Electronic OtherRealms #23 Winter, 1989 Part 10 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed only if the return address, copyrights and author credits remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way without the permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the original author. Lots and Lots of Reviews by Lots and Lots of People Anachronisms [****] Christopher Hinz St. Martin's Press $17.95 304 pg. The crew of the starship Alchemon is sent to the planet Sycamore after a probe revealed bacteria life on what should have been a lifeless planet. The study of the bacteria leads to the discovery of what may be an intelligent creature. The crew decides to take it back to Earth. Almost from the beginning of the voyage home, one disaster after another occurs. The crew must not only prevent the ship from being destroyed but also find the source of the disaster. Is it the creature from Sycamore? Is it one of the crew? Is it the company, Pannis? Is it space pirates? The story is a very original rendering of a familiar SF plot. One point of originality is to write the story as a true mystery instead of a puzzle story. It is not a given that there is a hostile alien loose on the ship. The crew is a collection of misfits, and it is made clear from the beginning that this is deliberate. Why this mismatched crew was allowed to ship out is not revealed until the end. The solution to the mystery is eventually revealed, but only after the reader has had an opportunity to figure it out and doing so is not easy. The characterization is uneven. About half the characters are fairly distinctive personalities and the rest are rather vague. It is no coincident that all the survivors are the more distinctive characters. None of the characters are very likable, although by the end of the story, certain of them develop into people for whom the reader can feel some empathy. Hinz has created an interesting technology for his FTL drive and it plays an important role in the story. The ship is also a very interesting artifact of its own. The story universe appears to be unrelated to that in Hinz' first book, Liege-Killer. While the story does not have the epic tone of Liege-Killer, it is as good and is highly recommended. --Danny Low Anachronisms The science fiction ghost story, the haunted space ship, the mixing of horror and space opera--this half-breed genre offers rich possibilities that few have explored. Christopher Hinz adds to the sub-genre with his second novel, Anachronisms. I was excited when I picked up this novel. Since I've always been a sucker for this type of story, I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, Hinz borrows too heavily and too obviously from the few other similar stories and doesn't do enough of his own work. Surely all the ideas in the hybrid SF/horror sub-genre haven't been played out already? A research vessel from the Pannis corporation goes to a storm-swept blasted world and finds a mysterious supposedly dead alien organism, which they bring aboard the ship (does it already sound like Alien or It: The Terror from Beyond Space?). On their way back to Earth, the alien comes alive again and starts messing with the mind of a psychic crew member, causing all sorts of funky haunted-house things to take place (now it feels like we're reading Nightflyers...). The alien begins to take over the master computer, but the computer has its own orders and its own defense mechanisms, the Sentinels, who will fight off the intruder, no matter what these defenses might do to the crew members (gee, now it sounds like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Frank Herbert's Destination: Void). The characters seem to be lifted right out of Star Trek or Alien. I found myself baffled at why Hinz had taken the easy way out so many times, as if he thought he had a good idea but didn't have the interest to keep going. Much of the writing is clumsy lecturing, inept introduction of background material and clunky explanations over and over again. Some of the plot threads are weak links and don't hold together well. On the good side, several of the spooky scenes are vivid and very effective, such as when some of the ship's defenses awaken and the crew try to fight back, or when the alien takes over the biological gardens and begins to terraform them into its own long-lost alien world. These are chilling and cinematic, and they show the true talent Hinz holds--but he doesn't let it shine through often enough. The brilliant scenes are so good they are worth reading the book for, but unfortunately the pieces don't fit together into a solid whole. --Kevin J. Anderson The Ascension Factor [***] Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom Ace/Putnam $18.95 381pp This is the third book of a series, preceded by The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect. While there is a definite sense that there are previous books, the story in this book is sufficiently self-contained that it can be read by itself. Much of the richness of the tale is lost, but the story still comes across as a well written action/adventure story. Raja Flattery has gained control of Pandora and is about to complete his Voidship. His plan is to abandon the planet and its people. To build his Voidship, Flattery has altered Pandoran society to the point that the society and the planet will certainly fall into chaos along with the physical destruction of the planet when he leaves. There are several groups with various motives working against Flattery. The story revolves around the conclusion to all their plotting as well as Flattery's. The groups have little or no idea of each other's existence. When they finally meet, their plans fall apart convincingly. The story is told as a series of parallel story lines that converge in the end. There are also some independent vignettes whose purpose is to convey a sense of the society. Everything is suitably chaotic. The characters are well done, with a lot of action. Read by itself, this is a good fast paced action story. When read as part of the series, it is a well done story that advances the series. The ending is a suitable one not only for the book but for the series as well. --Danny Low Bloodthirst [Star Trek #37] [***] J. M. Dillard Pocket, 1987, $3.95, 264pp. Perfect Halloween reading--a Star Trek vampire story. Yet another vampirism as a disease tale, plus bio-weapons, Starfleet conspiracies, and the threat of Romulan attack. Dillard tends to use Kirk, Spock and McCoy and her own characters with only token mention of the rest of the regulars and lots of "gee, how many episodes can I refer back to," a trait that annoys me when it isn't relevant to the plot. Still, it works up to a tense conclusion with lots of action in a reasonable episode-like plot, especially since for once they just save themselves instead of the universe. --Mary Anne Espenshade The Chantry Guild [*] Gordon Dickson Ace Books $17.95 428 pg. I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is this book is the long awaited continuation of The Final Encyclopedia. The bad news is that this book is also long, repetitious and never comes to an ending. The Final Encyclopedia stopped after Hal Mayne and Bleys Ahrens meet as adults and agree that their differences are irreconcilable except by the Final Battle. The Chantry Guild starts with Mayne stymied in his attempt to develop the weapon that will insure victory in the Final Battle. He leaves The Final Encyclopedia for a solution. The story parallels his quest in the first book. It is shorter because Mayne only has to go to one planet this time instead of three for enlightenment. Both books could be reduced by a third without any effect on the story by simply eliminating the endless reiteration of events and philosophies. Hal Mayne suffers from a lack of personality. In the first book, as a youngster developing into a man, this was not a problem. As an adult, his lack of personality makes him an uninteresting character. The secondary characters, such as Rukh, have more personality, and they are nothing more than personification of archetypes. Despite his lack of "on stage" time, Bleys Ahrens is the most interesting character in the story. The book finally stops with Mayne finding the breakthrough he was looking for. The confrontation between Mayne and Ahrens is still to come. This book is of interest only to true fans of Dickson's Childe Cycle and completist collectors. It cannot be regarded as an independent book but rather as volume 2 of an excessively long novel. --Danny Low Cradle Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee Warner Books, 1988, 0-446-51379-2, 293 pp., $18.95 The late Mr. Heinlein never allowed contemporary marketing forces to create his novels, but the other two at the top of every SF readership poll, Asimov and Clarke, seem less resistant to such manipulations. With Cradle, we see yet another variant of the shared-world concept, where apparently the old master has an idea and the young turk fills in the outline, for no one familiar with Clarke's impressive body of work would confuse it with this novel's prose style. Lee strives mightily to overcome the NASAese in which he toils daily at JPL--and fails. At times, the narrative reads like an incomplete outline. Something is missing, too, from the story, a tale of first contact beneath the warm Gulf waters off Key West. Girl reporter in brass brassiere, Carol Dawson, leaves her dull lover at his Miami Oceanographic Institute, and reluctantly teams up with dropout misanthrope Nick Williams. Williams and his buddy, computer whiz Troy Jefferson, run the charter boat "Florida Queen," when they're not diving for sunken treasure. Carol hires them to blow the lid off the U.S. Navy's loss of a newly tested cruise missile. Only the Keystone Kops of the Navy and a robot crew aboard a stranded alien seedship have other plans. Lt. Todd, the kneejerk idiot of the story, is convinced that the pesky Russians stole the missile, and tries to convince Commander Winters that Carol, Nick, and Troy are spies. The Commander, meanwhile, lusts after the teenage lead in his amateur theater troupe, and is haunted by memories and a cold wife. And just to add a pirate flair, Capt. Ashford and his menage a trois splash across the stage with some very convenient gold bullion. Sadly, this collection of Hollywood cliches just doesn't gel. The love story is loveless; the lust ends in a cold shower; the mystery scales down to red herrings; and the whales simply wander off. Even if you wait for the paperback, you're going to wonder if this wasn't the other, alcoholic "Arthur" at work. Give this one a pass. --Dean R. Lambe Crown of Stars [****] James Tiptree, Jr. Tor Books, 0-312-93105-0 A volume of Tiptree stories that were uncollected (and in some cases unpublished) at the time of her death. In general, everything you expect from Tiptree stories: well-crafted prose, beautiful imagery, wonderful characters. The themes range all over the map: aliens, love and sex, life and death, heaven and hell, even adoption and abortion. All the individual stories are good; many can be called great. This collection shows how much the science fiction community lost with Tiptree's death. --Chuck Koelbel Deep Quarry John E. Stith Ace Books, 1989, 0-441-14276-1, 140 pp., $3.50. Stith appears to have specialized in that difficult earthquake zone, the area between murder mystery and science fiction. With his third novel, he moves to a alien setting, a planet distant in both time and space where humans are but one of four sapient species. In the hot and dusty constant daylight of Tankur, a planet whose astrophysics conflicts with its habitability, Ben Takent, an equally tired and dusty wisecracking private eye, wishes he could afford a secretary while he battles with the air conditioning repair company. While Ben sweats it out, he almost loses a paying customer in the lovely form of Kate Dunlet, resident egghead and archaeologist at the alien dig up the road. Kate and her fellow potsherd pickers hire gumshoe Ben because artifacts from their 10,000 year old Womper village are drifting past supposedly tight security into the local black market. While quickly puzzling out the crime--which doesn't much stump the reader either--Ben shows what a real detective mind can do with the greater mystery of Tankur, the ancient Wompers, and the resident Ayers Rock. Kate, Dr. Foster and the other scientists aren't too happy with the deductions of an amateur, but they follow him into the huge alien structure anyway. Wompers, ancient and modern, as well as the obligatory guy named Sam, then radically change the direction of the story, and Ben and friends wend through the maze and leave no turn unstoned. If the above seems a bit lackluster, a retread of the Bat Durston type, well it's not--quite. There is a solid SF gimmick here that is crucial to the plot, and save for the bar scenes that were tired when George Lucas used them, the story delivers solid entertainment. Expect even better from his next one, Redshift Rendevous. --Dean R. Lambe Dracula's Brood [****] Richard Dalby Crucible, 1987, 348pp. I don't often read horror--at least not the gore that passes itself off as horror fiction these days--but I do like gothic horror and this collection of short stories is in just that vein (sorry). Subtitled "Rare Vampire Stories by Friends and Contemporaries of Bram Stoker," the 24 stories in this collection date from 1867 to 1940. Some of the authors are familiar names from other works, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, others, most of the rest to me anyway, are obscure authors whose works have never been reprinted. Doyle's story, "The Parasite" (1894), is about a psychic vampire, drawing soul and vitality from the victim rather than blood. There are several of these in the collection. There are also traditional vampires in "Ken's Mystery" (1888) by Julian Hawthorne and "The Last Lords of Gardonal" (1867) by William Gilbert and some very unusual "vampire" objects in "The Living Stone" (1939) by E. R. Punshon and "The Feather Pillow" (1907) by Horacio Quiroga. --Mary Anne Espenshade Final Circuit Melinda M. Snodgrass Ace Books, 1988, 0-441-22876-3, 244 pp., $3.50. Snodgrass did not disappoint with the end of her trilogy about Judge Cabot Huntington and his Jenny, off in the asteroids with the new American Revolutionaries. It's every bit as bad as I expected. This new writer showed some potential in her first novel, for she aped classic Heinlein, but by the end, she had copied her own ignorance and created a tsunami of disbelief. As Cab Huntington jumps from frying pan to the fire, first in Earth orbit, then on Mars, and finally on the curiously-located Ceres (both 200 and 700 million miles from Earth in the same week), his law partner, Jenny McBride, becomes such a sex object that she loses her last name and is knocked up and sent to bed so the "boys" can talk. Meanwhile, the new American President is a doormat for his female Chief of Staff, and an odd band of Kenyan terrorists hijacks an antimatter drive spaceship, which gives the Russians an excuse to nuke American asteroid habitats. Forced into deep thought and backed into rebellion, the judge and all his friends sit down in micro-gravity and zilch partial pressure of oxygen to have a smoke with all the cigars, pipes and cigarettes available to the American Tobacco Institute. Back on the home world, the President's chief bitch takes a Valium. Then the technology and politics get really stupid. Even those who visit Africa via used books should know that it's not "secretary of the treasury," but the Honorable Minister of Finance & Planning who handles Kenya's money. Those who throw around concepts like "artificial gravity" and "anti-hydrogen" might make some effort to understand what they're talking about from one page to the next. Of late, Mesdames Brandewyne and Taylor have complained that the SF community has been unkind to their spaced-out romance novels. Never mind aphorisms about heat and kitchens, ladies, if you don't understand the rules, don't play the game. You too, Melinda. Should any care to learn, hundreds of SF writers-- women writers if that's the only language you speak--can show you how. --Dean R. Lambe Full Spectrum [***+] Lou Aronica & Shawna McCarthy, editors Bantam-Spectra, 0-553-27482-1 An anthology of short stories that the editors describe as "on the leading edge of science fiction." As you might expect, the quality does vary from author to author, but even the worst of these stories rate a [***-] in my opinion and the best are probably around [****+]. I expect to see some award winners out of this collection, and recommend it to anyone interested in SF. --Chuck Koelbel Ghosts Have No Feelings [****] Barbryn Press, 1988, 116pp. This anthology contains the 18 best stories from a short story competition to write about the ghosts of Warwick Castle. I picked this up when I visited England this summer. I didn't meet any of these ghosts personally at Warwick but some seem quite nice, like the Phantom Jogger in "The Wall" by Paul D. Wapshott or the talkative title character in "A Friend of Walt's" by Audrey Elizabeth Roberts, a comic piece. Others are real horror story ghosts, setting traps for unwary visitors and out for revenge. Some don't even know they are ghosts, like the sad little girl in "Run to Mama" by Sandra Gourlay. I go to medieval banquets in costume myself, but after the experiences of the narrator of "The Banquet" by F. B. Atkin, who attends one at Warwick castle, I'll be more wary of them. --Mary Anne Espenshade Here Be Demons [***-] Esther Friesner Ace, 1988, $2.95, 233pp, 0-441-32797-4 A group of demons have been banned from Hell and exiled to one of the more dismal corners of the Egyptian desert. Their offense: being insufficiently evil. Their ticket home: one genuinely damned human soul. After centuries of boredom, a golden opportunity presents itself: several archeology students and their inept professor on an amateur "dig." You would think that five demons could get at one American college student to commit a mortal sin. Janet Morris takes Hell seriously. Esther Friesner does not. Of the two, I am inclined to favor Friesner's choice. The author has a finely honed sense of the absurd; though what is absurd is not always funny. This book violates rather outrageously Mr. Twain's dictum of "one miracle per story"; and frankly, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It might have worked better had the author maintained one focus, rather than simply letting everything run hog-wild. However, I found the book at least mildly amusing. Some might find it hilarious. It depends on your sense of humor. --David M. Shea The IDIC Epidemic [Star Trek #38] [*****] Jean Lorrah Pocket, 1988, $3.95, 278pp. This book is a sequel to The Vulcan Academy Murders, featuring the same characters responding to a plague on the Federation research colony Nisus. Much of the action takes place on Nisus rather than the Enterprise, as Dr. McCoy, Dr. Corrigan and Sorel join the medical teams combatting a fast-mutating virus that seems to attack nearly all Federation races equally. Klingons turn out to be immune, and there is one Klingon scientist on Nisus.... Lorrah uses the view of Klingon society from The Final Reflection and the two Klingon races from the films. This story is as much a mystery as Lorrah's previous book--but a medical one this time instead of a murder mystery, a race to find cures and vaccines for multiple races as the disease becomes more virulent with each mutation. --Mary Anne Espenshade