Electronic OtherRealms #25 Summer/Fall, 1989 Part 3 of 17 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Permission is given to electronically distribute this issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used without permission of the author. From Beyond the Edge Reviews by our readers (Part 1, continued) The Gold Coast [**] Kim Stanley Robinson The cover blurb calls this a "prophetic glimpse" of Orange County, CA, in the 21st century. I've seen better prophets handing out literature in airports. OC is the drug capital of the country, but there are no problems with violent crime, worker productivity, or long-term addicts. But that almost makes sense, since drugs don't have any inconvenient side effects like hangovers, overdoses, flashbacks, or withdrawal syndrome. The engineers working on SDI-style missile defenses haven't noticed that their system can't aim fast enough to shoot down ICBMs, and are concentrating their efforts on other problems. The San Diego to Oslo red-eye (Hey, there's a profitable route!) is nearly as fast as military fighters that can outrun surface-to-air missiles. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but this is ridiculous. The only thing that partially saves this novel is some strong characterizations (mainly of the men -- most of the women are cardboard cutouts), and that's not enough by a long shot. -- Chuck Koelbel The Illyrian Adventure Lloyd Alexander Dell, 1986, $2.50 This book is meant for children older than those who read Alexander's The Wizard in the Tree. The story concerns orphaned Vesper Holly and her guardian Brinnie who search for the legendary treasure her father believed Illyria contains. From the beginning there is deceit and villainy towards them by the government of the country. From the beginning the rebels of the country are shown as heros. But the solution is not as simple as that. The author shows his pleasure in words by how and where he uses them, but I found the characters easy to pigeonhole. -- Joyce Scrivner Imago Octavia E. Butler Warner, 1989, 0-446-51472-1, 264 pp., $19.95 True to the nefarious trends of modern publishing, Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy has become a series, which means that this third novel is not the last we'll hear of the alien Oankali, and their genetic absorption of humanity. As with Adulthood Rites, the second book of this tale of sundered and conquered Earth, Imago focuses on crises in the life of a human-Oankali chimera, a "construct" child of Lilith, who was the first post-Third World War human victim of the alien's master plan. Again, the setting is in the mixed species colony in the Amazon basin, where Jodahs comes of age -- twice. As his first metamorphosis (hence the title) takes place, Jodahs discovers that he will not be male, as was always assumed, but will be in fact the first construct ooloi, the powerful third sex which initiates and controls all reproduction. Of his five parents, Nikanj, his own Oankali ooloi is equally disturbed at this development, for a human-based ooloi is not yet a part of the alien's master plan. Both on Earth and back on the giant organic mother ship that orbits beyond the Moon, the Oankali debate the wisdom of allowing Jodahs' independence. For an ooloi, especially one who may still contain elements of what the aliens regard as the suicidally violent "contradiction" that condemns unmodified humanity to extinction, can do great harm with its great powers of genetic manipulation and activation. Jodahs and his extended family separate themselves from the larger colony, even though they risk attack by the wild human resisters, the sterile free people who refuse to mate with the Oankali. As Jodahs' final metamorphosis approaches, however, he becomes desperate for human mates, and is shocked when he discovers young Jesusa and Tomas, diseased and disfigured, yet somehow fertile. In curing the brother and sister, he learns of their secret human town high in the mountains, and binds them irreversibly to himself as lifemates. The three rejoin Jodahs' family, only to discover that its sibling, Aaor, is also becoming a human ooloi and is even more needful of fertile human mates. Butler's fine writing skills have created another moving, memorable story, with believable settings and characters, despite the bizarre themes of this series. And still my skin crawls at the explicit and implicit messages. Time and distance factors also begin to seem inconsistent with the first two novels. With Imago, the vampire-like alien hunger for humans is made clear; mates are attracted and bound to ooloi via a neurochemical addiction that makes hash of free will (and of contemporary social values). Of more fundamental concern is the pivotal distinction Butler tries to make between the "bad" hierarchical life of human evolution and the "good" acquisitive life of the Oankali. Nothing in the biological literature supports such a separation, or suggests that good and evil could be so easily, evolutionarily resolved. "E" for effort and masterful writing recommend this novel to your attention, but my suspension of disbelief remains on hold. -- Dean R. Lambe In Alien Flesh Greg Benford Tor, 1986, $3.95 I've long been waiting for a collection of Greg's short stories. He is one of the few current writers who produces high quality hard SF; Timescape is especially memorable. His characters are usually human (this helps in short stories to bind the reader to the situation) presented by either a specific hard science problem (in other words a classic hard sf story) or by a problem created by society interfacing with a scientific discovery. The latter is shown in the lead story in the anthology where the main character has immersed himself inside an alien being to achieve scientific goals of discovery. The character afterwards has nightmares possibly caused by the alien's thoughts that interfere with his readjustment into his relationships. I think Greg is one of the more successful writers of character and plot in the field at the moment, and it shows in these stories. -- Joyce Scrivner King of the Murgos David Eddings Del Rey 1988, $16.95 I enjoyed David Edding's first series about Garion and Belgarath. I've reread it several times when I wanted to read a book I enjoyed and forget the current reality. I don't think it requires a second series about the same people and I wish he had created a new culture with new characters to act heroically. However, just because this second book in the Malloreon isn't what I would like, I refuse to reject the idea of returning to characters I have enjoyed already. So I do. And I recommend this book to those who enjoyed the first series, but wait for the paperback. The problems are much the same as those in the first book (evil gods stealing Garion's son this time and forcing him to follow them around to save the world.) It's a bit like Star Trek in the third year. I watched the shows because I enjoyed them more than other television, but there was a sameness in the plot and characters. -- Joyce Scrivner The Legacy of Herorot Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Steven Barnes Simon and Shuster, 1987 This is a hard science adventure of how to colonize other worlds. The problems are ecologic, the solutions are in changing the earth-logic thought for Herorot-logic thought. The people are intelligent, except when they use false assumptions. One man thinks differently and the story revolves around the conflict of the individual and his society as well. The resolution brings both situations to a climax. -- Joyce Scrivner Melancholy Elephants [*****] Spider Robinson TOR, 1985, $2.95, 244pp. Excellent short story collection, including the 1982 Hugo winner, the title story. A few puns, but more serious in overall tone than Robinson's Callahan's stories. Both "No Renewal" and "In the Olden Days" make unpleasant points about the kind of society our world's current greed and lack of conservation are leading too, so does "Melancholy Elephants", in a way. "Father Paradox" is a different solution to the time travel "kill an ancestor" plot. "Chronic Offender" is a time travel story on the "you can't really change anything" model. "Rubber Soul" and "Satan's Children" are my favorites of the bunch. Though I'm not quite old enough to get all the references in "Rubber Soul", I did realize who it was about rather quickly, and the detailed footnoted explanations are as interesting as the story itself (to say more would be a definite spoiler). -- Mary Anne Espenshade Memory Prime [Star Trek #42] [**] Gar and Judith Reeves-Stevens Pocket, 1988, $3.95, 309pp. I hadn't planned to get this one, it didn't sound very promising, and if I had spent money on it I'd be very disappointed, but since it was given to me I read it. While the overall quality (plots, characterization, consistency) of the Trek books has improved a great deal over time, don't use this book as an example. We have here yet another episode sequel, this time to "The Lights of Zetar", with yet another over- zealous Starbase commander made to look like an idiot by taking command of the Enterprise away from Kirk. Commodore Wolfe arrives on the Enterprise convinced that Spock is guilty of treason and assorted other crimes, before any of them have even been committed, on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. The real guilty party, and his motives for framing Spock, are all too obvious from the beginning. I think the authors have borrowed the repressive Federation from Blake's Seven -- it isn't recognizable as the UFP I'm familiar with, the portrayal of the Andorian characters is quite off base as well. The last quarter of the book picks up a bit, but it was hardly worth getting there. Memory Prime, the replacement for the destroyed library Memory Alpha, is a top security installation, using self-aware computer "programs" that interface directly from "core" with altered humans. It is also the location of an awards ceremony involving all the major scientists of the Federation and the target of a terrorist attack. The only redeeming features of this book are the continuing relationship between Scotty and Mira Romaine, now chief computer technician in command of Memory Prime, and some good lines foreshadowing the Next Generation, like McCoy's reference that he probably won't make Admiral (and be able to requisition a shuttle instead of using the transporter) till he's 140. -- Mary Anne Espenshade Outpassage [****] Janet & Chris Morris Pageant, 1988, $3.50, 0-517-00832-7, 368 Paige Barnett was a high-ranking executive of InterSpace Tasking, the powerful mining and exploration company. She probably knew too much about the peculiar disaster on the planet known only as "X-31A", but she assumed her rank would protect her. She was wrong. Sergeant Dennis Cox was a good soldier, a US Ranger on loan to IST. He was also one of the two survivors of X-31A, and he definitely knew too much. Cox had no illusions about protection, but even he was surprised when he and Barnett were shanghaied off Earth to another planet where the same problem seemed to be appearing. Was it merely a revolution among IST's slave laborers? The founding of a new religion? Could it possibly be the alien contact fearfully awaited for so long? It was a strange and weird challenge for Cox and Barnett, with not merely their own lives, but possibly a new departure for the entire human race hanging in the balance. Experience shows that the Morrises do, about as well as anybody, the fast-paced action/adventure story, combining that with a genuine feel for characters which is beyond most of the "future combat" wordslingers. Outpassage goes a step beyond that. This is not a book which glorifies militarism. It recognizes militarism as an inherent part of the human psyche, a useful and necessary tool in certain situations, not an end in itself. The book then goes on, exploring the next stage of human evolution. A book which thus combines exciting and plausible action sequences with thoughtful philosophy is something of a rarity, and well worth your trouble. I definitely recommend this book. Remember, you only die once.... -- David M. Shea Paradise: A Chronicle of a Distant World Mike Resnick Tor, 1989, 0-312-93183-2, 323pp, $17.95 Paradise, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder -- so Resnick discovered in the East Africa he's come to know so well. Thus his latest novel, set within his multi-species future history some 2800 years from now, is really about neither paradise nor a distant world, but a highly readable tale of politics and ecology, evil and good, and the interdependence of all things relative. As Matthew Breen begins his journalistic career in chronicling alien planets, first dominated, then freed by the vast human Republic, he focuses on Peponi and its lush, unspoiled past. Breen's first books follow from interviews of human expatriates, from big game hunters to colonial farmers, who -- in their own ways -- destroyed the Peponi they loved. August Hardwyke remembers the idyllic world of Landship hunting, with near savage Bluegill beaters and gunbearers. Sadly, the market for the Landship's gemlike eyestones meant extinction for those massive animals by the time Amanda Pickett had settled into her fertile Greenlands farm. Amanda, who came to be Peponi's first well-known human author, recalls those better days for Breen as well, and her fellow exiles explain the human side of the Kalakala Emergency, the wag's native uprising that drove Men out. On the strength of his books about the world and its people, the legendary Old Man, President Buko Pepon, invites Breen to see the planet. The pepons (as the bluegill wags wish to be called), newly independent and self- governing, face many problems as they try to accommodate imported livestock and crops, as well as a vital tourist industry. In the final segment, their harsh dusk in sad and sharp contrast to their innocent dawn, Breen visits a Peponi without its historic great leader, a planet of dust and death, yet still with beauty and dignity. If this morality play seems a little too close to home, rather than in a "far galaxy," it's no less science fictional or worthy of your attention. True, the "Bradburys," the portrayals of a different place and time as much like the people next door, are as apparent here as in most of Resnick's episodic novels, but one can scarcely fault Grand Master modeling. For those who see the world through traveler's glasses, Paradise will strike a chord and mist an eye; for others, it teaches that sometimes it is too late to go and see. -- Dean R. Lambe Paradise [****+] Dan Henderson Tor, 1983, $2.95, 314pp, 523-48549-2 In the Middle Ages, one of the common vices was overreaching: the wild ambition to be more than you were permitted to be. (See, for instance, MacBeth.) I suspect it is this flaw which caused this otherwise excellent novel to be slapped down, not by a status quo deity, but by a marketplace which would not take the trouble to figure out what the author was attempting. Henderson was trying to do about three different novels here with the same set of words, and if he fell a trifle short of bringing them all off, he should at least get bonus points for effort. First there's the religious novel, exploring the theme of Perfectability Of Man; and if you think it's a picnic doing a religious novel without mentioning God, you try it. Then there's the neo-noir mystery novel, an obvious growth industry in the SF genre (see Effinger's When Gravity Fails) which Henderson anticipated. Finally there's the New Southron Fantasy novel (as distinguished from the Old Southron Fantasy of the Manly Wade Wellman school). Of these three novels, Henderson succeeds in bringing off about two-and-a-half. Some writers of much greater commercial success can't write a book that succeeds as one novel. I don't know much about this author. (Though I also admired his wonderfully gonzo short story "Carruthers' Last Stand," deservedly anthologized by Donald Wollheim in his World's Best for 1979.) I do know this is much too good a book to be relegated to oblivion. Seek it out. -- David M. Shea Phases of Gravity Dan Simmons Bantam, $4.50, 0-553-27764-2 Simmons does not write simple entertainments, nor does he pen whizbang adventure, yet there is both action and amusements in his works. With his award-winning Song of Kali, he seemed to tell a chilling fantasy of contemporary Calcutta; now, as he ventures into almost science fiction, the territory is familiar -- if just a bit out of phase. Framed in flashbacks to his childhood, his failed marriage, his oddly hollow moon walk, we leapfrog about the life of middle- aged ex- astronaut Richard E. Baedecker. We first meet Baedecker as he attempts to communicate with his son, Scott, who has gone guru gah-gah in darkest India. There, amidst the flies, beggars and Taj Mahal, Baedecker loses his son and gains his girlfriend, Maggie Brown. Back home in St. Louis, Baedecker makes a pilgrimage to the home town he doesn't remember, then quits his empty aerospace job in favor of a random odyssey across America in search of sons and lovers. First in Colorado, where his former Apollo command module mate, Tom Gavin, seeks salvation on mountain peaks, then in Oregon, where his mission commander, Dave Muldorff, makes his own peace with mountains, Baedecker continues to look for his lost dreams. That he, and his former crewmates, all find separate truths about their sons is but one of many threads knit through this fine tapestry of hard engineering and mysticism. Well-tred though these paths may be, from The Right Stuff to the Jack Nickolson role in "Terms of Endearment," Simmons brings new meaning to the tarnished American Dream and those lunar footprints dearly won and so sadly lost. And if mention of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev seems odd in a SF context, remember that Simmons isn't really writing genre fiction here -- all the more reason to read him, and to encourage more of these Special Editions from Bantam. -- Dean R. Lambe Prison Ship [] Martin Caidin Baen, $4.50, 0-671-69814-1 I had to wait some time before I wrote this review, as I did not wish to let my first impressions overwhelm any secondary feelings. I reacted very badly to the book. Although I did finish it, I can't recommend this book to anyone. This is the first book that I've seen that had the literary equivalent of Television's "Viewer Discretion Advised" warning. It certainly deserves it. The offensive sections are discreetly marked, maybe too discreetly. My personal opinion is that the book would have been vastly improved by removing those sections entirely. The protagonist's total disregard for the lives of those not in his immediate circle while still being portrayed as a desirable role model, is a heavy turn-off. It may be as the discretion warning states, that Martin Caidin takes special pride in "faithfully rendering" reality. If so, you may be certain that I will no longer purchase books written by Martin Caidin. I've read some of his earlier work, so it's somewhat dismaying that I won't be able to enjoy his work any more. To give you some idea of my depth of feeling on this book, I (who NEVER have parted with a fictional work) have the hard choice of attempting to recoup some of my money by selling this book to the local used book store, or to avoid being responsible for someone else reading this book by throwing it away. -- Edwin Wiles Shadows of The White Sun [] Raymond Harris Ace, 1988, $3.50, 230pp, 0-441-06881-2 I wish I could figure out what's going on here, but I can't. The author seems to have fallen into the trap of knowing his own elaborate creation so well, he has forgotten the reader doesn't. There's a truckload of local color, names, places, ranks, customs, relationships, simply thrown without explanation at the reader, who struggles helplessly to sort the grain of story from the chaff of superfluous detail. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. -- David M. Shea ------ End ------