Are the moonriders responsible? Back on Earth, there are suddenly cries for more spaceships, armed spaceships, even an armed space navy. Meanwhile, Amy and McAllister have been parked at a museum while their ship goes on its rescue mission. And in the middle of the night, Amy sees an apparition that looks almost like Hutch and tells her to see to it that Origins is evacuated, for it is about to be destroyed.
McAllister thinks that Amy was dreaming. So do others. But Hutch is just the sort of stand-up lady a writer can build a series around. In previous novels, she displayed talents for bold deeds and no-nonsense decisiveness. Others do the deeds now, but the decisiveness is still there, as strong as ever. When eventually the kid gets to talk to Hutch, she goes out on a limb and pulls together an ad hoc evacuation flotilla.
Did Amy actually see anything? If so, was it moonriders? If so, what are they up to? Are they an enemy that warrants the expense of a space navy? Or are they the galactic equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency, making sure that we don't destroy the joint? If that's the case, what's with the asteroids?
Well, not everything is what it seems. But you'll have fun finding out what that means.
Recommended. And Jack assures me that there will be a sequel, so you have something more to look forward to.
* * * *
According to Jim Butcher, Harry Dresden is a wizard who consults with the Chicago cops. His adventures are chronicled in Butcher's eight (so far) Dresden Files novels, which appear to be very popular, partly because urban fantasy is hot, Harry's a very darkly romantic fellow, and he has a way of slicing and dicing his foes despite taking a few nicks himself. On the police force, even those who don't want to admit magic exists have to admit Harry has a pretty high effectiveness score.
Harry's world is shared by the White Council of wizards, Faerie, the Red Court of vampires (bad guys), soldiers of the Lord such as Harry's friend Mike, who carries a mystical sword into battle against evil, and ordinary folks who have nary a clue until something tries to eat them. And there's a war on, or several wars—vampires against wizards, faerie against vampires, Faerie faction against Faerie faction. As Proven Guilty opens, his Council superiors are telling him that he should look into a pair of mysteries: why one Faerie faction hasn't declared war on another and what sort of black magic is afoot in Chi-town.
Before long, Mike's daughter Molly is asking him to bail out a friend who has been arrested on suspicion of beating up an old man in a hotel bathroom, said hotel being the venue of Splattercon!! Then the monsters show up, phobophages out of Faerie disguised as horror movie monsters, Molly gets snatched, and Harry, with the aid of friends, must invade Faerie to get her back, confront his own superiors to save her life, and finally scratch his head over the nature of the mysterious force that seems to be pushing everyone around.
I vastly oversimplify, for I have no mind to describe the subplots, relationships, schemes, and background that decorate the plotline. They're there, they are well done, and they make Harry's world rather more convincing than many other fantasies. Nor does it hurt a bit that Harry is an interesting fellow. Think Buffy in a trenchcoat and have fun.
* * * *
Many people are deeply concerned today about the extent to which the government wants to keep an eye on everything about us, from our movements on the street to our emails and even our browsing habits. Those who favor surveillance argue that it is for our own good, to protect us against muggers and terrorists, pornographers and sexual predators. They don't seem too worried about invasions of privacy or perhaps we would see less spam and phishing attempts in our inboxes. Worry about privacy is the province of those who argue against surveillance, saying there is little room for it under the U.S. Constitution.
But government snoopiness has a long history, reaching back to the CIA of the 1960s (when long hair was deemed a threat to public order) and the FBI under Hoover. It goes back even further, when in the days after World War II the National Security Agency strove to eavesdrop on international telecommunications traffic. The resulting Echelon program, a multinational effort based in England, processed an astonishing amount of messages.
For our own good, eh? In Echelon, Josh Conviser supposes that the Echelon program grew to become a great force for peace and order. It detected and forestalled problems. It promoted peace and aborted war by judicious applications of information and misinformation. It monitored work in research labs around the world and preempted disruptive innovation, either killing or co-opting the inventors. And in due time, Echelon agent Ryan Laing, rock climbing to relieve his mind of guilt and pain, falls to his death. Fortunately, Echelon has in its arsenal of preempted technology a kind of nanotechnology, called “drones,” that lets Laing be revived and reassembled. On his next mission, he stumbles across evidence of a high-level conspiracy, and soon Echelon itself has crashed and Laing and his operator, Sarah, are running for their lives.
As soon as Conviser says the computer code that defines Echelon displays unusual logic, the astute reader leaps to the conclusion that aliens must be behind it (after all, mere humans wouldn't want to control the world, would they?). But the characters don't see it. Instead Sarah hares off to the Arctic on what seems no clear clue at all to find an iceberg still bearing an old Cold War listening post, an antique computer, and a memory board still holding the code ancestral to Echelon. This is one of several moments when I wanted to throw the book across the room. The time is many decades after the Cold War ended, a span over which icebergs and ice floes (which were more likely to serve as bases) vanish. And with global warming threatening to make the Arctic ice-free within a few decades, I felt a massive disconnect.
It does not help that Conviser periodically halts the story while Laing and Sarah agonize over their pasts and sprinkles an annoying number of contrived sound-bites throughout his pages. He overwrites egregiously when he could be putting his effort into reading about his world (the global warming thing) and devising ways to smooth out and justify the arbitrary jumps in his plot.
The blurb likens him to Philip K. Dick, who had similar faults. But faults they were and are, and I cannot find it within me to recommend this one.
* * * *
Esther Friesner has more range than almost any other two writers you can name. She can excel in the dark, serious, adult mode of Sword of Mary (reviewed here in the June 1997 issue). And she is superb in the quite light and nonserious young adult mode of Temping Fate.
The basic idea is pretty simple. Ilana Newhouse is desperate for a summer job for several reasons. The biggest may be that her sister is being quite insane about her upcoming wedding. Next to that is parental nagging. But the kid dresses like a wannabe goth, complete with an inked skull on her cheek (and didn't sister Dyllin shriek about that!), so she's not having much luck in the conservative Connecticut suburbs. That's when she discovers the Divine Relief Temp Agency, where Mrs. Atatosk thinks skull and attitude are good signs, not bad ones. The kid is hired.
Will it last? The first assignment features a talking spider and a job typing death receipts for the Fates. Yes, those Fates. D. R. Temps finds help for the gods themselves, who love to take the occasional day off to go to the beach or their kids’ soccer games. Ilana makes new friends amongst the other temps, meets Circe (would you believe she's into feminine empowerment?), and does quite well, right up to the point where half of Olympus shows up at Dyllin's wedding.
The only other author I can think of who could have written this is the late, lamented Thorne Smith. He would have given it a more adult tone (he could be pretty racy), but he would not have made it more fun.
The next stop for this one is the hands of a certain niece.
* * * *
I enjoy John Moore's fractured fairy tales (Heroics for Beginners, reviewed here December 2004, and The Unhandsome Prince, October 2005), so it was a pleasure to find Bad Prince Charlie in my mail. In brief, it's even better than its predecessors, partly because it is a bit less of a parody and more of a story
in its own right. The bad jokes are still there in plenty, but when Moore introduces the down-at-heels kingdom of Damask and its problems—the king is dead, the rain is so unreliable that crop failures are routine, and a neighbor would like to undo the secession of a century before—the story makes perfectly good sense from the start. So does the proposed solution to the problems—recruit Bad Prince Charlie (who earned his sobriquet by abusing a date), illegitimate son of the late king, to serve as regent, get the populace in a rebellious mood, and spark a neighborly takeover. He agrees only when the beauteous Lady Catherine Durace appears to be part of the deal, and then he promptly proves to be not so bad at all. He's been away at school, studying things like engineering, and he has an eye for the books and a tendency to toss corrupt officials into jail. If only that didn't conflict with the Standard Operating Procedures or Culture of Corruption of the bureaucracy, he would actually have a decent shot at setting the kingdom straight. He also has a practical turn of mind, and when he gets the wizardly weather forecast—drought and crop failure—he starts rationing immediately. This ticks off the people. So he's doing all the right things, and rebellion seems right on schedule.
Lady Catherine, of course, turns out to have her own agenda, and the agenda of the uncles who recruited Charlie as Chump Royale turns out to be a bit different from what they said at first. It seems the missing chief wizard just may have created an impressive Weapon of Magical Destruction, and that's what the neighbor really wants. Meanwhile there's the High Priestess of Matka, who knows rather a lot about everything, peddles advice, and seems to have a very unholy interest in Charlie.
Some of the story's elements are close kin to things we've seen in the news over the last few years. That is surely deliberate, for it adds point to the humor. But it also brings the novel so perilously close to political satire that one can actually read it for commentary on how to do certain things right. Perhaps that is why I think it better than the earlier books!
Look for it, and enjoy!
* * * *
Since Marianne de Pierres is an Australian, it is no surprise to find her novels set Down Under. Code Noir, the second Parrish Plessis novel, centers on a refugee camp, the Tert, built upon an industrial zone polluted with assorted nasty chemicals, nanotechnology, and warped people, including kids with mechanical and biological enhancements, including bioweapons. The time is far enough in the future that some of the refugees come from Merika, but not so far that de Pierres thinks referring to architecture as “Art Crappo” doesn't make sense. The past is strong in other ways as well, for the people of the Tert have an assortment of shamans rooted in many cultures, and all their magic works.
Is it science fiction or fantasy? Neither de Pierres nor those quoted on the cover seem to care. She has loads of “futuristic cool” and that's enough. Hollywood, which I suspect warped the author's mind at a young age, often seems to need no more justification than that for its efforts, so it must be true.
Well, no. SF is rooted in rationality. Fantasy is not. And I suspect de Pierres doesn't know or care about the difference. After all, she is capable of hybridizing dogs and rats as “canrats” and of saying that a waterway contaminated with copper sulfate is so toxic that it kills instantly, on contact. (It won't do that even if the active toxin is biological. Even viruses and nerve gases take time!) She also waves the nanotech wand whenever she wants a flashy danger, such as a fiber-optics bundle bursting from the ground to become a tower that captures and shreds living things.
So what's the story? Parrish emerged from her first novel, Nylon Angel, as a hero. Now she wants to get her life back together and find some way to handle the parasite that wants to take her over. But here's the Cabal, saying she has a debt, someone has swiped their shamans, and her job is to get them back, before the King Tide in less than two weeks. They promise help with the parasite if she succeeds. Of course, she doesn't seem very likely to survive, but that's not the sort of thought that stops a Parrish. She puts the word out that she needs info, informers die in nasty ways, and she's off and running, heading for Dis, home to an evil mastermind who plays with the bodies of children as if they were made of modeling clay. Along the way she picks up an assortment of guiding spirits (including a canrat), runs into old friends and enemies, displays her bleeding heart for the reader to empathize with, discovers an overarching, evil scheme, and finally manages to pull at least some of the chestnuts out of the fire.
Alas, de Pierres's characters and world exist at too far a remove from reality. The same can be said about a great many other novels, of course, but other writers generally take some pains to justify their visions. Despite all the futuristic cool and frenetic action, de Pierres does not make me give a darn. One villain remains on the loose, so there is room for a sequel, but I hope she refrains.
* * * *
“Space opera” used to be a pejorative term. It meant a pretty direct transliteration of the old-fashioned Western into SF, with the hero riding a spaceship instead of a horse and heading the villain off at the nebula instead of the pass. It was written rapidly to formula with the simple goal of collecting a check. It was hackwork.
It was also popular, for it put good against evil in no uncertain terms. The stakes were high—the fate of humanity, the world, or even the universe. It was exciting, it was adventure, it was unsubtle, and if it makes you think of certain modern SF movies, some critics have in fact criticized those movies as representing no SF past about the 1930s.
Yet today a great deal of SF is cast in a very similar high-stakes, adventurous, exciting, good vs. evil mold, to the point where critics speak of the “new space opera” as a major and even dominant line of modern SF. And when they say “space opera,” they are not knocking it. In fact, they often seem to forget that the term was ever negative.
How did this happen? Hartwell and Cramer track the story in The Space Opera Renaissance, with thirty-two examples, a massive anthology. From “World-Wrecker” or “World-Saver,” Hamilton through Leigh Brackett (whose 1949 “Enchantress of Venus” is still readable) and Cordwainer Smith, David Brin, Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, Catherine Asaro, Allen M. Steele, Gregory Benford, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stephen Baxter, to Charles Stross, and many more, the case is clear. Space opera occupies a prominent place in our memories of the best and is indeed front and center on the modern SF stage.
Perhaps we should ask whether the negative use of “space opera” was ever a fair use. It came from the fanzines, which—beloved though they be—were home to some remarkably pretentious and snotty would-be critics. It was given better credentials by some equally pretentious and snotty critics of the British New Wave. From the outside, SF has been condemned as popular in antithesis to more literary fiction. Within the field, popularity has also earned sneers, perhaps because popular writers and works do not advance the field and/or the fight against the external snobs. I have even uttered some of those sneers myself, usually by way of wondering why utter tripe is popular and something better (which may in fact qualify as space opera!) is not.
Call it “space opera” or “adventure SF” or “hard SF” or “modern SF,” a great deal of very good work is done in the category. If you are not interested in the debate over terminology, this anthology is an excellent overview of the category, with enough excellent work by excellent writers to keep any reader happy for a while. It could also serve as a great introduction to SF for young or new readers, and I would love to see copies in every public school and town library.
Copyright © 2006 Tom Easton
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
BRASS TACKS
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
I enjoyed Mr. Rosenkranz's short story, “Preemption” (June ‘06). The nicely crafted story brought to mind the alternative view written by Eric Russell entitled “Into Your Tent I'll Creep” back in the late 1950's which is also a good read.
C. Henry Depew
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Dear Dr. Schmidt:
; Just finished reading Carl Fredericks's story ("The Door That Does Not Close"), which I liked very much. However, having visited Romania's Black Sea coast not too long ago, I felt that I should let you (or your proofreader) know that in Romanian, the site in the story is spelled with a small diacritical mark (similar to the Spanish c's cedilla) placed under the second “t” in Constanta, so that is more properly spelled in English (and pronounced phonetically in Romanian) as “Constantsa.” Unlike the description in the story, Constantsa is a thoroughly modern town, but with many interesting Roman ruins (church, baths, the largest Roman mosaic floor ever discovered, a large statue of Ovid, who was exiled there in the 1st century AD) and such modern amenities as a domed casino (not unlike the building the story described), art and archaeological museums, the Black Sea's largest beach, with an amusement park and Water World, and decent restaurants. A very nice place to visit, if you ever have a chance.
Jack Garrett
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Hi Stan,
I just read your editorial ("Can't Argue With That,” June 2006). I think some of us contributors who hold Christian/Jewish/etc. views actually stated them on that forum only to repeatedly hear that you boycotted such folk. And to get drawn endlessly into Catholic bashing.
It's going to be exciting times on the message board for a while, though!
All of which is a roundabout way of saying you're dead right in your basic point, but it's not just religion: it's everything. Do you think the ultimate culprit is sound-bite politics? I'm not attacking Kansas here—with a gubernatorial election looming in Oregon, we're starting to hear it already. Incredibly mean attack ads from every direction, determined to twist their opponents’ views into something inaccurate.
A libertarian friend of mine says that this is a side effect of a drawn-out political process better adapted to 150 years ago, when you had to wait for mail to go overland, and news was slow. Our campaigns are too long, he argues, and therefore inherently dirty. In comparison, he cites the Canadians. Alternatively (also citing the Canadians) he says it's an artifact of the two-party system. Coalition-building governments, such as parliamentary systems, can't afford the bitter polarization, and are therefore more cautious.
Analog SFF, October 2006 Page 24