered that he has secret powers and that there is a dark plot afoot. Tyler isn’t a magician, though, he’s a Shifter, which means he can change any decision that he’s made in the past and his present will rewrite itself, both for good and for ill. Tyler also goes into training at a Ministry of Magic-esque agency called ARES, where he learns to harness his power for good rather than evil. Because there are, of course, those who are doing the exact opposite.
This sort of coming-of-age story is as old as stories themselves. Rowling didn’t invent it, just spun it in a newish direction. Ditto Curran. Her hero is learning how to work in an imperfect world. Where Rowling aimed her series (at the start, anyway) at younger kids, Curran aims for the Hunger Games cohort. There’s a love interest, Aubrey Jones, who is a quirky young woman who initiates Tyler into the ways of the shift. And there is a Malfoy analogue, Zac, who may or may not be trouble.
What makes Shift shine – it is a remarkably engaging story that takes off quickly and never looks back – is Curran’s brisk voice and snappy dialog. No matter how familiar its skeleton, Tyler’s story is one well told. While it would be nice to know a little bit more about how shifting works and what the ground rules are, Shift is a more than solid story that takes on its own life.
–Adrienne Martini
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: DIVERS HANDS
Something Red, Douglas Nicholas
Nell Gwynne’s on Land and at Sea, Kage Baker & Kathleen Bartholomew
The Diviners, Libba Bray
After, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds.
AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Ivor W. Hartmann, ed.
CECELIA HOLLAND
Something Red, Douglas Nicholas (Emily Bestler Books 978-1-4516-6007-4, $25.00, 320pp, hc) September 2012.
Sometime in the 1200s, in the north of England, a little band of people is toiling through the mountains, trying to get to the coast before the snow closes down the high passes. The travelers are Irish exiles, a dispossessed queen and her followers, on their way back to reclaim their true home. The land they are passing through seems like nobody’s real home: a place of cross purposes, a mix of hostilities – Normans, Saxons, tiny isolated communities in a wilderness of forest and rock. And the bitter winter is swiftly burying them in a relentless driving blizzard.
Douglas Nicholas’s hero is Hob, a half-grown boy whom the Irishwoman Maeve, who leads the band, has adopted. Hob is the standard fantasy protagonist, a green boy who does not yet know who he really is, and who will be tested in the story until he finds out. Maeve herself (Molly, in her mundane life) is a stock Irish battlequeen, who at one point whips out a knife and hurls it point first into a wall to prove her bona fides. Besides Hob, her band consists of her daughter Nemain, a willowy and elusive shee, and Maeve’s lover Jack, a manly brute yoked in the queen’s service.
But it’s Hob we come to love, because we can inhabit him. In his frozen feet we sense the furious cold, the icy wind creeping through his clothes makes us shiver; through him we experience the gladness of coming into a place of warmth and safety, the chance beauty of an ox’s eye, the delicious taste of fresh bread. His innocence, his terror, his awakening
love, and his courage make the story happen.
This is a world shot through with magic, where the violence of humans is feeble against the power and shock of the forces of nature, all of it far beyond the ability of a mere boy even to understand. As they toil up to a monastery, Hob hears a cry in the forest.
His heart seemed to freeze. He was aware that he had seized the rope of the ox’s bridle and was holding the big head, or perhaps just clinging to it. His eye was locked to the curtain of trees, and now he saw a flicker, a glint of russet color: red as fox, but tall, tall, high as a big man perhaps, but hard to judge how to tell from here, then gone as though it never was. A faint coughing snarl came down the wind, and the ox shoved hard against his chest, breathing moist heat through the folds of his sheepskin coat, its blunted horns to either side of his body. The huge beast was hiding its face against him.
Out there, in the snow, something red is after them.
Hob and his companions stagger on, coming to the first of the three refuges they will find along the road: a monastery, an inn, and a castle. In each, they meet more people, including a savage Norman lord, the pretty and flirtatious and doomed girl Margery, an inept bunch of bandits, and some mysterious Lithuanians. In each place, the great menace stalking them all becomes more real and more horrifying, until, at last, they come face to face with it.
One of the problems with this book is that Nicholas is too good. He makes it so real, so scary, the wild, snow-blasted, wind-frozen wilderness, where the people struggle even to lift one foot from the ground, while a bloody beast strides uninhibited from massacre to massacre, that when he finally solves the puzzle, it’s disappointing. The wilderness has become a standin for reality itself, for the utter randomness and power of the phenomenal world, whether 13th century or 21st. Reducing it all to a fantasy gimmick doesn’t satisfy.
Locus, December 2012 Page 10