SLAN HUNTER

by A.E. Van Vogt &
Kevin J. Anderson

Tor, $24.95 (hc)

ISBN: 0765316757

SLAN HUNTER

This posthumous collaboration is a sequel to one of the most influential books of SF’s golden era. In my case, Slan was among the first books I bought when, some time in my teens, I joined the Science Fiction Book Club. I’d read SF before, of course—why else would anybody want to join the book club? But Slan was my first taste of Van Vogt’s high-energy space opera, and that was all I needed to get hooked.

According to the introduction by Van Vogt’s widow, Lydia, he had begun working on a sequel to Slan in his late years, but was prevented from finishing it by the Alzheimer’s disease that eventually killed him. His widow passed along his various notes and drafts to Anderson, who has completed the story; exactly how much he had to work with is anyone’s guess, although a lot of readers will undoubtedly have fun trying to figure out whether this piece or that is Van Vogt’s or Anderson’s. In my opinion, there aren’t any dead giveaways; in other words, Anderson does a good job of making his style blend with Van Vogt’s.

The book begins with a young couple on the way to the hospital; the woman, Anthea Stewart, is in labor, and her husband is driving recklessly. The radio has just announced an imminent attack of slans—superhuman telepaths who represent the next step in evolution. The couple arrive at the hospital in the nick of time, and the mother goes into the delivery room. To the doctor’s horror, when the child is born, it has on its head the tendrils that are the mark of a slan—even though both the parents appear to be normal humans!

That’s just the first surprise the authors pull out of their hats, and I won’t give away any more, since the book, like all of Van Vogt’s work, is a roller-coaster ride of plot twists and dramatic reversals.

Jommy Cross, the hero of the original Slan, returns, of course. He is an orphaned slan, who has used his powers and knowledge passed down by his father to build super-weapons that he hopes will return his people to their rightful place in society. Also here are his great opponents: the title character, John Petty, the head of a government agency devoted to ridding the world of slans; and the tendrilless slans of Mars, who detest both humans and the true slans. It is the tendrilless slans who have launched the overwhelming attack on Earth with which the book begins.

One pervasive element here is a strong feeling that the characters are living in the 1940s—the era when the original Slan was written. Smoking is commonplace, sex roles are stereotyped, even the technology seems frozen at that point in time. This is a bit jarring at first. Even after the explanation that the human/ slan wars set society back so far that it has barely managed to reach the level of the forties, it seems strained. The real reason is probably to avoid a disconnect between two books written over fifty years apart—of course Van Vogt was carrying the assumptions of the era into his writing, although they feel dated now. On the other hand, the out-of-period atmosphere may give the book an alien feeling to a younger reader—so possibly it works for a fair fraction of the audience.

BREAKFAST WITH THE ONES YOU LOVE

Fintushel, whose work should be familiar to readers of this magazine, pulls off a tour de force here: a science-fantasy novel with a deep underlay of Jewish mysticism.

The story is told through the eyes of Lea, a young woman best described as street-tough; she tells us from the beginning that she has killed and won’t hesitate to do so again. When we meet her, Lea is working as a waitress, and is involved with another character, Jack Komarr, to whom she usually refers as “the Yid.” And we learn very quickly that something extremely odd is going on between them.

To begin with, Lea is helping Jack turn a large abandoned showroom into what he calls a spaceship—but a very odd one, indeed. The ceiling is covered with gold leaf. One wall is covered with identical photos of the great pyramid; another is a “light sponge,” darkened and roughened to reflect nothing. Still another is covered with Playboy centerfolds. Behind the light sponge is a Sears Roebuck store, which nominally owns the space that Jack is using to build his spaceship.

Jack’s explanation for all this activity—which, considering the amount of gold leaf it takes to cover the ceiling of a Sears showroom, is as expensive as it is time-consuming—is simple. If he manipulates the cabalistic symbols that make up his spaceship correctly, he will open a door into another world, and allow a chosen few to escape this corrupted planet.

Lea, despite her street toughness, is curiously naïve, and takes Jack’s explanations of his odd obsession at face value. At the same time, she is aware of dangers he seems oblivious of, in the form of gangsters and street toughs who aren’t impressed by Jack’s mystical vision of a better world. As the project moves ahead, a motley group of characters appear; Jack recruits some of them as helpers, including a few who appear at first to be enemies.

In the end, Jack’s plans work out—although with enough twists to surprise even those who think they see what’s coming. Fintushel’s use of a body of lore with which most readers are not likely to be intimately familiar gives the whole story an appealing exoticism. At the same time, he manages to subvert several currently fashionable SF clichés, without making any great fuss about it. A very deft and highly original performance.

THE GAME

By Diana Wynne Jones

Firebird, $11.99 (TP)

ISBN: 0142407189

THE GAME

Jones’s title works two ways; not only do her characters play a fascinating game that spans entire universes, but she herself is playing a game with modern characters who play roles defined for them by classical mythology.

We meet the protagonist, Hayley, as she is being packed up for a trip to an out-of-town relative. A number of other young family members are expected to be there, many from her generation. Surprisingly, she has not previously met any of them, having been brought up in a home isolated from the outside world and governed by strict grandparents. In fact, Hayley has been sent to the big house in Ireland because of her involvement with a couple of characters of whom her grandmother disapproves, Flute and Fiddle, who apparently have magical powers.

But if her grandparents think that a trip to Ireland will remove Hayley from bad influences, they are mistaken. Almost at once, she is given clothes more suitable for rough outdoor play than the flowered dresses her grandmother has packed. And the other children—all her relatives—involve her at once in a curious game, a sort of scavenger hunt that spreads beyond the ordinary confines of space and time into what the children call the mythosphere.

Hayley is at first timid—she has spent very little time with other children, let alone anyone quite as uninhibited as most of her cousins appear to be. It’s clear that the game is in some sense forbidden; her cousin Tollie keeps threatening to tell the adults on them, although he takes part in the game once they all begin.

It quickly becomes apparent to the reader that the objects of the scavenger hunt are rooted in lore that ranges from fairy tales to classical mythology. Hayley’s first quest is for a scale from the dragon in the zodiac; another character is sent to fetch one of Cinderella’s slippers. The children return to the game day after day, until a crisis arises in the form of Uncle Jolyon, a formidable elder who evidently frowns on the children stepping beyond the mundane world.

In the end, Hayley finds her own place in the mythosphere, while defusing Uncle Jolyon’s attempts to end the game. Jones smoothly blends mythology with the convincingly recreated world of children at play when the adults aren’t looking over their shoulders. The result is a story that, while aimed at a YA audience, will strike a note with many adult readers as well.

AN UNEXPECTED APPRENTICE

Nye, a veteran writer who’s touched most of the bases in our genre, offers a fantasy that pays tribute to the usual models, but marks out a territory very much her own.

The story begins traditionally, in a pastoral setting that will undoubtedly evoke many others in fantasy—the Shire is probably the most famous example. The protagonist, Tildi Summerbee, is a young woman of a race that is human in form and abilities, but of small stature.

As the story opens, Tildi is in the kitchen of the family home, preparing a meal for her brothers, who are out working in the fields. Out of the blue, the workers are attacked by thraiks, demon-like flying creatures, and her brothers are killed or carried off. This is the second time her family has fallen victim to the thraiks, her parents having been killed some years before.

Tildi quickly realizes that the traditional society of her village has no way to accommodate an orphaned female with a large inheritance except to find her a husband, whether she wants one or not. So she sets off to claim another kind of inheritance: the apprenticeship to the great wizard Olen that her brother had earned. Perhaps by impersonating him, she can help fulfill his destiny. And after all, she has some small magical talent of her own.

The journey to Olen’s home in the human city of Overhill takes Tildi through several adventures. But the wonders begin upon her arrival, when the wizard accepts her and begins training her. Before she has gotten far along, a crisis arises, which brings together ambassadors from many parts of the world. An important magical item has been taken from where it has been hidden to prevent its misuse. A book that gives the exact magical name for everything in the world, it allows the user to manipulate reality by changing those names. A company must be assembled to find the book and return it to safety.

Not surprisingly, Tildi—who has come into possession of a leaf copied from the book and seems attuned to its use—is one of the chosen. With her go several others: a pair of wizards, mother and daughter; a pair of warriors; and several others who know the lands and peoples among whom they are to travel. Interestingly, only one of them—one of the warriors—is male, and he is severely handicapped, apparently by the trauma of an earlier magical battle.

The quest that follows, and the various ordeals the company goes through, are well paced and sufficiently original to distinguish this epic fantasy from what has become an extremely large subgenre. Nye manages to make her characters something more than variations on familiar types, and she has a nice sense of humor—a welcome antidote to the tendency of much fantasy to take itself too seriously.

In fact, there is an air of geniality about much of the book, even though a lot of the plot places the characters in decidedly unpleasant circumstances. Tildi, like Sam Gamgee, is a down to earth character in spite of her magical talent and tragic loss. This gives her a sense of inner strength that is only occasionally challenged by her doubts about whether she is really worthy to take on the magical role her brother should have had.

THE NEW TIME TRAVELERS: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics

Nowadays, physicists are taking time travel seriously. About time, a veteran SF reader might grumble. For one example, see Time Traveler by Dr. Ronald L. Mallet, reviewed in this space several months ago.

Toomey’s book is another sign of the trend: a survey of the ways several eminent modern physicists have devised to make the dream of time travel at least a theoretical reality. Interestingly, Mallet’s work doesn’t figure in this book—so the field is even wider than Toomey’s treatment indicates.

After paying tribute to fictional treatments of time travel, Toomey zeros in on its scientific pedigree. Not surprisingly, much of current theory arises from Einstein’s relativity theories, in particular the effects of rapid travel or strong gravitational fields in slowing the passage of time for those who experience them. This obviously allows one sort of time travel, to the distant future—well beyond the life expectancy of the time traveler. But that’s just an accelerated version of what each of us is already experiencing. And since it’s a one-way trip, there’s no chance to go find out who wins next year’s Kentucky Derby, or what Microsoft will be selling for in fifteen years, and then come home to cash in on the knowledge. On the other hand, it might allow someone with a terminal illness to reach an era when effective treatments have been discovered, which would certainly be attractive to many people.

Other types of theoretically possible time travel fail on the ground of being “unphysical:” i.e., they violate some property of physics. For example, the Dutch physicist Willem Jacob van Stockum, who died in World War II, came up with a time travel device involving a rotating cylinder of infinite length. Most interestingly, such a device would allow travel into the past—which would let the traveler benefit from knowledge of things to come. But while the math checks out just fine, the infinite cylinder can’t exist in the universe we know.

In the absence of infinite cylinders, some physicists have tried to find more plausible engines to drive their time machines. One of the best-known examples was developed when Carl Sagan, writing his novel Contact, wanted to come up with a plausible mechanism for time travel. He asked Caltech physicist Kip Thorne for suggestions. Sagan had thought of using a black hole, but Thorne told him that a black hole could only offer a one-way trip: not what Sagan wanted. Instead, he suggested a wormhole, a shortcut through space that can be deduced from general relativity (although nobody has ever detected one). A paper published in 1988 summarized his conclusions, although Thorne is reportedly reluctant to talk about the subject because of the sensational publicity it has generated.

Toomey goes on to examine time travel explorations by a number of highly respected physicists, among them Stephen Hawking. The list is long, and includes visits to such esoteric theoretical ground as string theory, the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory, and the anthropic principle. Two especially interesting chapters conclude the book: one advancing explanations for the apparent absence of time travelers in the present day, the other exploring whether far-future time machines might be used to escape the heat death of the universe.

One apparent limitation of time travel is that no theoretical mechanism seems to exist for travel to a time before the machine is turned on. Since no working time machine is known to exist in the present day, that would eliminate some of the most interesting fictional uses of the time travel phenomenon, such as preventing Hitler’s rise to power, or giving your younger self advice that would have changed your life. But Toomey points out an obvious loophole: that all that’s really necessary is for some society elsewhere in the universe to have developed time travel at a sufficiently early time. Then the problem switches to overcoming the light speed limitation on how fast someone from Earth can get there to use it.