And that's when things start going wrong. A bit of damage to the machine, and Pelmore escapes with it, leaving them marooned to face a horde of naked, barbaric horsemen. There's some work to do before Danolarian can escape again, this time into the very distant past, some three and a half million years back, to find people who look human, but whose culture cannot help but make one think of what Wells’ time traveler found in the future. When he returns...
Ah, but it's all a bit of a game. The gods make sport of mortals, all is illusion, and the world remembers its past. The result is a tying up of loose ends and a packing off of characters onto a new line that may or may not lead to a sequel or three. The potential is there, but the Moonworlds Saga is satisfyingly complete now.
* * * *
Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath are back in Jack McDevitt's The Devil's Eye, which opens with a pair of mysteries. The first, mere prologue, has to do with one Edward Demere, a resident of Salud Afar, a world so far out on the fringes of the galaxy that its night sky contains but a single bright star, Callistra, also known as the Devil's Eye. He is watching the broadcast of the dedication of a monument installed on a distant asteroid, some 36 years out, when the broadcast suddenly cuts off. The second begins with Alex and Chase showing their Mute (Ashiyurrean) friends, Selotta and Kassel, around Earth, including a trip to the ruins of Atlantis. This gives McDevitt a chance to remind the reader that Mutes and humans generally find each other repulsive and that the Confederacy and the Ashiyurrean Assemblage are glaring at each other over their daggers. Keep an eye on this, as it plays a major role later on.
When they are finally on their way home, they find in their mail a message from Vicki Greene, renowned horror writer. She asks for help and adds, “God help me, they're all dead.” Later attempts to contact Greene are fruitless, for she has had her mind wiped, though not before sending Alex a sizable check. Investigation reveals that she had recently returned from Salud Afar, where she apparently learned something someone did not want her to repeat. The mysterious someone performed a memory-block, and that was apparently so distressing that she opted for the mind-wipe.
If you're familiar with the series, you know Alex can't leave it at that. He and Chase promptly fire up their ship and head for Salud Afar, where they attempt to retrace Greene's movements, hoping to discover whatever got her in trouble. Among other things, they discover that some years before, a number of houses were blown up and their residents, including an Edward Demere, killed. But they have not quite succeeded in putting the pieces together when they are kidnapped by supposed representatives of the local security forces. They manage to escape before the memory-blocks can be installed, and soon thereafter they realize what is going on.
It's politics, of course, mixed with human greed, driven by an astronomical catastrophe. Stars from time to time blow up, blasting waves of hard radiation into space. If you're close enough, you're fried. If the explosion is big enough, “close enough” can mean many light years away. If you're lucky, you can see it coming and—because the radiation blast can't travel any faster than light—have enough time to get out of the way. If you're not lucky, well, it's hard to evacuate a world, especially if the Confederation refuses to send a fleet to help out because it needs the ships in case the enemy Muties decide to start a war.
But Alex and Chase have friends...
Chase has other friends too. She likes guys, and she'd be happy to have a long-term relationship if only they wouldn't get bent out of shape over her long trips away with Alex. The answer seems obvious, and McDevitt provides a hint or two that maybe they will see it. But we'll have to wait for another book to get the clinch.
As usual with McDevitt, I recommend this one highly.
* * * *
Timothy Zahn began an interesting series with Night Train to Rigel (reviewed here in December 2005) and The Third Lynx (March 2008). In its future, the stars are linked by FTL passenger trains run by the robotic Spiders, who work for a rather timid sort of aliens known as the Chahwyn. There is also a species of symbiotic coral, the telepathic group-mind known as the Modhri, created as a super-weapon by a long-extinct alien species and now bent on ruling the galaxy. The Chahwyn recruited ex-military agent Frank Compton to help fight the Modhri and gave him Bayta, a human-Chahwyn hybrid, as a sidekick. She comes in handy when she uses her telepathic link to the Spiders to make train reservations (etc.).
Odd Girl Out, the third in the series, begins when Compton is returning to New York after the Adventure of the Stolen Sculptures. As he walks into his apartment, he is greeted by a young lady with a gun. She introduces herself as Lorelei Beach and says her sister is in trouble on the colony world of New Tigris and Compton is the only one who can help. The guy's tired, so he says something like “Fiddlesticks,” tosses her out, and goes to bed. Unfortunately, it's still the wee hours when the cops wake him to say she's been killed. With his gun. And he's under arrest for murder.
A nice classic setup dating back to the days of the hard-boiled detective yarn. The obvious next step is to get him bailed out and on his way to New Tigris, where he and Bayta find the Modhri eagerly hunting for an Abomination who seems to be none other than the late Lorelei's kid sister, Rebekah. Pretty soon the bullets are flying, the bodies are piling up, and Compton, Bayta, and Rebekah are heading for a mysterious refuge.
But there's more going on than that. The Chahwyn are timid, as I said. They shudder at the mere thought of doing violence to others, and their creations the Spiders aren't much better. But when faced with a deadly foe, they are capable of taking steps. They hired Compton, didn't they? They made Bayta what she is, and she doesn't just make train reservations. It should be no surprise that they have other irons in the fire, even at the risk of changing their very nature and perhaps destroying the benign institution, the Quadrail, that galactic civilization is utterly dependent upon.
That should be vague enough. If you've enjoyed the earlier volumes, you'll find this one a very satisfying read. You'll also be happy to see the clear signs that Zahn isn't done yet.
Bruce Coville is an utterly charming writer who focuses his efforts on younger readers and on running Full Cast Audio, a publisher of audio books (featuring multiple voices rather than just one). The New England Science Fiction Association honored him as a special guest for the February 2008 Boskone, and as is NESFA's wont marked the occasion with a book, The One Right Thing.
It's a collection of stories, some of them over two decades old but reading as fresh as anyone could ask and all of them quite sure to appeal to kids. After all, he throws in enough boogers and farts! Not to mention “The Stinky Princess,” who began life as a perfectly normally fragrant child. But she thought nice smells were boring, and when the smelly envoy of the goblins came to court, she found him quite interesting. So interesting, in fact, that when he left she stowed away in his saddlebag, and his steed—a giant frog!—didn't rat her out because she bribed it with June bugs. Eventually, of course, she was discovered, but by then the goblin stink had rubbed off on her and she could not go home.
My favorite was “The World's Worst Fairy Godmother,” Maybelle Clodnowski, whose best efforts have a way of going bad. But her heavenly boss, Mr. Peters, is willing to give her one last chance, with the world's best fairy godmother, a bit of a prig, as backup. Her assignment is a little girl who thinks she is just too, too perfect, for which everyone hates her. And there's an imp who, it is early revealed, long ago sabotaged Maybelle's wand. He is chortling with delight as his assistant finds out Maybelle's assignment and he schemes to mess this up too. But...
There's always a but. Coville's stories come to satisfying and instructive ends, but the morals are never so blatant as to oppress his young readers. Love is important, tolerance of difference is good, and sometimes you just have to take the bitter with the sweet.
If you haven't discovered his work, remedy the lack on your next trip to the bookstore. His books are perfect Christmas presents.
Copyright (c) 200
8 Tom Easton
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Dear Analog:
I just started reading Stanley Schmidt's The Coming Convergence and, right after reading the first two very well-written chapters, cheated and went right to Chapter 8—"The Explosion in Information Technology” (after reading the first two chapters, forty-five years in the IT business made me want to see how the threads established early in the work play out in my field). I think that the analysis of IT was right-on—but might have gone even further in exploring the importance of the newest paradigm shift in IT, the next truly “disruptive technology"—Web 2.0.
Since the introduction of the first personal computer, the “Altair,” there have been two major disruptive technologies in this arena—technologies that have not only changed how we use these devices but have impacted the very way we work. Wikipedia (www.en. wikipedia.org) defines disruptive technology as “a term describing a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a ‘disruptive’ strategy, rather than a ‘revolutionary’ or ‘sustaining’ strategy, to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market."
The first of these, the electronic spreadsheet, exemplified first by “VisiCalc” and later by “1-2-3” and “Excel,” brought personal computers into the workplace. As uses such as word processing, desktop publishing, and telecommunications followed, personal computing revolutionized the business world, causing both great efficiencies and job displacement. Approximately fifteen years later (and fifteen years ago), the graphically based World Wide Web arrived, bringing computers into the home, changing the very nature of retailing, marketing, and information dispersion; and previously non-existent firms such as Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo became major players on the economic scene.
In each of these cases, the early impact of the technology was “under the radar"; most of those soon to be affected did not see the impact coming until there was great job disruption and major changes in the competitive landscape (Microsoft and Apple grew out of the earlier paradigm shift and the aforementioned firms out of the more recent one.) Early adopters of the technologies were at the forefront of the changes while those “late to the party” were normally those changed.
We now seem to be at the forefront of the next disruptive technology, one called, for want of a better term, “Web 2.0.” Web 2.0 is a fairly nebulous term, encompassing many different technologies. The common thread that joins them is that they are based on user content. From the dawning of the World Wide Web, it has been institutions (Amazon, Sears, Chase, etc.) supplying information and services to users; now users collaborate freely, bypassing middlemen in the distribution of information and the trading of services.
As an example of the impact of these technologies, one has to go no farther than the advertising pages of local newspapers, where Craigslist is wiping out what was once the largest portion of newspaper revenue.
To compete in this world, we must first understand the loosely connected tools that make up Web 2.0 and that is not very easy to get one's arms around—in fact, venture capitalist Francine Hardaway opined on the Stealthparters site (blog.stealthmode.com/2008/04/what-every-geek.html), “Fellow geeks, we live in a dream world—a world of Twitter-Twhirl-Friendfeed-AlertThingy-Seesmic. And if you think most people reading this can identify any of those things, think again. Moreover, if you think there's a chance of any of those crossing the real chasm in the next ten years, think again. Why? Because the rest of the world just isn't ready. We live in a rarified world of social media consultants and early adopters. Where is the rest of the world? Well, I hate to tell you this, but it's back at YAHOO."
While I agree with Hardaway about the existence of what she calls “The REAL Digital Divide,” I disagree with the ten-year gap. It seems to me that there is so much technology expertise available and such great worldwide economic pressure that consumers and workers will be forced to move into the twenty-first century much more rapidly.
Some of types of tools defined as Web 2.0 include wikis (wikipedia), blogs, social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin), audio and video chatting & collaboration (Skype, OoVoo), 3D virtual reality (Second Life, There), file sharing (Limewire, BitTorrent), interactive group discussion (Twitter), video sharing (YouTube), photo sharing (Flikr, Picasa), advertising (Craigslist), miscellaneous (Google Earth, OpenSocial)—and the list keeps growing with new applications and tools limited only by human creativity. Additionally, users “mash up,” combine these tools, to develop new applications and uses.
How can the uninitiated get involved? First, by immersion—plunge in and try the various tools. Second, read—and then read some more. The following recent books (in addition to Stanley's) will also be very useful: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff; Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky; Web 2.0 Heroes: Interviews with 20 Web 2.0 Influencers by Bradley L. Jones; and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
Those who are able to rapidly adapt to this paradigm shift should be able to mirror the success of the early embracers of the previous disruptive technologies; those who do not will go the way of the adding machine, typewriter, film camera, and audiocassette.
John F. McMullen
Professor of Information Technology
Monroe College
* * * *
Analog,
This [Palmer's Tracking, July/August 2008 ]is unreadable crap. It's bad enough that middle school english (sic) teachers indulge this sort of moronic babble so the little darluings (sic) can express themselves, but unless the author is 13 or under it's time for him to get over it. The egocentric ramblings of the prepubescent drama queen make the mentally challenged narrator in Faulkner's Sound and the Fury sound like an intellectual genius (and he possibly had something significant to express)
Susan Shackelford
Louisville, Kentucky
* * * *
The author responds:
Dear Ms. Shackelford:
I presume you're aware of the fact that publishing houses and magazines customarily forward reader correspondence to the writers toward whose work such comments are directed. Therefore it won't come as a surprise to you that Stan passed on your sentiments to the creator of the unreadable crap in question.
It's tempting to limit my response to a comment such as yours by being equally flip and subjecting you to the quote of the apocryphal playwright (possibly George Bernard Shaw, though I haven't been able to pin it down on the Internet) who, when a single theatergoer, from among the hundreds applauding his new play, stood and booed, called down to him, “Personally, sir, I agree with you—but who are we to disagree with so many...."
However, what I should be doing is helping you enjoy the story, if that's at all possible.
Now, based on letters, during the run of the previous story (the Emergence and Seeking novellas in Analog, ‘81 and ‘82 respectively, and the full Emergence novel (Bantam paperback, ‘84, with four additional printings, and several foreign editions), about five percent of readers worldwide initially agreed with you.
Upon random inquiry, however, many, if not most, proved to be speed-reading “skimmers": non-word-for-word readers, whose eyes actually focus upon only three to four lines as they skim down a page, absorbing most of the sense of the surrounding text via peripheral vision.
There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I learned originally to read that way. Like Candy, as a youth I devoured whole C. S. Forester and James Michener novels, etc., in two—and three-hour nonstop gulps. I was insatiably, literarily omnivorous. I irritated my grammar school teachers no end when, from about third grade on, almost without exception it turned out I'd read more books of every description than they had. (It didn't improve matters that I really was an unsocialized, insufferable little snot—I didn't help myself....)
&nbs
p; However, the Emergence stories are impossible to skim and grasp a coherent understanding of the story. Much of the sentence structure is what used to be referred to as telegraphic; i.e., it's “preskimmed": Most nonessential words have been omitted, as in a telegram, for which, In Ye Olden Days, Western Union charged a lot of money for each word. Telegraphic text must be read word-for-word.
If you can discipline yourself to do that (and it's not easy; when I became a court reporter and had to proofread transcripts, I found it terribly difficult to slow down and read word-for-word), you've got a pretty good shot at becoming a fan of Candy and her friends.
If not, God bless you; over the years Analog and others have offered many wonderful stories, most employing conventional sentence structure—I've even committed several myself; they're about to be released over roughly the next year by Wormhole Press.
However, back to “who are we to disagree with so many": Both predicate novellas were nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards in their respective years; as was the novel in its publication year—plus it won the Compton Crook award for best first novel. In the worldwide Hugo voting, both Seeking and the Emergence novel garnered second-place finishes; the novel beating out stories by Vernor Vinge, Larry Niven, and another fellow you may have heard of—Robert A. Heinlein, I think his name is. Further, as Stan mentioned, both novellas won their categories in Analog's AnLab voting by the largest margins ever seen. Finally, in ‘85, the American Library Association listed the Emergence novel as a Best Young Adult Selection. So clearly some readers have managed to soldier through them.
Now, as Messrs. Faulkner, Hyman, Joyce, and Heinlein have demonstrated, there's a difference between knowing the rules well enough to decide which to bend and by how much, and consistently sticking to one's chosen matrix to achieve a specific effect, and simply not knowing any better. The first clearly is an art form in its own right; the other is, as you've mentioned, widespread and just sad. The risk is, it's going to go over the heads of some readers; they're simply going to miss the point.
Analog SFF, November 2008 Page 24