| On Books: by Peter Heck |
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Bantam Spectra,
$13.95 (tp)
ISBN: 0553381849
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Here’s one for fantasy lovers who’re tired of quests and faux medievalism. Kushner and Sherman set this elegant tale in the same world as, but several decades after, Kushner’s solo novel Swordspoint, in a society that has long since outgrown its mythic past, but can’t escape it. The setting is a large university town, the capital of a nation that has a strong British feel, although its history differs in details. The country was once ruled by kings who depended on a council of wizards to keep their policies aligned with the elemental forces on which the kingdom’s health depended. But the wizards and kings are gone, replaced by a council of nobles. And just as well–the wizards were after all charlatans, preying on the superstitious age to maintain a position of power over the credulous kings. Or so believes everyone with any sense, especially the academics who specialize in the early history of the realm.
Into this arena comes Basil St. Cloud, a brilliant young academic touted as a leading candidate for the Horn Chair, the most prestigious History position in the university. He casts his fate on the proposition that history has misrepresented the wizards; not only were they the true power behind the throne, but their role was to employ their powers to preserve a magical link between the ruler and the land itself. The scholarly establishment sides against him, and the battle lines are drawn for a vicious academic turf war, including not just the learned professors but their coteries of students.
Unknown to any of them, the material of their debate is far from academic. Conservative factions of the nobility are watching, ready to initiate legal or military action if the scholars’ disputations step over the line into treason. For, as becomes clear, there is strong underground royalist sentiment in the northern provinces, from which the royal house originally came, and while the royalists’ agitations may appear harmless on the surface, they could easily become the seed for a genuine rebellion. The nobles realize that the royalists might become especially dangerous if their dreams of a royal heir are given encouragement.
As it happens, in an ancient house across town from the university lives Theron Campion, a restless young gentleman whose family traces its lineage back to the deposed kings. Campion has a voracious appetite for new experiences, which leads him to St. Cloud–both as a mentor and as a lover. While Campion enjoys the new liaison, St. Cloud has stumbled on evidence that he believes fully vindicates his belief that, far from being charlatans, the sorcerers wielded genuine power through their rituals. Especially convincing is an original wizard’s spell book–which St. Cloud decides to translate and put into action as the clinching proof of his thesis.
Kushner and Sherman create a multi-layered urban fantasy world, full of quirky characters and perceptively drawn settings. It borders on cliché to say that the city itself is a major character in the story, but for once the statement is true–and it is equally true of the university, which the authors portray in knowing detail, from its grand buildings and atmospheric pubs to the dilapidated apartments where its scholars live. The plot is worthy of the characters in its convolution and sophistication. In short, a book for readers who enjoy subtlety and craftsmanship along with a full quota of magic and adventure.
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The Briar King
by Greg Keyes
Dell Rey,$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0345440668
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The Briar King is the first volume (of a projected four) in Keyes’s new fantasy series, "The Kingdoms of Thorn and Rose." This one is set in Crotheny, a kingdom in a fantasy world somehow connected to ours by a gateway to Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost Roanoke colony of 1587–a fact reflected by the descent of the ruling family from Virginia Dare, but not (at least not as of the first volume) fully explained.
Keyes begins with one scene providing a glimpse of a key event in the early history of Crotheny: the overthrow of alien overlords and the founding of a world ruled by humans. The narrative then jumps forward to a time when the human dynasties are about to be brought face to face with the dark powers they have ignored. Remnant populations of other beings, parallel to elves and the like, are still to be found, as are folktales and prophecies that darkly hint at an end to human rule.
Keyes focuses on three appealing characters. All three are young, yet have become very competent within their own fields. Yet all three show considerable innocence regarding the larger world they inhabit. The first is Stephen, a neophyte scholar sent to a monastery where he can study ancient languages. Then there is Neil MeqVren, a young warrior brought to the royal court to be knighted; and finally Anne Dare, a spoiled princess whose main redeeming feature is a streak of tomboy independence. As the novel opens, each of them is on course for what appears to be a conventional coming of age, given their stations in life and their basic character.
But the world they expect to inherit is rapidly falling apart. Several conspiracies are in progress at once, both in the conventional political realm and in the realm of occult magical events. Stephen finds himself the target of hazing by several older members of the order in which he is a novice. And much to his discomfort, his superior is giving him ancient texts to translate, all of which seem to concern unspeakably evil rituals. For his part, Neil encounters opposition among the established knights, many of whom object to a commoner’s being raised to their status. After confronting a sudden emergency, he finds himself in a position of great responsibility for which his training has given him no precedents. Anne, for her part, falls in love with an unsuitable young man, and is sent away to a sort of convent, where she finds herself being trained in the arts of dark magic and assassination.
Keyes weaves together their adventures–and those of several older characters with whom the three main protagonists join forces–to show the chain of events building to a crisis, while still leaving the stage set for the next in the series. Inevitably, there are going to be loose ends–for example, the connection with the lost Roanoke colony, and the meaning of the Briar King (who does figure in this book’s conclusion). Keyes nicely balances the conflicting requirements of setting up the subsequent volumes and providing a coherent, rounded book-length narrative. A very promising beginning to a multi-volume work by one of the more accomplished newer writers in the fantasy field.
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SNARE:
A Novel of
the Far Future
by Katherine Kerr
Tor, $27.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0312890451
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Kerr, probably most widely known as a fantasy writer, turns her hand to an SF novel that carries much of the evocative power of fantasy in its interplay of different cultures and races on a distant planet.
The leading characters of Snare are from Kazrajistan, a neoIslamic society that follows the Third Prophet. One group, drawn from the Kazrak military, seeks to convince Jezro Khan, their exiled former general, to lead a coup against his brother, the despotic ruler. Their guide is Soutan, a sorcerer who uses crystals to speak to various spirits–or so it appears to the superstitious Kazraks. At the same time, the ruler’s secret police have sent an assassin, Zayn, on a mission to prevent Jezro’s return from the Cantons, the distant country where he has taken refuge.
To get to the Cantons (which turns out to have considerable similarities to France), all parties have to cross a broad steppe-like territory inhabited by horse nomads and by roving, often hostile bands of the planet’s indigenous race, the Cha’Meech. There, Zayn arranges to be adopted by one of the nomad tribes, led by a woman named Ammadin–a Spirit Rider who has in her possession crystals similar to Soutan’s. At first, the assassin is clearly taking advantage of the chance to travel with a group that can take him safely across the steppes; the nomads make regular visits to Canton to sell horses, and by attaching himself to Ammadin (who, by tribal law, is the owner of most of the group’s horses) Zayn expects to get himself to his victim more quickly than the rebel group.
The meat of the novel is a series of encounters between members of the different societies on the planet, leading eventually to revelations about the long-forgotten origins of the world’s unusual mixture of races and cultures. Kerr makes good use of the various clashes between cultures, setting up expectations based on the earthly societies of which they are analogues and then surprising the reader when the expectations turn out wrong. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the "magic" used by Soutan and by the Spirit Riders turns out to be an example of Clarke’s Law in action.
Kerr’s characters are complex, evolving personalities, and the societies become more interesting as one learns more about them. By journey’s end, almost all the characters have found new perspectives on their former beliefs, and the societies of which they are members are on the threshold of significant change, as well. A very solid performance–recommended for the reader who wants well-paced adventure and something more to chew on.
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The Life and Death of Planet Earth: The new Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
by Peter D. Ward
& Dolnald Brownlee
Times Books,
$26.00 (hc)
ISBN: 0805067817
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Here’s a sobering look at scientific truths most science fiction very deliberately ignores: the long-term prognosis for our world, and not incidentally for our own species. Not that there’s any drastic shortage of far-future SF–in fact, a good fraction of the most interesting work in the field has always been set in an era so far down the timestream that few remnants of our civilization survive. But very little of that work takes its setting very seriously. Like most SF settings, the far future is often no more than another stage on which to turn loose an adventure story with characters and a plot that could just as easily have been set on the sea coast of Bohemia.
Ward and Brownlee aren’t interested in comfortable images of the human race somehow surviving and persevering over the forces of nature. That might happen, or it might not; what they do here is lay down the conditions that we (or more accurately, barring the sudden discovery of cheap and practical immortality, our descendants) are going to face. In particular, in a time that seems long by human standards but is very short in geological terms, the habitability of the planet is going to become a significant issue.
We’re not just talking global warming, although that will undoubtedly have important effects on the human species. Longer term, the climate for the last several million years has been bouncing between temperate and frigid conditions; we’re living in a brief period of pleasant climate, not to be taken as any sort of guarantee of future conditions. There is no reason to believe that we are going to be able, in the long run, to escape another glacial period of the sort that covered half of the northern hemisphere with ice only a few thousand years ago–if not an even more severe "snowball Earth" such as the world may have experienced at least twice before the Cambrian period. And barring significant technological advances, we have about as much ability to do anything about a return of the ice as our Cro-Magnon ancestors did.
That’s just the beginning of the bad news. In the longer run, plate tectonics will put its hand in, driving the current continental masses together into a single supercontinent, setting off a runaway greenhouse effect that makes current global warming look like Indian summer. In the long run this can be expected to kill off almost all multicellular life on the planet. (Bacteria and some other simple organisms may survive a very long time.) Things don’t stop there; eventually the sun becomes a red giant, swallowing what’s left on Earth and making the environment unsafe for life well out into the solar system, before shrinking back to a white dwarf. Can our species survive all this? Perhaps–although it’ll take a greater and longer-range commitment of resources than anything in history. The authors aren’t convinced we can put our internal squabbles aside long enough to pull it off.
SF writers have generally dodged the long-term prognoses Ward and Brownlee outline, although much of their material has been known to scientists for decades. It will be interesting to see if any writers respond to this book, which is in a sense the ultimate reality check for SF–and for the aspirations of our species as a whole.
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Six Degrees: The Science of a
Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts
Norton,
$27.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0393041425
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We’ve all played (or run screaming from those who play) the film-buff’s game, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." Here’s a book that not only takes the game seriously, but explains why it works and how that insight applies to a much larger (and considerably more interesting) class of phenomena.
Watts is one of the young turks of network theory, a science combining the results of several disciplines. To begin with basics, the nature of a network is determined not by its individual members but by the form of their connectedness. In other words, all networks have structural features in common, whether their individual components are people, computers, or even the neural cells of nematode worms.
For example, the "Six Degrees" game (to generalize it beyond Kevin Bacon) claims that within a small number of steps one can find a connection between any two people in the world–for example, between a Vietnamese farmer and a cellist in the Leningrad symphony. What makes the theory work is the fact that both these figures have close acquaintances who move beyond their own immediate circle. The farmer may know a grain agent who regularly goes to a nearby city, where he deals with a merchant whose sister runs a restaurant patronized by . . . but you can use your own imagination. Or better yet, let Watts show you in detail how even one or two members of the local circle who know someone outside their immediate neighborhood can lead to tight interconnectedness between almost all the members of the larger universe.
Watts summarizes several areas of research–by mathematicians, biologists, and physicists, giving memorable pictures of the individuals involved as well as of their ideas. A fair amount of the material comes from everyday experience. For example, the mechanism that starts a large crowd clapping in unison, without any signal, also lets all the crickets in one meadow synchronize their chirping. Computer viruses spread in much the same way as the flu, and the 1996 failure of the power grid of the western U.S. was an object lesson in how tinkering with connections in a network may turn out to be completely useless when the entire structure comes under stress.
Very well written, full of surprising insights–a good look at an emerging discipline from the point of view of one of its central figures. Especially useful is the extensive bibliography, graded by degree of mathematical difficulty.
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"On Books" by Peter Heck, copyright © 2003 with premission of the author.
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