Electronic OtherRealms #25 Summer/Fall, 1989 Part 6 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. Odds 'n' Ends Reviews by Alan Wexelblat Copyright 1989 by Alan Wexelblat Last time everything was more or less the same. Which is great if you happen to like a steady diet of the same sort of thing. This time there's something for everyone: semi-serious SF, dark fantasy, light fantasy, and war story. Software [***+] Rudy Rucker Avon, 167 pp, 1982, 0-380-70177-4 In the kingdom of cyberpunk novels, Rudy Rucker is something like the court jester -- irreverent, rude, sometimes corny, always risque. Underneath the farce, though, is something worth listening to. Software is not his best work but if, like me, you're interested in robots, AI, and the problems of consciousness, it's a nice addition to your shelves. Software is a novel about programs, the kind that drive our bodies and the kind that drive computers. Rucker juxtaposes a decaying human society, top-heavy with aged baby-boomers, against an infant robotic society coming to grips with its own evolution. Sounds weighty? It's not. Rucker's a jester and, even though he breaks into Narrator's Voice on occasion, he keeps things amusing for most of the novel. The main characters are an old pheezer (freaky geezer) named Cobb Anderson and a young wastrel who insists on being called Sta-Hi, an apt description of his only talent in life. Cobb is the man who, to the dismay of humanity, created robots with the potential to evolve self- awareness. Humans were unable to directly create artificial intelligences but Cobb, by simulating evolutionary processes, created conditions out of which AIs could emerge. Naturally, people didn't want to lose their slaves, so they've banished the rebellious machines to the moon. So it's something of a surprise when a robot who looks remarkably like Cobb shows up in Florida offering him an all-expenses-paid trip to the moon. It seems that some of the larger robots have decided that they need recorded human brain patterns. Just as humans were unable to create intelligence by themselves, the evolved intelligences of the robots cannot produce other creatures with the spark of self-awareness. In order to continue along the path toward unified consciousness, the robots are looking for a few good men. The process of recording the brain patterns is destructive but, since the robots have promised Cobb an all-but-immortal mechanical body to house his consciousness, he's willing to go along with the plan. He and Sta-Hi set off for the moon. Unfortunately, they arrive in the middle of an anarchist revolution. The little boppers, not wanting to be absorbed into the group consciousness that the larger robots are trying to impose, are rebelling. Rucker pontificates a bit and some of the puns are truly awful, but the action is good and the ideas are excellent. People who are not 'into' computers and the problems of self-consciousness will probably get less out of this book than those who are into it. Fairie Tale [***] Raymond Feist Bantam fantasy, 435 pp, 1988, 0-553-27783-9 Faeries are not nice people. Not cute, not funny. They're an alien species living in, at best, an uneasy truce with mankind. At worst, they're implacable enemies of humanity. Like the jacket blurb says: not all fairy tales are for children. The story revolves around the family of Phil Hastings, his wife, college-age daughter, and young twin sons. They have purchased a farmhouse in upstate New York and are living there for the summer. Phil is trying to write a novel, his daughter Gabbie is trying to fall in love with Jack Cole, a doctoral student. The twins, Patrick and Sean, are trying to find someone to play baseball with and Gloria, their mother, is trying to keep order in the house. Then the Magic comes. It starts off simply enough: under the Troll Bridge in the woods is a Bad Thing. Sean and Patrick know it's there even though none of the adults seem to be aware of it, and they can avoid it. Unfortunately, it seems to have quite an interest in them, showing up in their bedroom and frightening them badly. Meanwhile, the adults are engrossed in unravelling the mystery of the house. It seems to have been the refuge of a mysteriously-rich immigrant who left Germany in something of a hurry after a period of odd activities there. The hunters are aided by Mark and Gary, a pair of professional oddity-investigators who make their livings tracking down mysteries and publishing books on their findings. As the house's secrets are being unravelled, it becomes more and more obvious that odd things are going on. First, Gabbie has her horse's shoe fixed by a mystery blacksmith, then Patrick is swept by a flash flood under the Troll Bridge and badly injured by the Bad Thing. Finally, Gabbie is nearly raped by what, to all appearances, is a particularly vicious teenager. From there the plot accelerates as the family is caught up in the faeries' machinations. Feist does a good job of portraying people hopelessly outclassed by the Magic forces arrayed against them. He switches to the faerie point of view long enough for the reader to get a sense of the importance of actions which are not apparent to the family members. As the trouble worsens, no wizards or heroes show up to help the family out. They have to make do with Mark's parapsychological research and the maunderings of a drunk Irishman who remembers the old legends well. The adults staunchly refuse to give up their rationalistic explanations for what's happening, leaving the children to deal with the situation. Unfortunately, the novel is marred by a number of problems. For all that Feist pushes the Magic aspects, he seems unwilling to allow that to be an explanation. The characters keep talking about "energy beings" and "alien races," as if Feist thought that were a more logical explanation. The first seventy-five or so pages move very slowly as a lot of time is spent introducing characters without really making them distinct. Feist's style is a bit pedantic; he spends too much time telling you what's happening instead of showing it. The ending also has a logical flaw in it that makes it look like the author was trying to take the easy way to tie up a loose end. The good points and the bad just about balance out. I'd have liked something exceptional for the effort of reading 400 pages, but you can't have everything. The Story of the Stone [****+] Barry Hughart Doubleday hardcover, 236 p, 1988, 0-385-24636-6 Putting The Story of the Stone in the same 'genre' as Fairie Tale makes me wonder about the usefulness of genre labels. It would be hard to think of two books less alike. Hughart's specialty is humorous tales of a China that never was. His first novel, Bridge of Birds won a well- deserved World Fantasy Award. The characters from that book -- Number Ten Ox and Master Li -- return in this story. While this one isn't quite up to the caliber of the first, it's still a fun book. For those who haven't read the first book, go out and find it. This one will make much more sense if you have. Hughart doesn't assume that you've read that one, but the background explanations in The Story of the Stone are pretty sparse. The in-jokes are also funnier if you're in on them from the beginning. This book tells the story of a mysterious and powerful stone, a prize people are willing to kill for. It is also the story of the Laughing Prince, an ancient evil ruler who appears to have risen from the dead. Li and Ox are initially hired to investigate the death of a monk in the monastery of the Valley of Sorrows. The monk has lost his life over a document that, while appearing rare, is actually a fairly obvious forgery. Clearly there's more to the monk's death than initially meets the eye, and our heros are soon off on a quest to discover who has murdered the monk and why. Along the way they meet the usual quotient of magic, madmen, schemers and innocents. Saying any more would, I'm afraid, ruin the plot. Those who have read Bridge of Birds are apt to be taken somewhat aback by the prologue and first couple of chapters of this book. They're written in a harsh and unexpectedly brusque style. It's almost as though it took a while for the author to settle back into the characters. In addition, there's an ongoing rant about Neo-Confucianism running through the whole book. I'm sure it's supposed to be an allegory for something, but for me it just detracted from the enjoyment of the book. Even with these weak points, I still found The Story of the Stone enjoyable exciting light fantasy and I look forward to seeing what Hughart will do next. The Healer's War [****-] Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Doubleday, 303 pp, 1988, 0-385-24828-8 There's a lot to be said for anyone who has the guts to try and write honestly about her experiences in the Vietnam war. For anyone who wants to get some idea of what China Beach was really like or of what it meant being an Army nurse in Nam, this book is for you. It's not exceptionally gross, but it's not prettied up either. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a Vietnam vet and former nurse, doesn't pull a lot of punches in this one. Add to that the fact that she's not writing her own story, or even a purely factual one: she's writing a fantasy novel, weaving in the elements of a native Vietnamese healer and his magic. Combining these two ideas is a tall order. Scarborough succeeds partway; the book has flaws, but my hat is definitely off to her for her audacity and honesty. The book tells the story of Lieutenant Kitty McCulley, a midwestern girl with a family and a prospective boyfriend at home. She writes frequent cheerful lies to her mother to shield the old woman from the horrors of the war; her boyfriend gets the real stuff, when Kitty can bear to write it. Kitty treats both the GIs and the Vietnamese. The former leave quickly and don't play a large part in her life. The latter, however, stay as long as they can, trying to heal before being shoved back out into the war. This gives the hospital staff a chance to become attached to them. One day an old man appears on the Vietnamese side of the ward. He has lost both legs and is clearly dying, yet he keeps trying to help the other patients. His power is somehow connected to an amulet which he always wears. When the doctors make him take it off for surgery, he insists that Kitty wear it. She discovers that it allows her to see auras and that it amplifies her natural healing tendencies to unnatural levels. By using her energy, she can effect miraculous cures of everything from broken nails to infected amputations. Before the old man dies, he passes the amulet on to her. I had a hard time getting started with this book; the pace is extremely slow for almost the entire first half. A lot of characters who aren't very important to the story are introduced in great detail while those who are important tend to stay enigmatic. I suspect that many of the minor players are drawn from the author's experiences. The important characters, with the exception of Kitty, seem to be creations and therefore less detailed. In addition, Scarborough spends a good deal of effort on describing the surroundings and setting from the nurses' quarters to China Beach to the Vietnamese jungle and villages. While this gives the book its unshakeable feel of authenticity it further slows the pace of the action. It also had the unfortunate side effect of distancing me from Kitty. At times when I most wanted to be drawn in, I found myself sitting back admiring the book like I'd admire a painting in a museum. Still, this is a far cry from most of the war stories that find their way onto the fantasy shelves and I recommend it. Past Imagining: Forgotten Classics Lawrence Watt-Evans Copyright 1989 by Lawrence Watt-Evans World Out of Mind by J.T. McIntosh The Sentinel Stars by Louis Charbonneau Costigan's Needle by Jerry Sohl A Scourge of Screamers by Daniel F. Galouye The Circus of Dr. Lao, by Charles G. Finney I couldn't remember the title or the author, but for years I remembered the story. It was one of the very first novels I ever read; I think I was eight. It was the story of Eldin Raigmore, a man with no past, and his rise in a society where social status is completely dependent upon one's performance in a series of tests of intelligence, creativity, character, morality, etc. I looked for it half-heartedly for years -- half-heartedly because I was afraid it wouldn't be as good as I remembered. I found it; it's World Out of Mind, by the much-maligned and underrated Scottish SF writer J.T. McIntosh, published in the U.S. under the name J.T. McIntosh so as not to look so foreign. And if it's not quite the great epic I remembered, it's still a fine novel in the pulp tradition, with its stratified society of Browns, Purples, Reds, Yellows, and Whites, sub-graded as Circles, Crosses, and Stars, threatened by emotionless alien spies working from within. It's naive by modern standards, but a good read all around. It was a Science Fiction Book Club selection, and can be found in either paperback or book club edition in the used book stores. I know now that The Sentinel Stars owes a lot to the classic dystopias of 1984 and Brave New World, but I read it before I read either of them, so I didn't care. It's an odd combination of the two; most of the world is a drab, oppressive 1984-style world state where citizens labor to whittle away their tax debts. However, there is hope, a goal they're working toward -- Freeman status. That's right, when one's debt is paid, one is free to live in one of the special freeman reservations, where nobody works, where there are endless entertainments -- and occasional bits of nastiness that the workers don't hear about, as it might harm the idyllic image, and where the real danger is terminal boredom. TRH-247 is an ordinary citizen who finds himself tangled in the truth behind the idealized image of the freeman camps, involved in an illicit romance with ABC-331, and just generally running afoul of the entire system. This was a 40" Bantam paperback, one of dozens they churned out in the sixties, but it's one that stands out in my memory as being a notch or two better than the rest. Costigan had invented a gadget that did something amazing; things that went through the "eye" of the needle-shaped device didn't come out the other side. At least, not in our world. They did come out somewhere, though. The local religious fanatics considered this tampering with other worlds to be diabolical, and during the first critical testing of the first man-sized "needle" (prototypes had been little table-top models) one of them threw a monkey wrench in the works. The resulting power surge put the entire population of a one-block radius around the needle into a harsh alternate reality where survival was difficult. Costigan's Needle is a "survival" novel in the tradition of Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky (except I believe Needle is the older, actually) or Tom Godwin's Space Prison, where a bunch of people are thrown into a hostile environment and not all make it to the end of the novel. In Costigan's Needle there's the added twist that they know how to build a needle that might get them back -- if they can get their technology to a high enough level in time. Daniel Galouye's writing career was aborted in 1973, apparently as a result of an argument with his publisher, Bantam. Before he left the field, however, he produced a series of midlist novels that were pretty nifty. The best, in my opinion, was A Scourge of Screamers, in 1968. For no known reason, people all over the world suddenly burst out screaming in anguish; is it a plague of some sort? Is it a new weapon? What is it? It's the onset of zylphing, a result of rault previously obscured by the huge Saggitarian dust-clouds that block Earth's view of the galactic core, rault that's now getting through. It's a new means of perception. Why the screaming? Imagine if you had grown up in total, absolute darkness, having functional eyes but not knowing that you did, never seeing anything, having no concept of light or vision -- and then suddenly you're plunged into brilliant displays of light and color. You'd scream, too. It's a nifty idea done well. I almost didn't include The Circus of Dr. Lao in this, because unlike the others, just about everyone who has ever read this acknowledges it to be a classic. Even so, far too many people out there (and you know who you are) haven't read it. Well, you should. It's been reprinted several times, either by itself or with other stories; I originally read it in an anthology edited by Ray Bradbury, but the copy now on my shelves treats it as a complete novel. It's an awkward length -- just under 50,000 words, where novels are generally considered 60,000 and up, and novellas are 20,000 to 45,000. That may have something to do with its not having gotten the attention it deserves. If you've seen the movie version, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, don't think you know the story, because you don't, and it wouldn't matter if you did; it's one of the most literary fantasies ever produced, and needs to be read. Written in 1935, in the depths of the Depression, it's the tale of the very strange circus that arrives mysteriously in Abalone, Arizona one day, a circus run by an odd little Chinaman named Dr. Lao and featuring attractions that are much more real than anyone can quite deal with -- when they realize just what the attractions are at all. It's a story of mysteries -- most of them never explained -- and of how people deal with mysteries -- usually, by ignoring them. The whole thing is written in a cynical style that's at odds with what's being described, giving a peculiar result indeed, epitomized by the weird "Catalogue" at the end -- "An explanation of the obvious which must be read to be appreciated" -- which lists the characters, starting with the more or less human ones and working down to the foodstuffs, which also, as it happens, include a human or two. This is really simply indescribable; the author drew on extensive travels in China and Mexico as well as experiences in the American Southwest, and seems to have managed to put everything he ever did or believed into this one story -- which virtually no writer ever manages. If you haven't read it, you should; there have been many editions over the years, both hardcover and paperback, so you should be able to find one. ------ End ------