Alice in Pleistocene Park

kw: book reviews, science fiction, alternate history

How's this for a "what now?" moment: You're a filthy rich real estate deal maker, when you inherit the one truly unique estate on earth; it happens to be about eight times the size of Manhattan Island, and worth much more. Upkeep could make your fortune look like pocket change. Or how about: Eden isn't where you thought it was, it's still in existence, and the "angels" who guard it—a coterie of aging monks—have mostly traded in their swords for more up-to-date weaponry. Or this: Some of the immortal art and music of the great Masters just might have more of a foundation in fact than in the fantasy with which they are usually imputed. Have I given away too much?

Michael Tobias writes in a genre of his own. Hmmm. Perhaps it would be better to say, when he writes, he tends to create new genres on the spot. Chateau Beyond Time could be compared to The Da Vinci Code, with its ancient order of monks and skull-cracking puzzles, except these monks are the good guys…a whole lot "gooder" than you can imagine. It could also (partly for the puzzles) be compared to Ms Christie at her best. But the characteristic of the nonpareil is it really can't be fairly compared with anything.

I sort of expected a time travel novel. Sometimes I like those. Chateau isn't; call it more of a timeless persistency work. And timelessness is just what one wants in a refuge. This novel is about a Refuge with a capital R. There, that's enough.

The gears of home

kw: book reviews, fantasy, alternate history

In my earlier post Geared-up Universe I reviewed Jay Lake's first Tor novel Mainspring. At the time, his website had the provisional title of the sequel as Stemwinder, and having just finished reading it, I agree that that should have been the title. I don't know why it was changed to Escapement, the current title.

We are to imagine that one can literally see the Creator's handiwork in the heavens, as immense ring gears upon which the planets revolve about the Sun, and the Moon about Earth, and so forth. This alternate Earth is largely governed by Victoria, who has lived a bit longer than our Victoria did, and 1901 is fading into 1902. The primary rival to British hegemony is the Chinese Empire of Celestial Harmony. Both world powers use hydrogen-lofted airships as a major means of transport and projecting force afar, as the eyes aloft for their navies, and for expeditions not requiring heavy cargoes. In this new novel, the Chinese have also developed submarines, and one plays its part in the narrative.

The "albino toucan" is not the password here, being replaced by the avebianco. Of the three main clutches of characters followed here, the primary one follows a chiastic path from her home on The Wall that forms the Equator and holds Earth's geared ring, to Europe and back to The Wall. She is a new, magical Newton, an engineering genius who builds a large pocket watch, from scraps of brass given by an errant airman, using hand tools. Now, I've created replacement gears for a broke mantel clock using a lathe. Hand tools, indeed! In fact, she does so twice!!

The clocks she makes have four hands. Two follow the beat of Earth and Moon, one her own heart (a sort of Seconds hand), and the fourth can be tuned to any rhythm she can sense, then re-tune that rhythm. Her senses improve throughout.

She calls the first a Stemwinder, as the airshipman had called the pocket chronometer that was its model. Later it is called a Gleam by others, an apparently superstitious term. Our heroine uses this term for the rest of the narrative.

If the Solar System were really a great Orrery, in some way similar to the one pictured here, perhaps a Gleam would really have the powers of sympathetic magic. What is clear by the end of the book is that there is no limit to the power of the girl and her contrivance.

Lots of loose ends have been left for future books. The book opens with a British project to drill through The Wall using a pair of huge steam tunnel borers. These are left embattled at the book's midpoint, and the officer who goes for help is found at the end in Sumatra, bargaining for a way to convey his message of "help needed" to the seat of Empire. The "white bird" (avebianco) and a rival political faction are locked in a confrontation that threatens to embroil the world in warfare (imagine the Masons versus the Trilateral Commission and all those conspiracy theories coming true). And there are lots of clock parts and jargon to go through. I just wish the Escapement had not been wasted upon this one, which ought to have kept its Stemwinder label.

Geared-up Universe

kw: book reviews, fantasy, alternate history

From the author's picture, I'd expect to find him driving a flower-painted VW microbus. The Portland home address fit right in. But we find him frequenting the halls of the wordsmiths, and rapidly rising therein.

Mainspring is Jay Lake's third novel, the first to come to my notice. I see from his web site that he also wrote Trial of Flowers a few years ago. I've seen it at the library, but didn't look at it; the publisher, Nightshade, specializes in fiction darker than I care to read. He is also expecting to publish Stemwinder in 2008, which I expect to be a sequel to Mainspring.

Take Isaac Newton's speculation of God as a divine clockmaker, who created the Universe as a complex mechanism that now runs on its own, and William Paley's divine watchmaker (the first creationist argument from design, and forerunner to "intelligent" design apologetics). Mix in medieval fantasies of monstrous varietal 'people', and you have a milieu fit for Lake's tale of a clockmaker's apprentice charged by an angel to rewind the mainspring of the world.

It is early in the reign of Victoria, and one need only look to the heavens to see the handiwork of God. Not just in the planets and the stars, but in the brass ring gear within which the world revolves. One may at times also see the moon's own brass gearing. But things are subtly going out of whack, and young Hethor Jacques is charged to find the Key Perilous and set them right.

What follows is a classic, chiastic Quest narrative. I did not take notes to determine if the chiasma is perfect, but it is close. Half the book is taken up with the youngster making his way, helped by a seeming hidden fraternity linked by the password "albino toucan", to the Equator (or perhaps the Ecliptic; it is not stated), where a hundred-mile ridge supports the mighty ring gear that meshes with the cosmic ring. A mighty click at midnight establishes the beginning of each day. It can be heard worldwide, and when one is atop the ridge, it is literally deafening.

The second half of the book draws our apprentice ever closer to the South Pole, where he will find the gears that drive the world. He is helped here by a hairy species of men, self-called the 'correct people'. At the beginning and end of each half, Hethor must overcome the resistance of powerful adversaries.

The charm of a chiastic structure is that it mirrors the experience of walking a labyrinth. You first enter, making turn after turn to reach the center. From the center you return, making each turn in reverse order. A vast number of stories use plot formulae that follow either a 3-turn or 7-turn labyrinth. Most take you to the center, resolve the problem that was initially set, then jump you back to final peace (or a tickler for a sequel) in a closing chapter or an epilogue. Fewer use a complete in-and-out sequence.

Though the story has two linear elements (northern North America to the equatorial Gear to the South Pole; and the young man's coming of age with women, in much too much detail for my taste), the chiasma ties everything together, and in the epilogue, Hethor Jacques is in a southern mirror of his former northern home, but amongst friends, finally.

Venus as we wish it to be

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, alternate history, interplanetary travel

S. M. Stirling is a new author to me, one who adopts a recent trend against having an author's photo on the book jacket, or any revealing VITA. The blurb does state he writes both SciFi and Fantasy. The Sky People is a bit of both.

Imagine that Edgar Rice Burroughs was right, that there are people like us on both Mars and Venus, and that the robot probes of the 1950s and 1960s showed them to us. I imagine that by the 1980s there would have been several visits to each, and a number of residents, not yet colonists.

The premise of the book is that the life on Venus seems to be a jumble of everything from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, and a fossil record that begins abruptly, with nothing preceding, about 200 million years ago. Not only so, the Venerian creatures' DNA and proteins are compatible with the Terran, so that things from either planet can eat each other. This considerably lightens the load one must carry to Venus for a prolonged stay. It also leads to much risk, because the predators include huge wolves, saber-tooth cats, and allosaurs...and Neandertals.

The Human and Neandertal species are at war, and visiting, Terran, humans naturally get involved. DNA compatibility is subsequently proven.

Hints of an alien, or at least other-worldly, presence appear early, and lead to an interesting conclusion. A connection with the Martian ecology that appears late in the narrative opens plenty of room for sequels.

Global warming means bad winters

kw: book reviews, science fiction, global warming, climatology, near-future, alternate history, trilogies

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain a few years ago, before beginning these reviews. The second book in the trilogy, Fifty Degrees Below, came out about a year ago, and Sixty Days and Counting is due out in a half year (Spring 2007).

Fifty Degrees Below continues Frank's assignment at NSF, working with Director Diane Chang. Frequently, the book goes on as a pure continuation of its forerunner, so much so that one can get a little lost if reading it without having read the other. A trilogy author has to balance the needs of readers who first encounter a sequel against those familiar with earlier work. I know too much explaining the "obvious" can get annoying to one's more faithful readers, but annoying new readers is also risky.

There are two stories here. The private story of Frank's love life is woven into a realistic portrayal of a major expected effect of polar warming: shutdown of the Gulf Stream. This portrait is well-researched and well-presented. It ought to be required reading by all policy makers, particularly those (sadly, mostly 'conservatives' who are bent on anything but conservation) who deny human-caused (or at least human-emphasized) warming.

Frank comes across as a neo-cave man. As the novel opens, he must move out of a borrowed apartment, and recent severe flooding in the DC area has driven housing costs very high. He winds up living in a "distributed" home: his office, the back of his van, a tree shelter, and a health club. A flood-damaged park near the National Zoo is his backyard. He hangs with homeless guys and begins running with a small band of compulsive Ultimate Frisbee players. They are portrayed like a neolithic hunting party in their camaraderie...rather apropos, I'd say.

The book ends with a massive effort to re-start the Gulf Stream with a half million tons of salt, and with Frank's love interest in hiding from her "blacker than black" spook of an ex-husband.

A subtext is electronic surveillance via "chips", poppy-seed-size microwave transponders, the offspring of the RFID chips retailers want to put in clothing (eventually all goods). A little physics knowledge is the spoiler here: The most efficient wavelength a single-wire antenna can transmit is four times its length. A millimeter-size chip, unless it's attached to a longer wire, works best at a 4-mm wavelength, or a frequency of 75 Ghz. Even at this resonant frequency, the received (and thus echoed) signal strength is proportional to the square of the antenna length, so you just can't get much of a signal into or out of such a little chip, even at its best frequency.

Passive RFID (no battery) works by bathing the chip in pulses of strong microwaves at its resonant frequency; the chip is briefly powered by each pulse to respond with a serial number modulating that frequency. So, some of the energy runs the little processor that encodes the number, and most of the rest can get re-emitted.

I'm a radio ham, and have fooled around with microwaves. RFID works pretty well at frequencies in the 1-3 Ghz range. Such devices require a 1- to 3-inch (25 to 75 mm) antenna. You only lose about half the energy if you coil the antenna up, as long as it is still the size of a dime, more or less. However, remember that the energy capture, and thus that available for re-radiation, drops as the square of the length of the antenna.

Inch-size chips work at ranges of a few inches, less than a foot even with a 3-inch straight antenna, unless you whack them with a large microwave pulse, large enough for someone to feel. Then their "echo" can be detected a few meters away. You need an expensive sniffer that can send a big pulse, then turn on a very sensitive receiver in a nanosecond or less to receive the return signal. Go from 75mm to 3mm in wavelength, and the signal drops by a factor of 625. You can receive it from a few meters away only if you have a meter-size dish pointed exactly at the little chip!

The rice-grain-size passive chips people now put in their dogs work at a range of about six inches. You have to sweep the reader over the dog's back at least that close. You're not going to drive down the street and pick up an echo from your dog's chip. Although I expect technology to improve a lot, I suspect chips cannot get any smaller than a sesame seed, and still be detected by a doorway-mounted device as you step through.

The use of tiny chips does lend a frisson of drama to the narrative. I just wish the author had thought, you don't need to destroy chips or even shed them to avoid detection. If you know a chip is in your sweater, just wrap your sweater in foil and drop it into a carry bag. The dark gray bags made of conductive plastic, that many electronic components come in, are ideal "chip shields." If someone should implant a chip in your arm, you can hide by wearing any long-sleeved shirt with a lot of metallic threads woven in. These aren't popular now, but I expect them to resurge...

There is a lovely scene in the book, a regatta at the North Pole. The sun is depicted as standing still in the sky on midsummer's day. Actually, it'll circle the sky at an elevation of 23 degrees. I wonder how many readers will catch that one.

However, pardon my quibbles; the book is a great read, and on a subject with which I have much sympathy. I'm awaiting Sixty Days and Counting.