by John Grant
To a large extent, her mind is made up for her, because she falls headlong in love with Megan. For her part Megan, who has hitherto preserved her virginity in the interests of maintaining distance from and impartiality towards her people, finds to her intense annoyance that she's fallen completely for Laurel ...
Unabashedly a work of lesbian evangelism, Daughters of a Coral Dawn is a work of very considerable charm, a quasi-allegory (genetic considerations alone make it a dubious candidate for straightforward science fiction, and the astrophysics is bizarre) that manages to make its profoundly anti-male sentiments, despite their irrationality (all blanket descriptions of millions of individuals are by definition irrational), quite unexceptionable, quite inoffensive. Where perhaps one really ought to take offence, because this sort of sexism is the cousin of racism, instead one grins and understands.
In part this is because of the sensitivity and sympathy with which Forrest draws a few of her central characters. One grows genuinely to like Megan, Laurel and Minerva, the latter being the historian who carries the main burden of the story in, particularly, the first half of the book. Outside this central circle, Forrest's hand is less sure; many of the women are just blurs distinguished only by their names, the three men are of course merely crude stereotypes, and Mother becomes fairly swiftly a rather annoying caricature. But that doesn't really matter because one becomes so involved in the tales and emotions of those three main protagonists.
For the lascivious, there are a few fairly graphic sex scenes, the last of which seems to go on forever for no reason other than attempted titillation. These scenes, although written with an extremely appealing wry yet loving lyricism, seem to have been grafted onto the main body of the book in order to establish its credentials – political or commercial – within its perceived market ghetto. It's as if Forrest had been told that there was no real market for sf with a lesbian theme, so she should aim primarily for the lesbian erotica reader and hope readers would tolerate the rest. This is actually a very great pity, because Daughters of a Coral Dawn is far too interesting and pleasing a book to be confined to any ghetto.
Copies of Daughters of a Coral Dawn were until very recently rather hard to find, because the book had been out of print for quite a while. However, in September 2002 Alyson Publications released a new edition (not seen by this reviewer; paperback, $13.95). Unfortunately, Alyson is a press whose main focus seems to be gay porn (oops, I meant "erotica"); back to the ghetto with a vengeance for this very charming, certainly non-pornographic work – but at least it's readily available once more. Whatever your sexual orientation, Daughters of a Coral Dawn is a book that's worth your time.
—Infinity Plus
Reunion
by Alan Dean Foster
Del Rey, 328 pages, hardback, 2001
Because of his prolific production of movie novelizations – some pretty good, some, to be honest, pretty dire – it is often almost overlooked that Alan Dean Foster has created a significant body of other fictions. These are often very enjoyable entertainments, and at their best can be something more than that.
Among the most popular of these independent novels have been those in his Pip and Flinx series, set in the far future when the Galaxy is divided up between the Humanx Commonwealth and a fairly limited number of alien cultures. Flinx is Philip Lynx, an empath who owes his erratic talent to his genetically engineered origins as an experiment by a now outlawed eugenicist cult, the Meliorare Society. Pip is his lifelong pet and ally, an alien creature that resembles a miniature dragon, spits corrosive venom and is capable, like Flinx himself, of a high level of empathy. Because of his abilities, Flinx feels – and in fact is – an anomaly in humanx society, and thus devotes his life to a quest for an understanding of his origins and hence of himself.
This episode of that quest starts on Earth, where he discovers that a computer file containing details of his origins has been stolen from a central databank, with the sole copy being expropriated to the remote desert world of Pyrassis, which lies within the region of the Galaxy governed by the AAnn, a hostile reptilian species. During a lengthy sojourn on Pyrassis, Flinx discovers a mountainous ridge there is in fact a vast alien transmitter, half a million years old. Sparked into activity during a gunfight between himself and a couple of AAnn xenarchaeologists, this device transmits a signal, its content unknown, to the gaseous moon of the Pyrassis system's outermost planet (which seems to be the sixth world if you go by page 86 or the tenth world to judge by pages 201 onwards). Still pursuing the stolen file, Flinx heads for this moon and discovers that all is not what it seems there. As he engages in a three-way struggle between himself, a vengeful AAnn military mission and a humanx party led by his infinitely evil yet also infinitely beautiful alter ego, he gets answers of a sort.
During the course of this entertainment there are flashes of early Harry Harrison and of Eric Frank Russell, yet Foster's telling lacks certainly the slickness, verve and humour and arguably the wit of either of these authors. In place of these attributes he deploys – or, more accurately, invites us to wallow in – an excess of vocabulary. (Okay, okay, so I'm calling the kettle black here.) Occasionally his logophilia runs rampant to deliberately amusing effect, but more often it leads him into linguistic booby-traps or to produce tracts of hugely over-adjectived narrative that feel consciously padded and are, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit dull.
As an example of over-adjectiving, we find on page 181 that Flinx "followed his excited former reptiloid captors", which has at least one adjective too many because of course the beings concerned were not former reptiloids. Again, on page 243 we discover that a membranous construct "looked like a razed segment of electrified soap bubble", a description markedly difficult to construe. Similarly hard to understand is this, from page 281: "Warm particles trickled from her tail where it emerged from the soothing sand, as it did from those of her staff." Or, on page 300, "Mahnahmi had moved so rapidly that the ... escort she had coldly and efficiently liquidated still lay where they had fallen in the corridor" – the corpses hadn't had long enough to crawl deadly off, one assumes. (The word replaced by an ellipsis in that sentence is actually "stunned". No, Mahnahmi didn't stun her escort: she killed them. Foster's meaning is that they had been stunned by the fact that she should suddenly turn on them and kill them.)
There is really rather too much of this sort of stuff.
The whole central section of the book, in which Flinx wanders about the desert surface of Pyrassis to no particular purpose except to have brushes with death – thirst, hunger, cunningly camouflaged alien predators, pursuing AAnn, etc. – seems uncommonly overextended. All that happens of any real importance during the course of 120 pages or so is that Flinx learns of the existence of the alien supertransmitter, alerts the AAnn to the presence of a human intruder in their territory (so that they can start chasing him), and in conjunction with a couple of AAnn inadvertently triggers the supertransmitter into activity. This portion of the book ends somewhat perfunctorily: suddenly, inspired by quasi-intelligent plants aboard, his ship's AI decides to send down a shuttle to rescue Flinx – and, whoosh, away he goes.
This anticlimax could be more disappointing to the reader were it not for the fact that, during those preceding 120 pages, the pulse has largely failed to pound. The great disadvantage of throwing vocabulary into a text by the bucketful is that all possibility of dramatic tension is smothered under the verbal scree. Here is just an abridged part of the description (pages 110-11) of those quasi-intelligent plants coming to the conclusion that Flinx needs rescuing from the Pyrassian surface:
His emboldened convictions were not matched by certain growths he had left behind on board the Teacher [his ship]. In ways that could not be explained by contemporary biology, physics, or any other branch of the familiar sciences, they sensed that something had gone seriously wrong with the warm-blooded vertebrate in whose charge they had been placed. When his absence persisted, they grew quietly frantic. Leaves twitched im
perceptibly in the windless confines of the Teacher's lounge. Petals dipped under the influence of forces far more subtle and less obvious than falling water. Unseen roots curled in response to wave patterns that had nothing to do with the subtle movements of soil and grit.
The situation was analyzed in the absence of anything Flinx or any other chordate would recognize as a brain. It involved a manifold process of cogitation far more alien than any propounded by AAnn or thranx, Otoid or Quillp. Among the known sentients, only the cetacea of Cachalot or the Sumacrea of Longtunnel might, upon exerting a supreme effort, have glimpsed an intimation of the process, but no more than that. It was not possible for compartmentalized organic brains deliberating by means of sequential electric impulses to fathom what was taking place among the plants of Midworld. [...]
In silence broken only by the whisper of air being recycled through the hull, envisionings sprang lucent and undiminished among the alien flora. What inhered among them inhered among every other growing thing on the world from which they had come. It was not a discussion in the sense that subjects were put forth for disputation and debate. Did clouds moot before resolving to rain? Did atmosphere argue prior to sending a breeze northward, or to the east? When a whirling magnetar blew off overwhelming quantities of gamma rays, was the direction and moment of eruption a consequence of cognizant confutation?
And so on. A later piece of description (page 154) seems curiously apropos in this context: "Like black pudding, the maze threatened to congeal around him ..." Maybe it's all intended to be a parody of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Or Lionel Fanthorpe. Or Michael Innes ...
The net effect of such overwriting is to turn what should have been a fast-moving romp – as per Harry Harrison's Deathworld (1960), shall we say – into something rather sluggish and tedious. Although the abrupt removal of Flinx from his Pyrassian hazards is, as noted, anticlimactic, certainly this reader greeted it with a heartfelt sigh of relief in that it signalled the end of an extended section in which it seemed the author had lost his way – as if his schema insisted that 40% or so of the book should consist of Flinx's adventures on Pyrassis but that, once Foster had got his protagonist there, he discovered there was a paucity of adventures to be had.
And the telling does indeed improve a bit thereafter, as we head towards the final confrontation between Flinx and his alter ego, although still there is never any great suspense because of the continuing plethora of unnecessary vocabulary. (The first section of the book, set on Earth, is much more plainly told and hence much more enjoyable and effective.) The ancient artefacts display their wonders, as ancient artefacts do; the greatest wonder of all is that Flinx has, at some stage in the past, encountered something just like one of them, and so knows what to do with it even if unclear as to its actual function. No real surprise for the reader here: what it does is zap the AAnn who have been malevolently hunting him down.
The conclusion of the book, alas, leaves much unresolved, thereby allowing for the inevitable sequel.
Foster is a very much better writer than this book portrays him – novels like Icerigger (1974) and Midworld (1975), while hardly heavyweight classics, are memorably enjoyable, even if the latter is perhaps a bit too redolent of Brian Aldiss's Hothouse/The Long Afternoon of Earth (1962). Reunion, by contrast, comes across as a romp that doesn't romp or a space-operatic Sense of Wonder tale that lacks the Sense of Wonder. It is reasonably entertaining in parts, but lacks either the vivacity or the central driving idea to pull the reader delightedly forward. Its blurb describes it as "a roller-coaster ride into the unknown", but the car – although occasionally trying to hiccup itself into motion – stays fixed in its place at the start of the rails, while the ideas and imaginings of the book seem to stick only too resolutely to the known.
Yet Foster can never be discounted, as far too many people do on the basis of all those novelizations. In the past he has often enough followed an unsatisfying novel with one that is tremendous fun. Dedicated followers of the adventures of Pip and Flinx will doubtless enjoy Reunion as a minor entrant in a series that began as long ago as 1983. Other readers might wish to wait until the next volume.
—Infinity Plus
Last Harbor
by George Foy
Bantam Spectra, 357 pages, paperback, 2002 reissue of a book originally published in 2001
Somewhere in New England there's a decaying harbour, and living there on a decaying sloop is the equally decaying Slocum, once the technical brains behind X-Corp Multimedia but now a recluse nursing himself through the miseries of his shattered marriage and rejection by his daughter. He wants nothing to do with the world, and the world is adamant that it wants nothing to do with him.
That future world is both recognizable and unrecognizable to us. The milieux within which Slocum moves are little different from their counterparts today; the poor and relatively poor have seen little change in their lives except possibly for the worse. The elite rich, by contrast, have grown inexorably richer, and the technological future is really theirs alone. The sad paradox is that they seem to be doing very little with it except find new ways of entertaining themselves, of filling up the hours with pleasurable idleness, of keeping their lives empty. The vitality of the human race seems to be almost exclusively the province of the poor and dispossessed.
The business of X-Corp Multimedia is interactive virtual-reality entertainment – the Flash. In effect, X-Corp Multimedia are the new drug lords, and they have come to rule the world; because the Flash is as mind-destroyingly addictive as any pharmaceutical yet of course perfectly legal.
One night, as Slocum contemplates either death or his dreams of sailing off to find freedom in the as yet untrammelled parts of the world that must surely exist – the two subjects of his contemplation are really one and the same – there moors in the harbour an almost impossibly huge luxury ocean liner. Aboard it, aside from the crew and security goons, there is only one person: an enigmatic and secretive young woman, Melisande, a recluse like himself by whom Slocum is at first idly attracted, then obsessed. As his obsession unfolds, it draws him back into the land of the living while at the same time progressively revealing the hideous truth not only of Melisande's existence but also of the way the world is run.
The Last Harbor is a singularly beautifully written book, one that transcends all genre boundaries; it is a serious and major piece of fiction. At the same time it is also a crusader for fiction, for the written and printed word, encroached upon as it increasingly is by other media forms. Consider this:
In that same cool blue light he looked at the book and saw what she [Slocum's estranged daughter] would see – an incomprehensible attempt to approximate, in black-and-white and painful script, a story that four years ago she could have watched in color and sound so perfect that she might as well have been living it. Worst of all, the gap between what he had put into it as both creation and gift, and what she saw it as, would substantify, more than her mother's words ever could, how the separation between them had grown. If he could not understand how she felt about the stories that had once shaped her life, what could he know of who she was now, or how she felt? And what right did he have to insist that he know the forces she reacted to daily?
In other words, the printed book grants the reader freedom – a freedom that is all too readily denied to the population of The Last Harbor's VR-dominated world. It is the same freedom that Slocum evisages when he fantasizes about sailing his sloop away to somewhere new, somewhere better, somewhere so bright and shining that it could only exist in those dreams of his – the freedom of exercising one's own imagination rather than simply participating vicariously in the enactment of someone else's imagination.
Foy is a master of atmospherics, and mood. This is one of those books where, once immersed, one has to make an effort to jolt oneself back into the everyday world, to recognize it as the true reality and the book's as a fictional one. Although there is in fact quite a lot of physical action in The Last Harbor, the real story is one
of mental action – and it's an absolutely engrossing one.
Foy's characterization is spot-on as well. He is an expert in that rare art of perceiving other human beings. Here is just one of the many little character vignettes that appear all through the novel:
[Vera's] gaze seemed the product of great internal pressure. Slocum remembered Vera from X-Corp Christmas parties ... She had always seemed poised and charming and without foundation; one of those people who talked a great deal and the more they talked the less, you realized, they were actually able to do.
Or this, spoken by one of the characters:
All dat man's got is, leaving his wife. Madre de diosh, what's he gonna have left if he really does it?
And then there is the somewhat longer description of Melisande when Slocum first meets her:
She had thin shoulders covered by a scarlet dressing gown that fell to the floor in columns so that for a microsecond he had the impression the ship had been designed to suit her. Or maybe it was the other way around and, because the whole ship was designed like that, she had dressed to match.
A white silk scarf was wrapped around her neck, which seemed to bend as it rose to support the oval of her face. Her nose was very straight until the end, where it turned up. Her chin and cheekbones were not weak but they did not quite work together – though they looked as if they might, in a plane projected forward from her face, closer to where she was going. Her hair was caught up in back and draped around her features in frondlike whirls and curves. Thin, a little crooked in how she held herself against the door; those were all part of his collection of first impressions of Melisande Yonge. But the ones that hit him hardest, and stayed with him longest, were: She was pale, so pale her skin looked like rice paper lit from within; and the combination of that pallor and her sudden appearance out of nowhere and the particular presence of her convinced him, for another microsecond, that he knew her; more specifically, that he had invented her... .