Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Manifold: Origin by Stephen Baxter involves the Fermi paradox - if the universe is so big and so old and life evolves spontaneously, then where are all the aliens? Space ought to be as overpopulated as India by now.

I didn’t say that the novel addresses the Fermi paradox; it rather takes it as given that man is depressingly alone in the universe, then connects those lonely Homo sapiens across the quantum multiverse. We’re alone in all those universes, but we’re not always the same. Sometimes we’re furry geniuses, and other times we’re still swinging with the apes.

The variety of primates is interesting, although every one of them, from the apes to the humans to the hyperintelligent denizens of a moonless Earth, seems more animal than angel. My concern for the endangered heroes was not what it could have been, had they been more sympathetic characters.

I hear the previous volumes, Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space, were better. I may give one of them a shot.

Undersea City is a juvenile by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson that proves I’m still in my used-pulp phase. Like “Manifold”, “Undersea” is a title theme that unifies this moldy old volume with the lost works Undersea Quest and Undersea Fleet.

“Juvenile,” for your information, is a trade term for what I suppose is now called young adult fiction. As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, children’s books are books starring children, and their reading level is the age of the hero. The hero of Undersea City, whose name I’ve already forgotten, finds himself in special cadet training at an earthquake-prone undersea city. Of course, a series of earthquakes begins and our hero finds friends and relations acting suspiciously. There’s a cadet snob, a gruff superior officer, and a city council who refuse to evacuate before the Big Underwater One hits the city. It all works out in the end.

Great literature it’s not. The only interesting part of the story for me was the authors’ dated insistence that computers were not up to the task of predicting earthquakes. Instead, cadets with a few weeks’ training checked the seismograph readings and did their calculations by hand, and almost always agreed on where, when, and what force the quake would be. It was never quite clear what they’re doing that a computer couldn’t, in theory, reproduce, even back in 1958 when the book was written.

I suppose that’s a danger of the genre. Fantasy keeps, but hard sci-fi goes bad.

The last time I was at Pandemonium, I picked up a couple of those yellowed old pulp novels, the ones that cost more used than they did new. Since I read so much Golden Age and pulp sci-fi in my misspent youth, I’ve tended to focus on the last decade or two in my recent reading. Sometimes, though, I long for the pulpiness of a simpler age.

Wolfling by Gordon R. Dickson (1968) was just what I’d been looking for. The hero is your standard inscrutable, antisocial, independent man. He finds his Earth subsumed in a newly discovered galactic human empire, ruled by a master race of High-born from the mysterious Throne World. The High-born are genetically superior to other humans, yet they have their own weaknesses which Our Hero hopes to exploit to free Earth. Despite several clues along the way, I managed to be surprised by the twist at the end.

I’m not saying there was any literary merit to this novel, or even anything of scientific interest beyond the one anthropological observation made by Our Hero late in the story, yet it exceeded my very slight expectations for a disintegrating Dell paperback with a half-naked guy on the cover.

I reread the ancient A. E. van Vogt classic The World of Null-A because I’d come across his name more than once recently. He’s famous for the frenetic pace of his writing - apparently, he liked to insert a major plot twist every 800 words (the standard length of a scene).

For those of you who keep count, there were two female characters in this story, the hero’s false wife and a villain’s good wife. There was one sentient machine, and everyone else was male. As usual, that didn’t bother me. What did bother me was the alleged use of non-Aristotelian logic (null-A). Not once did any of the null-A positive characters actually use non-Aristotelian logic. Van Vogt based the novel on General Semantics, yet another wacky pseudo-science from the Golden Age of sci-fi that brought us Dianetics, among other things. I suppose this sort of superman (as opposed to superhero) myth has been going on since Vril, The Power of the Coming Race.

It never ceases to amaze me what people could get away with writing fifty years ago, all gender issues aside.

I lent my lovely sister Veronica Core by Paul Preuss, but she didn’t make much headway and gave it back. I can certainly see why. The characters were entirely unsympathetic. The Hudder dynasty in particular consisted of four generations of indistinguishable, unemotional, unheroic men, two of whom (the designated heroes of the book) flounder through life in a series of flashbacks which break up what there is of a plot into tiny, useless pieces. The story was heavy on the science, but not in a way that enlightened the reader about oil-rigs or magma, or even what’s going on in the novel itself. Overall Core reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, though Preuss’ skill at painting scenes in technobabble cannot compare to KSR’s.

The currently-tanking movie “The Core” is supposed to be based on Core, but isn’t. First of all, the loss of the earth’s magnetic field is barely mentioned in Core - twice at the beginning and once at the end. A decade of missing magnetic field ought to have more noticable effects, but the only thing that interests the novel’s author is the big hole. The reader gets no dramatic scenes of falling bridges or Parthenons. In the book, no submersible is built to explore the magma - instead, the novel focuses on issues of patent law, politics, and international intrigue, with a side of bratty kids and the aforementioned flood of flashbacks.

The science behind Core is not as ludicrous as Hollywood has portrayed it. Much of the technobabble is devoted to issues in materials science that come up when trying to work with the astronomical pressure and heat of the Earth’s core. The secret to coring success is using a sci-fi substance named hudderite and some interesting bucky-footballs.

I wouldn’t recommend Core unless you know a bit about drilling for oil (I didn’t, and still don’t) and are unusually fascinated by the question, What is the deepest hole which may be dug into the earth? I hear the movie is even worse.

I never read media tie-in fiction, but I made an exception for the recent Star Wars novel Destiny’s Way because it was by Walter Jon Williams. I couldn’t have told you otherwise that it was by WJW - it was readable, but it didn’t have his special way with characters and universes.

I spent the beginning of the book wondering how it had come about - did WJW write a masterpiece, and then the Lucas Books people gutted it or dumbed it down for the masses? Or did he go into this assignment with the intention of slumming and raking in the big bucks? Did WJW get to write his own plot, or, like an unfortunate participant in a bad Virtual Season, was this Nebula-winning author expected to take dictation from the Lucasfilm people? By the time I’d reached the end, I’d decided that the “New Jedi Order” universe was sufficiently complex (or baroque and soapy) that the novel contracts must come with detailed outlines.

(Spoilers ahead!) As with most media-fic, the main characters were somewhat sketchy - Luke and Leia, Han and Lando were still running around, but they were rather wooden. I found myself sympathizing with the bad guys - in fact, I couldn’t tell at first that the bad guys were supposed to be bad. I thought Nom Anor was a double agent, and I agreed with Fyor Rodan that the Jedi cult had no natural place in a democratic government. I wanted to storm out of the room with him after Luke had had his smuggler friends bribe senators to throw the election to his friend. I was with Vergere in her criticisms of New Republic Jedi dynasties founded by Darth Vader, one of which, to my shock, had the nerve to name a child Anakin. Bring back the Old Republic!

Another problem of media fic is laziness the lack of description. While Destiny’s Way was good with the battles, I don’t recall any extensive descriptions of worlds besides Zonama Sekot. Much of the appeal of the movies is the gorgeous future scenery, like that of Naboo in Episode One, so it surprised me that I didn’t even realize much of the action was taking place in a floating city until someone aimed a torpedo at it.

And then there’s the Force. In the movies, the Force is mysterious, and Jedi knights are single, solitary, and monklike. In the books, the Force serves as a gigantic invisible calling card with which the various Jedi reach out and touch each other, not to mention reproduce with each other. All the Forcely reaching and sensing and touching and energizing got tiring quickly. Judging from the anvils of backstory, the Jedi bounce back and forth betwen the light and dark sides like so many ping-pong balls. At least the Real Anakin had the decency to stick to the dark side until the end, and to die immediately thereafter rather than tiring the reader with a perpetual repentance.

None of these problems are particular to Destiny’s Way, though. If you like the Star Wars thing I’m sure this was a fine example of the genre, if not of Walter Jon Williams.

It’s finally over - “Shootout at the Nokai Corral” has come to the traditional yet satisfying conclusion of all Westerns. The stereotypical Western characters didn’t evolve much to speak of over the course of four issues of Analog, but that’s sci-fi Westerns for you. “The Monopole Affair” wasn’t bad, and I highly recommend “A Good Offense” by Don D’Ammassa, a tale about the diplomatic challenges of dealing with aliens who communicate entirely in insults.

I read the first volume of Otherland by Tad Williams, but those first 800 pages were barely even a start. I realized 300 pages from the end that the margins would not allow space for a conclusion at the author’s current pace. I’ll have to wait until Book 4 for a proper, reviewable ending.

Desperate for something that concludes, I decided to read Crossfire by Nancy Kress. I figured she could be counted on for a simple, one-novel, ends-at-the-end plot, and I was almost right. Most of the book was good - wacky characters and mysterious aliens, a little space travel, more than one moral conundrum, and a running Quaker theme. The only trouble was the end, in which a vital and somewhat vague plot point happened off-stage. In fact, for all I know it didn’t happen at all, and there will be a sequel dealing with the non-event.

Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre won a Hugo and a Nebula - that’s how I heard of it. I’ve always thought of her as a Trek writer, but it turns out she’s written other original stuff. This novel is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the heroine, Snake, is a sort of 1970’s Xena - she does it all on her own or with one unexpected female sidekick, while her boyfriend spends the novel wandering about the radioactive desert following her elusive trail.

Dreamsnake is most interesting, and sometimes most annoying, for its brief tangents into technology and sociology. Although genetic engineering is the main form of technology, only certain people practice it - to everyone else it looks like magic. One adventure in the middle of the book is centered around teaching and using one’s biological ability to kill gametes and zygotes. Another adventure takes the reader to the gates of Center City, where a paranoid civilization bars itself behind impassible walls, but the glimpse within is frustratingly brief. Everywhere there are signs of polygamy, or perhaps polygynandry (group marriage) - I can’t say which because the practice is never commented upon or explained. Near the end the contents of one sealed dome are revealed and used, but not accounted for.

Taken together, Snake’s travels fill out a novel but they don’t quite coalesce into a novel-length plot. Her trials are all dead ends from which she retreats, until she stumbles over her goal purely by accident. The setting overpowers the plot, making this an example of the milieu story (Orson Scott Card’s terminology) in which a character explores a world. If you’re in the market for a new world, check Dreamsnake out.

Prey by Michael Crichton is a medical thriller about nanotechnology programmed with simple behavioral routines that runs amok. For all the explicit scientific background (don’t trip over the info-dumps), the novel takes a twist into horror that is neither convincing nor scientific. Most of the novel (up until day 7) was a very good adventure, though, and if you’re not inclined to nitpick you might want to pick it up.

Skeptical link of the day: multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder)

I read Analog on the T, where my standards are lower. I even enjoyed Catherine Asaro’s story “Walk in Silence” in the latest issue (April 2003), despite two, count ‘em, two occurrences of “gentle” as an intransitive verb. In general, it shares the strengths and weaknesses of The Last Hawk, Catch the Lightning, and, I can only assume, her other novels: a good plot with weak characterization and a side of wholly unconvincing romance.

At the other end of Analog was part three of “Shootout at the Nokai Corral,” a serial that’s holding my attention over the months despite a very silly setting and intentionally stereotypical characters. “A Deadly Medley of Smedley” doesn’t overcome its silliness nearly as well, and I found “Emma” and “Coming of Age” technically deficient for reasons it probably isn’t worth going into.

On the other hand, Bellwether by Connie Willis was so technically proficient that there’s little I can say about it but go thou and read likewise. It’s a fine example of a subgenre I otherwise wouldn’t have thought existed - sci-fi set in the present time. Usually such books are thrillers about secret corporate conspiracies or, more rarely, secret Amish conspiracies. Bellwether is about scientists working for a think tank, struggling with the inanity of Management Acronyms and the incompetence of their office help. At stake is both pure knowledge and grant money, and the plot is baroque and surprising as usual.

I’d heard of the Horatio Hornblower novels (by C. S. Forester, author of The African Queen) mainly as an influence upon the military sci-fi coming-of-age genre. I certainly saw Honor Harrington in old Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Back when I read the other H.H., I expressed a hope that 2D naval battles would be easier to follow than Weber’s space battles. In that I was disappointed - I was lost many times, not only in battle, and my ignorance of sailing ships accounts for only a part of my confusion. The characterization wasn’t quite what I might have hoped, but I don’t mind a stock, reticent, long-suffering hero now and again. By the way, there’s Horatio Hornblower fanfic out there, if you’re interested.

I can’t stop rubbernecking at anthologies. I’m always disappointed with them, but when I see one lying around the new books table in the library, I think, maybe this one will be different. Impossible Things, covering about ten years of Alan Dean Foster in short stories, wasn’t any different. Many of the stories were written for other anthologies - never a good sign. None of the stories were actually bad, though - he’s a competent writer. Several were trick stories where the end reveals that the story was not about what you thought. Having more than one such in the collection detracted from their effect.

The spine reads Del Rey Science Fiction, but out of nineteen stories, perhaps three were science fiction proper. If you consider medical thrillers, superheroes, and alien abduction stories sci-fi, then a few more could be included. The majority, though were fantasy, or more accurately, magical realism (unless you define magical realism to be fantasy written by someone with a Spanish surname). Now, I like magical realism, but it’s not science fiction. I think Alan Dean Foster is better at writing magical realism than sci-fi. I’d have been more likely to pick up the book had it advertised itself as such, rather than as sci-fi by a sci-fi writer I’ve never heard anything good (or for that matter, bad) about. I particularly liked “Laying Veneer,” an Australian outback story which I’d read before elsewhere, and the trick stories. I can’t tell you which ones they were; that would spoil the trick.

Another anthology I couldn’t leave well enough alone was the latest Writers of the Future volume. Though it had a higher proportion of sci-fi, the fantasy was better. There was more sex than the contest rule against it would have led me to expect, but it wasn’t particularly explicit. The nonfiction articles were not as helpful as the ones in the last volume I read. My favorite stories were “Graveyard Tea” and “The Road to Levenshir,” which were both first-place winners for their quarters. The former was magical realism and the latter fantasy in a more standard medieval mode.

So, to define my terms: Science fiction is fiction set in the future or an reality which depends on science or technology for major plot points, or at least for the setting, or at the very least to explain the setting. Fantasy is fiction set in the past or an reality which depends on magic or medievalism for major plot points, or at least for the setting. Magical realism is fiction set in the present which involves magic or the vaguely supernatural. Anything else probably falls into a non-sf/f genre or subgenre: medical thrillers, spy thrillers, horror, disaster, comic books, etc.

I tried to post this entry with Archipelago, a Mac blogging interface, but the interface and documentation were too obscure. So the reviews will be typed up the old-fashioned way, through the web interface.

I really ought to know better than to read topical anthologies like Pharaoh Fantastic. The theme was ancient Egypt, and most of the stories took a magical approach to the topic. Some were closer to sci-fi or pulpy adventure, and several were disturbingly irreverent tales of the origins of Judaism and Christianity. Even that was better than the Wicca-style magic of other stories.

The stories I enjoyed were the ones that best recreated the spirit of ancient Egypt. “Succession” by Tanya Huff followed an aging queen in her struggles to save Egypt from the stereotypical Evil Vizier. The prose wasn’t always clear, but the characterization was good. In “The Voice of Authority,” a new Pharaoh becomes acquainted with his powers and duties as a god. “Whatever Was Forgotten” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman recounts thousands of years of the immortal dead, up to the final tomb robbery.

I picked up Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy at some library sale. It’s a typical Rip Van Winkle story, in which an insomniac has himself hypnotized to sleep in 1887 Boston, and doesn’t wake up until the year 2000. A doctor revives him and he discovers a communist paradise. Of course, the doctor has a beautiful daughter and the inevitable happens. All of that is standard for this sort of proto-scifi utopian novel. The interesting bit for me was near the end, when Our Revived Hero repents of his past capitalist sins, and becomes converted to the wonders of communism. The Christian imagery is used, and perhaps abused, by the author, but the conversion is in essence intellectual, making it a fascinating sci-fi theme.

Of course, it’s not called communism in the book. It’s just some rosy socialist view of the future, long before anyone had tried socialism and found it wanting. Looking Backward is only occasionally a novel; most of it is polemic, with Our Hero making naive protests that this workers’ paradise can’t possibly exist and the doctor telling him, “Nothing could be simpler,” and variations on that theme.

It’s easy, after 2000, to mock the doctor’s simple communism; the biggest hole in his logic is the hole in man’s motives. Whenever Our Hero asks why the workers will do their best rather than slack off, or share alike rather than hoard, or be comrades rather than asserting their power over one another, the doctor answers that they will have no incentive to do wrong. He keeps saying exactly that. The absence of selfish or evil motives is assumed. Maybe it was a reasonable assumption in 1887, though I doubt it; it’s certainly glaringly naive after the year 2000.

Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia deals with a very different sort of conversion - the Conversion of Europe. Strange lights like a giant aurora borealis fill the sky one night in 1912, and in the morning, Europe is no longer there. In its place is a jungle, and not just any jungle - a jungle with a completely different evolutionary history, where the vertebrates’ spines run up their stomachs, and the poisonous things are very, very poisonous. The population is gone; there’s nothing smarter than a pack animal on the entire continent.

The nickname for the new Europe is Darwinia, a joke, since this miracle is supposed, by most people, to have disproved Darwin. Yes, indeed, species arise out of single stupendous acts of creation. The huge, obvious (if ambiguous) miracle starts a religious revival and raises creation science to scientific respectability. A few of Our Heroes disbelieve the nouveau science, but the novel’s creation-science bashing never gets intolerable.

The reader soon finds Our Heroes on an expedition into deepest, darkest Darwinia, à la the Lewis and Clark expedition. This bothers the surviving Europeans, who don’t like the Wilson Doctrine declaring Darwinia a new world open to any colonists - which is to say, American colonists. The expedition runs into the dangers of the new continent and of the angry partisans, and makes a startling discovery. That’s just the beginning.

Early on there’s an interlude that lets the reader in on what’s really behind the “miracle,” though Our Heroes remain in the dark for quite a while longer. I don’t think I wanted to know that early on, but perhaps the truth was so strange that the author needed to work up to it. I don’t think he filled out his premise quite as far as he could, and his technical details and bad guys were a bit sketchy, but the excellent characterization more than made up for the problems.