The Irish flavor is well handled. The Christianity, however, is not just cultural world-building. There is a good deal of God-talk, good boys and girls remain virginal till married, and liberalism is a corruption of the body politic. Check Sutcliffe's homepage biography (www.arjay.bc.ca/biog.htm) and you can see pretty quickly that this is his life. Yet you don't have to share his beliefs to enjoy the story. It works well as multigenerational dynastic intrigue. The biggest flaw—one hardly unique to this series—is the way the author lapses from time to time into textbookish summary mode, telling the reader what happened rather than showing.
And you can hardly beat the price!
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I'm looking at this one in May, so it can't possibly be what it says it is, the best SF of 2006. In fact, every one of the thirty stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection appeared in 2005. But Gardner Dozois has still done an excellent job of finding excellent SF by the likes of Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed, Bruce Sterling, Vonda N. McIntyre, Gene Wolfe, and many more. Many of the names are familiar from our bookshelves. A few—Paolo Bacigalupi, Hannu Rajanieme, Dominic Green, David Moles—are new, at least to me. Source publications are varied, perhaps more than the last time I looked at one of these volumes; perhaps it has served the reader well for Dozois to give up magazine editing. Analog is represented twice, with Harry Turtledove's “Audubon in Atlantis” and Mary Rosenblum's “Search Engine."
As usual, an excellent survey of recent SF, complete with a long essay summing up developments in publishing, TV, and film, and a long list of Honorable Mentions which could easily keep you reading until the next volume comes out.
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James Tiptree, Jr., was famous for two things. First, he wrote excellent, insightful stories that took the SF field in new directions, stories that were “brilliant and disturbing ... urgent messages from some haunted house on the corner of Eros and Mortality.” Second, he didn't exist. After the debut, after the praise for being a man who (at last!) understood women, “he” turned out to be a woman, Alice Sheldon, whose early photos show her on safari with her parents, who eloped soon after her coming out, who worked for years for the CIA, who became a psychologist, and who eventually committed suicide. A troubled genius, of exactly the sort whose story begs to be told in detail, which is exactly what Julie Phillips does in James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
The book is fairly standard in form—parents, childhood, youth, discovering SF&F, developing a rebellious streak, and running head-on into the inevitable conflicts that awaited any woman who wanted to be independent in the 1930s. Phillips uses letters of Alice Sheldon and her mother, interviews with family members and colleagues, and a great deal of research to assemble the story of who Sheldon was, what made her that way, why she wrote, and finally why she died. The result is one more book that deserves a place in every SF reader's library.
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A major foundation block for Robert A. Heinlein's reputation is the dozen novels known as the “Heinlein juveniles.” They began with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 and continued through Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958), all from Scribner's, and they introduced a generation of kids to the solar system and the galaxy and the wonderful adventures waiting to be embarked upon. Some of those kids became the rocket scientists who put astronauts on the moon in the ‘60s. Some became science fiction writers, many of whom are still mining the claims staked out by Heinlein and struggling to meet the standards Heinlein set.
After 1958, Heinlein signed with Putnam for the still youth-oriented but more adult-toned Starship Troopers and Podkayne of Mars. All fourteen novels are discussed at length in Joseph T. Major's Heinlein's Children: The Juveniles. His focus is plot and context and interconnections, not literary and social significance, which makes the book an excellent survey for those who remember the juveniles fondly, wish a reminder but don't want to reread them all (there are so many new novels coming out, after all!), or who want to know what all the fuss was and is about. In his introduction, Alexei Panshin (author of Heinlein in Dimension, 1968) does an excellent job of portraying Heinlein's impact on the kids of the time: His work was eye opening “growth food,” a taste of the future (in Space Cadet, 1948, there is actually a pocket-sized phone of a very familiar sort today), and life-lessons galore.
This one is essential to any good SF collection.
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It's for kids nine and up, but Ken Croswell's Ten Worlds: Everything that Orbits the Sun is still a coffee-table book, over-sized and loaded with gorgeous photos and paintings of planets and moons. What makes it kid stuff is surely its accessibility, a matter of length, simplicity of language, and price. It's the first book to include the newly discovered tenth planet beyond Pluto and its gentle introduction to the rest of the Solar System is entirely suitable for older readers who want to know a bit more.
I don't expect Analog readers are very likely to want this one for themselves. But Analog readers have kids and grandkids and friends, and though this is the December column, you're reading it in plenty of time to buy this one as a gift.
Copyright © 2006 Tom Easton
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BRASS TACKS
Dear Stan,
Michael Click's letter (June 2006 issue) sure raises a lot of possibilities for alternate universe storage. Apparently, however, he's not aware of Heinlein's usage of essentially the same concept in “Glory Road"; of course Heinlein was there first, though!
Also, he and Bob agree on at least one thing: military applications would be one of the premier uses.
I do have to disagree with one of his points: the one where he states that prisons and apartments would be essentially the same thing. I believe that this would be prevented by intent. Prisons, after all, are supposed to be places of punishment, not rest homes with luxury hotel rooms ("Camp Fed"-type prisons notwithstanding)! So while that could be done, I doubt very much that it would be done.
Howard Mark
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Dear Analog,
I enjoyed “Puncher's Chance” in the June issue, and I liked the follow-on article about “MagBeam Plasma Propulsion” at least as much. In fact, it was the Science Fact article that prompted me to write this.
I'd like to address a couple of thoughts brought to mind by the article itself. For one thing, I note the absence of any mention of the effects of the projected ion beam on the orbiting platform. Ions have mass, and Newton's third law suggests that such a beam must produce some thrust that would act on the orbit of the platform itself. This effect might be trivial, in view of the relatively large mass of the platform, but it would seem to be something that would have to be handled in any real-world implementation of the scheme. Of course that would be an engineering problem, not necessarily needing to be discussed in an introductory presentation.
What intrigues me more, however, is the idea of a hybrid “first step” scheme for building the distal terminus of a magbeam route. This would entail using a platform in Earth orbit to boost a payload to Mars, for example; the payload might consist of a conventional (chemical rocket) system designed to place a small magbeam platform, or perhaps only part of one, in Mars orbit. Such a “one-ended” magbeam implementation would not be nearly as efficient as the finished product, but it could be used to bootstrap the process.
By the way, I assumed that this idea had sprung full-blown from my own mind, until I recalled (and re-read) a phrase from the story that says, “The magbeam harness is just strapped on.” This leads me to suspect that my “original idea” is perhaps something that's already being evaluated. If so, so much the better!
Norm Mosher
Corinth, NY
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Dear Analog,
I grew up on Staten Island New York City, which has electric commuter trains with a third rail on most of the tracks on the island. Also, I am familiar with the Pennsylvania Railroad that ran commuter trains across New Jersey, from
Washington DC to New York City using overhead power lines for power. I also was exposed to the electric powered inter-urban trolley cars that traveled across Michigan from Lansing to Jackson and Battle Creek, back around 1923 to 1927. So the concept of using ground-based power to drive a mobile power system was not new to me.
However, I worked on the test planning for the development and early flight tests of ion propulsion in early space programs back in the 1960s. After all, we had to put the test item up into space where the vacuum available permitted ionization and acceleration of ionized gasses to generate a measurable thrust and payload attitude adjustment.
To me, the use of plasma propulsion was just something possibly useful for vehicle attitude control, too feeble to be ever useful for propulsion to Mars. Until I read James Grayson & Kathy Ferguson's very interesting story and article about a solar system commuter train.
Suddenly I realized that Professor R. M. Winglee had provided an answer to the main problem facing the proposals for establishing a Mars base for manned settlement as was proposed several years ago.
Clear back in 1963, I worked on a test-planning proposal for a manned flight to Mars using atomic power for thrust using superheated hydrogen for jet propulsion. Even with that plan, the flight to Mars took more than six months, making the proposal unrealistic even if the use of atomic power had been solved.
I retired from work as an engineer on space programs in 1990, but follow engineering progress yet via Analog.
I once had to justify an income tax deduction for the cost of taking a course in fiction writing that I made. The income tax inspector wanted to know why I deducted the cost of taking a course in fiction writing when I was an engineer. My answer was that “I write test plans that when written, look like science fiction, but often become true."
Regardless, I had to remove that deduction.
Henry M. Salisbury
Vista, CA
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Brass Tacks;
As a former toiler in the uplink/downlink sync-sat trenches, I wonder what effect an inadvertent pass of the beam across dozens of satellites would have.
As a former toiler in the beam business, I wonder about beam-spreading attenuation at large distances.
As a former editor, I am puzzled by 4-page Brass Tack letters.
Jolyon Ramer
Winter Park, F
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Usually we limit “Brass Tacks” letters to about 1000 words, or a bit less than 2 printed pages, and prefer them as much shorter as their content will allow. However, we are not completely inflexible about length and will make rare exceptions if a letter covers enough ground.
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Visit www.analogsf.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Analog SFF, November 2006 Page 25
