Analog SFF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Bleys’ tale was told in Young Bleys (reviewed here in September 1991) and Other (March 1995). Now David W. Wixon, working from Dickson's notes, has completed the third volume, Antagonist, in which Bleys’ shortcomings become clear as he grows to see that only war will serve his purpose. He cares for his dream more than for the people around him, much less those at further remove, and he readily manipulates them all in furthering his plots and schemes. He is clearly a destroyer, where Hal is a builder.

  The novel begins with Bleys trapped in a bunker while unnamed foes close in. Flashbacks reveal how he got there, strengthening his political position by visiting Friendly mercenaries on Ceta. Soon he is aware of a competing conspiracy, working to weaken the worlds of the Dorsai and the Exotics. When he gains their cooperation by helping them, his cause seems strengthened. The momentum for war builds. But Hal Mayne is always one step ahead, until finally they are nose-to-nose across a line in the sand, and Hal is saying, “We will prevail."

  But even though Bleys’ plans have been inverted in more than one way, who will prevail is by no means certain. If Dickson had lived, he would surely have planned another book. If Antagonist succeeds in the market, Wixon may do the same. But Antagonist suffers from the same flaws as its predecessors of the 1990s. It is wordy and didactic, even preachy, and characters are too thin to be convincing. Nor does the pacing seem real, for the colonies’ readiness for war leaps forward with no more preparation than a wave of the auctorial wand. Bleys faces far too little resistance for a reader accustomed to modern politics to believe.

  * * * *

  SPOILER WARNING: I said Bleys’ plans wind up inverted, which is a pretty cryptic statement. Recall that Bleys is helping to destroy the Dorsai and the Exotics and that he wants to move the people of the colonies back to Old Earth. The line in the sand is a barrier around Earth, with Earth and the Dorsai and Exotics on one side, and Bleys and the Friendlies on the other. If Earth is the pot in which humanity grows up, the recipe is for adding reason and intuition to chaotic diversity. Bleys’ preference would have been for adding religious fervor to that diversity. Sound familiar?

  * * * *

  Science fiction has long loved such notions as matterporting, where the basic idea is to scan something such as a human being, generate a corresponding signal, send the signal, and then reassemble the scannee, perhaps light-years away. As a notion, it doesn't really matter whether the scanning uses matter-to-energy conversion or nanotechnological disassemblers. The point is the signal, which of course can be recorded and edited. So there have been stories about doppelgangers and mind control.

  The latter is particularly frightening. It presupposes an extraordinarily intimate understanding of how the mind works at both the software and hardware levels, but given that, it is no great leap to think of editing beliefs and loyalties (not to mention what it could do for education!). And you wouldn't need matterporting to do the editing with. An injection (or infection) of nanobeasties would be enough to do the trick, and we've seen those stories too.

  Yet though the technology could be used for evil, there are also great possibilities for healing, for freeing people of their slavery to ideology, for helping people be the best they can be. If and when such technology is developed, what will it be used for? This is the question Justina Robson addresses in Mappa Mundi, which begins (after a set of introductions of main characters which seems to serve no real purpose except to establish the author's credentials as a “character-oriented” writer) when a small town next to a Native American reservation suffers an attack of madness. White Horse, whose brother Jude is a government agent who hunts down illicit “Perfectionist” technology (such as genetic engineering), escapes an arsonist mob with the strange device she had stolen from a car still in her possession. Now meet Natalie Armstrong, who is involved in the development of NervePath nanotech, which explores neural interconnections in the brain, and Mappa Mundi, which aims to build a brain map that can be tweaked to—in Natalie's clinic—heal brain damage such as that of Patient X, who fell off a roof. She has also been trying to get funding to develop her own variant, Selfware, which should boost personal potential. She is dodging calls from someone named Jude.

  Things get strange when Natalie's crew finally tries their cure on Patient X, for someone has hacked the software. Now he has Selfware, and though his brain is clearly repaired, he goes transparent and vanishes. But not before passing through Natalie and activating her own internal gadgetry.

  Meanwhile it is becoming clear that there are far too many schemes and conspiracies to keep straight. The US government is trying hard to get its hands on the Mappa Mundi technology first, so it can—of course—ensure that peace, democracy, and the American Way dominate the world. Or so says one faction; others have more sinister aims. The Russian genius who has been Jude's target for years turns out to have a host of identities, including that of the moving force behind Mappa Mundi, and his agenda is something quite different. As Natalie and Jude figure out what is at stake, they must face decisions. What can they do? What should they do? Is it even possible to save the world? And here comes Patient X again, a genuine deus ex machina, to help them reach a more or less satisfactory resolution.

  The book is interesting, but ultimately quite bleak, especially for a reader who cannot accept the transcendence represented by the deus. Nor is the final epilog or “Update” much help, for it hints at a world where Mappa Mundi has become blinders as effective at enforcing ignorance of the real world as any ideology. No “solution,” says Robson, works forever. Indeed, says her Russian genius, his Memetic Calculus proves that. No matter what is done with Mappa Mundi, it is only a matter of time before the status quo ante returns. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

  * * * *

  You may recall James Van Pelt's short work from these (and other magazine) pages. His collections have won praise as fine fare for young adults. His first novel is Summer of the Apocalypse, a rather gentle, warm, and symmetrical tale of life after a plague nearly wiped out the human species.

  Meet Eric. He's 75, one of the last survivors of the Gone Times. He lives with a few hundred others in Littleton, Colorado, and tries to sell the idea that literacy matters, that regaining the lost knowledge and technology should be seen as just as important as scavenging another shirt or knife from the ruins of the past. His son Troy scorns all that guff. The important things are planting and reaping, marrying and burying, day to day life, not the future. But Eric knows that the miscarriage rate is high, and if no one minds the future, the future will have no place in it for them. Fortunately, his grandson Dodge and his skittish friend Rabbit seem more interested in learning to read and listening to Grandpa's tales. And when, after one more argument with Troy, Eric decides to set out on one last trek, perhaps all the way to the University to see if its books are still there, they follow him. And when he finally spots them, they become his companions.

  For the symmetry, Van Pelt has Eric recall his own youth. He was just fifteen when the plague struck, and his own father took his wife and son into the hills, where he had already stocked a cave with supplies. But the plague is relentless, and soon Eric is left alone to witness the collapse of civilization in flame, chaos, and several kinds of barbarism. Despite the horror of the collapse, however, the dominant mood is a very sad melancholy, underlined by a cop who struggles to do his job, an ex-nurse who hopes desperately that capturing healthy survivors and taking their blood can save her and her lover, Eric's own determination to return to his suburban house and find there his missing dad, and the patience with his obsession shown by Leda, an older woman who will in due time become Troy's mother.

  In the contemporary tale, Eric, Dodge, and Rabbit trek onward. Eric's strength isn't what it used to be, so progress is slow. But he is game, and when they meet a band of people who sneer at “jackals,” scavengers like they and their people, Van Pelt brings into focus an important question: In the wake of disaster, should people scavenge for survival, or shoul
d they strike out anew? Live in the past, or the present? Or perhaps, he says a little later when he brings in still another group, should people plan for the future?

  The father-son thing is strong here. Eric and his dad. Eric and Troy. Troy and Dodge. The generational tension is clear, and so is Van Pelt's thought that the tension cannot be resolved without remembering the past in the present and passing it to the future. “Everything circled around."

  Is this one, like the Van Pelt collections, fare for young adults? I called it “gentle,” so it would certainly fit that market segment, but it is not kid stuff. Give it a try. I think you'll enjoy it.

  * * * *

  Mike Resnick's Starship: Pirate follows Starship: Mutiny as space opera in the classic vein, but with plenty of touches of pure Resnick. The earlier book introduced Wilson Cole as first officer aboard the Theodore Roosevelt, a superannuated warship staffed by misfits and screw-ups. Cole got there by embarrassing the brass by being right too many times, and he soon did it again. In the process he earned the crew's loyalty, and when he was court-martialed for his sins, they busted him out of jail. They then stole the Teddy and it was heigh-ho for the Jolly Roger.

  But Cole is one of the good guys. If he's going to be a pirate, who should he prey upon? There's only one real choice—the bad guys, meaning other pirates—and soon they have a very nice haul in their hands. Alas, the fence they find—an alien named David Copperfield who is quite enchanted to find that Cole knows his Dickens—isn't about to give them any sort of reasonable price. It seems that piracy, like any trade, requires learning. Before long, Cole has found the beautiful and deadly Valkyrie, a Pirate Queen who has lost her ship, needs help getting it back, and is willing to coach Cole along in return for that help.

  More problems ensue, and though Cole is more than competent at dealing with them, there remains the fate of the Teddy's erstwhile owners who given the chance would blow it and all its crew to space dust. The eventual solution ... Suffice it to say that the titles of the books remaining in the series—Mercenary, Rebel, and Flagship—seem designed to sketch Cole's future path.

  Few writers have Resnick's gift for pace and momentum, nor his talent for producing a fast, smooth, utterly effortless read. This one's light, to be sure, but you'll enjoy it.

  * * * *

  German author Daniel Kehlmann is a phenomenon. According to the press release that accompanied Measuring the World, the book has sold more than 600,000 copies in Germany and knocked Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code off the bestseller list. Foreign rights have sold to 32 countries, and all that's missing is a contract with Hollywood.

  Who knows? Maybe that will come, for the film A Beautiful Mind, about mathematician John Nash, was a success, and Measuring the World features not one but two—count ‘em!—eccentric geniuses. The first is mathematician Carl Gauss, who could jump out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula; from time to time Gauss worked as a surveyor, literally measuring the world. The second is geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who explored South America, climbing mountains, sending back to Europe shiploads of specimens, and constructing maps, thus also fitting the book's title. Both men were driven and arrogant. Gauss in particular was contemptuous of those around him, who thought more slowly and less deeply. Humboldt was impatient with delay and human weakness, including his own, and invented a breathing apparatus so he could go deeper into mines and caves.

  Kehlmann tracks their lives and careers, showing how they created difficulties for themselves and those around them, before bringing them together, both full of honors, in 1828 for a journey across Russia, during which their attention is monopolized by meet-and-greets while various hangers-on and assistants usurp all the scientific work for which they had lived. The overall tone of the book, despite a wealth of wit and irony, is thus quite sad. The theme is the struggle to control one's destiny and how, after success, it escapes once more. And then, well ... Gauss's son Eugen, fallen afoul of the secret police, has been exiled. As the book ends, his ship is approaching the coast of the New World, where the struggle will be renewed.

  Kehlmann, at least in translation and I presume in the original, is an assured and skillful writer who deserves the acclaim he has received. You could do much worse for yourself than to pick up a copy.

  * * * *

  The first of Ben Bova's Sam Gunn stories appeared many years ago, and they're still coming. If you've enjoyed them, you want to get The Sam Gunn Omnibus, which collects them all, puts them in chronological order (though Bova says “It isn't easy to put all the tales ... in any sequence that even vaguely resembles chronological order,” and adds enough new ones to get the total count up to fifty. Unfortunately there is no listing of where and when all the tales first appeared, so you won't find it easy to tell whether a tale is new or you just missed it before.

  Did you miss them all? Well, Sam Gunn is a quintessential scalawag, con man, and letch. No scruples at all. But he is also a hero bent on justice in his uniquely twisted way. He can sue the Pope, rescue girls in a sex-trade jam, and finagle investors into making the space program boom, all while having fun himself and making the reader smile till it hurts.

  Copyright © 2007 Tom Easton

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BRASS TACKS

  Mr. Schmidt:

  This, with reference and in response to your January/February 2007 Analog editorial, “The Cheesesteak Nazi, etc."

  You make a good point, but appear not to notice in your fervent pursuit of declaiming individual rights to choose (and, I hope, make such choice as an informed citizen) to have missed the fork in the road that may lead to considering the validity, nay, necessity of imposing requirements on those who provide for sale things about which those decisions must be made: food, in particular, but I would extend the list well beyond the making of gustatory choices that we must make several times a day, to include other, non-food consumer items, as well.

  "...People have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their own bodies—if they also accept ... And that is something that our current culture has aggressively discouraged, to the point of making it practically impossible."

  Oh, so true, that part about our culture making it virtually impossible to make such decisions! But, it seems that your course is rather to decry imposing controls on the supply side, to the detriment of what could be a balanced argument in the article.

  The fork in the road (no pun intended) is this: the purveyors of food containing transfats do not typically provide information that allows one to make an informed decision that would allow one to pursue an obviously available recourse to “going elsewhere” to obtain a meal. This has changed a little since the suit to which you make reference was filed—probably, in great measure, as a consequence of the fact that the suit was filed!

  Here is a question for you: When did you see the fried chicken chain to which you make reference advertising that they served chicken cooked with transfats and that those transfats might be detrimental to the health of the consumer and if you (the potential consumer of their faire) prefer to obtain a more healthy alternative, you should consider dining elsewhere?

  Have you ever known of any purveyor of food to provide detailed recipes of their dishes for perusal by customers so they can make their informed decisions?

  Case in point, the restaurant that had peanut butter as a “secret ingredient” in their chili and, as a result, one of the customers with an allergy to peanuts died after eating their chili. Could that customer have made an all-important informed decision? The answer is obviously “no.” Would anyone even suspect that peanut butter were one of the conceivable ingredients of chili? Not I! That one hit me in the side of the head—but, then, I am not a chef.

  Yes, we should allow people to decide for themselves, but we must give them the tools they need to make such decisions intelligently, even if we have doubts that the majority of the population is fully competent to make intelligent decisions. Still, we have an obligation to
make the effort.

  I don't really want to get into an attempt to address smoking—though you mention it in your article. But it serves as a prime and “in your face” example of the provider of a commodity making every effort to avoid disclosure of essential information that would have helped at least one reasonably intelligent individual to make a decision not to take a course of action leading to emphysema, cancer, or a multitude of other drastic consequences that could have been avoided, had the apparently well-documented information, available to insiders for years, not been hidden.

  Enough of this, for me. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my comments. I wish you the best. I should mention that I have found much pleasure in reading Analog and anticipate many more years of doing the same.

  David Marciel

  * * * *

  Actually, many restaurants do make such information available on request, or by looking at a poster on the wall.Even if they don't, though, people who care can also take responsibility for learning about the general nutritional content of types of food, and asking about things that particularly concern them.People who know they have allergies can and should take it upon themselves to ask, when ordering anything, whether it contains their particular allergen.Those with uncommon allergies have to do this, and I'm not yet convinced that it's reasonable to expect everyone selling food to list everything it contains that might conceivably be a problem for somebody.