Analog SFF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Meanwhile, in our own era, in Seattle, three strange young people are being hunted by agents of the Chalk Princess. Ginny, a “chancer,” has a way of making luck, and she carries a strange stone she recalls her mother calling a library stone and her father a sum-runner. She finds shelter with Conan Arthur Bidewell, who occupies an old warehouse and collects mountains of books, searching for the small mutations in text that are signs of encroaching chaos. Jack, a “shifter,” can avoid trouble by moving from one of the many alternate world lines to another; he too has a sum-runner. Both dream of the Kalpa, visiting two denizens of that era to look out through their eyes. Daniel too is a shifter, but when he is introduced as a beggar and followed to the house he once called home, he turns out to have two sum-runners.

  Meanwhile at the end of time, Tiadba and Jebrassy, two of the current varieties of human “breeds,” crave to leave the Kalpa and strike out across the Chaos to find the fabled alternate refuge known as Nataraja. Occasionally they zone out while “visitors” from the past—Ginny and Jack, of course—drop by. Their world is ruled by highly advanced descendants of humans, immortals who spread themselves across multiple dimensions, the greatest of whom are as gods with lives woven through history and legend. The greatest is Polybiblios, the Librarian, who brings Jebrassy to the Tower for a bit of education while Tiadba is trained for her Chaos excursion.

  But time is running out for everyone. In fact, it is approaching Terminus, the end of all world-lines, and when Seattle bounces off that barrier, everything falls apart in ways as bizarre as anyone can imagine. Ginny, fortunately, is sheltered within Bidewell's warehouse along with three rather mysterious women who might represent the Norns or the Fates. Jack and Daniel join her, and before long all three are in Typhon's realm, along with Tiadba and Jebrassy, hunting for the mysterious mechanism that will save time and the cosmos.

  It's a powerful and evocative novel, but I felt the end was weakened when Bear threw in the cats. Cats are cute and mysterious and of course they walk through walls, but—dammit!—he went way over the top!

  And yes, I know full well that if that is all I say, you'll just have to read the book to see what the heck is going on. You'll enjoy it.

  * * * *

  Between them, Monk and Nigel Ashland have a lot of experience as teachers and travelers. Monk has even been a teacher in China, which helps to explain why a good portion of Kaimira: The Sky Village is set there, or more accurately in the air above China. Years before the story, the world's animals and robots rebelled against humanity. The resulting war brought civilization crashing to a halt, and when the beasts and meks turned on each other, the result was a patchwork world dominated by enclaves of beasts and meks, with humans struggling to survive among them. In China, however, a few people had the foresight to launch hot air balloons before the war arrived. Those balloons have multiplied to make the Sky Village of the title, which depends for supplies—including fuel—on the humans below (and never mind where those folks get fuel). A world away, in Las Vegas, humans such as Rom struggle to survive in the ruins, while rumors of Demon Caves entice.

  In China, Mei (or Dragonfly) is a young teen whose mother—once of the Sky Village—has been kidnapped by meks. Her father has sent her to the Sky Village with a family treasure called the Tree Book. She has been told not to open it, but of course she does to discover that the stories her mother used to read to her about a boy named Rom are real. Rom, of course, has a Tree Book too, and his father used to read him stories about a girl named Dragonfly. The book also seems to contain something called Animus, which promises aid and revenge if only she will free it.

  Mei learns the ways of the Sky Village and when the Village is attacked by meks, she learns that she can somehow communicate with them. This angers the Village's allies, the birds, with whom she can also link, apparently because she carries the kaimira gene, which makes her partly beast and partly mek in addition to human.

  Rom too has the kaimira gene, and when he pursues the demons who have captured his sister into the Demon Caves, he learns that it gives him the ability to conjure demons, odd hybrids of mek and beast, the fruit of a technology originally aimed at giving humans the upper hand in the war, but now co-opted to serve a base economy based on betting, especially on gladiatorial combats where demonsmiths pit their demons against each other. There is a risk of mental breakdown, but Rom proves to have immense talent, much as his father had in his day. Can he use it to rescue his sister and escape? Can he do it—and can Mei save the Village and find her mother—without releasing Animus?

  The Sky Village is a fascinating if highly unlikely setting. The theme of nature versus technology with humans caught in the middle unless they can somehow integrate it all is important in the world we have created, and it is one that the younger readers that are this book's audience will profit from absorbing. However, the book is marred by nonsense science—mek/beast genes? C'mon now! But the Ashlands do hint at a logical explanation in the science that preceded the war, and future volumes of the series may make it all make more sense.

  * * * *

  Otherworldly Maine is the second anthology of Maine SF&F that I have been in, but my own story ("The Bung-Hole Caper") is hardly the reason to buy it. With a nod to Mainer Frank Edward Munsey, who in the 1880s created the pulps, editor Noreen Doyle has reached back more than a century and a half to include a portion of Henry David Thoreau's “Ktaadn” to set the tone. At that time, there was plenty of wilderness to the west of the Appalachians, but on the East Coast, where Europeans had been settled for over two centuries at the time, there was already little left, and that little was epitomized by Maine's North Woods, full of large trees, inscrutable natives, pristine waters, moose and bear, trout and salmon, and the mystery of the unknown. Much of that is gone, but the image remains, partly a matter of landscape, partly one of people. The mystery part of it has appealed to fantasy writers, among whom Doyle of course counts Stephen King ("Mrs. Todd's Shortcut"). To accompany King, she has recruited Edgar Pangborn's “Longtooth,” Elizabeth Hand's “Echo,” Jeff Hecht's “By the Lake,” Gregory Feeley's “Awskonomuk,” Steve Rasnic Tem's “Creation Story,” and fifteen more. Of historical interest is Mark Twain's “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” (1878) and Edward Kent's “A Vision of Bangor, in the Twentieth Century” (in 1848, he actually managed to get some things right). Exercising the writer-editor's prerogative, she has included her own “The Chapter of the Hawk of Gold,” wherein the mystery has much to do with the penchant of Yankee traders and whalers for collecting curios from around the world.

  Regional anthologies are not as common as they used to be. If they were, this would stand out as an excellent example of the kind. With less competition, it stands out even more. So if you have a taste for the Maine mystique, order a copy.

  * * * *

  James Patrick Kelly has a way of pushing the edge of science fiction way out there, and The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories provides plenty of supporting evidence. In “Dividing the Sustain,” the scene is a starship in transit. The people aboard represent a distant future where immortality is normal, but after enough years one goes “stale” and must be recast into a new form and/or psyche. The more times one has been recast, the more extreme the recasting must be, and when a married couple gets into a fight the results can be bizarre indeed. Is Kelly just trying to appeal to tabloid readers and Jerry Springer fans? There's enough here to make one wonder, but the idea works as metaphor and possibly even as a likely corollary of immortality.

  The title story centers on an AI that is the exploration ship Godspeed, which roams the galaxy seeking habitable worlds and serves as host to an ever-varying suite of pilgrims who beam aboard for a year or a century. Alas, Speedy is a bit mad and self-directed, which offers the pilgrims an interesting future.

  Don't miss.

  * * * *

  There was science fiction with literary pretensions before I started reviewing, but in my tenure here I have
seen that sort of SF proliferate. Some of it has been good, even excellent. Some has not. But few of its practitioners enjoy the popularity of Jack McDevitt, who despite a relatively plain and direct (traditional) approach to his work is surely one of the best writers of SF alive today.

  His novels are enough to support that statement. But if he had never written the novels, his short fiction could do the job almost as well. If you doubt me, get a copy of Cryptic: Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt. It begins with one of his best-known tales, “Cryptic,” which concerns how much you can learn about distant aliens from the mere fact of a signal; you don't have to figure out their language to be scared spitless. If that (like his novels) seems too much like hard SF, consider “Welcome to Valhalla,” coauthored with Kathryn Lance, which considers the role of art in shaping history, and the recalcitrance of the artist's ego. Or “Ignition,” which imagines a future America ruled by folks a lot like the Taliban, even unto their propensity for destroying graven images with high explosives. Or ... The book has thirty-nine tales, and I am not about to go through them all for you! Suffice it to say that you should have no trouble finding plenty to enjoy.

  * * * *

  It is now time to say farewell as the Reference Librarian.

  I began writing for Analog in 1971, with stories and science fact articles. My first “Reference Library” was in the October 1978 issue. It was a review of a single book, David Rorvik's In His Image: The Cloning of a Man, which I had not intended as a book review column. I sent it to Stan thinking it would make a nice guest editorial. The book was controversial, for it claimed that a human being had already been successfully cloned and described how. It is worth noting that the methods Rorvik described would not have worked in mammals as described, but they weren't that far from methods that later actually did work. And the bioethical debates that flared around the book have continued ever since, for the last few decades have been dominated by biotechnology and the associated ethical and philosophical issues. I concluded the review by saying:

  * * * *

  "Rorvik has been called a liar, a fraud, and a jackass in print, and his book has been called a hoax. But even though I do not believe his claims, I will not be that unkind. I suspect Rorvik of a devious, and perhaps mercenary, turn of mind, and I think he has devised a clever, attention-getting ploy that will have an entirely salutary effect. Bioethics is important at this time in our history, but like most ethical and philosophical areas, it requires too distasteful and laborious an amount of thought to get much shrift from the average Jane and Joe. Rorvik has put it into a frame as carefully and dramatically plotted as a novel. He has made it accessible, and he deserves far more praise than blame."

  * * * *

  I was a bit amused when later on lawyers contacted me to ask whether I would be willing to serve as an expert witness in the court case involving Rorvik and his publisher. (See www.museumofhoaxes.com/cloning.html.)

  Given the nature of the book, I still think my review would have made a fine guest editorial. But editors are by definition filled with vast editorial wisdom, and a “Reference Library” it became, displacing Lester Del Rey's column for a month.

  Some months later, after Spider Robinson had succeeded Lester Del Rey, I asked Stan to bear me in mind if he needed a new book columnist, and he wrote back saying that as it happened, Spider was wishing to alternate with someone else. Stan was asking people to produce sample columns, and if I wished, I could do one too. By the end of 1979, there I was, a more or less regular Analog columnist. Spider and I tried not to overlap our coverage, and by and large we succeeded. Within a couple of years, Spider had decided to step down entirely, and I was the sole Reference Librarian.

  * * * *

  And now, after 30 years and 341 columns, I have had enough. I said as much to Spider, and he was kind enough to provide the following for quotation here:

  * * * *

  "My own tenure at the Reference Library was only a little over two years—just long enough to solidify a healthy—nay, robust—respect for P. Schuyler Miller. Sky not only lasted nearly a quarter of a century at the arduous, underpaid and largely thankless job, he contrived to leave it liked and respected by all. But to manage the same unlikely trick for THIRTY years is even more impressive. In all that time I've never heard a single writer utter a single harsh or even snide word about Tom Easton; those unfortunate enough to receive an unfavorable review from him tend to react with disappointment rather than anger. Remarkable. I salute him and thank him and will miss him. His successor has large shoes to fill. I hope at least this means we can look forward to more of Tom's own fiction now."

  * * * *

  I could argue with bits of that. Miller started reviewing for Astounding in 1945, though “The Reference Library” itself didn't start till 1951. I've run into a harsh or snide word or two. My shoes are the same size they always were, and anyone with a size 12 foot can fill them. Arduous? Well, some, but any writer has to get used to keeping an eye on the deadline, and it's been fun, getting paid to read books many of which I would have wanted to read even if they weren't coming to me in the mail for free. In the process I have been able to pay attention to portions of the science fiction realm usually ignored by reviewers. This has included poetry, and in fact I was once told that when a book of Tom Disch's poems came out, my review was the only one it received in the entire country. It has also included small press fiction, art books, SF criticism and history, biography and autobiography, books on writing SF, and—practically from its beginning—electronic publishing, first on floppy disk and later on CDs and online. Once or twice, I think, I even mentioned calendars by SF artists. Given the nature of the Analog audience, I also felt no compunctions about covering popular and even fairly academic science. And once in awhile, I would even review a mystery, a romance, or something for the kids.

  In 2007, Borgo Press published much of this non-mainstream SF material in Off the Main Sequence: I. O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, No. 31. The book is perhaps most valuable for the section that contains, in chronological order, everything I had said about electronic publishing. It amounts to a history, though it isn't a unified history. It's more a series of snapshots, but I know of nothing else that comes close to telling the story.

  And telling a story is something that a book columnist can do, if the gig lasts awhile. It isn't even deliberate. It just happens, as the snapshots accumulate and fill the album. Look at the right entries in the columns and you can see the growth—and perhaps decline—of a writer. Look at other entries, and you can see the growth (and decline) of a subgenre, a publisher, a form of publication. It is perhaps like a family album, where the snapshots are literal photographs and you can see the growth (and decline) of family members, houses, marriages, and all the rest of life.

  Despite the series title of the Borgo book, I haven't, to my mind, been doing criticism. Other writers, such as John Clute, do that, and they bring out periodic collections of their analyses to contribute to knowledge of the field. I've reviewed them when they came my way. But their contributions to the knowledge of the field are deliberate; sticking to the photographic metaphor, they tend to do landscape shots, framing shots, photo essays. What I have done deliberately is to contribute knowledge of this book, that book, and another book, month by month, year by year. Family snapshots, if you will, with the landscape as background, and snapshots when properly arranged—which the Borgo book tried to do—can add something to knowledge of the field.

  Will I do another Borgo book? Probably not. There really isn't much market for that sort of thing. I have other projects to work on, including one that has already given rise to a science fact article for this magazine. Maybe I'll find time to write a bit more fiction, but don't count on it. Google me, and you'll see that I'm pretty busy now with nonfiction work.

  So. I can't say there are no regrets. “The Reference Library” has been a part of my life for a long time—almost half that life, in fact! Readin
g, thinking about the reading, and writing about the reading long ago became part of my daily rhythm. But it's time to move on. If I still review the occasional book—and review copies are still coming in the mail—you'll find that on my blog at technoprobe.blogspot. com/.

  If you visit me there, I'll be overjoyed to see you. If you don't, this “Farewell” will have to do. I'll miss you all, but it's time to go.

  Now I've got to take the smoldering torch out of the bracket on the wall over there. Give me a second to wave it around a bit. There—the flame has picked up. Brighter, warmer, not so smoky. Somewhere around here, Stan has the next Reference Librarian waiting for me to pass the torch. Uh, well, it seems to be stuck to my fingers. Must be thirty years of habit. I have had enough, really.

  Dammit! Will someone just grab this torch?

  Copyright (c) 2008 Tom Easton

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  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Dear Stan,

  As someone who has had a keen interest in linguistics for many years, I was both surprised and delighted to discover Henry Honken's erudite and informative article on click languages in Analog's May issue. I had often wondered how Xhosa managed to start with an “X"—now I know. However, I was also surprised to find within the article what would in school exam terms be called a “silly slip": the English “f” sound is not produced by a constriction of the lower teeth against the upper lip—that is not easy and, once achieved, it is practically impossible to produce any sound—but rather the reverse. Perhaps this was a deliberate mistake designed to find out how many people actually read the article?