| On Books by Peter Heck |
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FLEDGLING
By Octavia E. Butler
Seven Stories Press,
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0446696161
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Butler’s final novel is a vampire story, set in the present-day American west, with a black woman as protagonist.
The narrator, Renee, comes to her senses in a cave somewhere in the countryside—naked, badly injured, and starving. The first few pages are her struggle to survive: she somehow kills an animal and eats it; eventually she stumbles out, looking for more food. Nearby, she finds a small settlement, burned down sometime recently. In one of the houses, she finds clothing that fits her, but nothing to eat. At last her hunger drives her to a nearby road, where she flags down a car—and begins her life again.
The driver who picks her up is Wright Hamlin, a young white man working a construction job after dropping out of the University of Washington. His first reaction upon seeing her is that she’s about twelve years old—but he quickly learns that she’s fully adult, mentally and sexually—and that she is, in fact, a vampire. Renee’s childlike appearance creates an immediate problem: anyone seeing her and Wright together is going to get all sorts of ideas that will inevitably create trouble. But by feeding on him, Renee has created a bond; they will stay together. This has the additional advantage of giving her someone to drive a car or make purchases on credit—tasks her youthful appearance makes difficult.
The mystery of her past eventually lures them back to the village where Renee believes she lived before it burned—was deliberately burned, she is convinced. There, she finally meets another of her own kind, and learns that she is part of a community. Here Butler goes into myth-making mode, creating a fresh take on the vampire legend. Her vampires are not undead predators, but symbiotic partners with the humans on whose blood they feed.
The reunion with other vampires doesn’t affect the ties Renee has forged with Wright, or with a handful of other humans—not surprisingly, she has to alternate several hosts to keep herself healthy without endangering their lives. Renee also realizes that whoever burned the village where her original family lived was after her—ironic, in that we normally think of vampires as predators, not prey. After the introduction of a number of interesting new characters, and several surprising episodes, her problem is resolved—not necessarily neatly, but satisfactorily to most of those concerned. Butler builds an interesting and credible society around this original model of vampirism, with occasional nods to older treatments of the theme.
While this book is complete in itself, the conclusion has elements that could justify a sequel. Unfortunately, Butler’s untimely death (in February, 2006, at the age of fifty-eight) has deprived us of any more work from her hand. The first major black woman writer of SF and fantasy, she was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1995. Her work was always challenging, especially in its open treatment of America’s ugly racial history. We’ll never know what she might have written over the next few years, but we do know that her loss has deprived SF of a top-rank talent.
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THE TERROR
By Dan Simmons
Little, Brown,
$25.99 (hc)
ISBN: 0316017442
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Simmons has a knack for big, ambitious themes with a strong literary edge, from the Keats-inspired “Hyperion” sequence to the reworked Homeric materials of Ilium and Olympos. Here, he takes on the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition in search of the fabled North-West Passage—a polar tragedy that ominously expands into a horror tale worthy of Poe or Lovecraft—both of whom set memorable works against the same background of polar exploration.
Historically, Sir John Franklin’s expedition set out in 1845, searching for a northern route around the Americas—a quest that had already claimed many lives without useful results. Franklin’s expedition had experienced officers, two ships (Erebus and Terror) specially modified for icebreaking, and a five-year supply of food. He and his men went off with high hopes—only to vanish. Expeditions sent to find them came up with few answers, mostly the reports of Eskimos who claimed to have seen members of the party after they had abandoned ship and headed south. A number of bodies were eventually discovered, and artifacts of the expedition later turned up in native hands. One report suggested cannibalism among the survivors; a later investigator pointed to lead poisoning from improperly packed canned goods. But scurvy, bitter cold, and starvation are more than enough to account for the tragedy.
From these bare facts, Simmons works up a complex story of men against nature, with considerable emphasis on the arrogance and veniality of the human element. The reader sees the action through the eyes of Franklin; his second in command (and captain of Terror) Francis Crozier; Dr. Harry Goodsir, one of the expedition’s four surgeons; and a variety of lesser figures. Each of them is flawed, as we quickly see: Franklin almost unworldly in his piety, Crozier a hardened alcoholic, Goodsir a surprisingly naïve tenderfoot, well out of his depth.
Simmons tells the expedition’s story out of chronological order, so as to introduce the major fantastic element right at the beginning: a creature that seems at first to be no more than a giant polar bear, but that gradually takes on hints of a predatory supernatural being, preying on the terrified sailors during the seemingly endless Arctic night. The thing—as the expedition members refer to it—seems somehow associated with a mute Eskimo woman, Lady Silence, whom the expedition comes into contact with just before its first appearance. Is she a were-bear, the priestess of some malign elder being, or something else again? Simmons keeps his cards close to the vest, dropping hints every now and then.
He also plays his patented game of alluding to a wide range of earlier writings, from Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” and Moby Dick to the classic SF movie The Thing, as well as any number of nautical adventures set in the age of sail. But alongside this game of allusion and pastiche, Simmons works in the known historical details of the Franklin expedition and of Victorian Arctic exploration generally to produce a full-blooded portrait of the era in which the story takes place.
Meanwhile, the thing creates a physical manifestation of the fiercely hostile Arctic—a relentless killer, but no deadlier than the fifty-below temperatures, the scurvy, the storms, or the utter desolation. (It seems analogous to the Shrike in the Hyperion sequence—an external menace to increase the tension of an already hopeless situation.) As the men abandon their stranded ships and head south on a trek they know is hopeless, the thing stalks them. Simmons keeps it hovering around the fringes of the camp, attacking every so often to remind readers of its presence. The Eskimo woman, meanwhile, remains silent and mysterious, her exact relation to the killer beast a mystery. The answer, when it arrives, will surprise many readers who think they’ve figured out how Simmons is going to end the story.
This is one of Simmons’ best, combining his broad literary range with a down-to-earth story of struggle for survival in one of the harshest environments on the face of the planet.
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GLASSHOUSE
By Charles Stross
Ace,
$24.05 (hc)
ISBN: 0441014038
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GLASSHOUSE
By Charles Stross
Ace,
$24.05 (hc)
ISBN: 0441014038
Stross’s latest looks at a new aspect of the post-singularity culture of which he has been one of the prime fictional creators. This one manages to combine an intriguing far future with a cold and accurate critique of mass culture and conventional gender roles. If his “Merchant Princes” series pays homage to Roger Zelazny, this one’s clearly a tribute to Pohl and Kornbluth.
The book begins as the narrator, Robin, arrives on a new world and meets a local. The first words out of Robin’s mouth are a statutory warning that he’s undergoing rehabilitation and may be subject to fits of violence. Like most of the inhabitants of this future, he has the ability to back up his memories and recover them in case of accident or homicide. And like Kay, the young woman who greeted him, he has the option of altering his body to fit the whims of fashion or whatever else seems interesting or expedient. In short, it’s a world of infinite possibilities.
But Robin’s not doing well. For one thing, despite the prevalence of recreational homicide in this society, he hasn’t backed himself up since arriving, which means that getting killed would be for real. For another, his memory isn’t coming back from his reprogramming the way it ought to. This bothers Kay, who’s clearly taken a liking to him. She suggests he register for an experiment for amnesia cases, run by a researcher named Yourdon. In due course, he registers—and wakes up in a female body, on a world nothing like anything he’s seen before.
The world, as the reader will quickly recognize, is meant to resemble mid-twentieth century middle America. The experimental subjects are sorted out into couples (Robin chooses an amiable and unthreatening big fellow named Sam), sent to suburban houses, and slotted into what used to pass for normal life some forty to fifty years in our past. To Robin, it’s an utter madhouse, where nothing at all makes sense.
The insidious nature of the experiment becomes clear as Robin begins to test the limits of her freedom. Failure to conform to the norms of the society brings punishment, in the form of demerits; demerits against individuals affect the score for the entire team to which they belong. And the other team members are quick to bring pressure against anyone who earns demerits—or who fails to earn them points. Points are gained by traditional behavior—particularly including sex, and as Robin quickly learns, no contraceptives are available to the experimental subjects. Robin is disgusted, angry, and miserable.
Despite the pressures to conform, Robin begins to look for a way out. Not surprisingly, she has trouble finding allies in a society where everyone around her is as afraid as she is to buck the system. She is particularly anxious to find Kay, who gave her reason to believe that she would also take part in the experiment, but with everyone around her doing their best to keep the authorities from noticing them, uncovering anyone’s true identity is an exercise in frustration. Stross builds the suspense with a sure hand, and eventually delivers a satisfactory number of surprises as he resolves the plot with a nice bang.
Stross has progressed from writing about the Singularity, most notably in his “Lobsters” stories (eventually issued as last year’s Accelerando), to works like this that take place in a society where the Singularity is taken for granted. His deep familiarity with earlier SF, and his use of this modern theme imbues his material with a rare combination of up-to-today originality and a deep connection with the SF tradition. This latest novel is no exception.
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THE SWARM
by Frank Schatzing
Regen (Harper Collins),
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0060813261
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An international bestseller by a German author, this 896 pager now appears in English, translated by Sally Ann Spencer. A cross between ecological thriller and near-future SF, it offers an unusual picture of how the US looks to Europeans—and how thoroughly the tools of SF have been absorbed by the mainstream.
Schatzing follows a large and international cast of characters, but two marine biologists are at the center of his story: Sigur Johanson, a Norwegian expert on invertebrates, and Leon Anawak, a Canadian Eskimo with a doctorate in ceteology. For both of them, the adventure begins when they become aware of strange events occurring in the sea. For Johanson, the trigger is a population explosion among worms; for Anawak, it’s a sudden shortage of whales.
Elsewhere, there are reports of mass jellyfish invasions, outbreaks of red tide, and other seemingly unrelated but increasingly sinister phenomena. But of course, everything does turn out to be related, and Schatzing builds convincingly through several episodes of natural calamities to a major disaster affecting a significant segment of the human population. At this point, the nations of the world—under heavy-handed American leadership—band together to find out what’s going on.
The scientists, under the guidance of various military honchos, go to work on data from around the world. Reluctantly, they come to the conclusion that the human race is under attack. This conclusion is of course just what the US military wants to hear—although the CIA director, a crude buffoon named Vanderbilt, is openly disappointed that neither Arabs nor communists are responsible. The other major villain, US General Commander Judith Li, lets the scientists follow their noses, knowing they’ll lead her to something she can use to increase her already significant power. Li, an accomplished pianist and strikingly attractive Asian-American West Point grad, is also a close confidant of the book’s dim-witted US President.
Schatzing has done a creditable amount of research into oceanography, marine biology, geology, and a number of other disciplines, and he gives fairly convincing pictures of the scientists at work. There’s a nice range of personality types, from Johanson, a man of aristocratic tastes and bearing, to the down-to-earth Anawak, or the SETI specialist Samantha Crowe, who claims to be the model for Jodie Foster in Contact. The general respect for scientists is in welcome contrast to most non-genre novels, which tend to portray them as stereotypical absent-minded professors or geeks without social skills.
The main SF trope here is a first contact—not with alien invaders, but with a previously undiscovered intelligent lifeform on our own planet. And, as so often in such stories, the real villains turn out to be the military—in particular, the American military, who can’t see beyond their own agendas to the greater good of the planet. I know nothing of Schatzing’s politics beyond what an intelligent reader might deduce from this novel; but it is a sobering experience to see how my country looks in the eyes of an environmentally concerned European—and to several million readers who spent their euros for this book.
The Swarm has more in common with science fiction than many other eco-thrillers, and an undefinable European touch to the style. There are occasional awkwardnesses—such as Li’s exact military rank—that may annoy some readers. (Hard to say whether the author or translator is at fault for those.) Still, this is worth a read.
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TIME TRAVELLER
A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality
by Dr. Ronald L. Mallett
with Bruce Henderson
Thunder’s Mouth,
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 1560258691
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Here’s a non-fiction title of unusual interest to SF readers: the autobiography of an African-American physicist whose professional and personal life has been shaped by his quest to build a time machine. Not surprisingly, one of the key influences was his early love of science fiction, both in print and in other media.
Mallett’s father, a TV repairman, died of a heart attack at age thirty-three, in 1955, when the author was ten, the oldest of four children. Mallett’s discovery of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in the Illustrated Classics comic version, gave him new hope. If he could build his own time machine, he could return to the fifties and save his father! He tried and failed—like many of us in our childish days—but instead of showing him the dream was impossible, the failure made him decide to learn more about science. Despite bouts of depression that nearly led him to drop out of school, he began to study harder—and to read more science fiction.
School was followed by Air Force service, since the family had no money for college even if his grades had been good enough. Stationed in the Deep South, he became aware of serious racism for the first time; instead of crushing him, it simply made him withdraw into the world of his mind, learning advanced math and computer skills. Back in civilian life, he was ready for college, majoring in physics at Penn State.
He kept his time-travel project secret, knowing that it would mark him as a crackpot and derail any chance at a scientific career. But careful study of relativity theory convinced him that his dream was possible, after all. Mallett interweaves the story of his professional scientific career, full of conferences and publications, with the drive to make his dream of time travel—still being fueled by SF books and films—come true.
Surprisingly, his perseverance paid off. By the 1980s, leading physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Frank Tipler, and Kip Thorne were investigating corollaries of relativity in which time appeared to move backward. Their speculations, combined with Einstein’s recognition that light is subject to the pull of gravity, led Mallett to investigate the effects of a laser beam following a tight circular path. After formidable calculations, he found a theoretical foundation for time travel—and saw it accepted by other physicists.
While his dream of going back in time to save his father remains unfulfilled—travel to times before the machine is built is still theoretically impossible—Mallett has achieved a significant scientific breakthrough. And his inspiration was one of the classic science fiction stories—based on an idea everyone once thought impossible.
Okay, we probably aren’t going to see practical time travel any time soon—although Mallett does have a team working to see if they can turn his theory into an operational device. We do know we won’t get the opportunity to go back and tell Lincoln to skip the theater. But it does show that wild dreams can come true, and good old SF was at the root of it.
This would be a good book to give to any of your old high school teachers who dismissed SF as worthless and unreal—except that we can’t give it to them when it would have mattered, which is before they taught us. Maybe Mallett’s hardware guys will figure out how to do that for us. And then maybe we’ll get our flying cars and matter transmitters.
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WORLDCON GUEST OF HONOR SPEECHES
Edited by Mike Resnick
and Joe Siclari
ISFiC Press,
$30.00 (tp)
ISBN: 0975915630
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For many of those who read science fiction regularly, just the knowledge that this book is available is sufficient incentive to buy it. Most of those people can skip this review; just go get your own copy of the book, guys. But if you’re sitting there asking yourself, “What’s a Worldcon?” this is a book you might learn a great deal from.
Start with the list of speakers: Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Gene Wolfe, Joe Haldeman, Gardner Dozois—and two dozen others, all of whom I’d be willing to bet you’ve not only heard of, but that you’ve read a fair number of words from. For a lot of SF readers, that alone would be sufficient reason to go looking for in the book.
Of course, speeches aren’t stories—and we admire these men (Kate Wilhelm and Doris Lessing are the only women in the list) primarily because of the stories they’ve told us. But if, as we’re often told, SF is the literature of ideas, their ideas ought to be of considerable interest as well. So these speeches, as much as they may have been intended as entertainment, deserve at least some attention as vehicles for their authors’ ideas.
Heinlein’s speech at the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon for short—now you know) is a good specimen. We get a look at Heinlein’s thought processes near the beginning of his career, when he was writing stories that changed the face of science fiction itself. Titled “The Discovery of the Future,” the speech combines several themes familiar to readers of Heinlein’s fiction: in particular, the attempt to predict probable futures, given the pervasiveness of change in modern society. He doesn’t make any claim to prophetic powers, and of the specific predictions he makes, several have yet to come true. But his central point, that reading SF enables us to deal with change, and that it therefore ought to be a valued branch of modern literature, is worth pondering even today. (Mallett’s book, in the previous review, is one clear example of its impact.)
Heinlein’s seriousness is characteristic of these speeches. No surprise: it would be unusual if a Worldcon Guest of Honor did not take SF seriously, appreciate it, and gladly seize the chance to say a few words in its praise—especially in the company of several hundred like-minded listeners. And while a few of the speakers offer lighter fare, for the most part even they make it a point to address issues of some importance.
In many ways, the most interesting speeches are the ones whose authors are no longer among us. John W. Campbell and Hugo Gernsback had ample opportunity to express their views in magazine editorials. But for others—Sturgeon, Leinster, “Doc” Smith, Simak—today’s readers can only turn to their fiction, which is at best an imperfect reflection of the authors’ ideas on more general subjects. This is especially true for readers who weren’t involved in fandom in the early days—or, in many cases, who haven’t ever felt the need to go beyond the printed word for their SF experiences.
Resnick and Siclari have done readers and fans a real service by making these speeches available to a much wider audience than their original listeners. Interested readers or booksellers can reach the publisher at www.isficpress.com. |
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Copyright
"On Books" by Peter Heck, copyright © 2007, with permission of the author.
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