That said, Firebird has a major flaw, one that haunts all of the Benedict/Kolpath books. Chase Kolpath tells these stories, but the writing is rather flat and there is nothing particularly distinct about her character. That is to say, she’s not a Dr. Watson. And Benedict certainly is no Sherlock Holmes. His character is rather flat, and so is his speech diction. More to the point: Kolpath writes like a 21st century white, middle-class American. Indeed, there is no real sense that these stories (and these characters) are products of a future eight thousand years distant. Read Ilium by Dan Simmons or the Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright. Read the Long Sun saga by Gene Wolfe. Or Dune. These stories triumph because their authors have envisioned a future that is extremely different. There are no white, middle-class Americans in any of those books. McDevitt so concentrates on the mysteries to be solved in the Alex Benedict novels that he misses the bigger picture. There will be no white middle-class Americans eight thousand years from now. Whoever they will be, posthuman or not, they will not be speaking English with American inflections; they won’t sound anything like us or have any of our concerns regarding politics, religion, or culture. And there won’t be television talk shows like you can find on CNN or MSNBC or Fox.
And McDevitt knows this. Right in the middle of the novel, we have this exchange:
“I’d be interested,” said Alex, “in coming back in, say, ten thousand years to see what the human race is like.”
“We’ll all be different by then,” [Chase] said. “We’ll probably have gotten rid of old age. We’ll have a complete map of the Milky Way. Everybody will have a 200 IQ. And we’ll all be impossibly good-looking.”
With this bit of dialog McDevitt seems to be attempting to convince the reader that things won’t change much by Alex Benedict’s time but that they most certainly will eleven thousand years hence. Think of the visuals from the first Dune movie. Think of when they wheeled out the Third Stage Navigator in his hovering aquarium. Think of his mute assistants—their garb, their physical carriage, their demeanor. Whatever you think of the movie Dune, that one scene is the future. That was a posthuman ten thousand years from now.
Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath are really no more than prosperous antiquities dealers living in Cincinnati or Miami right now. They speak like them, act like them, and the world around them isn’t all that much transformed by any kind of cultural or sociological changes—except that it has FTL transportation.
McDevitt is missing a great opportunity here. He’s a fine writer and has written some excellent fiction in the past. But his job is also to dazzle us. We know how his mind works. We really need to see his imagination take control and soar.
^
The Big Book of Adventure Stories
Edited by Otto Penzler
Vintage, 2011
Paperback: 896 pages
ISBN 978-0307474506
This is a must-have collection for all readers interested in the great pulp literature of the first half of the 20th century. Editor Penzler has chosen stories, novelettes, and whole novels from those magazines that gave us Tarzan, The Spider, Zorro, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, and Bulldog Drummond. You’ll find a Conan story, an entire Tarzan novel, epic stories by H. Rider Haggard, Alistair MacLean, Talbot Mundy, and the classic “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. There are few science fiction stories in this collection, stories by Damon Knight and Philip José Farmer. But there is also the first Buck Rogers novel, Armageddon 2419 A.D.
Only two pulp characters are missing here (probably for copyright reasons): Doc Savage and Jules de Grandin. Doc Savage is represented, in a sense, with a short story by Lester Dent, Doc Savage’s main writer. Dent’s story will remind the reader of why he was so good at writing Doc Savage novels. It has all the Doc Savage elements for a good story: A mysteriously deserted island with dozens of shipwrecks, pirates, and very narrow escapes for our heroes.
This important collection is 896 pages in length and will provide the reader with weeks, if not months, of pleasurable reading. I highly recommend this anthology because science fiction did not arise out of nowhere. It came from a milieu of magazines that were published cheaply, magazines that allowed for a flourishing of brilliant storytelling. This collection belongs in every library.
^
Wool Omnibus
by Hugh Howey
Simon & Schuster, 2013
Mass Market Paperback: 528 pages
ISBN 978-1476735115
Wool by newcomer Hugh Howey is probably science fiction’s first major self-publishing success story. Howey originally published this novel online in five smaller sequences, none of which, it turns out, really do stand on their own. Wisely, he put them together in the form it exists in now, which you can get in an electronic edition as well as a print-on-demand book of excellent quality. Professionally copyedited and proofread with a fine cover to boot, Wool is a terrific book, a great read from start to finish. (So successful has this book been this last year, that Simon & Schuster will publish it officially in March 2013. Talk about finding a publisher the hard way!)
Wool is a throwback to the after-the-apocalypse novels of the 1950s wherein humans have taken to caves or tunnels or the basements of bombed-out buildings waiting for the radioactive dust clouds above them to settle and for life to return to normal. Think Daniel Galouye’s Dark Universe (1961), Philip Wylie’s Triumph (1963) and scores of other stories that were products of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war.
Wool chronicles the adventures of a small group of humans living in a very deep silo. Just where is never made clear. But something terrible had ruined the earth and its toxic residue still can be seen outside through a single camera lens. Their enclosed culture has several rigid rules in order to keep everyone alive. One rule is that anyone who even thinks about going outside is actually “invited” to leave. They’re kicked out because simply having the thought of leaving is a crime. The novel opens with the silo’s sheriff who has voluntarily opted to go outside. Earlier, his beloved wife had gone outside after a bout of extreme depression. So, he’s finally reached the end of his emotional tether and decides to leave. It’s a self-inflicted death sentence.
Those who go outside are provided with a protective suit (but no oxygen tanks) and a piece of wool to clean the lens of the only camera that allows an outside view. Wool, here, is an obvious metaphor. Nonetheless, the world outside is still caught in the grips of a staggering ecological disaster. The sun is barely visible during the day and only recently have a few stars been seen through the haze at night. The city in the distance still stands, but it’s in ruins and thoroughly dark. This is how this brilliant adventure starts.
Howey’s writing style is clean, crisp, and the story never lags as we learn about the silo and who keeps the humans in check within their barely pleasant prison. It’s clear that Howey has done his homework and has avoided the usual clichés that crop up with this kind of story. The novel takes some unusual turns, but Howey never loses control of the story. It becomes more complicated as it evolves, particularly when a new sheriff, a woman named Juliette, seeks out the answer to the question as to why their first sheriff left on his own. I won’t give away any more than that. Hugh Howey, an author unknown to me until now, has written an extraordinary post-apocalypse novel that actually adds something new to the literature. It’s a keeper (and I’ll bet you a quarter that there’s a movie in Mr. Howey’s future).
^
Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
Broadway, 2012
Paperback: 384 pages
ISBN 978-0765367457
Ready Player One takes place in or around 2045 where the world is an over-used, fuel-depleted, bombed-out, broken-down nightmare. There is little, if any, civil order. Kids still go to school and there are shards of a government manifesting here and there, but the protagonist of Ready Player One won’t have any of it and has to get along the best he can.
Our hero, Wade Watts, is a pimply, ov
erweight teenager who spends most of his spare time in an online world call OASIS. Watts, though alienated, is nonetheless resourceful, brilliant, and inventive. Thing is, he’s cracked the secret “key” to OASIS left behind by its creator, James Halliday, the richest man in the world. As such, Watts stands to inherit the fortune Halliday left behind, and lots of people start chasing after Watts. The novel is rife with fanboy references to games and gaming and especially to the 1980s, the decade not only of cool music but the rise of video games. It’s a thrill ride for any kid who’s played any chase ’em and gun ’em down video, hated school, and was afraid of girls.
This book has received rave reviews for its depiction of a “novel” future (to quote one reviewer) and a uniquely resourceful hero (to reference another). These would be true if the customers who posted their reviews on Ready Player One’s Amazon page hadn’t been at all aware of the last seventy years of science fiction literature and hadn’t seen the Matrix movies (as well as Blade Runner, Escape from New York, and 12 Monkeys).
Nothing in this book is even remotely new or inventive. The main character is every pre-pubescent hero or heroine that you’ve read about in science fiction. Think Podkayne of Mars. Think Ender. And of course Wade Watts survives by his wits (which are nothing more than PC gaming skills that in real life would be worthless). In Wade’s world, the sky is polluted; the water is polluted; people’s minds are polluted. And Ernest Cline writes all of this with clear élan as if neither he nor his readers have ever seen any of this before. I had a lot of trouble finishing this novel because every page had ideas and character types taken directly from other science fiction short stories and novels, especially since the 1980s. However, if you are under thirty and haven’t read much science fiction and have never seen the Matrix movies or Blade Runner, or any movie where computer geeks save the world, then Ready Player One is for you.
^
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress
Tachyon Books, 2012
Paperback: 192 pages
ISBN 978-1616960650
Nebula- and Hugo-Award-winner Nancy Kress’ short novel, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, is a tightly controlled story in three alternating parts about a world in the midst of several ecological disasters, most of them manmade. The main plot concerns a young boy named Pete in the future who is tasked to “raid” our present era for children who are necessary to create a breeding population in the “Shell.” The Shell is an enclosed structure built by aliens called the Tesslies who have imprisoned 26 humans and given them “Grab” technology to pull human babies out of the past in order to keep humankind going in the future.
The novel’s main adult character, mathematician Julie Kahn, using her unique algorithms, has discovered a pattern to strange child kidnappings that keep occurring in the present era and sets out to find out why they are happening. In the midst of all this, bad microbes are mutating and eating at roots and plants, tectonic plates are shifting everywhere, especially in the Atlantic, and Yellowstone’s super-massive magma dome is about to explode.
The novel is efficiently written with a careful balance between the sections of the novel that are the “before,” the “during,” and the “after.” And all of it makes for an effortless read.
That said, the novel has several flaws. While Ms. Kress has created a number of sympathetic characters in this novel, especially Julie Kahn, the science itself is iffy. Kress wants a convergence of catastrophes that will wipe out humankind. But she also wants them to have been caused by Gaia, the Earth Goddess, in rebellion. But such tropes don’t actually work here. Mutated germs and toxic pollution are one thing. But to have a super-volcano explode while a massive Atlantic tsunami (in an unrelated geologic action) destroys the coasts of Europe and America at the same time is a stretch. That is, having them caused by an Earth Goddess. It becomes something we have to take on faith—and that transcends science fiction.
In the end, one of the novel’s characters lectures us on how bad we all are to the earth. I’m surprised at this because it breaks the first rule of writing which says, show, don’t tell. Truly, we don’t need a character telling us that we’re horrible people because we shit where we eat (so to speak). We’ve already seen it throughout the novel.
Still, I loved the Tesslies, the aliens who resemble Nikola Tesla’s electrical halo experiments, and I liked the Shell. I particularly loved the fact that Kress doesn’t tell us who the Tesslies are or where they came from or why they’re doing what they’re doing with such a small breeding pool of 26 people. There is more here for Kress to play with, if she wishes. I’d love to see how Pete and his new family make use of the future the Tesslies have created for them.
**********
SERIALIZATION: DARK UNIVERSE
by Daniel F. Galouye
We’ll be serializing a novel in each issue of Galaxy’s Edge, and I’m incredibly proud to introduce Daniel F. Galouye’s Dark Universe. Published in 1961, it was Dan’s first novel, and it was nominated for a Hugo, which is almost unheard-of for debut novels.
But the real kicker came when I had lunch with him at the 1968 Worldcon, and he mentioned to me that he had voted for Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land for the 1962 Hugo. I later found out that Dark Universe had lost by two votes. If Dan had voted for himself – which would be one vote less for Stranger, one more for Dark Universe – his very first novel would have tied one of the bestselling books of the decade by an acknowledged master of the field.
Dan wrote this book at a time when half the country expected a nuclear war with Russia to take place momentarily. There were thousands of prepared caves, sub-basements, and bomb shelters just waiting to protect us from the devastation. I’ll say no more. Read on, and enjoy the opening of one of the field’s classics.
DARK UNIVERSE
by Daniel F. Galouye
CHAPTER ONE
Pausing beside the hanging needle of rock, Jared tapped it with his lance. Precise, staccato-like tones filled the passageway.
“Hear it?” he coaxed. “It’s right up ahead.”
“I don’t hear a thing.” Owen edged forward, stumbled and fell lightly against Jared’s back. “Nothing but mud and hanging stones.”
“No pits?”
“None that I can hear.”
“There’s one not twenty paces off. Better stick close to me.”
Jared tapped the rock again, inclining an ear so he would miss none of the subtle echoes. There it was, all right—massive and evil as it clung to a nearby ledge listening to their advance.
Ahead were no more needles of rock he could conveniently tap. The last echoes had told him that much. So he produced a pair of clickstones from his pouch and brought them together sharply in the hollow of his hand, concentrating on the returning tones. To his right, his ears traced out great formations of rocks, folded one over the other and reflecting a confusing pattern of sound.
Owen clutched his shoulder as they pressed forward. “It’s too smart. We’ll never catch up with it.”
“Of course we will. It’ll get annoyed and attack sooner or later. Then there’ll be one less soubat to contend with.”
“But Radiation! It’s pitch silent! I can’t even hear where I’m going!”
“What do you think I’m using clickstones for?”
“I’m used to the central echo caster.”
Jared laughed. “That’s the trouble with you pre-Survivors. Depend too much on the familiar things.”
Owen’s sarcastic snort was justified. For Jared, at twenty-seven pregnancy periods of age, was not only his senior by less than two gestations, but also was still a pre-Survivor himself.
Drawing up beneath the ledge, Jared unslung his bow. Then he handed Owen the spear and stones. “Stay here and click out some distinct tones—about a pulse apart.”
He eased forward, arrow strung. Now the ledge was casting back sharp echoes. The soubat was stirring, folding and unfolding its imme
nse, leathery wings. He paused and listened to the evil form, audibly outlined against the smooth, rock background. Furry, oval face—twice as large as his own. Alert ears, cupped and pointed. Clenched talons, sharp as the jagged rocks to which they clung. And twin pings of reflected sound brought the impression of bared fangs.
“Is it still there?” Owen whispered anxiously.
“Can’t you hear it yet?”
“No, but I can sure smell the thing. It—”
Abruptly the soubat released its grip and dropped.
Jared didn’t need clickstones now. The furious flapping of wings was a direct, unmistakable target. He drew the bow, placing the feathered end of the arrow against his ear, and released the string.
The creature screamed—a piercing, ragged cry that reverberated in the passage.
“Good Light Almighty!” Owen exclaimed. “You got it!”
“Just punctured a wing.” Jared reached for another arrow. “Quick—give me some more echoes!”
But it was too late. The thrashing of its wings was carrying the soubat off down a branch passage.
Listening to the retreating sound, Jared absently fingered his beard. Cropped close to his chin, it was a dense growth that projected bluntly forward, giving his face a self-confident tone. Taller than the span of a bowstring, he was lance-like in posture and his limbs were solidly corded. Although shoulder length in the back, his hair was trimmed in front, leaving ears unobstructed and face fully exposed. This accommodated his fondness for open eyes. It was a preference that wasn’t based on religious belief, but rather on his dislike for the facial tautness which came with closed eyes.
Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 1 March 2013 Page 15