FSF, August 2008

by Spilogale, Inc

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  Department: Books by Chris Moriarty

  Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov. Tor, 2008, $24.95

  The Null-A Continuum, by John C. Wright. Tor, 2008, $25.95

  Lorelei of the Red Mist, by Leigh Brackett. Haffner, 2007, $40.

  The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman, by Leigh Brackett. Planet Stories, 2007, $12.99.

  The Martian General's Daughter, by Theodore Judson. PYR, 2008, $15.

  * * * *

  How do you explain Isaac Asimov to Earthmen?

  How do you even begin to describe that glorious union of all-American optimism, bleeding-heart Yiddishkeit, and cutting-edge science speculation? You can't. He's one of a kind—like all true miracles.

  I suspect Pebble in the Sky held up better as hard sf back in 1950. Asimov kicks off the book with a D.C. Comics-style lab accident and some half-hearted handwaving about the “queer and dangerous crannies” in nuclear physics. You couldn't play this fast and loose with science today—not even if you sugarcoated the pill with a thick layer of closed time-like loops and entangled photons. Frankly, compared to Arthur C. Clarke's stories from the 1950s, Pebble in the Sky feels downright flimsy.

  But who's complaining? The plot and characters are vintage Asimov, complete with a delightfully tongue-in-cheek cameo of alien tourism that I can't help suspecting was the inspiration for one of my favorite Hal Clement stories. When a shtetl-born tailor is transported to a future Chicago that has become a radioactive quarantine zone, he collides with a maverick archeologist who claims Earth is the origin point for all of humanity. Naturally, Earth's Imperial Procurator is skeptical. He protests (with classic Asimovian excess) that Earth is:

  a pigpen of a world, or a horrible hole of a world, or a cesspool of a world, or almost any other particularly derogatory adjective you care to use. And yet, with all its refinement of nausea, it cannot even achieve uniqueness in villainy, but remains an ordinary, brutish peasant world.

  Foundation junkies will perk up at the Procurator's tone of imperial ennui. And indeed, Pebble in the Sky offers tantalizing glimpses of an earlier and marginally less decayed Galactic Empire. Psychohistory buffs will love this book for its through-the-looking-glass view of the Foundation series. And everyone else will love it because it's just fun, fun, fun.

  * * * *

  A. E. van Vogt's pulp classic The World of Null-A ranks right up there with Asimov's Foundation novels and Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game on my list of books to recommend to really smart teenagers. Not that they aren't fun for kids of all ages. But teenagers take a special joy in books that come complete with their own self-contained philosophical systems.

  John C. Wright was clearly one of the smart kids who devour such books. And he obviously stumbled on The World of Null-A at exactly the right moment. The result is The Null-A Continuum.

  The book's back cover copy is a pulp geek's dream, complete with claims that Wright (better known for his hard sf “Golden Age” trilogy than for his pulp credentials) “has trained himself to write in the exciting pulp style” so that readers can “return again to the Null-A future."

  Happily, it's all bunk.

  Null-A Continuum is no slavish copy. In Wright's hands, the pulp original turns into a pulp-meets-hard-sf meditation on cosmological evolution. Purists may howl, but in my opinion this is a good thing. Van Vogt was a short story virtuoso: a master of the firefly-bright idea that flashes and flickers and can be worked through in a dozen brilliant pages. His novels often feel a bit freeze-dried in the home stretch, as if he's lost interest in his characters and just wants to get the whole ordeal over with.

  Wright, in contrast, is a born novelist. And Null-A Continuum is a novelist's novel, bristling with ideas and characters that demand novel-length treatment. It's also a thoroughly modern piece of work, heftier and yet more disciplined than the original Null-A books. The writing is smoother, the characters more developed, the science more rigorous, the ... oh, why go on? What it all boils down to is that the original Null-A novels were pulp of the first water, while Wright's book is an erudite homage to the pulp tradition by a twenty-first-century hard-sf master.

  Wright has retooled van Vogt's characters, plot, and science for today's readers. And though his love for the master is evident, he hasn't hesitated to put his own stamp on the Null-A universe. The science of the original Null-A books centered around the characteristic science ideas of the 1940s: the threat of nuclear war, the vision of vast, centralized bureaucracies run by ENIAC-style thinking machines, the hope that hypnosis could unlock the hidden powers of the human mind. In contrast, Wright's scientific concerns are those of today: the cosmological implications of new discoveries in physics and astronomy; the untrustworthiness of memory; the extreme pressures placed on humans as we leave behind the environment to which our evolution has adapted us.

  How you feel about Wright's book will depend on how you feel about the differences between the pulp of yesteryear and the hard sf of today. If you're looking to relive the experience of reading van Vogt for the first time, you'll just have to settle for reading van Vogt a second time. But if you're interested in what one of the smartest hard sf writers of our generation has to say about the universe of Null-A, then Wright's Null-A Continuum will let you get your geek on.

  * * * *

  If Asimov's and van Vogt's speculations were rendered obsolete by subatomic physics, then Leigh Brackett's were outrun by NASA. Who could have predicted back in 1943 that NASA would turn the swashbuckling Martian frontier over to bean-counters and bureaucrats? By the time Brackett wrote her last Erik John Stark novels in the 1970s, NASA had made the whole idea of Mars so boring that Stark had to retreat to a distant star system like Shane riding off into the sunset in search of open range.

  And yet somehow Brackett survived....

  To read Bracket is to dig deep into science fictional bedrock. Want to know where Dune comes from? Or Bradbury's haunting canal cities? Or the noir heroes of Dick, Tiptree, and Gibson? Read Brackett. (Pulp factoid of the day: Dick's first published novel, the Null-A-influenced Solar Lottery, originally came out bound back-to-back with Brackett's The Big Jump.)

  Brackett's cardinal virtue is the ability to forge sentences so clean and direct that the poetry, ambiguity, and sheer complexity of her stories seem to sneak up sideways on you. Her plots pinball between rip-roaring adventure, thorny ethical dilemmas, and glittering moments of pure technowow. Her characters are dramatic and boldly drawn, yet still conflicted enough to be believable. And her prose has a mythic clarity and luminosity reminscent of Le Guin's best work ... though, of course, that's getting it backwards.

  It's exhilarating reading. And for anyone who writes sf, it's more than a little daunting. You can't ignore that nervous inner voice that keeps wondering how stuff this good could possibly have gone out of print ... and what that says about the future prospects of your own paltry scribblings.

  So why has Brackett languished out of print while lesser writers prospered? I don't have a clue. And, at least in Brackett's case, I'm not sure I buy the all-too-obvious gender-based answer. So here is your mission, if you choose to accept it: read all the Brackett you can get your hands on, and if you think you can figure out why she's not a household name, drop me an email. Or, heck, just drop me an email to rave about how great she is. I expect the latter kind of email will vastly outnumber the former.

  The best place to start for first-time Brackett readers is the Planet Stories back-to-back reissue of The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. It's cheap and portable—and best of all, it's Stark.

  At the risk of being accused of creeping lowbrow-ism, I have to confess that I think the Stark stories are Brackett's best work. They may not be the most subtle stuff she ever wrote, but they're jaw-droppingly good. They're also a pivotal moment in sf history—and not just because Stark is arguably the genre's first black hero.[*] With Stark's first appearance in the Summer 1949 issue of Planet
Stories, Brackett found the perfect hero for her signature blend of hard-boiled prose and pulp action—a mix that would dominate sf for the rest of the century and beyond. From Dick and Tiptree to Delany and Gibson, so many giants of the genre have adopted Brackett's noir-inflected tone that it has become an almost invisible part of sf's stylistic bedrock. These days if it's not noir, it barely feels like sf at all. And maybe that's one of the stylistic ticks that will eventually make today's sf look dated....

  [*Since someone will inevitably ask, I hereby declare my adherence to the school of Brackettology that believes she purposely made Stark's race ambiguous.]

  Or maybe not. After all, achieving immortality is easy: you just have to be as good as Brackett.

  * * * *

  A rare beast appeared in my mailbox last month: one of those books so astonishingly good that it made me run out and buy everything else its author ever wrote.

  The Martian General's Daughter is Theodore Judson's third novel. Judson's prior work has sparked comparisons to Heinlein and Asimov—and here he turns Asimov's famous advice about “cribbin’ from Gibbon” into an unnerving little gem of a book that explores the intersection between science fiction, history, and metahistory.

  The story is familiar to anyone who's read the Augustan Histories or seen the film Gladiator. But Judson's retelling of the old tale is quietly riveting, and his image of a decaying post-galactic aristocracy lamenting the loss of email and central air conditioning is priceless.

  I kept asking myself what Judson was after while I was reading this book. I even asked myself once or twice if it was actually sf. By the time I read the last page, I knew it was sf—and sf of the very highest quality. But as to what Judson's after? Well, that will take deeper minds than mine to conjure.

  One of the book's villians—and this is a book with many villains—spends his days padding around the Imperial Palace in antique driving slippers so he can sneak up behind people and make casual chitchat about assassination. Judson's story will sneak up on you in much the same way. And if you're anything like me, you'll hear the whisper of antique driving slippers shuffling down the dusty corridors of your brain long after you've turned the last page.

  * * * *

  Taken as a whole, this month's books remind me of a story my father-in-law tells about visiting Katz's Deli for the first time since the 1950s. The glorious, towering piles of corned beef that dominated his childhood memories of the famous Lower East Side sandwich joint were gone. When he asked why, the guy at the counter just shrugged and said, “Health Code."

  Well, life certainly has gotten more hygienic since the pulp era. And it's hard to complain about hygiene. Or rigorous scientific speculation. Or second drafts, for that matter. But still ... the old pulp had a rascally, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants charm that sometimes seems to be missing from modern sf.

  All of which leaves us readers with tough choices. Do we go for the decadent thrills of pulp? Or the more intellectual pleasures of hard science and elegantly honed sentences? Personally—at least when the books are this good—I'm happy to swing both ways.

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  Novella: The Political Prisoner by Charles Coleman Finlay

  Although Charlie Finlay's story “The Political Officer” ran in our April 2002 issue, your editor has an indelible memory of reading it on 9/15/01, when the drama of workers enduring radiation burns took on extra poignancy in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Towers. (If you want to read the story again to see that scene for yourself, you can find the story reprinted on our Website this month.)

  No such cataclysmic event occurred during the week when your editor read this new story, but we think what befalls Max Nikomedes in this tale will also leave a lasting impression.

  For everyone's convenience, the execution grounds on Jesusalem stood next to the cemetery. The cemetery was the biggest public garden on the terraformed planet: families sacrificed part of their soil ration to plant perennials and blossoming evergreens, bits of garnish like little sprigs of parsley on a vast platter of rocks. The sight of the garden usually made Maxim Nikomedes feel welcome when he returned to the planet, even if he only glimpsed the flowers for a moment from the window of his limousine.

  This return was different. An Adarean was scheduled for execution, and the mob that gathered to watch it blocked Max's view. And for this visit, Max was riding in an armored car for prisoners, not a limousine.

  Max peered out the tinted window, but was met with his own reflection: he was a small man in his forties, with an acne-scarred face pale from years in the space service as a political officer. There were loose threads on his uniform where the rank had been torn off. He raised his hands to scratch his nose—the window flashed with the silver gleam of the handcuffs.

  He looked past himself.

  The crowd, dressed in their drab Sabbath clothes, shoved and shouted, surging toward the execution altar. They were pushed back by the soldiers from Justice, spilling into the road and blocking the car. Atop the altar, the Minister of Executions poured baptismal water over the Adarean's bald green head. The crowd shook and roared in frenzy.

  "You want to stay and watch them stretch the pig-man's neck?” the guard asked Max.

  Max had been ignoring the guard seated opposite him. But now the seasoned political officer turned his head with a cold calm and lifted his handcuffed wrists, as if to say he had bigger worries. Soon enough, he might make an official visit to the execution altar. He would, at least, have a good view of the flowers in the graveyard.

  Looking back out the window, he said, “What does it matter to me if an Adarean lives or dies?"

  The guard craned his head around to talk to the driver.

  "See, that's what I don't understand,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun out the window. “They're like aliens. Adareans gave up their souls when they quit being human, so what's the point in baptizing this pig-man?"

  Max frowned while the guard and driver argued the merits of pre-execution conversion. Pig-man. It was odd how a man's work took on a life of its own. Max remembered creating that propaganda term years ago, during the war with Adares. The people on his planet thought they were God's Select, emigrating to a purer place where they could live a holy life. They fell into conflict with the emigrants to Adares, a population that claimed to be the next step, deliberate and scientific, in human evolution. To stir people up to fight a technologically superior foe, Max created the slogan There is no evolution, only abomination. Then he dug up some old Earth-history on using pig-valves in heart transplants—the first step toward godlessness, changing man into something other than God's own image. Max connected that to the genetically modified Adareans, who stole genes promiscuously from any species, and called them pig-men. It was adolescent name-calling, improvised in the service of a war long since over. Who cared if the Adareans’ chlorophyll-laden skin and hair indicated more plant genes than pig? The religious population of Jesusalem, thinking swine unclean, embraced the insult.

  That was many years, and a different identity, ago. Max was vain enough to feel proud—and old enough to be ashamed. He loved his home, and had always served it any way he could.

  Outside, the hangman fixed the steel cable around the Adarean's neck. Tradition called for hemp rope, but there was so little natural fiber on the planet, despite decades of terraforming, that everything but their clothes was made from metal or rock. The minister began preaching the repentance sermon while the powerfully built hangman forced the Adarean to kneel and bend his head. The crowd settled down to listen, and the driver nudged the car forward again.

  Max continued to stare out the window. They hovered through dusty, unpaved streets, leaving a cloud of grit behind them, until they arrived at a big, concrete, open-ended U. The Department of Political Education building.

  The guard hopped out, weapon at his side, and held open the door. “It must feel good to be back, huh?"

  Max looked up to see if the guard really
was that stupid. His simple, frank face bespoke genuine belief. Max scooted across the seat and lifted his handcuffed wrists for an answer.

  The guard waved his hand vaguely. “Nobody believes that charge of treason!"

  Max winced at the word. In the old days, even a suspicion of treason meant immediate death. He walked quickly as if to escape the charge, crossing the courtyard to the entrance. More guards, these blissfully silent in their charcoal-colored uniforms, opened the door. The lobby inside was an oasis of tan benches planted around a small blue pool of carpet.

  A pale green Adarean leapt up from one of the seats and blocked Max's way. “Please,” he said. “I must see Director Mallove while there's still time to stop the execution."

  Depending on the length of the sermon—they could run for a few minutes or a few hours—it might already be too late. “Can't really help you,” Max said, lifting his handcuffs in answer for a third time.

  The guard steered Max around the Adarean. When the door to the stairwell creaked shut behind them, the guard grumbled, “Weedheads."

  "I'll never get used to grass hair,” Max said. He doubted the Adareans converted much solar energy from their hair, despite all their talk of developing “multiple calorie streams."

  His legs ached in the full gravity as he climbed the stairs. He'd visited planets with elevators before: the older he got, the more he believed in the possible holiness of technology. When he went to Earth, he visited a museum about the Amish, a group of people who stubbornly lived in the past while technology swept others past them. The tour guide thought he'd find the religious similarities interesting. Max had begun to have sympathy for the galactics who looked at his planet as an oddity just like the Amish.

  Too bad his people had never been pacifists.

  On the top floor, the guard ushered Max past the admin—owl-eyed Anatoly, whose expressionless gaze followed Max across the room—to the office of the Director of Political Education, Willem Mallove. Max's boss.