Asimov's SF, June 2008
Page 22
Freed by the police, Kit encounters a figure from his past, Kate O'Mally —mother of an old lover—who convinces him to return to England to investigate her daughter's disappearance, which the officials have appar- ently ruled a suicide, although there is no body. He agrees, leaving a group of his biker friends to guard the site of the bar. The would-be developers are still trying to chase former bar denizens off with force. But instead of a return to a safer, more familiar place, Kit finds himself in another deadly game—and finds that Lady Neku has somehow come to England, and means to take a role in his future, whether he likes it or not.
Writing in a compulsively readable style, Grimwood propels his characters into the midst of strangeness and danger. Whether in the unfamiliar world of Nawa-No-Ukiyo, the somewhat more familiar one of modern Japan, or the superficially familiar London, Grimwood knows how to catch the reader off guard with the unexpected detail. At the same time, he knows how to ground his most exotic scenes in reality with a homely touch. And he has a very good ear for dialogue in several quite exotic flavors.
Grimwood doesn't really qualify as a new writer—this is his fifth book for Spectra, and he has several with other publishers—but he is definitely one to watch. You might want to look for some of the others—for example the “Arabesk” trilogy, also from Spectra—when you get your copy of End of the World Blues. This stuff is likely to be habit-forming, and it'd be a shame to finish one and have nothing else to follow it with.
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PUSHING ICE
By Alastair Reynolds
Ace, $25.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-441-01401-1
Pushing Ice is Reynolds's latest twist on his patented brand of modern space opera. This one begins in the relatively near future in our own solar system. By the time it's done, the story has worked its way into a distant future where much of the galaxy is occupied and something like a human empire has come into being.
A prologue in the far future sets the scene; a galaxy-wide senate passes a resolution to honor a historic figure known as the Benefactor, a woman named Bella Lind. The body of the story then jumps to 2057, aboard an asteroid-mining ship, Rockhopper, commanded by Bella Lind herself. The action begins when Lind asks her crew if they can be ready to move the ship to a new destination on short notice. It turns out that Janus, one of Saturn's moons, has broken out of its orbit and begun to leave the solar system. Rockhopper is the only ship in position to intercept it. Promised high bonus pay, the crew votes to accept the mission.
And then the problems begin to pile up. Partway to the intercept point, one of the crew is badly wounded in a freak accident. There is no way to save him—except to use a brand new technology that essentially kills him so that doctors can repair the damage and revive him. Another crew member, terminally ill with cancer, might be saved if he can get to doctors in time, but the ship's new course requires too much time. Lind has one daunting moral choice after another thrown at her, and each time she must alienate part of the crew, many of whom argue for aborting the mission before they reach Janus.
The chief of Lind's EVA crew is Svetlana Barseghian, a tough woman who begins to question Lind's decisions. Finally convinced that Lind is being lied to by the corporation that owns the ship, she takes over command in a bloody coup. But by then the ship has landed on Janus, which has accelerated even more radically and is obviously on its way out of the solar system to an anomalous structure in deep space. Rockhopper has gone too far to turn back; their only choice is to ride it out. Meanwhile, Lind lives in exile in a solitary module, far from the colony that clusters around the mostly abandoned ship. And as the ice that covered its surface begins to fall away, Janus has revealed itself as a gigantic machine of unknown origin and purpose.
As the story unfolds, Rockhopper and its crew find themselves in increasingly expanding vistas. Advanced aliens arrive, bringing the disturbing news of an entire larger conflict beyond the crew's struggle to survive. As the climax nears, Rockhopper's crew breaks out into a universe even larger than anything the characters imagined. This is the kind of sudden expansion of scale that one finds in the best of Clarke's work, to choose an obvious predecessor.
At the same time as the story is approaching apocalyptic dimensions, Reynolds keeps his plot rooted in the hard-bitten personal conflicts that set it in motion. Lind and Barseghian each remain true to their principles, each strong enough to compel admiration even as the reader sees their flaws. The conclusion, which involves several reversals of fortune, is strengthened by the fact that, even with the miraculous powers of a superior alien race available to them, the characters prevail because of their own human qualities.
Modern space opera with a huge scope, a strong scientific backbone, and plenty of heart. Read it.
* * * *
THE SPIRAL LABYRINTH
By Matthew Hughes
Night Shade, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-59780-091-4
This is the latest in a series featuring detective Hengis Hapthorn, perhaps most succinctly described as “Sherlock Holmes in the Dying Earth.”
Hapthorn is an inhabitant of a high-tech world, but his mind has been invaded by a denizen of a more primitive world, where magic is triumphant. His alter ego, Osk Rievor, excels as much in untrammeled intuition as Hapthorn does in logical thought. Neither of the two is entirely happy with this arrangement, since each has separate interests. In particular, Rievor wants Hapthorn to delay accepting an assignment that will take him into space, since Reivor wishes to investigate certain possibly magical phenomena that have come to his attention.
Reivor identifies a spot where several “lines of power” evidently come together, and asks Hapthorn to take him there. Hapthorn, intent on his space trip, insists on postponing the investigation. But the space voyage turns out to be a trap set by a mad ship's control system, which the two (aided by Hapthorn's formerly robotic assistant, now transformed into a grinnet, a creature that combines characteristics of cat and ape) finally manage to evade and return home.
After this odd (and seemingly disjunct) episode, Hapthorn agrees to go to the junction of the power lines, where he leaves the ship to investigate the odd landscape. Suddenly he finds himself propelled into a world where none of his technology is available—here, only magic works! Reivor is now in his element. Unfortunately, Hapthorn is well out of his, a problem compounded when the two of then are separated. With Reivor gone from his mind—whereabouts unknown, at least for a time—Hapthorn must make his way forward with only the grinnet, which is by turns a complete annoyance and an indispensable aid.
This begins a series of droll adventures in which Hapthorn encounters various bandits, mages, supernatural beings, and other creatures who fail to fit into his rational world picture. There are several plot twists that border on the outrageous, jumping through a series of settings that at first glance might seem utterly incompatible. Through it all, Hapthorn hovers somewhere between brilliant and clueless—a sure recipe for amusement.
Hughes somehow catches the trick of combining dry understatement with a colorful, almost baroque, vocabulary that characterizes much of Jack Vance's best writing. If you enjoy the latter as much as I do, this series by Hughes may well be just your cup of tea.
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DIFFERENT ENGINES: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
By Mark Brake & Rev. Neil Hook
Macmillan Palgrave, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-230-01980-5
This is a provocative short history of SF, from precursors to modern times, by two Welsh academics. Its particular slant, on the interplay between SF ideas and scientific discovery, is what makes this one different from the usual academic fare.
The authors begin in the renaissance, probably the earliest point in history at which it makes sense to describe any kind of story as science fiction. Previous voyages to strange worlds and encounters with odd beings may have been perfectly credible to their readers, and perhaps even to their authors, but it is only wit
h the arrival of the systematic investigation of the natural world that a writer could borrow the authority of what we now recognize as science to support his creations.
Interestingly enough, several of those renaissance scientists were quite at home with speculative fictions, beginning with Johannes Kepler himself. Somnium (The Dream), Kepler's 1623 story of a lunar voyage, begins a line of scientifically informed fictions. True, Kepler's travelers get to the moon with the aid of spirits; but what they find there is based on the cutting-edge astronomical theories of Copernicus and the latest observations of Galileo.
The authors follow the genre through several eras of science, each given a neat label and characterized by a certain approach to fiction and science. While much of the material will be familiar to anyone who's investigated the history of the field, their take on some of the material shows it in an unexpected light. In particular, they reject some of the orthodoxies American historians of SF have been prone to. The “Astounding Age,” as they refer to the period between H.G. Wells and World War II, spends little time with the U.S. pulp writers who were the bread and butter of First Fandom. Instead, the focus is largely on European writers and filmmakers, with an emphasis on the Soviet and German pioneers of rocketry. Interesting stuff, about which many U.S. readers don't know a lot.
But the writers’ omissions are also telling. A number of important authors are conspicuous by their absence. This is particularly evident in the chapter “The Atomic Age,” which deals with the era from World War II to the 1960s, characterized by atomic standoff and cold war paranoia. The authors concentrate on George Orwell's 1984, Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and George Stewart's Earth Abides, along with two films, “On the Beach” and “Dr. Strange-love.”
Granted, all are first rate. Granted, Miller and Stewart deserve wider recognition outside the field. But the authors’ picture of the state of SF in this era is decidedly flawed without some mention of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, or Pohl—just to mention the first names that pop into my head. Not a word about them—although, to be honest, they are mentioned in other parts of the book. Heinlein even serves as the lead figure in the next chapter, which discusses Stranger in a Strange Land—a book that many readers consider a departure from the kind of work that made him important. On that point, I would side with the authors, who treat it as a major catalyst of the era that followed. Still, it seems a distinct oversight not to recognize his work of the forties and fifties.
The best way to come to grips with the book is to see it not as a history of SF in the usual sense, but as a history of ideas, predominantly scientific ideas. The authors use SF to illustrate the way those ideas entered into the imagination of writers, some of whom did things with them that ended up influencing the thinking of scientists. From the SF reader's point of view, the book omits or distorts a fair chunk of our history. It also tends to blur lines of influence, often acting as if people were aware of developments that didn't occur until some years later; not impossible, of course, but a bit disconcerting.
On the other hand, the writers’ seriousness about the ideas behind SF and their unerring taste in picking some of the best work of the last half century to illustrate those ideas is worthy of high praise. They take it for granted that SF is important, and that its best authors are well informed about the scientific and intellectual movements of their times. Their exposition of some of the science behind SF is sometimes a bit perfunctory, but they do make a serious effort to show the connections. And, like much of the greatest SF, the book is an excellent starting point for passionate arguments on fascinating subjects.
Flawed, unreliable, biased—and in spite of all, well worth a look for anyone who cares about SF.
Copyright (c) 2008 Peter Heck
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* * *
Poetry: TIME TRAVEL TIME
by Ruth Berman
Time ship away
A day a day
And soon it'll need a new master.
The crew won't last
To get to the past
If their time per time isn't faster.
—Ruth Berman
Copyright (c) 2008 Ruth Berman
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* * *
Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR
by Erwin S. Strauss
Memorial Day is the biggest convention weekend of the year for SF and fantasy fans. Attend one near you. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con 5 months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard.—Erwin S. Strauss
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APRIL 2008
11-13—WillyCon. For info, write: c/o Ron Vick, c/o WSC, 1111 Main, Wayne NE 68787. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect). (Web) willycon.com. (E-mail) scifict@wsc.edu. Con will be held in: Wayne NE (if city omitted, same as in address) on the campus of Wayne State University. Guests will include: none announced at press.
18-20—EerieCon. eeriecon.org. eeriecon@juno.com. Days Inn, Niagara Falls NY. Joe Haldeman, Sephira Giron.
18-20—PenguiCon. penguicon.org. Troy MI. Open-source software and SF.
18-20—OLNFC, 22 Purefoy Rd., Coventry CV3 5GL, UK. theofficialleonardnimoyfanclub.org. Leamington Spa, UK.
24-27—Nebula Awards. sfwa.org. Driskill Hotel, Austin TX. SF and Fantasy Writers of America annual get-together.
25-27—RavenCon, 9623 Hollyburgh Terr., Charlotte NC 28215. ravencon.com. Richmond VA. Hickman, Strauss (me!).
25-27—Malice Domestic, Box 8007, Gaithersburg MD 20898. (301) 730-1675. Crystal Marriott, Arlington VA. Mysteries.
25-28—CostumeCon, 1875 S. Bascom Ave., #116-276, Campbell CA 95008. cc26.info. San Jose CA. Costume fans.
MAY 2008
2-4—DemiCon, Box 7572, Des Moines IA 50323. demicon.org. Hotel Ft. Des moines. S. Barnes, Bentley, T. Tomomatsu.
9-11—LepreCon, Box 26665, Tempe AZ 85285. (480) 945-6890. leprecon.org. Francisco Grande, Casa Grande AZ.
16-18—KeyCon, Box 3178, Winnipeg MB R3C 4E6. keycon.org. Radisson. Flint, Yolen, Mattingly, Wilkes, Luke Ski.
16-18—MobiCon. mobicon.org. Best Western Ashbury, Mobile AL. R. Picardo, Jim Butcher, Larry Elmore, P. Burns.
16-19—EatonCon, c/o Slusser, UCR, Riverside CA 92517. (951) 827-3233. eaton-collection.ucr.edu. Academic.
23-25—MarCon, Box 141414, Columbus OH 43214. marcon.org. Hyatt. Weisskopf, Van Tilburg, Brust, Sola, Standlee.
23-25—Oasis, Box 592905, Orlando FL 32859. oasfis.org. Sheraton Downtown. D. Gerrold, P. Vincenti, the Suttons.
23-25—FanimeCon, Box 8068, San Jose CA 95155. fanime.com. help@fanime.com. Convention Center. For anime fans.
23-25—Anime North, Box 24090, Toronto ON M6H 4H6. animenorth.com. For anime fans.
23-25—Animazement, Box 1383, Cary NC 27512. (919) 941-5050. animazement.org. Sheraton, Durham NC. Anime.
23-26—BaltiCon, Box 686, Baltimore MD 21203. (410) 563-3727. balticon.org. Marriott, Hunt Valley (Baltimore) MD.
23-26—BayCon, Box 610427, San Jose CA 95161. baycon.org. Hyatt and Convention Center, Santa Clara CA.
23-26—ConQuest, Box 36212, Kansas City MO 64171. kcscience fiction.org. Airport Hilton. General SF/fantasy con.
23-26—WisCon, c/o SF3, Box 1624, Madison WI 53701. wiscon.info. Concourse Hotel. McHugh, Duchamp. Feminism/SF.
23-26—MediaWest*Con, 200 E. Thomas, Lansing MI 48906. mediawestcon.org. mediawestcon@aol.com. Holiday Inn S.
23-26—MisCon, Box 7721, Missoula MT 59807. (406) 544-7093. miscon.org. Ruby's Inn. Ge
neral SF & fantasy con.
23-26—TimeGate. timegatecon.org. Holiday Inn Chamblee/Dunwoody Rd., Atlanta GA. Doctor Who and Stargate.
30-June 1—ConCarolinas, Box 9100, Charlotte NC 28299. concarolinas.org. Mike Resnick, Kim Harrison, F. Hunter.
AUGUST 2008
6-10—Denvention 3, Box 1349, Denver CO 80201. denvention3.org. Bujold, Sternbach, Whitmore. WorldCon. $200.
AUGUST 2009
6-10—Anticipation, CP 105, Montreal QC H4A 3P4. anticipationsf.ca. Gaiman, Hartwell, Doherty. WorldCon. US$150+.
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* * *
Department: NEXT ISSUE
* * * *
JULY ISSUE
Our lead story for July continues Brian Stableford's occasional series following the outrageous exploits of several famed Elizabethan personalities during humanity's introduction to the alien (not to mention strange) Universe. In the latest installment, we leave the humid nightmares of “Doctor Muffet's Island” behind, and, returning to England, find alchemist and charlatan Thomas Kelley in a peculiar position when his usual fraudery becomes chilling reality thanks to the mysterious powers of “The Philosopher's Stone"!
* * * *
ALSO IN JULY
July also features the return of one of the genre's finest talents, Michael Bishop, with his haunting allegory on the loss of a loved one, “Vinegar Peace, or, The Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage"; R. Neube returns with a funny and scathing take on the complications of love in a tightened-belt society of interplanetary colonists in “Cascading Violet Hair"; Gord Sellar, making a memorable Asimov's debut, takes us on a long, strange trip around the Solar System with an unlikely cadre of jazz legends in “Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons’ Blues"; Kij Johnson submits a clever meditation on the fleeting nature of human (and simian) happiness in “26 Monkeys, also the Abyss"; and Steven Utley contributes the latest in his “Silurian Tales” sequence with the frightfully cold equations of “The Woman Under the World.”