“...And so I am pleased to report the successful conclusion of an extraordinarily important dialogue, as a result of which United Planets researchers will receive a working copy of the K'vithian interstellar drive. In exchange, we will begin immediately the complete refueling of Victorious from UP stocks of antimatter."
And thus, after so long a time, everything had come together. Mashkith found his ears were wriggling. Lothwer's were too.
It was hard not to gloat when the humans were always so cooperatively several moves behind.n
To be continued.
Copyright © 2006 Edward M. Lerner
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
The Reference Library
by Tom Easton
The Armies of Memory, John Barnes, Tor, $25.95, 429 pp. (ISBN: 0-765-30330-2).
The Cunning Blood, Jeff Duntemann, ISFiC Press (www.isficpress.com), $28, 360 pp. (ISBN: 0-9759156-2-3).
Starship: Mutiny, Mike Resnick, Pyr, $25, 286 pp. (ISBN: 1-59102-337-8).
Pretender, C. J. Cherryh, DAW, $25.95, 327 pp. (ISBN: 0-7564-0374-X).
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard, Ballantine/Del Rey, $29.95, 468 + xxvi pp. (ISBN: 0-345-48385-5).
The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen, eds., Science Fiction Poetry Association, $15, 170 pp. (ISBN: 0-8095-1162-2).
The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, eds., Tachyon Publications, $14.95, 250 pp. (ISBN: 1-892391-31-7).
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Over a decade ago, John Barnes posited that the human species will proliferate in the galaxy and settle a hundred worlds (or so) with splinter cultures derived from ethnicity, history, religion, and myth. When instant travel via matter transmission or “springer” is invented, all these cultures will be put in touch with each other, and the Office of Special Projects will take on the goal of keeping the species unified against the day when the aliens—whose wrecks and ruins have been found—finally appear.
A Million Open Doors (reviewed here in February 1993) introduced Giraut Leones, a rowdy troubador in a culture dedicated to Romance. By Earth Made of Glass (reviewed September 1998), Giraut was a special agent of the OSP; his mission, to save two cultures from self-destruction, failed with the loss of a world and Giraut's own marriage. In The Merchants of Souls (reviewed June 2002), Barnes introduced the psypyx, a recording of the mind. It is the practice to have such recordings made periodically. If the body dies, the psypyx can be attached to a volunteer friend and nurtured (time-sharing the friend's brain, with conversations between the two occupants of one skull quite possible) while a new body is cloned. A psypyx is thus a backup self, a soul if you will, and now, in The Armies of Memory, he makes full use of the gimmick.
Someone is trying to assassinate Giraut, rather clumsily, and soon it is learned that the assassins are chimeras, bodies that look human but whose minds are formed by the merging of multiple psypyxes. There are hints that an unauthorized colony beyond the edge of human space, Noucatharia, is involved. And when his girlfriend dies, she turns out to be a chimera too—but the added mind is not from a psypyx. It's from an aintellect or artificial intelligence, and humans have a horror of aintellects ever since they were caught trying to take over. There is a fear that they will try to push everyone into the VR box, as so many back on Earth have indeed chosen.
If all this sounds familiar, three excerpts from the novel have appeared here, the last being “The Little White Nerves Went Last” (March 2006). Giraut is kidnapped to Noucatharia, one of the many worlds of Union, where he is implanted with the psypyx of his old boss Shan, who finally reveals where the springer really came from and the threat of the Brain-Eating Aliens from Beyond, which the Noucatharians have already encountered. It looks like humanity will need all its forces, including the sheer numbers and novel tech of the Union worlds, represented for the moment by Noucatharia, to survive the threat.
Giraut also learns that when an aintellect is implanted in the brain of a human cloned body (no human mind present), it quite likes the experience and comes across as quite a pleasant, interesting person. Or persons, since there is no rational limit on the number of an aintellect's instantiations. The VR box is no real threat, but a robot in a human body (or bodies!) still gives many folks the horrors.
Should it? What is a mind, really, and is any particular type of mind sacred? The OSP's mission is supposed to mean fostering diversity, as a means to being prepared for the alien threat. Are there limits to diversity? If you make love to a robot in a human body, are you a disgusting pervert? And what do you do to a human hero—Giraut, of course—who aids and abets the enemy, meaning the disgusting, treacherous aintellects in human disguise?
“The Little White Nerves” did not take things quite that far. I will not say much beyond this: human sacrifice, especially self-sacrifice, is a classic step toward changing paradigms and accomplishing great things. But when the last page is turned, the great things remain in the wings.
Even though the cover blurb calls this the final novel in the series, it does not feel very final, and I have been enjoying this series far too much to let go of my hope for one more volume. When I asked, Barnes assured me that the sequel, A Far Cry, remains on his agenda and may even wind up short enough to be an Analog serial.
* * * *
ISFiC Press scored a coup when it got its hands on Jeff Duntemann's The Cunning Blood, which I would not have been surprised to see appear from a major publisher such as Tor. Duntemann made a good impression on readers back in the 70s, before shifting his writing to the tech side (including ten books on computing). He returns with an ambitious, polished tale of intrigue, nanotechnology, and something that sounds a lot like mysticism.
Blood's backdrop is a universe where every Sunlike star has an Earthlike planet with very Earthlike life. Why? People speculate about ancient astronauts known as Gaians, and when ships such as the Yellowknife disappear, guess who gets blamed. Earth itself is ruled by Canada. Perhaps because Canada is a fairly polite place today, the new regime has zero tolerance for violent behavior and ships offenders to a world called Hell, where nanotechnological gizmos floating in the air destroy anything that uses electricity (they attack conductors carrying current). The intent is that Hell's denizens will never be able to develop modern tech and escape.
But ... Duntemann opens with the descent of an emissary from space, bearing high-tech gifts—fluorine-based chemical lasers—for the local tech-deprived yokels. Much to his surprise, he lands in the middle of a battle involving robotic dinosaurs and missiles and soon discovers that electronics have been replaced with fluidics. The yokels aren't so tech-deprived after all, though the new laser toys are still welcome.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Sangruse Society—people who bear copies of the nanotechnological consciousness called Sangruse—are plotting to help the Governor General of America put a member on Hell and even bring him back. That member is Peter Novilio—cocky, impetuous, risk loving—and as soon as he has committed a suitable offense, he is off as the ostensible bodyguard for secret agent Geyl Shreve.
When they arrive Peter is promptly recruited as an engineer for Rho Alpha Delta (the Ralpha Dogs—surely an homage to Ralph von Wau Wau), who turn out to have not only alternatives to electricity but also ways to make electricity work. Everything seems quite plausible enough to delight Analog readers; Duntemann is clever, even before he gets into the tricks his nanotech can pull. And when he goes there, well, Sangruse would be a miraculous thing to have inside you, if only it did not have its own agenda.
Fortunately ... Remember that emissary? He came from the Interstellar American Republic, which is plotting an attack on Canadian rule. We see it through the eyes of Jamie Eigen, also a Sangruse carrier (thanks to Peter), and very soon we meet Magic Mikey, a young savant who has found a way to image the very substratum of space-time, where something strange is going on. Since the IAR h
as the Yellowknife (and other missing ships), the putative Gaians aren't working on the macro level. Are they here instead? Or is it the souls of the dead? Jamie uses that notion to scare the agenda right out of his copy of Sangruse, and now the stage is set for a final confrontation of all the various forces Duntemann has set in play, all to marvelous gosh-wow-gee-whiz effect. There is even a hook on which to hang a sequel.
This one has a decent chance of showing up on award ballots.
* * * *
Mike Resnick begins a five-volume series with Starship: Mutiny. Space opera in the classic vein, Mutiny begins as Wilson Cole reports as first officer aboard the Theodore Roosevelt, a superannuated warship staffed by misfits and screw-ups. Cole's error is that he has embarrassed the brass by being right too many times, and he isn't about to quit. He's barely begun his duties when he spots an enemy ship on a Republic world, and pulls the TR away from its beat to check things out. Being the officer on deck, he neglects to wake the captain, who would surely tell him to stay on patrol and just call in the alarm.
But Cole knows the Republic's forces are so overextended that this enemy will not be interrupted in its nefarious mission. Even though the TR is hardly up to a battle, he decides to give it a go. In the end, he manages to make enough fuss, without firing a shot, to draw the troops in. He gets another medal, so does the captain, and he's once more in the deep doo-doo.
Does he have enough sense to quit while he's ahead? Of course not. He's a hero to the public and his crew. So when the TR is given another assignment and the captain is replaced by an even more rigid martinet, he wastes no time in exceeding his orders once more—again to excellent if brass-embarrassing effect. Unfortunately, this time he has to seize command from his captain. He's guilty of mutiny, and the court-martial awaits, complete with death sentence.
Four volumes to go? Pirate, Mercenary, Rebel, and Flagship. The story arc is clear: jailbreak, acclamation by the crew, declaration of independence, and hi-ho for the Inner Frontier and the life of a pirate, at least to start.
Resnick's Birthright Universe has been a fruitful playground for many years. It has given rise to some pretty meaty works, and to a number of lighter ones. This is in the latter category, for the basic story has been told and retold by many writers. However, few writers have Resnick's gift for pace and momentum, nor his talent for producing a fast, smooth, utterly effortless read. Buy this one to read while traveling; it's just about the right length for a plane ride from New York to Chicago.
* * * *
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, the starship Phoenix, laden with the builders and residents of a planned station, got lost in space, and built a station, Alpha, in orbit above a world whose humanoid natives, the atevi, had a technology roughly equivalent to nineteenth-century Europe or America. The Stationers soon rebelled against their leaders and landed. The ship and its crew departed.
It took two centuries for the humans to learn to get along with the atevi, for their hard-wired responses to each other and their world were very different. By the time C. J. Cherryh discovered them, Bren Cameron was the “paidhi” whose job was to interpret humans to atevi and atevi to humans. It was a high-stress job, complicated by differences in both psychology and politics.
Meanwhile, the ship built another station, Reunion, and ticked off another alien species. When the Phoenix returned from a journey and discovered a blasted station, it hightailed it back to Alpha to demand assistance. Since neither the human colonists nor the atevi had space travel yet, there was a bit of work to do, but it didn't take long to build the necessary infrastructure and start repairing Alpha. When the Phoenix finally left, it carried Bren as the atevi “Lord of the Heavens” along with the atevi overlord's young heir Cajeiri and grandmother Ilisidi, plus of course their personal staffs and security troops. By the time the mission was over, the Reunioners were rescued and Bren had figured out how to talk to the new aliens. He had also learned of still more aliens who just might pose a serious danger to both humans and atevi, and when he got home, he was hot to pass the word. Unfortunately, the atevi uberchief, Tabini, had been deposed and the shuttles were no longer flying. Bren, Ilisidi, Cajeiri, and their people wasted no time in boarding the one available shuttle and heading down, winding up at the country manor of the irascible Tatiseigi and under attack by the usurper's forces.
That much took seven volumes—Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, Precursor, Defender, Explorer, and Destroyer. Now we have Pretender, in which the people rally to the cause and march on the capitol, the usurper is overthrown, and Bren finally gets to give his report. As usual, Bren does a lot of internal agonizing over how badly he has screwed up and how little he really understands the atevi, but Cherryh makes it abundantly clear that a great many atevi think very highly of him and blame him much less than he does himself. Cajeiri grows up a bit more and bids fair to be a worthy successor to his father when the time comes. And all the other aliens remain offstage for the nonce.
Some readers may have difficulty with Bren's internal obsessiveness, but Cherryh has the gift of making even that move smoothly and quickly. My own biggest problem is that I wish Cherryh would move the story further in each volume. At the rate she's going I may not live long enough to read the end of the story!
* * * *
Conan is back!
Not that he has ever spent much time away in the three quarters of a century since Robert E. Howard devised the archetype of the mighty-thewed barbarian swordsman, slayer of monsters, and rescuer of damsels for the pages of Weird Tales. Others have taken up the pen Howard set down at his suicide in 1936, and both movies and imitators have glorified the trope. TheComing of Conan the Cimmerian, illustrated nicely by Mark Schultz (he write the Prince Valiant comic strip) and introduced by Patrice Louinet (French editor, teacher, and Howard scholar), gathers together thirteen Cimmerian tales, beginning with the first, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” along with an assortment of drafts, notes, synopses, maps, and appendices (by Louinet) on where it all came from. Read them, and understand the roots of much modern fantasy, even unto the modern video game.
This book was first published in 2002. This is the first US trade hardbound.
* * * *
The Science Fiction Poetry Association (www.sfpoetry.com) has been giving the Rhysling Awards for the best SF-related poetry of the year since 1978, when Suzette Haden Elgin founded the SFPA. The Alchemy of Stars displays the results to date, many of which remain as impressive as they were when they won. Rhysling winners include familiar names such as Elgin herself, Joe Haldeman, Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Ford, Jane Yolen, and William John Watkins, as well as many known only for poetry, such as Robert Frazier and Bruce Boston.
An essential purchase for anyone's library of SF, and the perfect gift for a school or community library.
* * * *
One of the great stories of science fiction is that of James Tiptree, Jr., who quickly earned a grand reputation for understanding women and—much to everyone's surprise (did they really think only men could write great SF?)—turned out to be Alice Sheldon. Her gift was great perception targeted at human folly, as in her most famous short story, “The Women Men Don't See.” A few years after she committed suicide in 1987, age 72, Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy founded the James Tiptree, Jr., Literary Award (funded in part by bake sales at cons) for SFF works that “explore and expand gender.” Winners of the award vary tremendously, with some (such as Raphael Carter's “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” fitting the prescription so well that they might have been written in an effort to cop the prize. Others, such as Joe Haldeman's Camouflage (serialized here, remember?), make sense only on second or third reflection.
Both of these stories, along with nine more, an essay, and one of Tiptree/Sheldon's letters that reveals much about her mind, are to be found in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2. Call it essential to any moderately ambitious SF collection, and buy yourself a treat.
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*
Just in case you've ever wondered why people believe in flying saucers, space aliens, or SETI, George Basalla points out that human beings have long believed in superior heavenly beings. Sure, once that meant angels, demons, and assorted gods, but it really didn't take long at all to move beyond that. Even some ancient Greeks suggested the existence of an infinite number of universes, each with “its own sun, planets, stars, and life forms.” (p. 4)
In Civilized Life in the Universe, Basalla takes the tale from that point onward and makes the connections to religion obvious. Some modern SETI researchers even seem to have their motivations rooted in fundamentalist Christian backgrounds! Yet religion is hardly the whole story. As he notes, “Two powerful strands run through the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The first strand is religion. There is religious sanction for populating the heavens with superior beings. The second strand is anthropomorphism. This is the tendency to describe the intellectual and social lives of those beings in human terms.” (p. 197)
His explication of these strands makes for a fascinating angle on the history of SETI. However, Basalla is a historian, not a scientist. He therefore leans a bit too much toward the fallacy of saying that science is a social construction and that therefore the science of an alien species may not be comprehensible to humans. Yes, any intelligent being is going to focus its attention on matters of concern to it. But the universe is what it is, and the definition of science is the search for understanding of that universe. Since the laws of physics and chemistry are the same everywhere, intelligent species must share their understanding of those laws. Are there similar laws of biology? Of course, though we must try to avoid the parochialism of familiar chemistries and forms. Natural selection (what works, lasts) must apply everywhere, as must the need for energy and raw materials and reproduction.
Analog SFF, June 2006 Page 24
