THE SEPARATION
by Christopher Priest
Old Earth, $25.00 (hc)
ISBN: 1882968336

An alternate history of World War II is the central SF theme in this ambitious novel from Priest. But to describe the story so simply is to give it far less than its due. This isn’t just another in the long list of “Nazis win” potboilers; instead, it uses the possibility of a different historical outcome to take a close look at a number of deep questions of history and morality.

The novel is told from a number of points of view, many of them presented in the form of documents and journals by various hands. The initial chapters, set in 1999, are told in conventional third-person narrative from the point of view of a popular historian, Stuart Gratton, who is sitting at an ill-attended book signing, trying to decide what his next book will be. On the first page, the reader learns that Gratton is living in a world in which the US fought a war with China in the 1940s. A woman approaches Gratton, offering him documents concerning her father, J.L. Sawyer, who is apparently mentioned in a letter by Winston Churchill as an RAF pilot who was also a registered conscientious objector.

As the reader might expect, the next section reproduces the narrative of J.L. (Jack) Sawyer. We learn that he and his twin brother Joe (also J.L.) were competitive rowers who won a bronze medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and that Jack later piloted a bomber that was shot down in 1941, crash-landing in the English Channel. We also learn that, while in Berlin, the two brothers lived with a Jewish family and that they helped the daughter, Brigit, escape from Germany after the Olympics. While Jack was madly in love with her, it was Joe who eventually married her.

Then the inconsistencies begin to add up. Jack is living in a world a lot like ours, one in which Joe died during the London blitz. But we begin to get glimpses of a world in which Jack’s plane crash was fatal, and in which Joe lived to see a different outcome to WWII—one in which Rudolf Hess’s (historically real) peace mission to England in 1941 actually bore fruit.

Priest plays fascinating games with shifting realities, switching between the twin J.L. Sawyers, and showing us doubles of several historical characters, including Hess and Churchill. The brothers, whose opposing views on the war are effectively contrasted, undergo vivid experiences (possibly hallucinations caused by the separate accidents in which each of them, in one reality, dies). Each of them sees significant events unfold, only to “wake up” and find themselves at the point where their hallucinations began.

The picture of England in the early 1940s is well drawn, and largely accurate historically. Likewise, Priest’s portrait of Churchill—a character about whom it is easy to be ambivalent—is a major source of amusement. And the consequences of a world in which Nazi Germany called off the war in Europe and turned east to pit its entire strength against Stalin’s USSR are well developed.

The book’s English edition met with widespread neglect, due to vagaries of the publishing business. As a result, this Old Earth edition is the only US edition of the book—possibly the only one likely to be available except to persistent collectors. It’s one of the best alternate histories I’ve read. Don’t miss it.

 

LEARNING THE WORLD
by Ken MacLeod
Tor, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0765313317

Old-time fans who grumble about the death of real science fiction should run and grab this one, which is packed with enough of the classic tropes to fill a generation starship. In fact, one of those tropes is a generation ship—although a very up-to-date one.

The generation ship comes out of human-occupied space, where a large number of stars have been visited by a series of such ships, each terraforming the likely planets and mining the less likely ones for raw materials before sending on a refurbished ship to the next star in line. Radical advances in longevity mean that most of the original crew and “founders” have survived to see the end of the voyage. Their descendants, the Ship Generation (who have come of age aboard ship), are the prospective settlers of the new system.

None of them know that the system they are headed for is already occupied by an intelligent, civilized species, from whose point of view alternate chapters are told. The bat-like Gevorkians (natives of one large nation on the system’s terrestrial planet) are relatively primitive in technology, relying instead on their own ability to fly and on the labor of trudges, slaves of a race superficially similar to themselves, but apparently speechless. Even so, one of them, an astronomer named Darvin, detects the approach of the ship. At first he mistakes it for a comet, but it soon becomes clear to him that the new object is no comet but something completely new.

But both the ship and the world it approaches are undergoing dangerous political changes. Aboard the ship, the tension between the three main factions—the founders, the crew, and the Ship Generation—are coming to a head. The onboard stock market in shares of various plans to exploit the resources of the target worlds undergoes tectonic readjustments as the passengers realize that they are arriving in an inhabited system. While there are protocols for such an event, the event itself is so far unprecedented.

Meanwhile, Gevork and its neighboring countries, long poised on the brink of war, must readjust to the reality of advanced aliens arriving in their system. Almost immediately, the human ship’s arrival sparks several technological breakthroughs by doing nothing more than making the locals aware that certain things can be done. (Darvin becomes the Gevorkian equivalent of Arthur C. Clarke by recognizing the principle of satellite communications.)

MacLeod’s portrait of the human society is more complex, told from several different viewpoints—notably Atomic Discourse Gale, a young woman whose biolog (open journals) shows the Ship Generation’s reaction to the world it is growing up in, and Horrocks Mathematical, a young techie who finds himself mediating among several factions in the ship’s huge complement.

The meeting of the two societies—one barely emerging from its equivalent of the Middle Ages, the other able to transform entire planetary systems—is a long-standing SF trope, but MacLeod finds enough new wrinkles to make it fresh. The final twist is particularly refreshing, and is likely to catch many readers by surprise. Suffice it to say that MacLeod again shows that the new hard SF isn’t doomed to arrive at the same conclusions as the generations who invented the form—any more than Horrocks Mathematical and Darvin are stuck with the institutions of their ancestors. Recommended.

 

HIS MAJESTY’S DRAGON
by Naomi Novik
Del Rey, $7.50 (mm)
ISBN: 0345481283

One interesting subgenre is what one might call alternate-historical fantasy, in which events of actual history are recast in a world in which one or another element of fantastic fiction holds true. One classic example was John M. Ford’s 2002 novel, The Dragon Waiting, which was succinctly (if inadequately) described as “the Wars of the Roses with vampires.” In this case, the reader will get a quick general notion of the overall tale from the description, “the Napo-leonic Wars with military dragons.” As with the Ford title, the bare description hardly touches the surface.

His Majesty’s Dragon is Novik’s first novel (and begins a trilogy) It opens as the captain of a French frigate, which has waged a desperate battle despite being badly overmatched, capitulates to Will Laurence, the British captain who has defeated him. Laurence is at first puzzled by the Frenchman’s stubborn defense, but all becomes clear when the sailors discover a dragon’s egg below decks; the egg is a prize for which any man would fight to the death.

Complications ensue when it becomes clear that the egg is on the verge of hatching. Unless a suitable companion to the hatchling is on hand, the dragon will become feral—and thus useless to the British, who lag far beyond the French in dragon breeding. Drawing lots, Laurence chooses one of his officers to “impress” the dragon, then stations the rest of them nearby as the shell breaks. To his utter surprise, the dragon bypasses everyone else and comes directly to him. He is its chosen companion.

Contrary to what the reader may expect, Laurence is far from happy with this turn of events. Naval captains and dragon-fliers are worlds apart in this era of history. Laurence is forced to give up command of his ship and go with his dragon—whom he names “Temeraire,” after a famous warship captured from the French—back to England for training as an aviator. Before he leaves, he learns that Temeraire is no usual dragon—he appears to be a Chinese Imperial dragon, meant as a gift for Napoleon himself.

Novik uses the training camp as a springboard for a broad portrait of the England of the Regency era, of its class distinctions and customs, and of what it might have been if dragons had been real. As a bit of an outsider, Laurence serves as a good medium to show the reader the various unexamined assumptions both of the dragon-captains and of the outside world—particularly the aristocratic family whose wishes he defied in joining the Navy.

Better yet, the intersection between our actual history and the world of the novel is rich enough to generate a number of interesting plot twists. To take the best-known historical incident, Nelson and his ships do fight the Battle of Trafalgar in this history, with similar results—but it is revealed to be just one card in Napoleon’s hand. Naturally, Laurence and Temeraire turn out to be in exactly the right spot to prevent the gambit from succeeding.

A very good first novel, with effective world building and interesting characters. I’ll be eager to see the sequels.

 

ONE PART ANGEL
by George Shaffner
Algonquin Books, $23.95 (hc)
ISBN: 156512457X

It’s tempting to describe this one as a fantasy, but to be perfectly frank, there’s no overt magic taking place in it. What happens could all have a perfectly natural explanation—or maybe not. Even the central character, Vernon Moore, makes no claim to any particular powers—although at the end, the reader may have other ideas about what’s happened.

Ebb, Nebraska, is a rural community where most of the major power is held by women. The Quilting Circle is the de facto ruling body, with a governing board consisting of most of the influential women in town. Its main adversary is Clem Tucker, the richest man in town, and the owner of the local bank. He also happens to be the fiancé of Wilma Porter, owner of the Come Again Bed and Breakfast, and a founding member of the Quilting Circle.

Then Loretta Parsons, the owner of the local beauty shop, is beaten and her shop torched; she lingers in a coma, with her young daughter in Wilma’s care. Worse, the police have arrested Wilma’s grandson, Mack Breck, who confesses his role in the attack, but refuses (despite significant pressure) to name his accomplices. At this point, Wilma prays for the return of Mr. Moore, Loretta’s former lover, who helped the town through a similar crisis in Shaffner’s previous novel, In the Land of Second Chances. Almost at once, Moore comes knocking on Wilma’s door.

Moore is instantly sympathetic, and agrees to help. After all, not only is he Wilma’s friend, he is the father of Loretta’s child. But his approach to getting Matt to talk is distinctly unorthodox: one part Socratic method, one part torture by wish-fulfillment, one part banjo-playing . . . and a fair bit of story-telling.

In between Moore’s sessions with Matt, the Quilting Circle learns that Clem, who has a finger in every financial pie in Ebb, is planning a new coup—one the members fear will put their town at the mercy of outsiders who would think nothing of closing their local bank and replacing it with a soulless ATM. Vince steps in with words of wisdom to both Clem and to the quilters. And at a critical point, he appears to perform a miracle, although he later denies it.

The story, told from Wilma’s point of view, is dryly humorous and full of good lines. Shaffner keeps the question of exactly what powers Moore possesses close to the vest; there are two apparently supernatural events in the plot, which Moore tries hard to explain away. The first time, one might buy the notion that it’s a coincidence. The second is a bit more spectacular, and a lot harder to dismiss, although readers who don’t want any hint of the miraculous in their fiction can probably manage it.

Winningly told, full of convincing small-town life. One to look for if your interests extend beyond hard-core genre fic.

 

THE PLANETS
by Dava Sobel
Viking, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0070034460

Sobel, whose Longitude was one of the best pop science books in recent memory, takes on another astronomical subject in The Planets. This time, her approach isn’t so much historical as thematic—while each chapter focuses on a different member of the Sun’s family, each takes a different approach, representing one of the many ways the planets has resonated in history, culture, and—yes—science.

Sobel begins with a brief reminiscence of her own introduction to science and astronomy, in school science fairs (where she made her own model of the solar system). Then, beginning with the Sun itself, she works her way outward through the planets. Mercury, too close to the Sun to retain any atmosphere, served as one of the first clear test cases for Einstein’s gravitational theory. Venus, on the other hand, suffers from an excess of acid atmosphere—with a greenhouse effect that heats its surface to above the melting point of lead. Our own world offers the occasion for a brief history of geography, from the days of the wide-ranging Greeks to the pinpoint precision of GPS technology.

The Moon, in its turn, launches a discussion of how we measure time, especially the problems of reconciling the incompatible rhythms of three different phenomena: the rotation of the Earth, its revolution about the Sun, and the revolution of the Moon about the Earth. Each of these has been the basis for some historical calendar, yet because no two of them can be put in simple arithmetic ratio to each other, our calendars are full of leap-days and months of uneven duration.

Sobel continues outward through the roster of planets, taking each as the springboard for an essay on some related subject. We see Mars from the point of view of a meteorite found in Antarctica—once a fragment of the Red Planet. The chapter on Jupiter is titled “Astrology,” with Sobel walking a path between ancient superstition and the current scientific picture of the giant world. Uranus and Neptune are discussed in the persona of Caroline Herschel, who got little if any credit for discoveries supposedly made by her brother William—including the planet Uranus—although it’s become increasingly clear that she was as good an astronomer as he was. Pluto’s status as the outermost planet becomes shakier year by year, with the discovery of various objects in more distant orbits and the growing suspicion among astronomers that Pluto itself may be just a big comet that fell into a quasi-planetary orbit.

Sobel is a consistently entertaining writer, and her asides are often as much fun as the main topic. Probably her most personal book, this one ought to appeal to readers well beyond the ranks of astronomy buffs.

 

THE COSMIC LANDSCAPE
String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
by Leonard Susskind
Little, Brown, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0316155799

First of all, the phrase “Intelligent Design” in the title is a bit of a misnomer. Susskind’s real topic, in his first book for a popular audience, is the multiverse—the entire range of possible universes posited by the “many worlds” variant of quantum theory.

Susskind notes that several critical parameters of physics seem to be so finely tuned that even a minor change in them would turn the universe into one utterly hostile to living things. The value of the cosmological principle deviates from zero only in the 120th decimal place. A change in this constant would lead to a universe that expanded too rapidly, or contracted too quickly after the Big Bang, would have allowed too little time for any kind of life to develop. Changes in the masses and charges of elementary particles, could have made even chemistry (at least, in the form in which we know it) impossible.

This apparent fine-tuning has led some cosmologists to propose the “Anthropic Principle,” claiming that the universe is as it is because otherwise intelligent life could not exist. To other scientists, anthropism is at worst religion in disguise, at best a tautology. Susskind sees anthropism as an inevitable feature of his cosmic “landscape,” where different sets of physical laws apply in isolated regions. Our universe is only one of many regions of the landscape, or multiverse, as SF writers like to call it.

Susskind even offers a sort of humorous SF story of his own, of a world of intelligent fish trying to explain their underwater world in terms of an “ickthropic principle.” But his main game here is an overview of the evolution of modern physics, especially the branches that lead to string theory and its various offshoots. He’s been one of the key players in physics for long enough that he has a good stock of entertaining stories about the other giants of the discipline, among them Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But he also manages to give as clear a picture of string theory as you’re likely to get without a hefty dose of math.

The anthropic principle seems unconvincing to me; perhaps I’ve been misled by the materialistic science of an earlier paradigm. Still, this is a good book to read if you want to see the hard-science underpinnings of some of today’s more adventurous SF writers.