The Involuntary Human, David Gerrold, NESFA Press, $27.00, 480 pp. (ISBN: 1-886778-68-X).
Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Jeff Prucher, Oxford University Press, $29.95, 342 + xxxii pp. (ISBN: 978-0-19-530567-8).
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John Scalzi concludes the series he began in Old Man's War with The Last Colony. The original premise was a nice inversion of traditional modes of warfare and a lovely echo of a line I first heard in the ‘6os, when critics of the Viet Nam war would say that it was so typical, old men sending young men off to fight the old men's war, and wouldn't wars be a lot simpler and shorter and even less likely if we could send the old pharts off to fight their own battles.
Maybe, but it wasn't very likely, then or now. So Scalzi imagined a future when humanity goes to space and discovers we're not the first. There are plenty of folks already out there, they're constantly fighting over colony worlds, and not one of them appreciates a new kid on the block. Hence the Colonial Defense Force, a need for troops, and at least a perceived need to keep the folks back home in the dark about how dicey things really are. So the CDF makes Earth an offer: Once Earthlings pass age 75, they qualify to join the Colonial Defense Force and be given a nice new super-strong young body with which to stave off the hordes of ravening aliens who threaten the colonies. The first novel started with John Perry and his wife Kathy. Alas, Kathy died too soon, but those who volunteered and died before their transformation got their DNA used to produce even superer soldiers for The Ghost Brigades. In due time, John became a hero and met Jane, who looked just like Kathy, presumably because she was Kathy's “ghost.” Together they went off in pursuit of a traitor scientist, Charles Boutin, who was trying to help the aliens defeat humanity, in part by tinkering up an electronic gadget that would give the definitely sentient Obin true consciousness. John and Jane wound up adopting Boutin's daughter Zoe, who came with two bodyguards from the eternally grateful Obin.
Last Colony opens to show John and Jane on the colony world of Huckleberry, where he is an ombudsman with a Solomonic gift for conflict resolution. Then the CDF's General Rybicki shows up to announce that they have a new assignment, managing a new colony called Roanoke being set up in defiance of an alien ban on new colonies. In other words, they're being planted right in the middle of a big red bull's-eye, all so the CDF can try to weaken the alien Conclave that forbade new colonies. Not that Rybicki is very forthcoming with this. The CDF is big on the mushroom theory of governance (keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em horse manure), so all John and Jane know at first is that Roanoke is supposed to be the very first colony settled from the colony worlds instead of Earth, they've got Mennonites aboard, and the manifest includes a lot of really retro gear. It's up to John and Jane—somehow!—to keep Roanoke from being pounded into dust. Where the earlier novels were pretty pure space opera, this one's all politics, of course, with much of it sounding fairly familiar. Zoe and the Obin turn out to be very helpful, and the CDF winds up with plenty of egg on its face as well as having to face some major changes in the way it does business, rooted largely in what John does to the mushroom farm.
As usual, I'm trying not to give away too much, though I can't help giving you a few cryptic clues. But no more. Scalzi has already shown himself to be a capable, dependable writer. If you've enjoyed the earlier books in this series, you know you just have to get this one. And if you picked up The Android's Dream (reviewed here last March), you know he has more stories to tell, just as entertainingly. Watch for them!
This one is space opera that looks fruitfully at the classic nature-nurture problem and concludes that one's experiences can make all the difference in the world. Scalzi once more does a very nice job.
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Sixty Days and Counting concludes Kim Stanley Robinson's eco-trilogy (preceded by Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below). Bantam bills them all as thrillers, but this one is more of a political diary, and as such I found it quite interesting. But thrilling? Not really.
Robinson's theme is the potential impacts of global warming, which—paradoxically!—include regional freezing. Indeed, in the last novel the Gulf Stream, which carries warmth from the tropics to the North Atlantic and thereby keeps England (which is on the same latitude as Labrador) habitable shut down and had to be restarted by massive human intervention. Sixty Days begins later on, when Phil Chase has become the president-elect and Frank Vanderwal, Charlie Quibler, and others are frantically looking for solutions to widespread droughts and extinctions. The search is complicated by Frank's brain injury and the absence of Caroline, who is being pursued by a black-ops agency starring her ex. But the complications are pretty low-key; even the attempted assassination of the president is more pro forma than anything else. Front and center is a U.S. president who has dedicated his first sixty days to redirecting policy, the economy, industry, energy, and more in the direction of sustainability, meaning less carbon, less greed, and more social justice. And it all moves ahead without nearly the obstacles one might expect.
So it's a political diary. New policies, aimed at mobilizing new technologies (most of which have been known for years), reining in corporate rapacity, and redirecting human motivation. It amounts to an agenda for change, so it's also a bit of a tract.
As a tract, how on target is it? I write textbooks in the field, so I can say that it seems very likely that the day will come—not tomorrow, but within a depressingly small number of decades (perhaps even before I die, and I'm 63)—when we will need to make changes just as drastic as Robinson portrays here. The details will surely be different, but most of the technologies he mentions as useful are either well-known (if not well-funded) or very short horizon. One, limiting sea-level rise by pumping seawater onto the Antarctic ice cap and into low spots on continents (though he fails to mention the extensive Qattara and Fayum depressions in North Africa; there have been proposals to dig canals from the Mediterranean and use the flow to generate power), is strikingly grandiose but perhaps feasible. The policy changes he puts in the story, of which the most important may be finding ways to stimulate the use of capital to help solve (instead of worsen) the problem, seem essential.
Does it work as a novel? It has plot and characters, but not much excitement. The dominant element is message, and a great many readers don't care for that. If you're a Robinson fan, though, it may not bother you a bit.
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If you read Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain, you surely wished to know more about the universe outside Nanagada. He hinted then, but all he said was that when Earth reached for the stars, it found folks already there. The ensuing debacle sent human refugees hunting desperately for worlds without aliens. One group—a mixed bag of Caribbeans, Aztec wannabes, French-speakers, and others—succeeded. But hot on their heels came the Teotl, who promptly assumed the role of Aztec gods and set things up for war and sacrifice. In Ragamuffin, Buckell reveals a great deal more. This sequel opens at the Pitt's Cross reservation on Astragalai, where Nashara is finally leaving, escaping a ghetto trap to resume her mission on behalf of Chimson, a world that, like Nanagada, has long been cut off from the stars.
A reservation? That's right. Under the alien dominated Benevolent Satrapy, humans live in reservations or ghettoes. Some are free, working as Hongguo, mercenaries, for the satraps and telling themselves they keep humanity alive by squashing defiance. Some exist as pampered pets. You can guess what Nashara's mission must be, but before she can do anything about it she must get as close as she can to New Anegada (Nanagada, of course). Hunting for a suitable stop, she soon discovers she is hunted. Worse than that, the Hongguo are now exterminating human habitats. Humanity seems doomed.
Meanwhile, back on Nanagada, the wormhole is reopening and more Teotl are coming through. But they too, it turns out, are refugees fleeing the Satrapy. Is alliance possible? Will they—and John deBrun and Pepper, the still-living representatives of the humans who first fought the Teotl centuries ago and are now renewing the ba
ttle—hook up with Nashara? Is there hope?
Science fiction being what it is, of course there is. Nashara is a powerful secret weapon who needs only to be able to link to the Hongguo computers to stop them in their tracks (unless they have borrowed a leaf from Sean McMullen's notebook and built computers from brain-controlled human beings). There is a human resistance movement ready to kick into high gear. The Teotl, despite being reduced to a remnant of former glory, have some very interesting technology. Some of the Hongguo are rather less under the Satrapy's thumb than anyone suspects. And the free humans are royally pissed-off, which as all SF readers know is all it really takes.
Is that a touch snarky? Well, maybe. “Underdog wins” is a popular theme in the genre, and it never seems to matter how massively outgunned the underdog is. Buckell breaks no new ground here, but he does do a very satisfying job of constructing his setting and characters. The plot moves rapidly and smoothly, and the reader should enjoy the ride.
Have fun!
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Ian McDonald tries to repeat his River of Gods success with Brasyl, with some panache. The setting is Brazil, Rio, the home of Carnival and samba, which is enough to lead the reader to expect flamboyance and verve. In the same spirit, Brazil is also a realm of vast economic contrasts, where the poor throng the favelas, “bairro” makes us think of “barrio” but means only “city district,” the rich buy their daughters nose jobs for high school graduation presents, and local TV makes North American tabloid TV look prim. That last is where it starts, with Marcelina Hoffman, TV producer on the make, worshipper of Our Lady of Production Values, supervising an entrapment show: leave a hot car on the street, and follow it, cameras rolling, when it gets stolen. Her life gets complicated when she starts running into signs that she has a double who steals her cab and sends messages under her name. Then there's Edson, a young man of the favelas, just as on the make as Marcelina. He has multiple identities to evade the ever-present surveillance, and through him we run into Fia Kishida, quantum physicist with a rack of bootleg quantum cores, and the Q-blades, quantum devices that slice through everything. His life gets complicated when goons with Q-blades destroy Fia (at least until he runs into her double, and then complicated ain't the word for it!).
McDonald soaks us in atmosphere: flamboyance, verve, religions (including soccer), lunch-hour plastic surgery, and all the rest of the potpourri that defines modern Brazil. Then he pops back to the 1700s, when an Irish Jesuit, Luis Quinn, is arriving to bring an errant missionary back to the fold. More atmosphere, darker, tinged in the blood and suffering of enslaved natives, and an expedition up the Amazon and its tributaries to find the missionary, building a City of God, but also enslaving and slaughtering. His life gets complicated when he is sent off to visit a tribe of natives with a reputation for accurate prophecy. It turns out that they capture emissaries such as Quinn, force them to drink the juice boiled out of a certain frog, which makes them see visions of multiple realities. Once they have answered questions, they generally die. But Quinn survives, maintains the ability to see the multiverse, and...
Quantum physics. Parallel worlds. Now you know where the doubles come from, but you don't have any idea what's going on. For that you need to add Tipler to Wheeler and think of Omega. There's a war on, and it's much more concerned with image than with anything real. That makes Brazil the perfect stage for this play, even as it calls into question the nature of reality and free will.
Brasyl is an impressively energetic novel that gains a great deal from the exotic ambience of its setting. It also makes an interesting philosophical point at the end: Only in imperfection, perhaps the work of the devil, can we find hope.
McDonald is well worth your attention.
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The halflings are halfers (or dwellers), and they don't dwell in holes, but they have hairy feet and they're stubby little fellows. The goblins are goblinkin, the wizard looks a lot like Gandalf, there's a dread lord in the background, and the dwarves wield mean battle-axes. And if there isn't a ring to dispose of, at least there's a quest. What more do you want? Well, maybe a little intelligence of the sort that is sadly lacking when Mel Odom tells the reader with a straight face that paddocks are found inside livery stables (p. 193).
If you don't mind blatant, ham-handed derivatives of classic works of fantasy, get a copy of The Quest for the Trilogy: A Rover Novel of Three Adventures. The basic notion is that Grandmagister Librarian Juhg, heir to the leadership of the Vault of All Known Knowledge and a halfer to boot, is trying to persuade humans, elves, and dwarves to establish schools, learn to read, and unify the realms before the goblinkin return. Wizard Craugh interrupts the proceedings by hauling Juhg off on an adventure, beginning by warning him of Kharrion's Wrath, a disastrous implement left behind after the Dread Lord Kharrion was defeated an age ago, and handing him a book penned by his predecessor, the famed Rover and Grandmagister Lamplighter Wick. The book is written in a code that only Juhg knows, and soon the reader is following Wick's search for the lost battle-axe of Oskar the dwarf smith (also at Craugh's behest). The book ends with a clue to the location of volume two, and thence to volume three. Meanwhile bog beasts invade a tavern, Craugh vanishes, leaving the word “Beware!” scrawled beside a puddle of blood, an animated scarecrow warns Juhg off the search, and...
You get the idea. It's adventure designed to appeal to fans who crave more of the same old same old, but not those who want a bit of originality or care with details. Not recommended.
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L. Sprague de Camp was one of the greats of SF&F. Anyone who ever reads his tales remembers them and revisits them happily for many years. Among his most memorable were the “Enchanter” tales he penned with Fletcher Pratt, beginning in 1940. Some of them were collected in The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), more in The Compleat Enchanter (1975) and The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1989). Now NESFA Press puts everything together in a single package, complete with a reminiscence by de Camp and an essay on how the hero should have been equipped by Jerry Pournelle, as The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of de Camp and Pratt.
The basic idea is that logic—a syllogismobile—can flip a character out of our familiar world into one of myth. To keep it entertaining, the hero, Harold Shea, tends to aim for one target and hit another, so he winds up visiting and adventuring in the worlds of Norse, Finnish, and Hindu myth, The Faerie Queen, and even Barsoom. It's all grand fun in the old Unknown mode, which insisted that fantasy could be as logically constructed as SF (Heinlein had a go at it too, with Magic, Inc.).
It ain't new, but it's still a treat. So treat yourself!
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David Gerrold has been one of my favorites since well before he and I and David Brin went to Miami to help the local PBS station think about doing an environmental SF show. It's still a good idea, even though they never did it. David G. is a good idea too, and I have long thought it a shame that we live on opposite coasts. But then the folks at Boskone got the bright idea to make him their 2007 guest of honor, so I got a chance to set and chat a bit with him, as well as to tell you about the Boskone GoH commemorative book, The Involuntary Human.
The introduction is by Spider Robinson, in which (he says) he tells the truth for a change, but David felt the need to issue a rebuttal. Since both of them are fond of puns, you can imagine the flavor. And that's before David gets down to business with a collection of Heinleinesque aphorisms by Solomon Short, followed quickly by one of his best-known tales, “The Martian Child.” A bit later, after more Short stuff, he gives us “Blood and Fire,” an unproduced Star Trek: The Next Generation script, written in 1986, and carefully refrains from telling the true story about what happened (though he does say that whatever you may have heard elsewhere is not the Truth at all). Add in an excerpt from the sixth Chtorr book, some Satanic limericks (cars illegally parked by the witches’ school will be toad—I said he liked puns), and...
There's more, of course, short (and Short) and long, fi
ction and non, loads of pages of very good stuff.
Enjoy!
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Jeff Prucher has assembled the very first dictionary that focuses on the terminology of SF, SF criticism, and fandom. It's Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, and while it's hardly exhaustive—as he says, practically every story in the genre introduces a new term or a new usage, so he focused on some 3,000 terms that have been used by many authors, often in many ways—it is an illuminating look at the history of the field. Perhaps most illuminating is that as you leaf through it, you find many terms first coined in SF (robot and stun gun, for instance) that are now part of the broader language. The shift has to do with the way science and technology eventually make SFnal dreams come true, as well as with the way SF penetrates the culture via film and TV. And most folks have no idea of where the terms came from!
Copyright (c) 2007 Tom Easton
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IN TIMES TO COME
Barry B. Longyear's unique detective team of Jaggers and Shad is back next month in the novella “Murder in Parliament Street,” which among other things, features probably the most unusual air force you've ever encountered—plus, of course, a mystery with a twist. We'll also have quite an assortment of other stories by writers including Henry G. Stratmann, John G. Hemry, Carl Frederick, David Walton, and Bud Sparhawk.
Richard A. Lovett's fact article ventures into unusual but intriguing territory: “The Search for the World's First Equestrians.” Who were they, how did they get that way, and how do we know? It's a fascinating look at both an often-overlooked wellspring of technology, and some of the less glamorous aspects of archeology.
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BRASS TACKS
Dear Stan,
In the June 2007 issue of Analog, which I recently scanned in the Pasadena library, I found an editorial on the subject of material suitable for publication in Analog. In particular I noted the requirement in general that stories for Analog conform to scientific principles and laws. Even whimsy should refer to assumed natural law such as the use of Hell as a heat source in reference to the second law of thermodynamics.
Analog SFF, October 2007 Page 24