* * * *
Jeffrey A. Carver began writing about living stars many years ago, with From a Changeling Star (1989), introduced the robot character Jeaves in Down the Stream of Stars (1990), and began the Chaos Chronicles with Neptune Crossing (1994), in which John Bandicut discovered an alien device, the “translator,” on Triton, acquired a resident quarx, and was sent off on a mission to save Earth from a malignly targeted comet, leaving his girlfriend Julie behind. Next stop was Shipworld, floating above the galactic plane, new friends, and missions to save the galaxy from the schemes of ancient artificial intelligences who—like Saberhagen's Berserkers—crave the destruction of all organic life. Now we have Sunborn, and Bandicut and his friends are off to stop an engineered hypernova in the Trapezium, which, if it blows, will destroy stars and worlds—including Earth—for 2,000 light years around. They have a desperate appeal from a hyperdimensional creature named Ed and help from a pair of sentient gas clouds escaped from a parallel universe. And the plot leaps quite madly from pot to kettle to frying pan to fire. The pace never lets up, except to revisit Sol System, where Julie is serving as intermediary between the translator and the humans who see this ancient device as a fount of technological wealth. But the translator has other ideas, for the threat to Earth is hardly over. Look yonder, and there is a tiny alien device aiming to divert more comets toward Earth, and only Julie is in a position to intercept the threat. Will she follow Bandicut's course to Shipworld and beyond? Will she ever meet Bandicut again? If she does, how will she and Bandicut's current love-interest, Antares, get along? Since Antares is a Thespi Third-Female, a mating facilitator of sorts, is Carver about to get kinky? And what of the ancient foe? The current battle is only a battle, not the war, which has been running for eons. Is there any long-term hope?
Carver isn't done yet. In fact, he has several more volumes to go to wrap up his remarkably expansive vision.
* * * *
Mike Resnick's Starship: Mercenary follows Starship: Pirate and Starship: Mutiny as space opera in the classic vein, but with plenty of touches of pure Resnick. The earlier books introduced Wilson Cole as an officer of the Republic's space navy. He is extraordinarily competent and honorable to boot, which is just what got him stuck on the Theodore Roosevelt, a superannuated warship staffed by misfits and screw-ups. When the ship's captain tried to destroy a world and its people just to keep the enemy Teroni from seizing a fuel dump, Cole intervened and saved the day. For his efforts, he was court-martialed. But since he had long since earned his crew's loyalty, they busted him out of jail, stole the Teddy, and took off to play pirate.
But Cole is far too honorable to make a good pirate. Once that becomes clear, and he has enlisted a couple of appealing characters—one a Pirate Queen straight out of the old pulps, and one an alien who collects Dickens books and pretends he is David Copperfield—he becomes a mercenary. Copperfield is his business manager until he comes too close to biting off more than Cole can chew. Cole manages, but the ship takes enough damage to need repair, so they visit Singapore Station, a big space station, where they meet the Platinum Duke. More mercenary missions ensue, and Cole acquires ships and a few ex-navy sorts who quite agree that the Republic is a wickeder entity than the Teroni.
As we've known from the beginning, the next book will be Starship: Rebel, followed by Starship: Flagship. The line of progression is clear. Cole is building a navy of his own. We know where Resnick is going with this; the fun is in the details (such as his Pirate Queen). And perhaps in a bit of speculation...
According to Resnick's timeline of the Birthright Universe, Flagship will be set in 1970 G.E., and his first tale of the post-Republic Democracy is set in 2122. That's a sizable gap, and we may be forgiven if we choose to speculate that in it Wilson Cole gets to be emperor.
* * * *
Nick DiChario's Valley of Day-Glo is an absurdist curiosity that should appeal to anyone whose sense of reality is a bit off center. The scene is centuries in the future, long after Hed'iohe, the Creator, destroyed the whites, yellows, and blacks—the Honio'o—with environmental catastrophe, leaving only the descendants of the Iroquois Indians, one tribe of which, the Gushedon'dada, has but three members left. Mother Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, Father The Outlaw Josey Wales, and their son eunuch-boy Broadway Danny Rose have taken their names from icons of Honio'o culture.
In the heat of argument, alas, Mother strangles Father. Then there is nothing to do but bundle up the body and go a'questing for the rumored Valley of Day-Glo, where death may become life. Alas again, they run into the Senecas, who are big on reviving pre-Honio'o ways and show a disturbing tendency to cannibalism. Fortunately, revolution overthrows them just in time for the last two Gushedon'dadas to find the valley. In due time, Broadway Danny Rose even becomes a hero, stops being a eunuch, and discovers the giant talking coffee pot that holds his fate.
Definitely absurd. But DiChario has made it make an amazing amount of sense. He comments on many foibles of the modern world and even explains himself by saying, “It's not the truth that's important, Danny, it's the story, and it's what we discover about ourselves in pursuit of the story that makes all the difference.”
Why else do we read fiction?
* * * *
Robert J. Sawyer's Identity Theft and Other Stories offers seventeen tales from various sources, including this magazine. I'm not going to take time to describe the stories—you're familiar with his work—but the publisher is not one familiar to many US readers. Fitzhenry & Whiteside is a Canadian house that deserves cross-border attention. I've mentioned it in the past in connection with some of Julie Czerneda's work, and here it is again with two books of very different flavors that are both worth your time and money.
If you want absurdity, go with the DiChario. If you want a more traditional, accessible approach, grab the Sawyer.
* * * *
Ellen Datlow has a long history of editing SF&F magazines and anthologies behind her. Now she brings us The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, filled with sixteen great stories by old writers (Elizabeth Bear, Carol Emshwiller, Maureen F. McHugh, Barry Malzberg, Pat Cadigan) and new (e.g., Margo Lanagan). It's a varied mix with a number of excellent and moving tales. Christopher Rowe's “Gather” offers a nice new twist on the post-apocalypse tale. Gather is a young man who dwells in a community ruled by priests who consult their bibles about everything, including things that could not possibly be in any ancient scripture. But then he gives us a glimpse of a bible, with its glowing blue screen, and a piece of paper shows the face of God, who dwells apart from people on the other side of the river. Except that on the paper God is surrounded by people. And that is enough to start Gather on an adventure; don't be surprised if the story turns out to be the first chapter of a novel. Lucy Sussex's “Ardent Clouds” concerns a woman who loves to photograph volcanoes, often under the direction of a distant man who often seems to know just when things are about to pop; fortunately, she respects folk customs. Barry Malzberg's “The Passion of Azazel” bends the folktale and ritual of the scapegoat into a tale of rapture in a quite astonishing way.
A varied mix, and excellent. If you cannot find enough enjoyment here to be worth the price of a trade paperback, the fault lies not in the stars, nor in Datlow's editing.
* * * *
Nancy Kress has written some remarkable novels but her shorter works are just as grand. To see why it's those shorter works that have won all her awards, order a copy of Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories. More than one story here is a tour de force. Consider “Ej-Es,” of which she says she “got to do something I've always wanted to try. I wanted to introduce the words of a made-up language, one or two at a time, and then write the final paragraph entirely in that language.” It's a short paragraph, but it works in a uniquely powerful and eloquent way. “Product Development,” one of the Nature shorts, is a remarkably deft short study of media dependence. She also likes to explore the future of artificial intelligence, as in “Sav
ior,” in which an alien spacecraft parks itself in Minnesota for centuries, completely ignoring human beings. And there are ten more for you to enjoy.
* * * *
The National Academy of Sciences recently released the third edition of Science, Evolution, and Creationism, “written to serve as a resource for people who find themselves embroiled in debates about evolution. It provides information about the role that evolution plays in modern biology and the reasons why only scientifically based explanations should be included in public school science courses.” It also discusses the evidence for an Earth much, much older than 6,000 years. To anyone with some science background, it is a clearly written and even eloquent review of modern science. However, it seems unlikely to convince those who take their various scriptures so literally that they reject the validity of scientific evidence and scientific thinking. It insists that science and religion are not in conflict and cites many religious thinkers who agree that the two fields are not incompatible. But—admittedly in the interest of not antagonizing an important segment of its potential audience—it downplays the truth that for some sects, scripture is the only admissible explanation for the origin of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity. Scriptural explanations definitely do conflict with scientific explanations, and to the extent that religion and science endeavor to explain the same things, they do conflict. Only when religion confines itself to discussions of the nonexistent (the supernatural, or the spiritual), does it not conflict with science, which can only say about such things, “No evidence.” And as Carl Sagan once said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Does that seem harsh? So be it. The only value of religion that I have ever been able to discern is that it helps people live amicably together, and that tends to work best in religiously homogeneous societies. In pluralistic societies, it far too often breaks down. Indeed, the very fact that this book is necessary provides an example of that breakdown. Evolution is not debated by most religious groups. It is an issue only because in our society, with its profusion of religious groups, there is a minority of very vocal extremists, some of whom have actually said that their ultimate aim is to throw modern science—biology, paleontology, astronomy, physics, anthropology, psychology, and more—out of the schools because it leads people to reject traditional modes of thought. Civil rights, feminism, the Pill, equal opportunity, TV and film, modern music, and any kind of liberal thinking are anathema to them. The decadent modern world must be restored to the God-fearing, hymn-singing, patriarchal status of yore.
Fortunately, there are only a few such extremists. Most on the creationist side of the debate are more focused. I would like to think that this little book had a chance to reach them, but I am skeptical. On the other side of the debate, you may find yourself trying to convince a school board to resist the creationists and refuse to damage science education. This book could provide you with data and arguments to help.
Copyright (c) 2008 Tom Easton
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Dr. Schmidt,
I found your editorital (sic) “Mirrors and Might-Have-Beens” in the April issue of Analog disgusting and repugnant. Have you no knowledge of history and did you spend more than 10 seconds before coming up with your “therepy (sic) by matchmaking” theory. What you are suggesting is self-segregation at best and reservations, penal colonies or concentration camps at worst.
I can imagine your future society where a misfit or loner-type is brought up before a “Committee of Cultural Matchmaking” and told that they don't fit into the culture here and that they will be shipped off to a colony somewhere else with other misfits and outsiders where they will be much happier. Do you not see any problems with this? Ideally this movement would be voluntary but if history is any guide it is likely to be cumpulsory (sic) “for the good of both societies.”
This is exactly the kind of thinking that justifies segregation. It is these kinds of arguments that White Americans in the 19th century used to push natives off their lands and into reservations. The argument was that native and white cultures could not peacefully coexist so it was better to seperate (sic) and isolate the two cultures so they would not have to interact. Of course no one really asked the natives if they wanted to be isolated from the rest of society and the fact that the lands they were moved to were generally poor in resources was just an unfortunate coincidence.
This “therepy (sic) by matchmaking” theory would also probably be heartily endorsed by Adolf Hitler. Before Hitler decided on his Final Solution, he thought he could improve German society by simply removing the unpleasant and disagreable (sic) types who just didn't fit in to the Aryan ideal. If you could simply remove the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists and others who just really didn't fit in and who made others uncomfortable, both sides could live in peace. You can see how that theory worked out.
I am sure these scenarios are not what you were envisioning when you wrote the editorial, but the implications of the “therepy (sic) by matchmaking” idea seem pretty evident to me. Societies need some level of conflict and uncomfortableness for them to grow and adapt. The Japanese culture you observe isolated themselves completely for 400 years from the mid 15th to the mid 19th centuries. The result was a relatively peaceful and stable society, but also a society that stagnated and fell way behind technologically and economically from the West. If not for a careful importation of new ideas and new technologies in the latter half of the 19th century I imagine Japan could have been dominated by European countries and it's (sic) economic resources exploited like most other countries in Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Dr. Schmidt, next time you write an editorial suggesting how to improve society, you might actually think for a minute what these changes might actually bring about. It is ideas like “therepy (sic) by matchmaking” that have led to some of the grimmest chapters in human history.
Cameron Blackford
El Cerrito, CA
* * * *
I find the ideas that you (not I) suggest disgusting and repugnant, too, and I marvel that you think you found them in what I wrote. But then, how careful a reading could I expect from someone who consistently misspells a key word in his topic, even though I spelled it correctly in the article he's criticizing?
I neither said nor implied anything about forcing anything on anyone. What I had in mind was more like a voluntary service that would educate individuals about the existence of cultures into which they might fit more comfortably, enable countries that wanted them to find potential new citizens who could contribute something valuable, and facilitate bringing the two together. Obviously there are practical and emotional problems in implementation—e.g., some individuals would be reluctant to move far from friends and family, even if they spend much of their time feeling like misfits in their society at large, and not all countries are equally welcoming of outsiders. Just as obviously, this kind of tool, like any other, could be abused—but that doesn't mean that the abuses are inevitable, or that the tool has no worthwhile uses. Your suggestion makes about as much sense as saying that surgery and anesthesia should be banned because they can be used to kill people.
I hope someday you'll reread carefully what I actually wrote, spend more than ten seconds thinking about it—and try to refrain from reading into it things that just aren't there.
* * * *
Stan,
After reading “The Beethoven Project” (Analog, April 2008), I went to my third floor storage vault of time machined CDs and found the world premiere of Beethoven's Symphony No. 10, with the London Symphony performing, Wyn Morris conducting, recorded September 8, 1988, with an illustrated lecture by Dr. Barry Cooper.
Now I can read “The Beethoven Project” again while listening to Beethoven's 10th!
Harry V. Wilkinson
Shaker Heights, Ohio
* * * *
Well, sort of ... What Mr. Wilkinson refers to
is actually Dr. Cooper's attempt to construct from Beethoven's sketchy notes the first movement of such a symphony. While the result may be, in Dr. Cooper's words, “fairly close to what he [Beethoven] had in mind,” it is at most a quarter of an actual tenth symphony, and includes a considerable amount of (admittedly educated) guesswork.
* * * *
Dear Analog editors and readers,
I am approaching my fifteenth year as an Analog reader and I am looking forward to the next fifteen years with great anticipation.
I am one of your many visually impaired readers who receive Analog in one of several pre-recorded audio formats. In the past, this consisted of 8 & 1/3 RPM flexible disks and 15/16 IPS four-track cassette tapes. As I write this, more contemporary formats are being developed.
Over the past years, it became obvious that I would require alternate realities to survive the insanity of the college classroom. Unfortunately, my appreciation of Analog developed slowly. In fact, there were scores of issues that I did not read attentively. I am now interested in revisiting past issues of Analog.
In recent years, I have developed a fascination with the concept of extra-terrestrial life arising from creatures that are analogous to some contemporary life forms, primarily aliens with strong similarities to the modern Carnivores, especially the Felids. Over the past years, I have read scores of interesting stories with themes involving anthropomorphic pseudo-felids. Novels, including Allen Dean Foster's Ice Rigger and C. J. Cherryh's Pride of Chanur exemplify the genre. Unfortunately, I have not preserved the hard copies of these issues in the form of an audio archive. This makes it impossible for me to revisit any of the works featured in past issues.
Consequently, I am writing to Analog in order to ask if any of the present or past employees of Analog are aware of any archival material consisting of past issues of this magazine in some audio format, preferably one of those of the Library of Congress. I am writing a similar letter to your sister publication, Asimov's Science Fiction, with a similar inquiry. If those of you at the magazines are unaware of such material, I am requesting that this appeal be published in an upcoming issue so that any of your readers, visually impaired or not, might be able to inform me as to the existence of the archival material.
Analog SFF, September 2008 Page 25
