Defense of the giant grasshoppers

kw: book reviews, science fiction, historical fiction, medieval period, aliens, first contact

Years ago, I read a novella that placed a time-traveling scientist in a medieval village during the 14th century plague. It devolved to a psychological study of the young woman, herself immunized against Yersinia pestis and a host of other ills, becoming the last person alive in the village, finally burying the village priest.

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn reminded me of it. I know that this book is an expansion of an earlier novella by Flynn, but I haven't determined if it was the one I read or not. There is no time traveler here, though the cosmological theory developed by one character hints at a way to travel in time.

The basic story, 80% narrative of 14th-Century life and 20% vignettes of the lives of the historians studying the earlier events, is of a starcraft that barely escapes crashing in the Black Forest, but lands damaged. Its insectile inhabitants are, rather astonishingly, welcomed by first one, then two or three of the first humans to locate their landing site. Gradually they become accepted by many, but not all, of the villagers. At the end, the ship is repaired, at least enough to take off, though a successful return to home is not assured. A few aliens remain behind, preferring certain, but slow, death in the German village to the rather significant chance of an infinitely-prolonged dying if the ship gets "stuck" in a space warp. Should their fellows succeed, they plan to return for them.

The aliens cannot gain full nourishment from Earth foods, because their biochemistry requires 21 amino acids, while nearly all Earth life lives with 20. The missing ingredient is never found, and the ship does not return. Rather, everyone dies of plague, except the aliens who die of malnutrition, and the village gains the name Teufelheim (Devil's home), later elided to Eifelheim.

Back in the present, a historian is trying to determine why this location alone, now with the name Eifelheim, was never resettled after being depopulated by plague in 1349. His lover, a physicist, is trying to develop a better model of cosmology than 11-dimensioned string theory. About the time she succeeds, she happens to see a strangely-configured illuminated capital letter in a manuscript the historian is studying, and recognizes that it is a circuit diagram similar to one she had designed to detect signs of her theory's special particles. The manuscript and others were located by a librarian who is trying to seduce the historian; at the end, it seems she might have done so, but that strand is left hanging.

In fact, a number of strands are left hanging, in the rather obvious way that is becoming common—it almost harks back to the cliffhanger endings of Perils of Pauline episodes. While the historian and librarian, with the help of a narrator-colleague, do confirm that the "demons" of certain documents really were aliens, no other subplot is completed. It's no surprise that Flynn wishes to write more books. Ending a novel with no more than a hope of the solution is an unsatisfying way to prompt for a series of sequelae.

As different an alien as he could imagine

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space travel, aliens, first contact

Peter Watts is a very accommodating writer. Following an increasingly popular practice, he has appended to his novel Blindsight a section explaining and discussing some of his ideas. Blindsight is the first book by Watts that I've read, so I don't know what he did with his earlier Rifter series (four books). In this book, he plunks us down in a society that is taking genetic and cyborganic tinkering pretty far, to the point of restoring recently lost species such as the Vampire, a Human subspecies that, being a predator on the next-most-efficient predator (us), has mental skills needed to lead increasingly complex projects, such as the mission to an object in the Oort cloud that seems to harbor an alien intelligence.

The narrator is a Synthesist, Siri Keaton. In this case, that means he's someone who had half his brain removed to eliminate debilitating epileptic seizures (complete hemispherectomy is now rare; functional hemispherectomy, which disables one hemisphere but leaves most of it in place, is performed on a few hundred people yearly). While they were at it, the installed some equipment in its place. Now, he is able to read body language well enough to just about read your mind. He is one of a team of four heavily altered and enhanced people sent to study the object they call Ben, and contact any aliens they might find. Their team leader is a Vampire.

The novel's title comes from the ability of the aliens, once encountered, to hide in plain sight. In the presence of one person, they can take advantage of the saccades, the tiny movements our eyes make constantly, to trick the brain into ignoring them. These aliens are really something. Watts has posited an alien physiology for which magnetic fields (really strong ones) and ionizing radiation interact with super-resistant proteins and superconducting polymers to produce creatures that read the electronic signals in a human brain at a distance, and the myoelectric signals from muscles, to read the people much better than Siri could hope to. All this is discovered over much time, and for much of the book, things keep going on in one mysterious way after another.

The tensions of studying the alien Scramblers, and an intelligence—artificial or otherwise, we don't find out—that controls their city-size orbiting habitat, pale by comparison to the tensions between the four very different human/cyborg crew, and the most-different member, the Vampire. In the end, we find that selective attention, which enables conscious beings to function in a very stimulus-rich world, is a fatal detriment to us in the presence of creatures that seem not to be conscious as we know it, but can process all stimuli in real time; their attention is not selective, so they learn really, really fast.

The concept of a Chinese Room is used to great effect to explain the difference. This thought experiment by John Searle is used to question the meaning and usefulness of the Turing Test. One the one hand, Turing asked, if you communicate with a computer by teletype, and cannot determine whether it truly is a computer, is it intelligent? On the other, Searle proposed a person in a room who receives written or printed messages that he cannot understand, but that he can recognize and find in a large (very large, I'd think!) rule book. He doesn't even know they are Chinese ideographs. He just looks up in the rule book how to respond, and writes the response on a fresh sheet of paper and passes it outside the room to an observer. Is the Chinese Room intelligent?

Some think consciousness is an illusion. Descartes offered the best reply (I think, thus I am). I know I am conscious, and you know that you are conscious. That poor soul over there doesn't think either one of us is conscious, but perhaps he (she?) just suffers from impaired self-consciousness...

Space Opera for the eXtreme generation

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, aliens, first contact

Here is everyone's blackest nightmare "first contact" story. Mysterious aliens have been contacted over a number of years by robotic and AI spacecraft of The Polity, an AI-ruled space empire. No image of the aliens' likeness, or of their spacecraft, has so far been permitted to return, only a few sparse records and distant views of a technological civilization on some of their outlying worlds.

Finally, a meeting is arranged. The docking bay specified by the Prador is unnervingly huge, big enough for them to be animate locomotives. They are, instead, big crabs. Very big crabs with very tough shells, nearly irresistible weapons, unthinkable hostility, and a taste for human flesh. They are looking for slaves and food, and we seem to fit the bill.

In Prador Moon, Neal Asher pulls out every stop on this old nightmare. Of course, humans just have to win, even at a terrible cost. It takes the confluence of an entirely fanatical warrior who has seen his lover wantonly destroyed and macerated, a couple of AIs with their own mysterious ways—using human or humanoid bodies—, and a woman with a mysteriously enhanced computer implant, a few million times more capable than the implants most folks wear; all these combine to drive off the alien attack. But there's plenty of grist for sequels...and The Polity has already been the subject of a few of Asher's books.

Home is where the heart wishes to be

kw: book reviews, science fiction, interstellar travel, aliens, trilogies

Alan Dean Foster writes one of the best known SciFi series, a light-hearted collection now numbering twelve novels, "Flinx of the Commonwealth". The "Founding of the Commonwealth" trilogy followed and is interwoven with these. Foster has a host of other series and stand-alone novels numbering more than one hundred. I don't know if he writes nonfiction also, but his fiction output rivals that of Isaac Asimov.

The Candle of Distant Earth completes his most recent "Taken" trilogy, begun in 2004. Volumes 1 and 2 are Lost and Found and The Light-Years Beneath My Feet. The trilogy's premise: Marc Walker is captured by aliens and finds himself a captive on a ship bearing numerous captives from many alien races. They are to be sold to zoos and collectors of alien "pets".

The first volume is concerned with Walker's gradual acceptance of interaction with some very different beings, their alliance, escape, and rescue by a more powerful alien civilization. The second covers the adventures of Walker and his alien friends as they gain the confidence and allegiance of a race that agrees to help them find their way home. In the third, they find their home planets, though they have all changed a great deal; homecoming isn't as expected, in each case. Along the way, their original captors occasionally intervene, trying to recover "lost inventory", or at least restore their "honor" by killing the escapees.

Hmmm. That's a pretty succinct story line. But it is more involved than a High Concept premise. The theme is really coming of age, a genre I heartily enjoy.