Analog SFF, October 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I vastly oversimplify, for I have no mind to describe the subplots, relationships, schemes, and background that decorate the plotline. They're there, they are well done, and they make Harry's world rather more convincing than many other fantasies. Nor does it hurt a bit that Harry is an interesting fellow. Think Buffy in a trenchcoat and have fun.

  * * * *

  Many people are deeply concerned today about the extent to which the government wants to keep an eye on everything about us, from our movements on the street to our emails and even our browsing habits. Those who favor surveillance argue that it is for our own good, to protect us against muggers and terrorists, pornographers and sexual predators. They don't seem too worried about invasions of privacy or perhaps we would see less spam and phishing attempts in our inboxes. Worry about privacy is the province of those who argue against surveillance, saying there is little room for it under the U.S. Constitution.

  But government snoopiness has a long history, reaching back to the CIA of the 1960s (when long hair was deemed a threat to public order) and the FBI under Hoover. It goes back even further, when in the days after World War II the National Security Agency strove to eavesdrop on international telecommunications traffic. The resulting Echelon program, a multinational effort based in England, processed an astonishing amount of messages.

  For our own good, eh? In Echelon, Josh Conviser supposes that the Echelon program grew to become a great force for peace and order. It detected and forestalled problems. It promoted peace and aborted war by judicious applications of information and misinformation. It monitored work in research labs around the world and preempted disruptive innovation, either killing or co-opting the inventors. And in due time, Echelon agent Ryan Laing, rock climbing to relieve his mind of guilt and pain, falls to his death. Fortunately, Echelon has in its arsenal of preempted technology a kind of nanotechnology, called “drones,” that lets Laing be revived and reassembled. On his next mission, he stumbles across evidence of a high-level conspiracy, and soon Echelon itself has crashed and Laing and his operator, Sarah, are running for their lives.

  As soon as Conviser says the computer code that defines Echelon displays unusual logic, the astute reader leaps to the conclusion that aliens must be behind it (after all, mere humans wouldn't want to control the world, would they?). But the characters don't see it. Instead Sarah hares off to the Arctic on what seems no clear clue at all to find an iceberg still bearing an old Cold War listening post, an antique computer, and a memory board still holding the code ancestral to Echelon. This is one of several moments when I wanted to throw the book across the room. The time is many decades after the Cold War ended, a span over which icebergs and ice floes (which were more likely to serve as bases) vanish. And with global warming threatening to make the Arctic ice-free within a few decades, I felt a massive disconnect.

  It does not help that Conviser periodically halts the story while Laing and Sarah agonize over their pasts and sprinkles an annoying number of contrived sound-bites throughout his pages. He overwrites egregiously when he could be putting his effort into reading about his world (the global warming thing) and devising ways to smooth out and justify the arbitrary jumps in his plot.

  The blurb likens him to Philip K. Dick, who had similar faults. But faults they were and are, and I cannot find it within me to recommend this one.

  * * * *

  Esther Friesner has more range than almost any other two writers you can name. She can excel in the dark, serious, adult mode of Sword of Mary (reviewed here in the June 1997 issue). And she is superb in the quite light and nonserious young adult mode of Temping Fate.

  The basic idea is pretty simple. Ilana Newhouse is desperate for a summer job for several reasons. The biggest may be that her sister is being quite insane about her upcoming wedding. Next to that is parental nagging. But the kid dresses like a wannabe goth, complete with an inked skull on her cheek (and didn't sister Dyllin shriek about that!), so she's not having much luck in the conservative Connecticut suburbs. That's when she discovers the Divine Relief Temp Agency, where Mrs. Atatosk thinks skull and attitude are good signs, not bad ones. The kid is hired.

  Will it last? The first assignment features a talking spider and a job typing death receipts for the Fates. Yes, those Fates. D. R. Temps finds help for the gods themselves, who love to take the occasional day off to go to the beach or their kids’ soccer games. Ilana makes new friends amongst the other temps, meets Circe (would you believe she's into feminine empowerment?), and does quite well, right up to the point where half of Olympus shows up at Dyllin's wedding.

  The only other author I can think of who could have written this is the late, lamented Thorne Smith. He would have given it a more adult tone (he could be pretty racy), but he would not have made it more fun.

  The next stop for this one is the hands of a certain niece.

  * * * *

  I enjoy John Moore's fractured fairy tales (Heroics for Beginners, reviewed here December 2004, and The Unhandsome Prince, October 2005), so it was a pleasure to find Bad Prince Charlie in my mail. In brief, it's even better than its predecessors, partly because it is a bit less of a parody and more of a story in its own right. The bad jokes are still there in plenty, but when Moore introduces the down-at-heels kingdom of Damask and its problems—the king is dead, the rain is so unreliable that crop failures are routine, and a neighbor would like to undo the secession of a century before—the story makes perfectly good sense from the start. So does the proposed solution to the problems—recruit Bad Prince Charlie (who earned his sobriquet by abusing a date), illegitimate son of the late king, to serve as regent, get the populace in a rebellious mood, and spark a neighborly takeover. He agrees only when the beauteous Lady Catherine Durace appears to be part of the deal, and then he promptly proves to be not so bad at all. He's been away at school, studying things like engineering, and he has an eye for the books and a tendency to toss corrupt officials into jail. If only that didn't conflict with the Standard Operating Procedures or Culture of Corruption of the bureaucracy, he would actually have a decent shot at setting the kingdom straight. He also has a practical turn of mind, and when he gets the wizardly weather forecast—drought and crop failure—he starts rationing immediately. This ticks off the people. So he's doing all the right things, and rebellion seems right on schedule.

  Lady Catherine, of course, turns out to have her own agenda, and the agenda of the uncles who recruited Charlie as Chump Royale turns out to be a bit different from what they said at first. It seems the missing chief wizard just may have created an impressive Weapon of Magical Destruction, and that's what the neighbor really wants. Meanwhile there's the High Priestess of Matka, who knows rather a lot about everything, peddles advice, and seems to have a very unholy interest in Charlie.

  Some of the story's elements are close kin to things we've seen in the news over the last few years. That is surely deliberate, for it adds point to the humor. But it also brings the novel so perilously close to political satire that one can actually read it for commentary on how to do certain things right. Perhaps that is why I think it better than the earlier books!

  Look for it, and enjoy!

  * * * *

  Since Marianne de Pierres is an Australian, it is no surprise to find her novels set Down Under. Code Noir, the second Parrish Plessis novel, centers on a refugee camp, the Tert, built upon an industrial zone polluted with assorted nasty chemicals, nanotechnology, and warped people, including kids with mechanical and biological enhancements, including bioweapons. The time is far enough in the future that some of the refugees come from Merika, but not so far that de Pierres thinks referring to architecture as “Art Crappo” doesn't make sense. The past is strong in other ways as well, for the people of the Tert have an assortment of shamans rooted in many cultures, and all their magic works.

  Is it science fiction or fantasy? Neither de Pierres nor those quoted on the cover seem to care. She has loads of “futuristic cool” and that's enough. Hol
lywood, which I suspect warped the author's mind at a young age, often seems to need no more justification than that for its efforts, so it must be true.

  Well, no. SF is rooted in rationality. Fantasy is not. And I suspect de Pierres doesn't know or care about the difference. After all, she is capable of hybridizing dogs and rats as “canrats” and of saying that a waterway contaminated with copper sulfate is so toxic that it kills instantly, on contact. (It won't do that even if the active toxin is biological. Even viruses and nerve gases take time!) She also waves the nanotech wand whenever she wants a flashy danger, such as a fiber-optics bundle bursting from the ground to become a tower that captures and shreds living things.

  So what's the story? Parrish emerged from her first novel, Nylon Angel, as a hero. Now she wants to get her life back together and find some way to handle the parasite that wants to take her over. But here's the Cabal, saying she has a debt, someone has swiped their shamans, and her job is to get them back, before the King Tide in less than two weeks. They promise help with the parasite if she succeeds. Of course, she doesn't seem very likely to survive, but that's not the sort of thought that stops a Parrish. She puts the word out that she needs info, informers die in nasty ways, and she's off and running, heading for Dis, home to an evil mastermind who plays with the bodies of children as if they were made of modeling clay. Along the way she picks up an assortment of guiding spirits (including a canrat), runs into old friends and enemies, displays her bleeding heart for the reader to empathize with, discovers an overarching, evil scheme, and finally manages to pull at least some of the chestnuts out of the fire.

  Alas, de Pierres's characters and world exist at too far a remove from reality. The same can be said about a great many other novels, of course, but other writers generally take some pains to justify their visions. Despite all the futuristic cool and frenetic action, de Pierres does not make me give a darn. One villain remains on the loose, so there is room for a sequel, but I hope she refrains.

  * * * *

  "Space opera” used to be a pejorative term. It meant a pretty direct transliteration of the old-fashioned Western into SF, with the hero riding a spaceship instead of a horse and heading the villain off at the nebula instead of the pass. It was written rapidly to formula with the simple goal of collecting a check. It was hackwork.

  It was also popular, for it put good against evil in no uncertain terms. The stakes were high—the fate of humanity, the world, or even the universe. It was exciting, it was adventure, it was unsubtle, and if it makes you think of certain modern SF movies, some critics have in fact criticized those movies as representing no SF past about the 1930s.

  Yet today a great deal of SF is cast in a very similar high-stakes, adventurous, exciting, good vs. evil mold, to the point where critics speak of the “new space opera” as a major and even dominant line of modern SF. And when they say “space opera,” they are not knocking it. In fact, they often seem to forget that the term was ever negative.

  How did this happen? Hartwell and Cramer track the story in The Space Opera Renaissance, with thirty-two examples, a massive anthology. From “World-Wrecker” or “World-Saver,” Hamilton through Leigh Brackett (whose 1949 “Enchantress of Venus” is still readable) and Cordwainer Smith, David Brin, Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, Catherine Asaro, Allen M. Steele, Gregory Benford, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stephen Baxter, to Charles Stross, and many more, the case is clear. Space opera occupies a prominent place in our memories of the best and is indeed front and center on the modern SF stage.

  Perhaps we should ask whether the negative use of “space opera” was ever a fair use. It came from the fanzines, which—beloved though they be—were home to some remarkably pretentious and snotty would-be critics. It was given better credentials by some equally pretentious and snotty critics of the British New Wave. From the outside, SF has been condemned as popular in antithesis to more literary fiction. Within the field, popularity has also earned sneers, perhaps because popular writers and works do not advance the field and/or the fight against the external snobs. I have even uttered some of those sneers myself, usually by way of wondering why utter tripe is popular and something better (which may in fact qualify as space opera!) is not.

  Call it “space opera” or “adventure SF” or “hard SF” or “modern SF,” a great deal of very good work is done in the category. If you are not interested in the debate over terminology, this anthology is an excellent overview of the category, with enough excellent work by excellent writers to keep any reader happy for a while. It could also serve as a great introduction to SF for young or new readers, and I would love to see copies in every public school and town library.

  Copyright © 2006 Tom Easton

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Dr. Schmidt:

  I enjoyed Mr. Rosenkranz's short story, “Preemption” (June ‘06). The nicely crafted story brought to mind the alternative view written by Eric Russell entitled “Into Your Tent I'll Creep” back in the late 1950's which is also a good read.

  C. Henry Depew

  * * * *

  Dear Dr. Schmidt:

  Just finished reading Carl Fredericks's story ("The Door That Does Not Close"), which I liked very much. However, having visited Romania's Black Sea coast not too long ago, I felt that I should let you (or your proofreader) know that in Romanian, the site in the story is spelled with a small diacritical mark (similar to the Spanish c's cedilla) placed under the second “t” in Constanta, so that is more properly spelled in English (and pronounced phonetically in Romanian) as “Constantsa.” Unlike the description in the story, Constantsa is a thoroughly modern town, but with many interesting Roman ruins (church, baths, the largest Roman mosaic floor ever discovered, a large statue of Ovid, who was exiled there in the 1st century AD) and such modern amenities as a domed casino (not unlike the building the story described), art and archaeological museums, the Black Sea's largest beach, with an amusement park and Water World, and decent restaurants. A very nice place to visit, if you ever have a chance.

  Jack Garrett

  * * * *

  Hi Stan,

  I just read your editorial ("Can't Argue With That,” June 2006). I think some of us contributors who hold Christian/Jewish/etc. views actually stated them on that forum only to repeatedly hear that you boycotted such folk. And to get drawn endlessly into Catholic bashing.

  It's going to be exciting times on the message board for a while, though!

  All of which is a roundabout way of saying you're dead right in your basic point, but it's not just religion: it's everything. Do you think the ultimate culprit is sound-bite politics? I'm not attacking Kansas here—with a gubernatorial election looming in Oregon, we're starting to hear it already. Incredibly mean attack ads from every direction, determined to twist their opponents’ views into something inaccurate.

  A libertarian friend of mine says that this is a side effect of a drawn-out political process better adapted to 150 years ago, when you had to wait for mail to go overland, and news was slow. Our campaigns are too long, he argues, and therefore inherently dirty. In comparison, he cites the Canadians. Alternatively (also citing the Canadians) he says it's an artifact of the two-party system. Coalition-building governments, such as parliamentary systems, can't afford the bitter polarization, and are therefore more cautious.

  His is an interesting point. My thought was that we are so bombarded with the junk our system serves up that it influences how we debate anything else, even with each other.

  Good editorial!

  Richard A. Lovett, J.D., Ph.D.

  * * * *

  Dear Dr. Schmidt,

  Your most recent editorial about the high national profile of “intelligent design” emphasized the importance of genuine national debate on the subject. In connection with the reticence of scientists to participate in a forum that was offered, you made some introductory comments about the need to unequivocally call nonsense nonsense, and the combinat
ion led me to write, because I think you unintentionally couched some of your comments in terms that contribute to the problem. I appreciate the strength and acuity of your concern and your persistence in airing it, particularly your pointing out with hugely needed clarity perhaps a year ago that “intelligent design” is not science. I think that is the pivotal issue and needs to be pointed out again and again, yet I never saw it so simply and properly emphasized as you presented it at the time. Probably that is what you refer to in your latest editorial when you say, “Some things are simply nonsense and deserve to be called such, without waffling or apology,” but I think it is in several respects unnecessarily, uneconomically (in the sense of Occam and his razor) absolute in a way that I and other appreciators of science like to hear, but also naturally arouses sympathy in the less-science-oriented parts of the public that left to itself does waffle, sympathy for the advocates of teaching “intelligent design” instead of for the advocates of science. A complementary comment of yours in the same editorial, “...if we don't keep the science in science classes, and non-science out...” continues what affects me as an excess in a good cause, because insistence on keeping non-science out of science classes seems to me to ask to make a straight-jacket of science for science education.

  In public education we have students who have no experience as yet in exercising their citizenship in public life, in any public life, and the crucial function of education is to prepare them to be people in the full sense of the term. I agree that teaching religious tenets has no place in education, but teaching something about religion and its role in public and private life must. Again, history has its classes, and science has its classes, but Galileo's obligation to recant heliocentrism for the sake of the Church is an important part of life, like the current “debate,” however well or ill conducted about teaching “intelligent design,” and naturally belongs to teaching what is distinctive about doing science. Again, to say science classes should not teach anything but science itself, in practice imposes an artifice that inculcates science in classrooms the way religion is inculcated in parochial schools. I think that rightly bothers people who want the benefits of religion as a center of family life for their children. It isn't hard to teach what you have already formulated, that religion isn't science, and science is the fascinating and endlessly resourceful study of nature, not of God. Its findings give the study of God more fuel, and the study of God can support scientific ingenuity, though it need not and though scientific ingenuity need not depend on it. It seems appropriate to me for such comments and discussion to have some role in science classes to clarify what science truly involves, because it is not obvious. Similarly for calling nonsense nonsense. It is so easy to assert that anything a student says is nonsense that I find it hard to imagine a gain in doing so, except of course to schooling in clarity of expression, which is indeed important. But if a student proposes a flawed idea about nature, where is the educational benefit in labeling that “nonsense?"