A mixed bag of an SF anthology

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, collections, short stories, anthologies

The volume is The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, edited by Hugh Howey. 20 stories. I skipped 8, 4 were at best so-so, leaving 8 that I enjoyed reading. Two of these I gave a ++ in my personal rating scheme, and I'll dwell on them briefly. But I must say, with only this volume to go on, I weep for the state of science fiction and speculative fiction in the US right now. Fortunately, there are other collections, and I'll review another in coming days. Note: this image doesn't pertain to any of the stories. It is a side product of another project, and it has a science-fiction-fantastic feel that I like.

Now, the two stories that had some good ideas:

"The Long Game" by Ann Leckie. Told from the point of view of semi-terrestrial creatures similar to octopuses, on a planet coveted by humans for its resources. These creatures live 2-3 years and die after reproducing, as earthly octopuses do, but they are intelligent, sapient, and a human liaison is caring for their case while fending off mining interests. That latter point is only lightly touched upon, because the crux of the story is the developing awareness of Narr, a natural-born leader among his people. Narr's people are hermaphroditic; all bear eggs and all emit milt. This makes it hard to assign an appropriate pronoun; the author uses "they". Narr is one of the first to develop an awareness of the value of projects that reach beyond one person's lifetime. This reflects the "slow revolution" of human cultural development, which has its most visible expression in the building of complex cities, as distinct from villages with minimal infrastructure. Narr's people build a pond, a significant step in their own cultural development. Narr also takes steps to find out how life can be extended.

"Form 8774-D" by Alex Irvine. In an era of superheroes and those with the whole gamut of "powers" popping up everywhere, an agency has been established to register them, and various "hero leagues" recruit some of them. The story is a few days in the life of a functionary whose only responsibility is to check application forms, which are quite detailed (and in themselves form a significant part of the story). It slowly dawns on her that she just might need her own superhero bodyguard. Saying more would be telling…

Both these stories were great fun, and the other six that I liked were enjoyable, if not quite so ideational.

A collection of very mixed value

kw: book reviews, science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, anthologies, collections

Long gone are the days I could pick up a book of short Sci-Fi stories, or an issue of Analog or The Magazine of F&SF, and read from cover to cover with few or no pangs of conscience. I don't mind the discomfort of learning, nor that of attaining a new viewpoint, as long as I gain something of value. But I don't like taking in something that drags me down and is hard to be rid of.

In SF genres, I prefer short stories to novels. Starting in about 1980, during a period in which I read very little SF, Tor began publishing in the genre and became a leader in the field. But now that sword-and-sorcery fantasies have come to dominate the genre, even being placed in space settings and alien planets, I read a lot less than I did before. Tor seemed to have a pretty good lineup of the "sword free" stories I prefer. Unbeknownst to me until this past week, Tor has an online imprint, Tor.com, that publishes shorter pieces, up to novella in length.

Tor.com is almost eleven years old, and to mark their first decade in business they gathered 40 stories into a hardcover book, Worlds Seen in Passing: 10 Years of Tor.com Short Fiction. I began to read with great anticipation, and when the first two stories ("Six Months, Three Days" by Charles Jane Anders and "Damage" by David D. Leving) earned my personal "Glad I Read That" distinction, my anticipation increased. Then, "Thud, Bam!", I read the next two ("The Best We Can" by Carrie Vaughn and "The City, Born Great" by N.K. Jemisin). The first was so-so at best, and the second made me cringe, not in any good way; it earned "Sorry I Read Any of That" distinction by 1/3 the way through, and I didn't complete it. A few stories later I came across my first "Didn't Read Any" ("Elephants and Corpses" by Kameron Hurley). The editors of Worlds Seen were kind enough to put a brief summary ahead of each story, which helped me select the ones to not even try. Scores for the 40 stories:

1. "Glad": 10
2. "So-So": 10
3. "Sorry", didn't read much of it: 7
4. "D.R.", didn't read any of it, or no more than a paragraph or two: 13

For someone who loves good SF, that is a sad commentary. Why do I dislike certain stories? First and most important, they offer to take me somewhere I don't want to go, and put something in me I wish I hadn't imbibed. I try to catch these as early as possible, and the summaries helped. Secondly, in others the main character(s) go nowhere, learn nothing, and leave a reader feeling at best like the time to read was just wasted. I look at such stories as fodder for the feckless Millennials of the stereotype (and I thank God that, among the Millennials I know, few are truly so directionless and void of aspiration). Thirdly, some stories are just plain evil.

Well, then, what do I like in SF? Firstly, the characters either dwell in a world I'd like to inhabit, or are effectively working toward constructing one. Secondly, the characters (and by extension, the authors) are capable of constructive thought and able to learn, unthreatened by the abilities of others. Coda: In a longer story, characters may not begin that way, but grow into it. That also makes me happy. Thirdly, if malice or evil makes an appearance, it is thwarted; neither is it over-dwelt upon.

I suspect the Tor.com editors thought all these stories were just peachy. Each story had its own editor, but I didn't count how many editors participated in the volume. It's a sure bet that no more than a fourth of them are people I'd be willing to count as friends.

Steampunk and Gaslight in the 21st Century

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, mysteries, cryogenics

From a distance, one simply sees a misshapen, though symmetric, skull. Once the book is in hand, the details resolve into a pair of men in tall hats flanking a pair of trees, a row of fenced tombstones, and a small, solitary female figure in the background. This cover art, coupled with the placement of Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan in the "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" shelving, promised a thorough mix of genres, and indeed, it proved a delightful mix.

Another detail in the cover art is more subtle. Upon a lengthy look, the scene is found to be snowy, with mountain shadows behind. The author's writing is similarly subtle. It took a good while for me to realize that the ice itself was the core around which the mystery resolved. Yet if I reveal more than that, it will be an "unseemly spoiler".

The milieu is of more immediate interest. The book is set in an early 21st Century England with a distinctly 19th Century flavor. Armistice in 1819 after a civil war has split the country along a line through the Midlands that divides Leicester into North and South halves. To the south is Kingdom, centered on London, and to the north is a Republic, centered on Carlisle. The former British Empire is now popularly called the Gas-Lit Empire. Most nations of the world have invested great power in the International Patent Office.

Unlike the familiar patent authorities of modern nations, which exist to facilitate technology, the Patent Office enforces the Great Accord, which primarily limits technology to innovations that can be shown to "protect and insure the wellbeing of the common man." One area considered practically exempt from their oversight is medical innovation, based on the risky notion that any medical advance must be beneficial. I'd guess they forgot Dr. Mengele.

The protagonist is Elizabeth Barnabus, a fugitive from the Kingdom living in the Republic. Her backstory is told in a former book by Duncan, The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter. Upon becoming pubescent and lovely, she'd been "acquired" by a certain nobleman as a plaything (mistress), but escaped and ran northward. She lives by her wits, a kind of female Sherlock Holmes, aided by her skills in disguise. Being tall and less shapely than one might expect, she is adept at taking on a male persona and doing business as her brother when a man's work is needed. Her "brother" has been asked to look into apparent theft of ice, which is produced in large amounts in the Welsh mountains by poor families of ice farmers, and transported southward where it is kept frozen by large, inefficient cooling machinery.

Chapters in this book are headed by quotes from two as-yet unwritten books, The Bullet-Catcher's Handbook and From Revolution. The latter is stated in a glossary as a mix of writings reaching back to the Federalist Papers. I am intrigued by the titling of carnival illusionists as bullet-catchers. Having seen on a Mythbusters episode that catching a bullet with one's teeth is quite impossible, no matter how much powder you remove from the shell, I understand that the carnival illusion is one of the most skillful.

Male writers cannot totally pull off writing in a female voice. Mr. Duncan does as well as any I've read, but the very familial sense I had reading it indicated that the character of Ms Barnabus is more male-like than a female writer would have made her. I suppose the author might protest that her frequent forays into a male world, disguised as a man, make her rather mannish in general. Perhaps. She is, nonetheless, a very engaging doubly-secret detective; doubly so in that she must do her work in secret, females being forbidden from doing business in the Republic.

Dramatic tension is amplified when the Republican government takes up a bill that would enact an extradition treaty with the Kingdom. Though the Republic has tolerated numerous fugitives from the Kingdom, "proper folk" (meaning mainly those with "jobs" few of us would call "gainful employment") look askance at such immigrants, and they intend to legislate them out of existence. Most will be forcibly returned to the Kingdom, finding themselves on a rapid course to the tight end of a noose. The author has done a delightful job of rendering the above ingredients into a gripping tale of multiple betrayals and surprising heroics.

I'm in the process of scaring up a copy of the earlier book. This one ends with sufficient closure that, while one knows the author plans another volume (or more), the book is a unit unto itself. One thing is clear. If she can, Ms Barnabus means to bring about the downfall of the Patent Office. My wager'd be on that being the subject of a successor volume.

One future diverting another

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, near-future, dystopias

Concerning time travel, one would have the same question that Enrico Fermi did about Martians or other aliens visiting Earth: "Where is everybody?" In The Peripheral, William Gibson finesses this in a milieu where contact across time is possible but difficult, and thus limited and easier to conceal. Here we find also a future, late 22^nd Century so far as I can determine, with a much lower population, and a very, very small number who can afford to pursue cross-time contact as a hobby. Also, conveniently, early in the novel we read that the earliest date that can be contacted is some time in the 2020s. The mechanism is a new kind of virtual reality system, with a server "somewhere in China". More than this is left a mystery.

What is a "peripheral"? Computer-savvy folks think of printers, external hard drives, game controllers,…all the things you might attach to a computer (or tablet or phone, these days) except the external monitor. Somehow screens aren't thought of as peripherals. In the novel, "peripheral" is reserved for robots and (Gibson doesn't use the word) androids that someone can inhabit virtually, via a special brain-contact headset that wraps around at forehead level.

I have minimal interest in the plot. Suffice it to say that the protagonists are one Flynne Fisher, a young woman in about the year 2110, and Wilf Netherton, a middle-aged man living some 75± years later. In Flynne's era, there is something like an advanced Skype machine on wheels, like a Segway with a screen and cameras on a stalk at head level. Devices like this are currently called telepresence robots, and enable someone a certain limitedly mobile presence at a distance. Presumably they'll be a lot better by 2110 or so. After a further seven decades, the technology of choice is a genetically human animaloid with neither brain nor alimentary canal (they are fed intravenously). In place of a brain, there is an AI that can manage the body when not in use, and interface electronics for its use. For tasks needing great strength or small size, various "homunculi" are used similarly.

Thus, Flynne gets to visit the future by inhabiting a peripheral that is a fully-functional young woman who looks similar to her, but cannot eat (and doesn't eliminate either). Wilf gets to visit the past in a telepresence robot. As it happens, Flynne is very fortunate that her brother is a former Special Forces (or something similar) soldier, with lots and lots of friends who are very, very good with weapons; Wilf is well-connected with an English-born Russian gajillionaire and his "klept". Think of a klept as a crime family with ambitions to grow into a kleptocratic government.

The plot hinges on a murder that Flynne witnessed while monitoring what she thought was a video game. As the only witness, she is targeted by future assassins who can only work by offering millions to folks in her time who will kill her. The future folk who contact her include a mysterious police inspector of great age, and members of the klept, who finance the search for the original killer. Of course, the killer will be fingered and dealt with, along with certain other evil folk. Other than that, there is remarkably little killing.

William Gibson is a master of high-tech future dystopian world-building. With The Peripheral he has crafted two dystopias, with the worse one attempting to avert their own fate for the other. I ought to mention another time-contact concept: first contact between someone in, say, 2085 with someone in 2010 splits off a "stub", which is now affected by that contact and develops differently without changing the future that is doing the contacting. Believe me, this is less of a mental conundrum than we usually find in "time travel" literature! (Most of it seems to be written just to set up, then solve, such conundrums.) Thus, it is possible for Wilf and his group to help Flynne and her group avoid "the jackpot" that led to the world he inhabits.

This "jackpot" is one of the intriguing ideas in the book. It is described not as a single catastrophic event, but a decades-long tangle of co-synergistic "slow disasters" (only global warming is presented as an example) that end up reducing human population to around 10% of what it was before. This is sufficiently plausible to be chilling.

The univere-splitting function of cross-time contact is another. At one point someone muses whether the contact initiates a split, or if quantum universe splits occur frequently and the cross-time function can only occur between worlds on different world-lines. This is in accord with the popular "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory. The most extreme version has every quantum "choice", everywhere, triggering a split into two or more universes, depending on how many possible outcomes the quantum event could have. If Richard Feynman's "virtual particle sea" interpretation of quantum electrodynamics is true, and quantum universe-splitting is also true, then new universes are created at the rate of about 10²⁴ per second per cubic femtometer of space. That is universe creation at a rate, per second, that is a number with roughly 500 digits. And people think this is more reasonable than my belief in God!!! "Stub" creation by intentional action is tons more reasonable than any "many worlds" theory I've read about. And Gibson nicely pushes off any such splitting into the future by a century or so. I found myself wondering whether the plot would twist into next-level contact, when someone from, say the middle 2200s contacts either Wilf or Flynne. Maybe it is something Gibson will take up later, except he is probably busy building another world instead just now.

I've already discussed the technology of "peripherals" a little. It is very reminiscent of the Avatar technology of the film Avatar. I kept wondering if this novel would end similarly, with Flynne's peripheral being replaced by one that can eat, and her getting stuck in it in the future, say because her body dies in her own time. Gibson had another idea, and a better one.

In the Flynne time frame, the technology of the day is "fabbing" using 3D printers of roughly a century in our future. In the Wilf time frame they use "assemblers", nanotechnology devices by the quadrillions. In one scene, a blocking wall just seems to appear. I had to step back and think about that. Where did the material come from? What about the energy? Even if this kind of "assembling" is not breaking and making chemical bonds, the particles being assembled will still be subject to van der Waals forces. vdW forces are what make glue work, and they facilitate the zipping and unzipping of DNA. But even assembly relying only on vdW forces requires energy. So much energy that, while the wall might be able to "arrive" in a second of time, its temperature would be a few thousand degrees. A different application of assembling, that brings a weapon into Flynne's hand through solid rock, would use at least as much energy as melting the rock. Her hand would be burnt off to the shoulder. This point in particular is why I added the tag "science fantasy" to the metadata.

No matter how hard or soft the science is in a science fiction novel, its enjoyment requires the suspension of disbelief. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. Then, I enjoyed speculating on the ideas presented here just as much. I am not pointing out errors, but confronting the concepts with physics as we know it today. Many of our devices would seem magical to people of Ben Franklin's time. We know some physics that was not known then. The physics of 200 years to come could advance a similar amount. Maybe there's a way to shift a vdW bond, or even a covalent bond, using much less energy than the break-plus-make procedure we must use today. I love Gibson's writing. His dystopias are more hopeful than most.

Scattering planets like billiards

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, space fantasy, space aliens, interstellar politics

The book is billed as "The explosive finale to the 'Ringworld' and the 'Fleet of Worlds' series": Fate of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. This is the latest, and allegedly the last, of twelve books in these two intertwined "Known Worlds" series, half of them published by Tor Books.

Exploding planets and vanishing stellar systems are "explosive" enough. So far Niven has not introduced an exploding galaxy. Such events take far too long for a human-scale story, anyway. Even when "human scale" has been expanded in the "Known Worlds" books to a few hundred years beyond the traditional three score and ten. Niven didn't invent "boosterspice" but he makes great use of it.

The whole series encompasses events between 630 and 880 years in the future, more or less depending on relativistic effects, such as for the fleeing Fleet of Worlds, six planets driven toward galactic north at 0.8c, for which Tw = 0.6To (calendar coordination is hard enough when your year is as long as mine!).

Where a typical novel has 3-5 important characters, this one has 25 or more (depending on how many downloads of Jeeves you count), 21 of them "natural" individuals, the rest being AI's. The core characters are Nessus, of a vaguely equine alien species called Puppeteers, and the humans Louis Wu and Sigmund Ausfaller.

The Ringworld is Niven's most famous idea, a detailed construct probably inspired by the notion of a Dyson Sphere. Ringworld circles its primary star at a distance of about 100 million miles, or 160 million km, filling the orbit. Its length is thus more than 600 million miles or 1000 million km; its width is a million miles or 1.6 mkm. Its mass is similar to that of Jupiter, or more than 800 times Earth's mass. In one of the novels it is shown that such a ring's orbit is unstable, so it has engines along its rim (with its multi-mile-high walls to hold an atmosphere) that periodically correct the orbit. It is home to tens of trillions of "sentients" who belong to an unknown number of nonhuman species, most of whom know nothing of any of the others. There is a lot of room in 1.6 quadrillion square km, even when a substantial percent is shallow oceans: Earth's area is 510 million sq km, counting oceans. Inward from the ring is a smaller, segmented one, that revolves on a different schedule, producing days and nights on the Ring. This one is also driven as needed.

Among a ton of interesting ideas, one that seems unique to Niven is the Protector: A post-sexual development of a sentient species, when fed an appropriate diet, a protector is hyper-intelligent and pathologically paranoid. A protector's mission is preservation of the species from all imaginable dangers, and they have incredible imaginations. As gadgeteers, they are super-Tom Swifts, super-Edisons.

Another is the Gw'oth, starfishlike aliens that can link nervous systems via sockets in the ends of their five "arms" (tubercles in the story), to meld into group minds. A 16-fold meld in a hypercubical configuration is formidable indeed. One such group mind is found to be the power behind the "power behind the throne" of the Puppeteer planets.

The book weaves together numerous strands left hanging by all those that came before, returning not only Wu, Ausfaller and Nessus, but a number of other protagonists to a place of stability, if not honor. Considering that they all have used variously dishonorable means to accomplish their prior feats, that is no mean bit of writing! The drama begins when Ringworld vanishes, leaving a hyperspace- and gravitational ripple which rocks detectors for a considerable distance. It ends when a few planets also either explode or take flight; it seems someone has cracked a conundrum of hyperphysics relating to the behavior of a "spacecraft" deep in a gravitational well. There is a little fodder here for Niven and Lerner to continue the series should they so desire. I wouldn't mind.

The hock shop from everywhen

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, time travel

Sometimes I read a story thinking the author bit off too much to chew. This time, I felt that I'd bitten off too much. Psycho Shop by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny doesn't quite have the totally breathless pace of old pulp SF, but manages to cover a great deal of ground anyway.

What starts out as a bit of investigative reporting for our hero, Alf, turns into as weird a riff on all possible archetypes as I've seen. Nobody is what or who they seem to be. A most unlikely personage even turns out to be God, or at least the Demiurge.

The idea of note here is that the master of a far-future technology can trade bits of his client's personality in and out, rather more simply than changing a spark plug in a lawnmower engine. And when you're done, you may have started out a lawnmower, but now you can also trim hedges (Oh, what a metaphor!). Most of the creative tension of the novel involves exploring just how far such shenanigans can be taken…including in a very Frankensteinian direction.

Other curious ideas abound. Lots of writers have tackled interspecies romance; these authors attempt to raise it so sacramental levels (can't be done). Many have characters whose repressed memories drive the plot; here it seems to be the plot. But the word "character" is almost violated by the actors in this drama. Almost entirely affectless, they inhabit a story whose narrative tension is carried by dialogue, with hardly a hint of feeling. You know what they are doing, but not what they are thinking. It reminds me of the Foundation novels of Asimov: nearly all dialog, but his robots were more human than the "human" characters. There are no robots here, just cat-people, snake-people (scions of a far-future technology) and at least one people-people.

For a novel about a time-traveler, there is less time travel than any other I know. Nearly all fo it comes at the end. Riding into the sunset is a little hard when the "sun" is setting on the existence of the Universe. So the star-uncrossed lovers manage to sidestep that eventuality.

When I return to mundanity from a time-based fantasy, I always have the same question, that mirror's Fermi's question about aliens: "If time travel is possible, where is everybody?" Don't say it must be too espensive. Everything is too expensive at first, but the price always drops.

Cash upon demand

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy

In recent years, Terry Pratchett has focused his Discworld novels on the careers of an individual or two at a time in his hyper-legendary city of Anhk-Morpork. The city's coat of arms has hippopotami rampant, its symbols are the Ankh (the loopy Egyptian cross) and the Morpork (an odd owl), and its central character is the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, as clever a rogue as ever managed a metropolis. Two prior posts of mine (
here, in an omnibus review of four books, and here) cover Pratchett offerings that focus on Commander Vimes of the Guard. I seem to have missed an earlier book that introduces Moist von Lipwig, but in Making Money we get a view of his career once he has straightened out the Ankh-Morpork Post Office.

Moist, under another name, had been hanged ... almost. Lord Vetinari had him "hanged" into a catch-basket, after which he offered him more honest employment, on terms he could hardly refuse, as they involved continuing to breathe. As Making Money opens, Moist has succeeded wildly, but is bored, and is found climbing buildings by night, to keep sharp. Vetinari has anticipated this, and contrives to lure him into the post of chairman of the city's largest bank and its mint, but with a twist: the bank is owned by a pug dog, and Moist must keep himself, and the dog, alive, long enough to resurrect the city's flaccid banking industry...in the face of a banking family that compares well (evilly?) with the Borgias.

Pratchett writes in a lovely parody of classical rhythms, and his plots loop one around until you think you're seeing the back of your head. He uses trolls (siliconic variety), golems, vampires, zombies, and other "species" as stand-ins for the ethnicities we aren't supposed to poke fun of in print. The author's fun-poking, however, far from perpetuating stereotypes, exposes and detoxifies them.

Here, however, I wish to comment more on form than on substance. In most fiction, the visual artistry of a book, between the covers and endpapers, is confined to a "readable and balanced" typeface and perhaps dingbats to indicate longer time periods between certain sections. Where drop capitals are used, they are usually enlarged, bolded letters from the text font. In his books, Pratchett takes advantages of several tropes of 19th Century typography: each chapter's opening page contains not just a title and a paragraph or two, but also a clever graphic such as the A-M coat of arms and a humorously cryptic summary of the chapter's contents (the hand guides the unwary reader). Sections begin with a drop-letter, as used in many publications, a nod to the much earlier practice of initial-letter illumination. In this case, they are of an elegant incised hollow font also used in the chapter headings. Click on the image to see more detail.

These elements adorn a writing style that indicates a writer who is enjoying himself hugely, and intends to pass on as much enjoyment as possible to the reader. Here is a sample:

When he was a child, Moist had prayed every night before going to bed. His family were [sic] very active in the Plain Potato Church, which shunned the excesses of the Ancient and Orthodox Potato Church. Its followers were retiring, industrious, and inventive, and their strict adherence to oil lamps and homemade furniture made them stand out in the region where most people used candles and sat on sheep.

Pratchett is also the apparent coiner of a lovely phrase, "War is a wicked waste of customers." This is my new favorite.

He does indeed ensure the reader's enjoyment.

A fractal-edged discworld

kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, world-building, alien empires

The hyper-nobility and hyper-venality of Heinleinesque characters; a quest worthy of Galahad; a universe where you can travel by "train" and "boat" farther than starships travel in ours; a collection of ETI's beyond the imagination of Lucas (or his screenwriter)...

Or perhaps it's Terry Pratchett's Discworld, writ large...very large, crossed with a Star Wars or Lensman milieu. Whatever you call it, the author is Kay Kenyon with Bright of the Sky: Book One of The Entire and the Rose.

A jacket blurb calls the book "high concept." That used to be derogatory. In a way, I suppose you can state the premise in a sound bite: Another universe exists, intersecting ours at various 4-D points; one man went there, seemingly by accident, and returned with few memories; he left behind a wife and daughter, and now has the chance to return for them.

If you're going to do high concept right, charactization is everything. The plot can be simple, as this one is: a straightforward quest, with few divergences, so it expresses the very, very linear nature of the Titus Quinn. Yet he has his complexities, as do his supporting cast: Anzi, a Chalin (ersatz Chinese) woman and warrior; Cho, an alien clerk with a soft spot for Quinn; even the cruel, paranoid Yulin, Anzi's uncle, who vacillates between deciding to drown Quinn or to help him. His daughter Sydney, the blinded rider of an Inyx, a sort of telepathic tricera-horse, is equally strong in vignettes that show her rise to co-lead in the realm of the Inyx.

However, Quinn eventually returns to his home universe, to Earth, without finding either wife or daughter. A host of threads are left untraced, leaving plenty of room for for sequelae (a quadrilogy is planned).

What is the Entire? A strange realm: a flat plain, universe-sized, but finite. It has to be; if I did my math right, no matter how thin the plain may be, if it were infinite, its gravity would be infinite, regardless how high you ascended "above" it.

It is also not really a disc. It appears to be analogous to the Mandelbrot Set, but with fivefold symmetry. The five "arms" may be millions (billions, quadrillions?) of miles long, but they have one edge that divides and subdivides, with cusps through which "our" universe can be glimpsed, and perhaps visited. The opposite edge, if I read aright, is bounded by a "river" that can get you to the center in very little time.

And the sky overhead: As the title implies, it never darkens, though it dims to support a daily rest cycle. The Entire has no planets, so it has no stars. The sky is a seething river of light and heat called the Bright.

But the creatures! Mantislike "Tarig" rulers, creators of the Entire, and perhaps of the Rose, as our universe is called. Their purposes are almost unfathomable, as is their technology: sky ships that alone can approach the Bright, and are found to be enslaved creatures from the Heart, the universe of the Tarigs before they created Entire.

The humans of Entire are long-lived "simulacra" of Earth humans. The many other sentient creatures, having many, or six, or four, or two, or no legs, hint at planets other than Earth that supplied models. As the subject species live in the presence of their creators, one would think they have no other gods. But they do, a "Miserable God" that is universally feared and hated. The main blessing one bestows is, "May God not see you."

In such a realm then, Titus Quinn must pursue his quest as his memories return.

Stripping the planetary gears

kw: musings, science fantasy

In a post in August (Geared-up Universe) I reviewed Jay Lake's novel Mainspring. Much action revolves around (giggle) the gear teeth at Earth's equator, and their meshing with a huge ring gear that forms Earth's orbit.

I couldn't resist doing the math. Earth's orbital velocity is more than 100,000 km/hr or nearly 2.6 million km/day, yet her equatorial circumference is 40,000 km (The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000^th the distance from the pole to the equator at the longitude of Paris).

The disparity is a factor of more than 64:1. Thus in Jay Lake's universe, either the year has 23,500 very short days (22.4 minutes long, each), or the sun must be very dim, so Earth can reside a mere 2.3 million km away, rather than 150 million.

Now, consider dear Luna, which has a much longer day, and a much smaller orbit. Are they perhaps a better match?

The Moon's circumference is about 10,900 km. Her orbital circumference is 2.4 million km. Simple division yields just over 220; that is the number of days a ring gear would enforce. However, Luna revolves but once in traveling that distance. No ring gear is needed, just a simple arm to fix her distance, and keep her face pointed toward Earth. The day length disparity caused by the ring gear so visible in one scene of Mainspring causes a discrepancy of 220:1, then, greater than for Earth.

Well, that is what fantasy is about, making us, for a short time, believe the impossible. Readers of good fiction know what the Red Queen knew when she told Alice she was in the habit of believing seven impossible things before breakfast.