| Peter Heck: On Books |
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ENDER’S SHADOW
By Orson Scott Card
Tor, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-312-86860-X
Card’s Ender’s Game is probably the single most widely read SF novel of the eighties–especially
among the generation of readers under thirty. For many of them
it was the first SF novel that really grabbed their imagination.
With its combination of a protagonist who embodies many readers’
daydreams about themselves–the bright misfit who uses brains to
save the world from the alien menace–and the intriguing background
of the Battle School, the novel (perhaps even more than the novelette
from which it grew) hit nerves in its audience. And its central
gimmick, the war game that turns out to be real, resonated in
the minds of many readers–enough to become one of the great clichés
of our time.
But none of the sequels to Ender’s Game, beginning with Speaker for the Dead, have had the same impact as that novel (although they have won
their share of awards and readers). The grown-up Ender Wiggin
is a complex character, permanently changed by his recognition
that his moment of triumph was the death knell for an entire alien
species. But it is the Ender of the Battle School that captured
everyone’s attention, and it is to that era that Card returns
with Ender’s Shadow.
The jacket copy describes the new book as "a parallel novel to
Ender’s Game," as opposed to a sequel. What that means, in brief, is that Ender’s Shadow covers many of the same events of the first book, but through
the eyes of a different viewpoint character: Bean, the diminutive
boy who became Ender’s key strategist in Battle School and in
the final battle against the Buggers.
This approach provides several benefits. Battle School, like military
training in all eras, is a highly stressful environment that puts
characters under a microscope. (Thus the continuing popularity
of military training, basic or otherwise, as a theme in military
SF, from Heinlein on down to the present.) By examining the locale
of his greatest success through the eyes of a new protagonist,
Card recaptures much of the defining flavor of the earlier book.
Bean, a survivor of street life in the gang-ridden slums of Rotterdam,
inevitably has a different take on the experience from Ender,
product of a stable middle-class family that values intellect.
He is also more curious about his immediate surroundings, exploring
the space station on which the Battle School is located much more
carefully than Ender ever did. (This also gives Card a chance
to explain several minor scientific glitches in his initial invention.)
And Bean’s diminutive size forces him to adopt a radically pragmatic
approach to problem-solving. Having faced a struggle for survival
from his earliest days, he is in many ways more dangerous than
Ender, to whom everything is in fact much like a game.
The downside of Card’s decision to tell the story of another of
Ender’s Battle School classmates is that a vast majority of the
readers who pick up this new book already will have read Ender’s Game, and know its major plot surprises. So Card has to create suspense
by focusing on Bean’s mysterious origins, and by giving him a
mortal enemy who eventually turns up at Battle School and must
be confronted. Neither of these attempts to pump up the level
of tension is entirely convincing, to this reader. In particular,
Card’s resolution of the question of Bean’s parentage seems calculated
to produce a facile and sentimental conclusion to the book. And
the deadly adversary is offstage too long, and disposed of too
quickly when he does return.
Still, many of the strengths of Ender’s Game are recaptured here. The child’s-eye view of reality remains
a strong tool for giving the reader a fresh perspective on experience.
When the protagonist’s origins are as stressful and perilous as
Bean’s–in one sense, the deadly serious Huck Finn to Ender’s Tom
Sawyer–the reader is often jolted into unusual insights. Card
makes good use of this perspective to offer thought-provoking
reconsiderations of the Battle School environment–Bean, unlike
Ender, almost immediately begins to question its ultimate purpose
and the competence of its instructors. Long before Ender grasps
the true end of his training, Bean has figured out what it has
to be.
Ender’s Game remains a singular peak moment of its era in science fiction;
not even Card has been fully able to match its appeal, either
in the direct sequels or in his other work; not even the "Alvin
Maker" fantasies have had the same broad impact. Still, most readers
are likely to find this parallel journey through the same imaginative
reality as Ender’s Game rewarding and thought-provoking in its own right. |
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THE TERRORISTS OF IRUSTAN
By Louise Marley
Ace, $13.95 (tp)
ISBN: 0-441-00619-1
Marley’s earlier books have been set in a world where the Gifted
have a rare combination of musical talent and psychic abilities.
Here, she turns to a more austere scenario, with a woman facing
life and death moral issues that demand a choice between betraying
the healer’s art and betraying her humanity.
Irustan is a planet-wide mining colony, settled by a fanatical
sect whose tenets will remind many readers of Islam. Women are
the property of their male guardians, circumscribed by taboos
and forbidden even to leave their homes without a male escort.
Their legal and social status is perhaps a step above that of
domestic animals in our society.
The primary values of the society are embodied in the mines, a
dangerous and demanding career. The religion urges unwavering
devotion to duty and stresses arduous labor as a value in its
own right. Weakness and disease are signs of divine disfavor.
As a result, the men of Irustan are extremely squeamish about
their bodies and the illnesses to which they fall prey. Thus healing
is the prerogative of women–one of the few professions into which
they are allowed to enter.
Zahra, the wife of a powerful politician, is an unusually talented
healer. But in the course of her duties, she cannot escape awareness
of abused women, routinely beaten by the men who control them.
Finally, pushed hard enough, she decides to save one endangered
woman by the only means available to her: the murder of the man
who has abused her. This is accomplished by giving him a deliberate
dose of a deadly disease endemic to the planet, but usually kept
under control by the medicants. The only problem is that killing
one man saves only one woman’s life. So other men must die . .
. but where to stop?
Marley builds on Zahra’s moral conflict to create a complex portrait
of her oppressive society, and of the outside worlds with which
it must do business to survive. Unlike many feminist dystopias,
Irustan is a world with a considerable degree of beauty. We see
this aspect of it most directly through the eyes of Jin-Li, an
employee of the Port Force that is the official contact between
Irustan and the other worlds with which it trades the products
of its mines. Port Force becomes suspicious of the deaths of local
men, but its charter forbids interference with local custom. Jin-Li,
who delivers medicines to Zahra and other medicants in the city,
becomes the agent by which Port Force investigates and finally
solves the crime wave.
This murder mystery, to which the reader already knows the answer,
operates to open up windows both into Irustan and into the apparently
more benign world of Port Force. And while the conclusion of Zahra’s
one-woman terrorist campaign is both predictable and inexorable,
Marley manages to turn it into a triumphant window of opportunity
for all the women of her world. Marley is obviously a writer to
watch; recommended. |
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ROVERANDOM
By J.R.R. Tolkien
Ed. by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond
Houghton Mifflin, $12.00 (tp)
ISBN: 0-395-95799-0
By now, J.R.R. Tolkien’s heirs would appear to have exhausted
the stock of unpublished writing the creator of Middle-Earth left
behind. The Hobbit and the "Rings" trilogy have struck sparks in the minds of several
generations of readers; most of the posthumously published work
has been of interest only to scholars. So ordinary readers may
be pardoned if they’re a bit skeptical of a "new" Tolkien fantasy,
especially one that comes with a full scholarly apparatus, including
footnotes to explain the author’s jokes.
Roverandom was conceived in the 1920s, when during a seaside vacation Michael
Tolkien, then five years old, lost a toy dog of which he was extremely
fond. To help him come to terms with this childhood tragedy, Papa
Tolkien improvised a story of the dog’s adventures, in which little
Rover meets various wizards, a dragon, and even goes to the Moon
before being transformed into a real dog. Tolkien wrote down these
bedtime stories, with an eye to turning them into something publishable.
About ten years after the original telling of the stories, when
his publishers had accepted The Hobbit and were looking for a follow-up, he polished up Roverandom for submission. Perhaps luckily for his readers, what his publishers
really wanted was a sequel to The Hobbit, and Tolkien dutifully laid aside the story of the little dog,
to concentrate on the work that created the fantasy genre as we
know it today.
Read in that context, Roverandom is definitely a lesser work, although it has its enjoyable moments.
Like The Hobbit, this story aims to amuse not only the children to whom it might
be read, but the adults reading it to them. (As any parent can
testify, it is easy to underestimate what children can understand,
although that is not normally one of Tolkien’s faults.) There
are allusions to a wide body of history and folklore, comparatively
sophisticated word-play, jokes growing out of popular culture,
and a good number of private jokes that the editors have dutifully
identified and explained.
How would one evaluate this story if the author had not gone on
to write one of the centerpieces of modern fantasy? Certainly
this is very much apprentice work; at the same time, in such points
as Tolkien’s portrayal of the irascible wizards, there are strong
indications of the direction his work would eventually take. He
already has the trick of suggesting something that he then leaves
the reader’s imagination to flesh out. In Rover’s adventures with
several other dogs, he shows some of his touch with broadly comic
material that eventually surfaced in such characters as Bilbo
and Sam. And there are brief glimpses of the extensive invented
mythos around which Tolkien’s mature works are built.
What the reader won’t find here are the more elevated flights
of drama and emotion that justify the "Rings" trilogy’s status
as a masterpiece of high fantasy. The absence of such moments
in the story of a lost toy dog is hardly surprising, of course.
This is in every way a light work, meant in fact to help Tolkien’s
son put his loss behind him. And while there are points at which
a prepared reader can glimpse what the author would become, it
is clear that this time out, he is more or less content to play
the role of parent. Roverandom is not going to change anyone’s evaluation of Tolkien. But it
is a very pleasant addition to the lighter side of his oeuvre,
taking its place with such worthy entertainments as "Farmer Giles
of Ham." |
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GREETINGS, CARBON-BASED BIPEDS! Collected Works 1934-1998
By Arthur C. Clarke
St. Martin’s, $35.00 (hc)
ISBN: 0-312-19893-0
Arthur C. Clarke needs no introduction to the readers of this
magazine; his work is a cornerstone of modern science fiction.
But today’s readers may not be aware that he has always been equally
at home in nonfiction. In fact, it could be argued that his nonfiction
is every bit as important as his fiction.
This collection is a sampling of Clarke’s interests over seven
dec-ades. The early pieces include fannish appreciations ("Dunsany,
Lord of Fantasy") and book and film reviews ("The Conquest of
Space," "Destination Moon"). Typically, the latter tend to place
the highest value on scientific accuracy. Later articles include
prefaces to classic works by Wells, and tributes to such colleagues
as Robert Bloch and Gene Roddenberry. A 1950 talk on the history
of fictional space travel (given to the British Interplanetary
Society) shows a strikingly wide range of reading, well beyond
what would have been on most libraries’ scanty SF shelves at the
time.
Clarke has also been an active force in creating the future, most
obviously in the famous 1948 paper in which he invented the idea
of artificial communications satellites. This collection is also
a reminder of Clarke’s rarely matched knowledge of the nuts and
bolts of space travel, from the days when the V-2 rocket was state-of-the-art
to the shuttle era. His topics include a look at astronautical
fallacies (e.g., the difference between orbital weightlessness
and "escaping gravity"), an expression of hope that the space
age could open a new Renaissance, a proposal to safeguard Earth
from meteor and comet impacts, and a more-or-less sober consideration
of orbital sex.
He has also been an important advocate for rational investigation
of the fringes of science: two articles on UFOs from the 1950s
show an impressive knowledge of unusual optical and meteorological
phenomena, as well as of scientific history. And he has kept an
open mind about the supernatural realm; he quotes J.B.S. Haldane
as having told him, "You are one of the very few living persons
who has written anything original about God." And that was before
2001!
Clarke was also one of the pioneers of underwater exploration.
That interest–from which he made a fair part of his living for
many years–finds expression in an early article on the future
of scuba-diving resorts and in excerpts from several books that
grew out of his own diving expeditions. Again, Clarke was not
just an armchair explorer; he put on the gear and went into the
water, and has the battle scars to show for it.
This brief summary barely scratches the surface of this fascinating
collection, in which Clarke’s reasonable, witty, and often elegant
approach illuminates subjects from fractal math and Martian geology
to advanced communications and gays in the military–all given
context by Clarke’s entertaining prefaces.
As always, the essays here shine a spotlight on some of Clarke’s
most central concerns, and often illuminate ideas that lurk beneath
the surface of his fiction. Essential reading for anyone who has
enjoyed his work. |
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ALMOST EVERYONE’S GUIDE TO SCIENCE
By John Gribbin with Mary Gribbin
Yale University Press,
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-300-08101-4
British astronomer John Gribbin, who has written numerous science
books for the layman, tops himself with this one-volume summary
of the current state of scientific knowledge. As the title acknowledges,
this is intended very much as a successor to Asimov’s Guide to Science–and even to a reader who grew up on the Good Doctor’s science
writing, it is an undoubted success.
With the help of his wife Mary (who reined him in whenever he
began to get too technical), Gribbin tries to give the broadest
possible picture of what science knows about the universe, from
the subatomic level up to the cosmos as a whole. Taking as his
credo the simple scientific principle, "If it disagrees with experiment
it is wrong," he attempts to give the reader an idea of the way
scientists create models of how the world works and then put those
models to the most exacting tests they can devise.
Gribbin begins with the concept of atoms and elements, which is
the starting point for much of modern science. As useful as the
atomic hypothesis was in understanding such phenomena as the behavior
of gasses, it was not until Einstein that the hypothesis was widely
accepted as a factual description of reality. By that point, evidence
that the atom itself was a complex entity, made of smaller particles,
had already begun to accumulate. And as we now understand, the
activity of one of those particles–the electron–is responsible
for all of chemistry. With the development of quantum mechanics,
the behavior of the electron can not only be explained, it can
be calculated with remarkable precision.
Having laid down the principles of chemistry, Gribbin turns the
discussion to organic chemistry, through the structure of DNA
to a broader overview of genetics and evolution. Gradually expanding
his focus, he goes on to examine geology and the history of the
Earth, then to astronomy and stellar evolution, ending up with
an overview of cosmology and the structure of the universe as
a whole. Gribbin is quick to make connections between the various
sciences he discusses. For example, he explains the simple quantum
mechanical reason for the vital fact that ice floats and why this
makes life possible. In fact, this is the first popular science
book I’ve read that gives the specific physical explanation for
that phenomenon.
Gribbin spices up his narrative with anecdotes about the scientists
responsible for various theories and discoveries, and draws usefully
on everyday experience to illustrate his material. While he provides
sufficient detail to give the various subjects immediacy, his
eye is always on the big picture–how the world fits together,
and what it means to each of us. He is a strong defender of the
scientific process; where appropriate, he takes pains to refute
the claims of anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific thinkers.
And, like Asimov, he knows when to throw in a touch of humor.
In short, this is a definitive and up-to-date treatment of the
subject, clearly written and down to earth, with a good awareness
of historical context. If you’re going to have just one general
science book on your reference shelf, this one would be an excellent
choice. |
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