Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (31 page)

He looked at her strangely and was silent a moment. Finally he muttered, “Yes, your world
has
treated you most unkindly, I see.” He cleared his throat, and his voice grew loud and firm once more. “You seem to forget that your world is the
primary
object of creation. What you suggest is that I precipitate Armageddon. Disregarding the billions of souls I would have on my conscience for a moment, let me remind you that Armageddon would engulf everything, involve the Creator directly. My world would no more survive it than yours, and with less promise of rebuilding thereafter. There will be no Armageddon laid against my soul’s account! I do not intend that—even if it means the total destruction of Husaquahr. But they will never believe that. Or they may believe, but not believe that they cannot somehow get the secret, anyway. But I have a different plot in mind.

“I intend to beat them at their own game. Send them back into the abyss from which they crawled, they and all their ilk.”

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The River of Dancing Gods
© 1984 by Jack L. Chalker.
All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

*****************************************

Paul Cook is the author of eight books of science fiction, and is currently both a college instructor and the editor of the Phoenix Pick Science Fiction Classics line.

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BOOK REVIEWS

by Paul Cook

Farside

by Ben Bova

Tor Books, 2013

Hardcover, 368 pages

ISBN-13: 978-0765323873

I would say that right now Ben Bova carries the mantle of what might be called Campbellian science fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr., by inheriting
Astounding Science Fiction
in the late 1930s, transformed science fiction from a cheesy space adventure genre to a genre that dealt seriously with humans (mostly scientists) in extrapolative situations and keeping to solid science along the way. He also demanded a higher quality of writing. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Murray Leinster, and later Arthur C. Clarke were Campbell’s early prodigies and
en masse
they brought respectability to the field.
Astounding
was changed to
Analog Science Fact and Fiction
in the mid-Fifties, and Bova himself took over the editorial chores of
Analog
in 1972 after Campbell passed away.

Bova’s output as a writer is quite varied. He’s written historical novels, fantasy, science fiction, short stories, and, of course, science fact. His most lasting contributions to the science fiction field will be his “Grand Tour” novels which consist of novels (and stories) taking place on all the planets (except the outer two or three) and the asteroids.
Farside
takes place on the far side of the moon but is not a sequel to either
Moonrise
(1996) or
Moonwar
(1998), though several characters from those books make an appearance in
Farside.

Cutting to the chase, Bova gets everything right in
Farside,
both the science and the science fiction. The extra added delight here is how he invests his characters, principally the two main competing scientists, with ambitions that anyone in academia would understand completely. We don’t often see scientists or astronauts as “career” people who take on tasks because they’re part of their career trajectory. But they often do. (This was a major trope in Tom Wolfe’s
The Right Stuff
, if you recall.)

Farside
is about one group of scientists on the far side of the moon trying to develop an imaging system using mirrors and regular telescopes to probe the atmosphere of a planet around a star called Sirius C, a planet which should not be where it is. Sirius C is the remnant of a nova explosion of its parent star and should have had its atmosphere and its surface blown into space a long, long time ago. But there’s an indication of an oxygen- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere and that implies life. A second group, headed by a rich woman based on Earth, wants to build an orbiting interferometer that would better image Sirius C. The novel is about how these two factions compete and collide, leading to a murder mystery and a cogent study about how academics (including scientists) fight for their careers as well as their very lives.

Farside
is a stand-alone novel, tightly written and keenly focused, expertly paced, and it is one of Bova’s best books, inside or outside his “Grand Tour” series.
Farside
has many narrative affinities with what I found in both
Mercury
(2005) and
Titan
(2006), which are among the best books in the series (they are also stand-alone novels). This is “Old School” science fiction, something which we could use more of these days and I do recommend this book to you.

***

2312

by
Kim Stanley Robinson

Orbit, 2012

Hardcover, 576 pages

ISBN-13: 978-0316098120

One approaches novels by Kim Stanley Robinson knowing for the most part they’ll be filled with lots of information about planetary societies, including interplanetary politics, religion and culture. They’ll also be filled with all kinds of engineering projects on a colossal scale. His Mars trilogy—an exemplar of this—will no doubt be his legacy, and rightfully so. Not only are those novels about how Mars might be settled (and terraformed over the centuries for human living), they are also about the changes men and women will go through as they become Martians instead of remaining Earthlings. Many science fiction writers have done this. Bradbury, of course, explored these changes in
The Martian Chronicles
and Philip K. Dick goes even further in his extraordinary 1964 novel
The Martian Time-Slip.

In his latest effort—also the beginning of a trilogy—we have a similar project in hand—the tale of an interplanetary society facing a new threat. But unlike the Mars books, nothing about the need to tell this particular tale is ever made clear until halfway through the novel. That’s not the least of the book’s problems. If you start reading
2312
cold knowing absolutely nothing about it as I did (I read the electronic version, without the aid of any blurbs), it’s almost impossible to determine what this trilogy is going to be about, other than to say it’s going to be about the interest of a few people traveling between the planets and some incredibly smart computers that seem bent on disrupting interplanetary goodwill.

Nowhere in the book’s early chapters (or the first 100 pages, actually) is anything approaching a conflict even announced. We simply begin by following the planet-hopping life of a terrarium designer named Swan Er Hong who gets caught up in an attack on a small city on Mercury after her mentor is assassinated. There is also a lot of talk about qubes, which are incredibly compressed quantum computers (I think) that are also functioning AIs (I think). The novel only gets going when a rail-bound city on Mercury gets obliterated by either a meteor or a bomb which forces several characters to literally walk home before the sun catches up with them and fries them. Unfortunately, when this happens, the novel comes to a dead stop as Robinson spends page after page describing the walk. In fact, at one point he simply writes: “Walk, walk, walk…”

What happened was that he’d written himself into a corner and this was the best way out. The best “trek” in science fiction happens in
The Left Hand of Darkness
when the two main characters have to cross the north pole of the planet Winter together. But Le Guin’s skill is such that she fills those pages with character interaction and narrative information that never lags. Here, Robinson has to have his characters walk about seventy miles and it really wears on the reader.

The novel does pick up when the main character leaves Mercury, but by then it’s clear that the novel wasn’t that well-thought-through. The proof of this is the inconclusive ending to this first volume. Each of the Mars
Trilogy books can be read as stand-alones and none of them lags in pacing or has weakly drawn characters. Not so here. The following volumes in this series might be better than this one, and when they come out I’ll probably read them. But I’m not looking forward to the experience, not when there are dozens of other novels to read and many more new authors to explore. If you haven’t read Robinson’s Mars novels, read them. If you want to read his best stand-alone, read his extraordinary
The Years of Rice and Salt
. That, to me, is Robinson at his story-telling best.

***

When the Blue Shift Comes

by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

The Stellar Guild Series - Mike Resnick, editor

Phoenix Pick, 2013

Trade Paperback 187 pages

ISBN: 978-1-61242-074-5

In 2011, Phoenix Pick embarked on a publishing program called The Stellar Guild Series wherein established writers team up with new authors. When the Blue Shift Comes, the fourth in the series, is a collaboration between Robert Silverberg and new writer Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. As Silverberg says in his afterword, his contribution to this project comes from a failed novella he wrote in 1987 called, “The Song of Last Things”. Zinos-Amaro, a friend of Silverberg, was chosen to complete the Silverberg story. What emerges isn’t quite a collaborative effort or even a co-authored work, but something rather unique.

The Silverberg story is about a small group of post-humans (or people who are
barely
recognizable as human) in an impossibly distant future facing the end of the Milky Way Galaxy which is being gobbled up by a stellar anomaly which no one understands.

As Silverberg says in his introduction to the second half of the book, his original story got out of control and wasn’t going where he thought it would go or where he wanted it to go, so he abandoned it. As it turns out, the original novella ends right at the point in the narrative where the main character, Hanosz Prime, has to confront the monstrosity that’s eating up his part of the universe. Zinos-Amaro picks up the story from there and right from the get-go it’s clear that he is able to resolve the story with all the same stylistic quirks and flourishes found in the opening segment by Silverberg.

The original story has all the hallmarks of Silverberg’s best moments as a writer, especially coming out of the Sixties and Seventies where point-of-view shifts and present-tense narratives were much more acceptable than they are now. Yet the novel reads less like a literary experiment and more like something you’d find in Harlan Ellison’s famous
Dangerous Visions
anthology or Terry Carr’s Ace Science Fiction Specials. Man, I miss writing like this. I quite enjoyed
When the Blue Shift Comes.

Previous novels in the Stellar Guild Series include collaborations between Kevin J. Anderson and Steven Savile (
Tau Ceti
, 2011), Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin (
Reboots
, 2011), and Harry Turtledove and Rachael Turtledove (
On the Train
, 2012). Some of the other “masters” will be Nancy Kress, Eric Flint, and Larry Niven. This is a series that could really matter.