Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Not that they know that till they emerge from their tanks and shake the cobwebs out of their synapses. And then it isn't long before the aliens—whatever they are—are talking to them, warning them to get out of the area, and showing signs of communicating without really understanding what they are saying. This is where the title comes in. “Blindsight” is something that happens with people who are blind in a particular way. Nerve signals do not go from the eyes to the visual cortex. But they do make it to the midbrain, and if you throw a ball at such a person, they can (sometimes, anyway) put up a hand and catch it. There are equivalent oddnesses associated with other senses, and Watts raises the question of whether there may not be an equivalent for consciousness itself: Is consciousness essential for intelligence? Can a being solve problems, invent, and communicate without being aware of what it is doing?

  The answer and its implications are intriguing. They have a good deal to do both with the nature of the aliens and with the unhappy state of affairs back on Earth when the tale ends.

  If it ends. There is no hint of a sequel, but there are definite signs of dramatic events that could provide a suitable stage.

  * * * *

  Jane Yolen and her son, rock musician Adam Stemple, have been collaborating on “Rock ‘n Roll Fairy Tales,” beginning with Pay the Piper (reviewed here October 2005) (on his own, Stemple did Singer of Souls, reviewed here March 2006). Now they bring to the YA market the charming—if a bit on the sweetish side for my tastes—Troll Bridge. Set in Minnesota, land of Scandinavian transplants, it supposes that a few mythical monsters, such as trolls, came along with the humans. As is the way in Europe, people made deals to keep the bogeymen off their backs, but it's not just a matter of putting a saucer of cream on the doorstep. Minnesota is dairy country, and for a very long time, the local county fair has featured a dozen dairy princesses whose likenesses are sculpted in butter. After the fair, the butter is set out on an antique stone bridge known as—you guessed it—Troll Bridge. But this year the town has a new mayor who has no patience for old superstitions. The melting butter has to be an environmental hazard, right? So it stays in the fridge.

  And when the princesses gather on the bridge for a photo shoot ... Well, it's a good thing harpist Moira Darr is running late. She gets there just in time to see a wave sweep over the bridge and a giant green humanoid snatch up the other princesses and chow down on the photographer. Quite bravely she leaps onto the troll's back, determined to rescue her friends.

  You have princesses, you gotta have princes. So the Griffson brothers, pop musicians, wind up magicked into Trollholm as well. But where the princesses are destined to be brides for the troll's sons—it helps to have the trickster fox, the Fossegrim, on hand to explain things—the princes are dinner, suspended by the heels above bloodstained chopping blocks. Jacob, the youngest, talks one son into swapping places so that Daddy eats his kid. The others—it's up to Jakob and Moira to save everyone, and it helps that among trolls (if not humans) the women are smarter and more interested in the finer things of life (such as music).

  I'm going to pass this one on to a certain niece.

  * * * *

  The last time I reviewed anything by Howard V. Hendrix (Standing Wave, April 1999), I complained about his tendency to weigh his story down with vast wads of bafflegab and infodump and strain for vaguely poetic sound bites. It was bad enough to keep me away from his later books, but I do like to give writers I have dissed another chance. So I read Spears of God. And it has the same problems, as well as a tendency to silly mistakes such as saying, on p. 77, that desert temperatures can hit 500 degrees Centigrade during the day (note that I was reading the advance reading copy; with luck, this gaffe will be corrected by the time the book is released). But it also has strengths the earlier book lacked.

  The world of the story is similar to that of his early books. But where earlier he had strange indigenes, altered by symbiotic fungus brought to Earth in a meteorite, sing their home mountain (or tepui) into space, the tepui is still on the ground for this tale. That is unfortunate for the indigenes, for a squad of high-tech soldiers invades their caves, massacres almost everyone, and steals a chunk of the meteorite. Four surviving children are discovered when meteorite-hunters Michael Miskulin and Susan Yamada arrive soon after. And not long after that, the reader learns that someone is collecting bits of meteorites from all over the world and hunting for fragments of genetic material that can be used to make super-soldiers or even recombined to recreate the genome of what just might be the creature we were meant to be, able to manipulate spacetime and see into parallel universes (such as the one where the tepui launched). At the same time, someone else is encouraging thefts of sacred stones such as the Black Stone of Mecca (which may be a meteorite) and attacks on sacred sites with the aim of bringing on the End Times. The kids quickly display extraordinary powers, plots and schemes develop apace, and the climactic scenes are climactic enough to satisfy everyone.

  Spears of God is good, but it would be twice as good and four times as readable if its arteries were not clogged by expository sludge.

  * * * *

  Scott Smith's The Ruins is billed as a horror thriller and equipped with a quote from Stephen King that calls it “your basic long scream of horror.” But the dominant emotion evoked in the reader is neither thrill nor horror but a rising crescendo of pity for the poor schmucks who walk like brain-dead idiots into a trap.

  Brain-dead? Well, they're just kids. Two couples, just out of college, ready to move on to grad school and jobs, enjoying a cheap Mexican vacation. Lots of beach, lots of booze. Good times, right? And if the Greek buddies who fall in with them can't speak English, that's okay. All you really need is sign language and a bottle, right? Then there's Mathias, who does speak English. Very helpful fellow, though he's sad. His brother met a girl who was heading off into the jungle to work on an archeological dig, an ancient mine. She left directions on how to join her if the guy chose, and so he did, never to be heard from again.

  You know what comes next, right? Our four young beach bums, with one of the Greeks, decide to accompany Mathias in search of his brother. All goes well until the taxi drops them off at the mouth of the jungle trail and the driver tells them this is a bad place. They should let him take them back to the bus station. But no, off they go to find a village of Mayan peasants who seem quite deliberately unhelpful. When they find the side trail they need, it has been hidden by cut branches. And when they reach their goal, it is a hill covered with red-flowered vinery and surrounded by a wide strip of bare ground. There are also Mayans who warn them off, waving guns and bows, and when Amy steps so close to the vine that it wraps a tendril around her ankle, they change their tune. Now they chivvy all five tourists onto the hill.

  There are abandoned tents on top of the hill, but there are no people. No archeologists, no girl, no missing brother. Nor are there birds or bugs. After a bit of exploration, they find the brother at the base of the hill, a body immersed in vinery, the “flesh oddly eaten away,” and arrows in his chest. The Mayans, now surrounding the hill, will not let them leave. They have until their food and water run out, or until someone arrives to rescue them, or...

  Now the reader begins to feel the pity. There were plenty of signs to warn our idiot tourists off, but if they weren't idiots—if they were savvy enough to pay attention, or to bring a local guide—there would be no story, or it would be a very different kind of story. As is, Smith has set up a very logical situation: An admittedly horrific life form, with no hint of its origin (except that the ancient mine is there, and miners worked there for an extended period, so the vine can't have been there forever). It grows vigorously, and the local Mayans have taken as their mission the maintenance of a quarantine. They have successfully created the barren strip around the hill (but for some reason they have not applied the same techniques to sterilize the hill itself). And when a visitor touches the vine and is contaminated by its spores, that visitor is not permitted to leave, f
or fear that the vine will escape its quarantine and lay waste the world.

  Smith's skills are enormous. From this point on, the tale is a steepening downward spiral of the loss of hope and sanity and life itself. There is no escape. There cannot be. The pity and sadness build and build and build with impressive inexorability. If there is any horror, it is entirely off the pages, when the cognizant reader wonders how long will it be before someone notices the bull's-eye pattern (hill surrounded by bare ground) in a satellite photo and sends troops or scientists to investigate and inevitably bring samples of the vine back to some government or university lab.

  Now there's a horror thriller for you! Not as subtle and restrained as The Ruins, but definitely one in the classic mold, with the fate of the world at stake.

  On second thought, perhaps we should commend Smith for his restraint.

  * * * *

  In World War II, air force planes had a tendency to retract their landing gear while landing, resulting in expensive belly flops. The reason was simple: the “retract landing gear” knob was right next to the flaps knob, and they were identical to the touch. The fix was just as simple: add a flap-like doohickey to the flap control and a wheel-like doohickey to the landing gear knob. No more belly flops.

  Sound ridiculous? It's a pretty good example of what Kim Vicente, a distinguished human-factors engineering professor, calls Human-tech in The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology. Make technology compatible with human beings, and you get fewer technology-related problems. Another example is stovetop design. The standard two-by-two rectangular layout is not obviously connected to the linear control knob arrangement, and a common consequence is melted pots. The obvious solution is to change the rectangular layout into a parallelogram, so that each burner is in line with its control knob. This was figured out in 1959, but good luck finding an example at Sears. Many more examples exist, from medicine (do thirty-hour shifts have anything to do with medical mistakes?) to urinals (Vicente quite likes the flies that mark the Amsterdam airport urinals with aiming points to minimize splashback but neglects the older practice of using a bee [genus name apis] for the same purpose). The human factor can come in at several levels (physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political). The problems that concern Vicente can be rooted in the attitude of technology wizards that if the machine works, it doesn't matter whether people can use it easily or safely, or in the attitude of humanists that workloads, management, and politics are irrelevant to safety. In case after case, he makes clear, technologies can be designed either to help people make mistakes, or to help them not make mistakes. The latter requires forethought, prototyping, user involvement in the design process, and provision for plenty of feedback. Not to mention, of course, “systems” thinking.

  Since I teach a computer science course in systems analysis and design, many of his points are no surprise at all. Yet the points are well worth making, and I plan to make the book available to my students. If they pay attention, it may help them avoid embarrassing mistakes.

  That said, Vicente makes a few embarrassing mistakes of his own, as when he says the world's problems include a population that may hit ten billion by 2025 (for some years now, official projections have pegged that as coming after 2050) or when he calls a paper written by a legal scholar and published in a law journal a “scientific” paper ("academic” or “scholarly,” sure). It's a subtler error to insist that if steering wheels turned the other way (rotate left to turn right), people would constantly be driving their cars into the ditch. This is true only for people who are already used to rotate-right-to-turn-right steering wheels. People who are used to boat tillers would have no such problem at all, and in fact the first cars used tillers to steer.

  * * * *

  Eric Brown is a British writer who is too little known in this country. For evidence to support the claim, see Threshold Shift, a collection of ten short stories and novelettes, half of them from Interzone. One, “The Touch of Angels,” is original to the book; it is one of three of Brown's “Kethani” stories. The Kethani are aliens who came to Earth and offered a kind of resurrection. People wear an implant which, when they die, permits them to be brought back to life in a new body. At that point, they are given a choice: return to Earth, or go to other worlds as an emissary of the aliens. The stories are set in the English countryside, among ordinary people who must face complex decisions: In “Thursday's Child,” a separated couple has a daughter with a fatal disease. Should she get the implant? The mother's religious beliefs forbid. The father insists. But both parents must sign the permission form. And oh, yes, fake implants that don't work are appearing on the market. In “The Kethani Inheritance,” a son must face the prospect of his abusive father returning instead of conveniently vanishing upon his death.

  I enjoyed the book. May you also.

  * * * *

  Just what we need, a couple of new “Best of the Year” anthologies. Rich Horton has assembled for Prime Science Fiction: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition and Fantasy: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition, both much smaller and more affordable than the massive tomes we have been seeing from Gardner Dozois. They are also more honestly named—not “the best of 2006,” with contents all from 2005, but “2006 edition,” contents ditto, and the obvious hint of future yearly editions.

  Are they really “best"? Horton thought so, of course, and whether you agree or not, the result is certainly a very readable set of stories. The SF book begins with Michael Swanwick's enticing “Triceratops Summer” and carries on with tales by Tom Purdom, James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman, Susan Palwick, Howard Waldrop, Wil McCarthy ("The Policeman's Daughter,” from Analog), Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, and half a dozen more. The fantasy book's nineteen stories include work by Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Peter S. Beagle, Pat Cadigan, Gregory Feeley, Paul Di Filippo, and other favorites.

  * * * *

  The 2006 Worldcon is coming up as I write this, and Guest of Honor Connie Willis is surely laboring over her GOH speech. Sadly, she—like all her predecessors to date and none of her future successors—does not have a copy of Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches from which to draw inspiration or even—ahem!—to crib.

  The book reaches all the way back to Frank R. Paul who in 1939 praised fandom's independent streak. In 1941, Heinlein called SF therapeutic and anticipated the remark that prompted Sturgeon's Law. And so on. Most of the speechifiers are dead now, so here you have preserved the words of Doc Smith, Van Vogt, Leiber, Gernsback, Campbell, Sturgeon, Leinster, Simak, and many more. You can also see the change of SF and fandom from a self-congratulatory cult to a more serious-minded literary “school” (not that the cult has entirely vanished from the SF culture).

  A very interesting contribution to any shelf of books dealing with the history of the genre.

  * * * *

  I keep running into Richard M. Wainwright at craft fairs and the like, where he festoons a booth with his colorfully illustrated books for younger readers and seems to do decent business. I chat with him, look at his wares, and urge him to send me anything suitable for review.

  The Crystal Palace of Adamas is SF. It deals with the world of Sagateum, seeking desperately for new worlds with exploitable resources, and explorer Janus, who finds just such a world—except that it is inhabited by a bunch of very nice folks. Do they deserve to be exploited? A good question, and a good example of the sorts of family-friendly themes Wainwright focuses on. His prose is suitable for older children (and for reading to younger ones), and the general tone is very civilized and even inspirational. I don't think his stories are complex or vigorous enough for many or most adult SF fans, but if you are looking for something different for the kids, take a look at his website, www. rmwainwrightbooks.com, for titles, samples, and discounts.

  Copyright © 2006 Tom Easton

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Dr. Schmidt:

  “A New Orde
r of Things” was intricate and imaginative. I enjoyed it very much, in spite of a couple of bothersome technical details near the very end (Chapter 44).

  In the story, the electromagnetic pulse only fried components that were turned on. I hope somebody corrects me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that really matters. An EMP kills circuits by inducing destructively high voltages or currents in conductors. A power switch interrupts only one of the millions or billions of conductive lines in modern electronic equipment. Throughout the system, delicate electronics can be destroyed by reverse voltages, breakdown voltages, and excessive currents. The normally miniscule voltages and currents of a powered system should be negligible compared to those generated by a strong EMP. (In some cases they would add; in others they would subtract.)

  The other thing that grated was the image of the remains of Harmony/Victorious “tumbling about three axes.” What happened to conservation of angular momentum?

  I recognize that bulkheads occasionally gave way, venting gas and debris. Nevertheless, for an object big enough to lose only a third of its structure to a Nagasaki-size explosion, I consider it unlikely that an individual bulkhead loss would produce enough angular momentum change for a human eye even to notice immediately.

  Chuck Gaston

  Lancaster, PA

  * * * *

  The author replies....

  Thanks for your kind words about the novel. I'm glad that the details that troubled you didn't detract from your enjoyment.

  Agreed, circuits are EMP-vulnerable on or off. That said, circuits that aren't in use are less vulnerable.