Ben's swan song

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, pluto, grand tour

These days when I read science fiction it is almost always a short story collection or anthology. One author whose work I have read on and off since about 1970 is Ben Bova. His "home base" genre is semi-hard science fiction: realistic fiction without fantastic elements, but certain future developments are of necessity only sketchily described, if at all. Recently I encountered the last of his Grand Tour series of novels and decided to read it: Pluto., AKA The Outer Planets volume 3. Bova died before the novel was finished; his literary heirs chose his friend Les Johnson to finish it. The result is a page-turner worthy of the name.

The time frame is a bit vague; the action takes place about 150-200 years in our future. I presume that earlier novels in the series flesh out the fusion drive that lets spaceships bomb around the solar system as though it were the Atlantic Ocean in the age of steam; a Sino-Russian-American war that resolved itself into the "frenemy" status of these three powers in the recent past (of the novel); the Space Forces of these three powers; and the establishment of outposts and mini-colonies on the moons of Neptune, Uranus and other planets.

A central figure is a professor who has been fused with an AI to save his life, or at least his personality, after a horrific accident. Naturally (as things go in the SciFi realm) he has become a megalomaniac, with some justification for his hubris since he now experiences things a dozen times faster than "ordinary folk". He has found some kind of artifact on Pluto, detected by a faint neutrino signal that seems to be caused by very slow matter-antimatter annihilation (I must note at this point that really, really new physics will be required to be able to engineer a neutrino detector/spectrometer smaller than an auditorium. Neutrinos are called "ghost particles" for excellent reasons). The professor had "gone rogue" on the surface of Pluto in order to track down the artifact, and the research ship Tombaugh had asked for help to rescue/recover him; the Space Force ship that did so is the Aurora.

Once the professor and the artifact have been retrieved and are aboard the Tombaugh, the two ships travel to Charon, the largest satellite of Pluto, to quickly investigate a gravitational anomaly there, before continuing either to Earth or to an outpost on (near?) Uranus to further study the artifact. That's where the story really begins. Where the artifact found on Pluto is about the size of a yard-long piece of drainpipe, what the scientists find on Charon turns out to be some kind of under-the-ice city, also dormant. Dormant, that is, until they try to drill into it. It awakens and the fun begins. The "Charon anomaly" begins sending out minirobots that are apparently reproducing even as they begin to transform Charon in some enigmatic way. Attempts to capture a minirobot by the Americans aboard the Aurora, then by later-arriving Russians and Chinese, are fruitless and fatal. Whatever the big anomaly is, it can disintegrate stuff!

At some point, the artifact from Pluto "awakens" and begins sending out not minirobots but nanobots. The scientists and most of the crew of Tombaugh are evacuated when it become clear that the nanobots have gotten into the ship's computers and begun to drive it toward Charon. It never becomes clear whether the Pluto artifact and the Charon "city" represent the same technology, or even the same alien species.

I've already told too much. I wanted to point out that the ending might have been different had Bova written it. His collaborator points out in an Afterword that Bova was a "seat of the pants" write who didn't pre-plan his work. I can't presume to read his mind, particularly since he passed away six years ago, but I expect he would have made it more clear that the artifact was originally hunting the city and had been sent to destroy it, in an interstellar war that had played out millions of years ago. Or maybe the story would have written itself out in another way. Who knows; the book is great fiction in any case.

SF (mostly) the way I like it

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, short stories, anthologies

A few days ago I reviewed (here) a volume of science fiction and fantasy short stories. I didn't care for most of them, and rejected even reading nearly half of them, based on the opening sentence or two. And this for one of those "Best of" volumes! Fortunately, I had a volume of more satisfying stories to follow: New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, with fourteen stories and only one that I skipped. This image, produced via Dall-E3, doesn't match the theme of any of the stories; I just happen to like it.

A word about where fantasy fits in. Whether it is about space or not, fantasy tales tend to eschew the rules of physics, any physics. In a fantastical story, physics only works when the author wants it to, so the characters are usually subject to gravity, for example, but a select few—or sometimes all of them—can zip about, seemingly gravity-free, as needed. In science fiction, including space fiction and space opera, the primary physical law to be broken, in a myriad of ways, is the speed of light. There is typically some explanation for how this speed limit is broken or sidestepped, so that the world of the story has consistent physics. In fantasy, physics need not be consistent.

Space Opera, in particular, relies on some kind of FTL (faster-than-light) mechanism, because the stage of a typical story spans at least a few dozen light-years. The last story in this volume, "The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir" by Karin Tidbeck, is one of my favorites, and relies on a kind of enormous spacefaring crab that ducks below spacetime—one of many versions of "subspace" or "hyperspace"—and then emerges to land on this or that planet, using some slower means of propulsion. This space crab is analogous to a hermit crab, except that the host "shell" that needs to be replaced from time to time is typically a large apartment building. This is a unique idea, one of the best I've encountered in decades.

The first story, "Zen and the Art of Spaceship Maintenance" by Tobias S. Buckell, is my other main favorite. The protagonist is a robot, really a type of android, a human mind in a powerful mechanism. Such servitude is temporary (but can last centuries), and the android is constrained to human-favoring laws similar to Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" (look 'em up). Android as he is (my surmise as to gender), he manages to outwit an evil human. All it takes is a nearby black hole and some fine-tuned astrogation.

I had a bit of fun with the premise of "A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime" by Charlie Jane Anders. See, there's this really enormous space creature named Vastness, described as "half the size of a regular solar system". It is apparently telepathic, and holds millions (trillions?) in thrall to satisfy its rather gargantuan needs. I thought, "OK, could it really be half the size of a solar system? Can it avoid becoming a black hole?" A few simple calculations showed, not really:

• The radius of Neptune's orbit, one possible measure of the size of our solar system (and the smallest possible such measure) is about 30 AU, or 4.5 billion km. Got a better choice for a "regular" solar system? Anyway, the term ought to be "stellar system".
• For simplicity, let's go just below half of that, and posit that the radius of Vastness is 2 billion km.
• The volume of Vastness is then 33.5 billion billion billion cubic km, or 3.35E28 km cubed. (The E stands for "ten-to-the")
• In cubic meters, that comes to another factor of a billion, or 3.35E37 cubic m.
• Flesh is just a little denser than water, so we'll use water for a stand-in. A cubic meter of water weighs 1,000 kg.
• The mass of Vastness is thus 3.35E40 kg.
• The Sun's mass is just under 2E30 kg. Vastness weighs almost 17 billion times as much as the Sun.
• At this website we find that the Schwarzschild Radius (event horizon radius) of a 17-billion-solar-mass black hole is just over 50 billion km. That's about 25 times the radius of Vastness and about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

QED Vastness is a black hole with a Schwarzschild Radius about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

Furthermore, here, near the end of the page, we see that a black hole of 4.3 billion solar masses would have a density of 1 g/cc, or 1,000 kg/cubic meter. The mean density of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, so heavier black holes are less dense. Vastness is too heavy to be "only" half the size of a "regular" solar system.

Onward! Another interesting idea is found in "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. Posit a whole-body Oculus Rift or similar system, that also projects an avatar of your choice around you to at least partly mask your appearance. Will such a system mediate your experience of the world to the point that you cannot function without it? Consider how many of your friends would find themselves utterly inept at everything without their phone. Or how about you? Could you function for a whole day without it?

Space opera is my favorite SF genre, because it removes enough limits on the author's imagination, while still requiring a modicum of realism, that the ideas can range farther and probe deeper than in any other genre.

A third MEGAPACK

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera, space aliens

My original purchase from the MEGAPACK® series included three e-books. I already finished and reviewed two of them. This is the third. Like other early volumes in the series, it is titled The 13th Science Fiction Megapack. Later collections of classics have a theme or author as a focus. This volume contains 26 stories, eleven published in 1963, and the rest scattered from 1930 to 2010. All were new to me.

A goodly proportion of the stories experiment with taking the alien's eye view. Two of these, sitting back-to-back, are "The God-Plllnk" by Jerome Bixby and "A Guest of Ganymede" by C.C. MacApp, both published in 1963. In both stories, the invaders from Earth are either consumed or subsumed. Sobering.

Others take a recent discovery or trend then present and extend it. One of these, "Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin Station", by Mary A. Turzillo, published in 2009, riffs on the effects of infection by Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that afflicts cats and eventually nearly everyone who owns a cat. With just a little studied exaggeration, and imputing to Toxoplasma characteristics of a few other parasites, including the one that turns rats from cat-fearing to cat-seeking, we find an entertaining tale of psychology and motivation. The cats and their "guests" take over Mars.

From time to time writers tackle the possible interactions between archaic humans and Neanderthals, some 30,000 years ago or more. "The Day is Done" by Lester del Rey, published in 1939 is one of the earliest and best. (My second-favorite, "The Ugly Little Boy" by Isaac Asimov, is from 1958). del Rey's very moving story is set as the last of the Neanderthals are vanishing.

One of the stories of 1963, "The Girl in His Mind" by Robert F. Young, is based on a sort of dream "technology" that seems to foreshadow a dreamland called "the Commons" in stories by Matthew Hughes (see this review from 2006). In both 1963 and 2006, the writers take lucid dreaming a few quantum leaps beyond anything actual lucid dreamers (such as myself) experience. Lucid dreaming as we know it permits the dreamer to have some control over the story line and content of a dream. In my case, most frequently, I "stick a toe" into a dream that presents itself, and if I don't like where it may go, I open my eyes briefly and banish it. Once a dream starts up that I am more happy with, I let myself fall the rest of the way to sleep. Often, but not always, I know I am in a dream and I direct it more to my liking. Other times, I have "ordinary" dreams, that just happen with me as more of an observer than a participant. Any of this is a far cry from the long quests described by authors Young and Hughes.

I think I enjoy classic science fiction so much more than most "modern" writing because the authors aren't grinding an axe, at least not in the overt way that is nearly universal today, which is why I read so little modern science fiction. Writers of the world: present your views and your reasoning; do not attempt to impose them or shame your readers – I am shameless anyway, and I'll shame you right back!

Enjoying space rovers

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera

In addition to the books on paper that I usually read, I keep a few e-books in my phone's library (Google Play Books). That gives me something to read when I am not at home or when it is inconvenient to carry a book. I recently encountered the Megapack series, a collection of more than 300 compilations in numerous genres, including many classic science fiction collections. I took advantage of a promotion to get a few books for a dollar or two each.

The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack contains 23 stories by Silverberg, mostly from the 1950's plus a few from the 1980's, in 460 pages. Page 460 is a gigantic "page" (30 screens) of Megapack advertising.

I recognized a few of the stories, but most were new to me. This is mainly because most of them predated the time I began reading science fiction in 1967. Silverberg wrote more novels and fewer short stories after about 1960, and gave much time in the 1970's and onward to editing anthologies.

Reading these stories brought me back to why I love science fiction, particularly prior to the 1990's. Space Opera is my hometown. A spaceship, to Silverberg and his ilk, was a special kind of automobile, one that could cross a galaxy the way we might cross a continent in a multi-day road trip. Little attention was given to how a rocket might cross light-years and light-decades in a matter of hours or days. Sometimes one finds mention of "subspace" or "hyperspace", but usually there is nothing about that. These "space cars" run on some kind of super-gasoline. There is even mention of an "auxiliary fuel tank" in at least one story. It reminded me of the special lever in my 1962 VW Bug, that connected a one-gallon reserve tank, so I could go 20 miles or so to find a gas station when the main tank emptied.

The focus of these stories was not really technology of space flight, but the relationships between the humans in the stories and between them and sundry alien species. This is similar to the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, with numerous aliens of many types (but most of them are "humanoid", making it easier on the actors).

The dictum of John Campbell was, "Pose a problem, and then solve it." Silverberg's earliest stories included an opponent, either someone who was the problem, or one who wanted to prevent the solving of the stated problem. Later stories are more sophisticated, but the problem always gets solved. In a few cases, a protagonist may lose his life in so doing, but most stories have a "happy ending".

I will limn just one story: "Valley Beyond Time" (12/1957) puts a few humans and a few aliens, a total of nine persons, in a magical valley, where they are thrall to a "watcher". They grow younger while there. Without giving too much away, this pre-echoes the episodes of Star Trek that feature the omnipotent alien Q.

Space opera may be out of date, but I for one revel in the clever solutions its heroes produced. Science fiction is about exploration of ideas, more than any other genre. That keeps me going.

Star Wars - through other eyes

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, short stories

I must admit I like Star Trek more than Star Wars. As I recall, I saw only the first two episodes of Star Wars, now called Episodes 4 and 5. But that was enough for me to enjoy reading Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, a collection of 40 short stories celebrating 40 years since the first film was screened.

The stories each present the experience of a minor or side character in certain well known scenes, such as the Mos Eisley cantina or the attack on the Death Star…most of them. Some limn a scene between the scenes, such as "There is Another" by Gary D. Schmidt, in which Yoda learns he is to train one more Padawan, the one he is least willing to train. The more memorable scenes get stories from several points of view each.

The writing is excellent, though a bit hagiographic in places. I enjoyed every one of the 40 stories, a rare occurrence for me when I read a short story collection.

I think I enjoyed the stories more than I did the film, but had I not seen the film, I would have enjoyed the stories less. To various degrees, the stories can stand on their own, but it really requires familiarity with Episode 4 to understand what is going on.

Growing up unique

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, child prodigies

Fiction authors frequently write to explore. I first recognized this while reading one of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories, in which stories he explored the boundaries of the Three Laws of Robotics. He had hinted at them in Robbie and first stated them clearly in I, Robot. Years later I realized he was also exploring the boundaries of neurosis. As I learned of his life, including what he wrote in several memoirs, I understood that he was profoundly neurotic and he used his characters—the ever-more-perfect and godlike robots in contrast to the all-too-faulty humans—to work through the ramifications of neurosis in himself.

I have read novels by Orson Scott Card for about thirty years, beginning with Ender's Game. I don't know if I have read all the Ender series books. I did read all of the Homecoming books, and it is more than clear that in those Card is exploring the boundaries of morality and altruism. His character Nafai is pathologically altruistic.

When I read Ender's Game I wasn't ready for it. I was a mere 40-year-old. I took it at face value, as a coming-of-age novel in a space opera setting. Speaker for the Dead and other Ender series books also left me bemused. Now, just this year, more than thirty years later, Children of the Fleet adds another layer to the Ender saga, and I think I am beginning to understand.

The children in this novel, including the protagonist, Dabeet Ochoa, resemble those in earlier books in that they think rather consistently at an adult level, and perform certain adult tasks, though with some limitations because they are, after all, mostly pre-teens. None has yet hit the pubertal growth spurt, so they wear child-sized space suits, for example.

I was forcibly struck in this novel (and in retrospect, in Ender's Game) that Ender and Dabeet are victims of profound child abuse. Each is massively distorted from what he might have been in a more usual environment. Ender completed his mission, one supplied by others without his knowledge, by becoming the "Xenocide", the one responsible for annihilating the Formics, an insectile alien species. Dabeet's mission is only partly concealed, and he initially conceals it from others. In carrying it out, he brings life, not death (except indirectly, to a couple of all-too-human evildoers), and he prevents massive death.

Rather than dig further into the novel, I want to riff on the meaning of intelligence. We all think we know what intelligence is, but if asked to describe it, none can do so. For a few generations, tests of IQ (Intelligence Quotient) were thought to measure it, but they really tend to measure a small collection of cognitive and memory feats that are more machinelike than I care for. I wonder how the supercomputer Watson would fare on a Stanford-Binet test.

Further, the meaning of IQ has changed over the years. Originally, an IQ test was used with children ten years old and under, to compare their performance with sixteen-year-olds. I don't know how the test was normed (normalized), but apparently youngsters of ages between six and sixteen were tested to establish the "normal" performance of each year cohort. Then higher or lower performance could be compared with these norms to establish an IQ score: 100 for "normal for one's age". Based on the scatter displayed within each cohort, a Gaussian distribution was fitted and a standard deviation of 16 (later 15) was applied. So, when I was given an IQ test in third grade, at age 7, and my IQ score was 170, that supposedly meant that, in the memory and cognitive skills that were measured, I was performing at the level of a 12-year-old (11.9 to be precise). All I knew at the time was that, having begun to learn to read on my own when I began first grade as a 5-year-old (I turned 6 three months later), as a third grader I was indeed reading books usually seen in the book bags of seventh graders.

But how do you measure the IQ of an adult? When I was 20 did I have the "smarts" of a 34-year-old? Does such a question even have meaning? I think not. Others who considered cognitive psychology their calling thought about this quite deeply, and re-normed the test, making the standard deviation (σ) meaningful as a measure of scarcity. Thus, in any Gaussian distribution, the p statistic for ±2σ is 0.9545, or about 21/22. With σ = 15 and a mean of 100, the range ±2σ is from 70 to 130. So if you have a "normal" group of 44 people, one is likely to have an IQ of 70 or less, and one is likely to have an IQ of 130 or more.

I can tell you from experience, though, that IQ has little relation to street smarts. As an adult, my IQ has settled to 160, or 4σ above "average", a level achieved by one person in about 31,000. As a pre-teen and early teen, I finally realized I was not very likable. I began to work toward fixing that. I felt that if I did not have good social reactions automatically, as my age-mates did, I would have to observe, learn, and calculate those reactions. I did so. I used to look at that 170-to-160 shift as "giving up 10 IQ points for a better SQ" (Sociability Quotient). Thus, this paragraph found near the end of Children of the Fleet hit me with special resonance:

Maybe making and keeping friends will always require me to think through the steps of it … Maybe it will never be natural for me, never reflexive, never easy. So be it. I can't live without it, can't accomplish anything without it, so I will become adequate at forcing myself, against my inclinations, to be a friend to my friends. If I'm good at it, they'll never guess the effort that it requires.

Dabeet's musings match mine at just about the same age. Now I'll tell you what happened after I was 40. No details, just this: I had occasion to learn, through a personality test, that my "calculated person" was pretty good; but also, because a part of the test elicited reactions that had to be too fast for my calculations, I learned that a "natural" personality was truly there, and it was also pretty good! I came away with a proverb, "You cannot build a tree." I had found out, after a few decades of tree construction and maintenance, that a perfectly adequate tree had grown up beneath my notice and could be relied upon to be a "me" that didn't need all the effort. I am happier and calmer as a result.

If Dabeet is a reflection of Card's view of himself, as I suspect, maybe he is in the midst of learning, or will soon learn, the same thing. Let's see where the next of Card's novels takes us, and him.

Space Opera redivivus

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

Stephen King calls Jack McDevitt "The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke." Kind words indeed, but just a bit inflated. Nobody has yet come close to the more than 400 books written by Asimov, nor the breadth of vision and versatility of Clarke. However, McDevitt's 21 novels are nothing to sneeze at, and I greatly appreciate his fresh insights into alien species.

Starhawk is the 7th of the Academy series, also called the Priscilla Hutchins series after the protagonist. I read (and reviewed) the 6th volume, Cauldron, in 2008, but don't recall Ms Hutchins being particularly prominent.

In the Galaxy of the Academy series, alien life of any kind is rare, and aliens—so far located—bright enough to have language can be counted on one's thumbs and big toes. The brightest alien species is stunningly boring, but a series of a dozen or so "great monuments" shows that the Universe can produce beings of amazing power, but, apparently, less-than-amazing longevity.

In Starhawk the author explores two ideas of alien contact, one with an automated device that tells them they "just missed us", and another with an apparently planet-wide being that is helpful but indifferent: not hostile, but not interested in being visited long-term either.

The core of the action surrounds Ms Hutchins, who eventually earns the nickname Hutch. A newly-licensed starship pilot, she trying to start a career in a shrinking economy (2007-2012 writ large), in an era of increasing pressure to cut back the space program. Hard choices and a few untimely deaths provide coming-of-age experiences for her. Early on, I had a certain fellow pilot pegged as her eventual mate, but McDevitt outwitted me; the pilot dies attempting to divert a terrorist-controlled starship being used as an impact weapon.

The mix of hard science with just enough blue-sky stuff (like FTL) seems just right to me, and makes for compelling reading. It provides a canvas on which the alien contact stories, the exoarchaeology in which McDevitt likes to indulge, can play across the imagination. I wonder if I can find all five of the Academy books I've missed…

The decamillennial man

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, space fantasy

The galaxy of the Culture may not be the Milky Way. The time is certainly not our own. The roughly humanoid body plan of many, probably not most, species seems the only trace of anthro-hubris. Space travel is accomplished in hyperspace, vaguely defined as a buffer space between "concentric universes" (Interestingly, the notion that there may be two hyperspaces available, one 'within' and one 'without' is not explored). Space ships of a mere kilometer or two are considered small, and the largest "ship" mentioned has 11 billion residents. Energies are casually expended that we might expect to require the annihilation of stars. Machine intelligence has taken two directions, one called AI, the other Minds; only the latter are self-reflective and self-directed.

Thus freed from constraints of physics as we know it, in The Hydrogen Sonata Iain M. Banks strings a 500-page novel across a substantial portion of a galaxy as replete with space-faring species as our poor Earth is filled with jet-setting peoples. One such species, the Gzilt (Derived from guilt? Likely), is on the verge of Subliming. This is no mere "going to Heaven" aspiration by some suicidal cult. Numerous species have Sublimed, and the readiness of the Gzilt to do so is betokened by the Presence, a dark, teardrop shape dozens of miles high hanging above their major cities.

Upon this backdrop, but presented as introductory, before all this setting up, a smallish ship zips into Gzilt space, bearing a message from a long-Sublimed culture. A Gzilt ship destroys the ship before its message can be delivered. The plot proceeds as the young Gzilt woman Vyr and a coterie of Culture ships and their Minds (no ship is entrusted to a mere human) track down an alternate source of the lost message, which is thought to challenge the veracity of a Scripture volume called the Book of Truth. Vyr's key contact is QiRia, species never stated, but humanoid, who claims to have been present at the founding of the Culture some hundred centuries earlier.

Vyr Cossont, a mere half-century or so old, is a musician who has had an extra pair of arms grafted on so she can play an enigmatic instrument called—among other things—the elevenstring, which actually has at least two dozen strings, some of them internal, making tuning rather tricky. It is played with two bows. The Hydrogen Sonata is the only major piece of music written for the elevenstring, and indeed preceded its invention; a ticklish joke by the author. Vyr is also the most recent contact of QiRia, some 20 years prior. Considering the book's title I began to wonder if the Sonata itself encoded the message; not really. Rather, an amputated portion of QiRia does, and the collecting of this relic forces the climax of the action.

QiRia interests me the most. Alone among the galaxy's trillions (or quadrillions) he persists across the centuries in full consciousness, not spending long periods in Storage as others do who wish to experience far-flung time periods. A former lover of QiRia is one such: awakened, ported into a new body, and sent to find and contact him while Vyr is half across the galaxy. QiRia has used technology to be able to store his centuries of memories throughout his body. Other authors have speculated that we might lose most of our older memories if we were to live for two or three centuries or more, and that someone who remembers events more than a century before would be exceptional. Here we find a technological alternative.

How does QiRia cope with the ennui of having seen it all before? He seeks novel experiences. He has loads of time, so early in the book he has spent a couple decades as a "leviathid", a whale-like creature, and his more recent jaunt back in human form is to dwell in a very noisy place, where cyclonic winds tease titanic organ-pipe sounds from a series of tunnels drilled through a mountain range. It makes me wonder, what sense of purpose can remain in one who has outlived a couple of hundred generations? Living for millennia would seem normal if everybody did so. When death is rare, though, would people rush to experience everything they can quite so obsessively? Yet the panic of mortality might still be as keenly felt, no matter how long delayed.

I like an author like Banks who can so casually deliver loads of engaging ideas (Of course, he just may protest that it is really hard work!). The Culture of this novel, and probably a few others, as embodied for us in a number of ship Minds, is insouciant and playful, yet deadly serious as needed. It struck me as an echo of what the US might be had The Articles of Confederation not been superseded by The Constitution. I don't recall a book that has explored that notion.

The longest odds

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, mysteries

What goes a light-year per minute, is operated by folks that scare just about everybody, and offers all the amenities you could possibly afford? If you have been reading Timothy Zahn's books, you know: the Quadrail. This cross-galactic "railroad" can get you across the entire Galaxy in about ten weeks. A minor jaunt to someplace nearby such as Dubhe (the brightest star in the Big Dipper, as seen from Earth) takes a mere two hours, once you get to the station, somewhere beyond Neptune. For getting to and from the station, Zahn has thoughtfully provided torch ships, which presumably can zip the required 5 billion km in a day or so (compared to a decade or so for NASA spacecraft), at a velocity in the neighborhood of 0.2 c.*

Judgment at Proteus is the fifth, and apparently the final novel in Zahn's Quadrail series. I has been quite a ride. By the middle of this volume, we understand that Frank Compton and his sidekick Bayta are up against the biggest odds I've ever seen an author get away with. A former galactic empire called the Shonkla-Raa is being revived, and Compton is nearly alone in standing against their attempt to arise again. His one ally, a chancy one at that, is a collective, self-telepathic being called the Modhri, that spreads by "infecting" members of other species, which it can then partially or totally control.

Early on the Modhri was Compton's perceived enemy, but the greater danger forced them to work together. The secret of the origin of both Modhri and Sonkla-Raa is the hinge upon which the situation is resolved.

So what can one man do, pitted against a Galaxy-wide conspiracy of powerful agents? Compton knows there is no such thing as a fair fight. As the twists and turns of the novels reveal, it is tactical creativity more than strength that makes him the warrior he is. At one point, expecting an attack using sound waves, he provides for a hefty dose of helium to be mixed into the atmosphere. You know how helium makes your voice sound? It turns the fearful sonic weapon into a squeaky, impotent joke.

I read a book like this and think, "If only…" It'd be nice to bomb around the Universe as easily (!) as we cross the skies of our lone planet. Even better if some super-engineers belonging to a million-year-old species have provided the means to do so. Now if we can just find out what it takes to be invited to join the galactic federation.

*Note, just under 20 hours at 10g acceleration will take you 2.5 billion km, reaching a velocity of 70,000 km/s or 0.23 c. It takes you another 20 hours to come to rest at the 5 billion km point. You'd better have great gravity control to live through the trip.

Space opera the way it ought to be done

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera

Some nine thousand years from now, will star travel be cheaper than intercontinental travel is today? Will dropping in on an orbital station be of no more consequence than visiting the Walmart in the next town? That is the world of Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict novels. Firebird is the sixth in a series that began with A Talent for War, first published in 1989.

Alex Benedict, famous for completing an archaeological investigation begun by his uncle Gabriel Benedict, and now his uncle's heir, is best known as a purveyor of antiques. This makes him unpopular with museum curators, who decry the supposed desecration. This fact adds a twist or two to the plot of this novel, in which Alex and his aide Chase Kolpath investigate the disappearance of a famous physicist, and then uncover a quirk in spacetime that may solve a number of other cases of disappearing starships.

The key idea related to the vanishing starships is that black holes, as they move through space, cause a damage track in spacetime that diverts a starship which attempts to enter hyperspace at or near the track. The ship is whipped forward in time by a few years or a few decades, and thereafter tends to appear for a few hours before vanishing for the same period, over and over. The climax of the novel is a rendezvous with one of the missing starships, and the attempt to rescue the passengers from their time warp. For the passengers, three weeks have passed. For "outside space", seven thousand years. The few passengers rescued are truly the oldest "relics" Alex has ever recovered, but they are living and breathing and speaking an archaic French dialect. An epilogue closes the loop on the rest of their fellow passengers.

Another very interesting idea is that of sentient Artificial Intelligences, or AI's. Everyone has at least one of these, but a planet that was carried through a dust cloud has lost all its biological inhabitants, leaving a world full of AI's to fend for themselves. Some become insane, and even pathologically homicidal when humans visit the world after its emergence from the dust cloud. Since pathology is not allowed by their original programming, this starts a debate about their status as possibly sentient and thus worthy of rights and even citizenship. Of course, Alex winds up in the middle of the mess when he and Chase "rescue" an AI from the lost planet, one who has been overseeing a schoolhouse for millennia and is not only bored out of his mind, but fearing retribution from the pathological AI's for his friendly contact with people. In a few thousand years, if humanity survives, computers powerful enough to emulate a human brain in a space no larger than a real brain will certainly become possible. I wonder if they can be "programmed" to be intelligent, or if instead, training will become the norm?

The book is a pleasure to read. A cover blurb on the hardback copy compares McDevitt's work to that of Asimov. As I recall, Asimov's later novels consisted primarily of dialog. McDevitt is also a master of believable dialog. Other than that, the worlds that he builds differ quite a lot from Asimov's, which is all to the good. We need fresh ideas more than a further exploration of older ones. I note in this Wikipedia article that he'll be 77 this year. That is the prime of life for an author.

Two-headed camels and starfish superminds

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

I gotta hand it to Larry Niven, he comes up with interesting alien races. While Betrayer of Worlds, written with Edward M. Lerner, is not the first novel in which the Gw'oth appear, it has the first extended treatment of their culture. A Gw'oth looks like a starfish, as they are aquatic and are built of five "tubacles". Certain groups of them—I am not sure if all are supposed to be capable of this—can merge together as 4-fold or 8-fold or 16-fold assemblages with nerve connections that allow them to work as a combined intelligence with a new name and identity. In a 16-fold configuration they can solve four-dimensional problems and generally out-think the best minds known to both human and "citizen" (i.e. puppeteer) species, and even perhaps the Paks.

Betrayer of Worlds is a prelude to Ringworld, and fortunately is quite free of the vulgarity found in it. While much of the action revolves around the genius Louis Wu and his citizen patron (friend is too strong a term) Nessus, and their conflicts with deranged citizen Achilles, I found most interesting the way the authors imagine the cultural and political life of the Gw'oth.

The citizen Fleet of Worlds, five planets fleeing the galaxy and a galactic explosion, is flanked fore and aft by the Gw'oth home planet and a colony planet further out. The colony is actually a rebel world trying to escape the totalitarian influence of the home world, led by the 16-plex mind named Ol't'ro. The rulers of the home world and their disgust for multiplex minds are well portrayed. A few multiplex minds, in particular one 8-plex, are tolerated because they are useful, but are held prisoner.

The excessively paranoid Achilles has fomented war with the Gw'oth, misunderstanding their civil war as an invasion, and it takes the combined cleverness of Louis and Nessus, plus cooperation with Ol't'ro, to forestall open warfare and even genocide. Ol't'ro is the wild card here. It maneuvers Achilles into leadership of the citizen worlds, where he can be manipulated to its will. The novel ends about fifty years prior to the events related in Ringworld.

I felt compelled to determine the energy budget of the species involved here. The Fleet of Worlds is moving at about 0.5c towards galactic north, and is still accelerating. The kinetic energy of each of the five planets (and a sixth, New Terra) is around 10⁴¹ Joules. This is about seven million times the yearly solar luminosity, which makes the citizen/puppeteer species a Level 3 species in my informal taxonomy of spacefaring species:

• Level 0 - muscle power only.
• Level 1 - fossil fuel and stationary fission plants. Planetary energy budget at least 10²⁰ J/y. Earth is in this category.
  
• Level 2 - fusion energy. Planetary or species energy budget at least 10³⁰ J/y.
• Level 3 - fusion and perhaps antimatter. Energy budget at least 10⁴⁰ J/y.
• Level 4 and higher - antimatter control including stellar annihilation. Inconceivable energy budget.

I can imagine these things, but I don't know if they are possible. It seems the citizens don't utilize antimatter, but deuterium is mentioned several times. It takes a lot of deuterium to generate 10⁴² Joules; several stellar masses of deuterium.

I like the writing of these two authors together better than Niven's earlier collaborations. I understand this is not their first, so I have some catching up to do.

A space opera to fly with

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, interplanetary politics

I was traveling cross country yesterday, a good opportunity to get a lot of reading done. A factual text isn't sufficienty engrossing for effective escape reading; I get distracted by the grim reality of being in an airplane seat the size of a floor tile. But a good space opera is just the thing to transfer me to far horizons and make the time melt away.

David Drake, a writer new to me, has a deft hand at interstellar politics and applying known concepts to a new idea for plying the space lanes. In What Distant Deeps, the latest of his RCN series, he pits Captain Daniel Leary of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy and his friend the spy Adele Mundy—both aristocrats who choose the military life—against an ambitious autocrat, the Autocrator Irene, who is taking advantage of an exhausted peace between two formerly warring empires to promote her own agenda of attaining a mini-empire from a few planets on the fringes of civilized space.

Both Mundy and her bodyguard/companion Tovera are described a few times as murderous psychopaths, not by enemies, but in the ruminations of Mundy's own mind; there is a lot of stream of consciousness twined amongst the action. Yet by nature Lady Mundy is a librarian, happiest when digging meaning from the data she is continually harvesting from any computer system she can break into, such as the planetary archives or an entire naval fleet's ship systems. She uncovers traces of a secretive "Farm" that is really a military camp being set up for an expected invading army. Leary recognizes the potential for such an invasion to destroy the fragile peace accord, and sets about short-circuiting the process.

To author Drake, the emphasis in RCN is on Navy. Space travel is a matter of inserting the ship into what is called the Matrix, where there are currents and forces that one can "sail" through using literal masts and sails on a starship's hull; this is followed by extraction into normal space. While in the Matrix, a ship can be guided by a skilled person who knows how to interpret the vision of an infinite array of bubble universes, and the swirls and currents that accompany galaxies, stars and starships within our own universe. There are mental and physiological effects of insertion and extraction, and a little of the drama rests upon their potential to debilitate people at critical times, such as extracting into the middle of a pitched battle. Only one major scene hinges on these effects; the author could have done more with it, and perhaps he has in prior RCN novels.

The author has done a competent job of interpreting the tropes of naval warfare into a space setting. The missiles and the plasma cannons that answer to the torpedos and cannon of water-based battles provide plenty of drama, as long as one refrains from thinking too deeply. The narrative really kept me going at times I sorely needed the escapism. Quite an enjoyable reading experience.

My intro to Honorverse

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, military fiction, space opera

Many years ago, when I first read Foundation by Isaac Asimov, I was halfway through before I realized that it consisted almost entirely of dialogue. I slowed down for a while and took notice. Asimov was a master of writing dialogue. I have found nobody similarly skilled at writing stream-of-consciousness. I quickly tire of interior monologues.

I had not got far into Torch of Freedom, by David Weber and Eric Flint, before I realized that this is another book that is very heavy on the dialogue, but with less skill than Asimov (maybe that isn't saying much). It also contains lots of interior monologue, as the authors depict at least seven facets of a multilevel intrigue and attempt to bring a reader "inside the head" of at least one protagonist from each facet. I've made it sound like I didn't like it. Let's say it is an acquired taste, and with nearly 600 pages to acquire it, I did find myself enjoying the book.

I admit I got it because of the cover, which depicts a spacecraft approaching "Fun City", a combination space station and roller coaster with a partly blacked-out marquee. It was a rather "splash in the pool" introduction to David Weber's Honorverse series. Fortunately an appendix lists and describes the dramatis personae and their allegiances, because you really do need the playbook to follow this game.

Honorverse is set in the 4000's, some 19 centuries "post diaspora"; presumably starship travel via hyperspace and wormholes was discovered in the 2100's, and star travel became as cheap, relatively speaking, as traveling to the New World via caravel in the mid-1600's. In some ways, the Honorverse milieu is similar to the 1600's. Slavery (of the genetic variety) is rampant in a large part of human space, the settled portion of the Galaxy is balkanized to an extent similar to Europe during the Enlightenment, and a new planet-nation of freed slaves has just been set up. This is Torch. Its freeing is the subject of an earlier novel in the series.

This novel focuses on and climaxes with the Battle of Torch, a space battle with laser-tipped missiles and giant warships that can accelerate at rates that make this old physics junkie shudder (hmmm: 200G of acceleration, with "inertial dampers" so the crew can survive, for a 2-million-ton craft… let's just say that you have to annihilate the mass of a small star to supply the energy needed for an hour's run)

I am less interested in the military aspects, though, compared to the social settings: one near-totalitarian state called Mesa that uses eugenic tinkering to produce its alpha, beta, and gamma "star lines"; the vastly powerful, but largely unaware Solarian empire; a slave-production "corporation" known as Manpower, Inc., which practices a kind of reverse eugenics and is allied with Mesa; and several smaller "star nations" with various allegiances—and two of them are at war; in addition to Torch. Once the pace quickens, about halfway through the book, the reader has seen the point of view of at least a couple of people from each of these constituencies.

The human stories focus on Queen Berry of Torch and several of her staff and allies, on "Ganny El" and her gypsy band that occupy the roller-coaster emporium, on two agents, Anton and Victor, who carry out intelligence-gathering on Mesa, and on a family with a brilliant but doomed foster daughter, a victim of eugenics that has overreached its limits. Interestingly, I can't recall a specific portrayal of any of the Manpower folk; that's probably on purpose.

Space opera fulfills its role best when events are too large for one planet to contain. This is such a case. Torch is not just a super-Liberia and Mesa is not just a super-Reich. The events of a book like this might have fit on Earth in the 1600's but cannot now, with every battlefield within a day's airplane ride from anywhere. In a faster-than-light setting, it takes plenty of space for travel to take days rather than hours, and for a Napoleonic sense of timing to bring together the forces for a dramatic climax. The Battle of Torch retains the freedom of the emerging star nation, setting the stage for as many novels as David Weber can write.

Turning point in a future history

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera

I've reviewed four short stories and a novel by Mike Resnick since beginning this blog. Prior to that, I read at least three of his Kirinyaga series of stories, and an unknown number of his other stories and books (because I kept no records). I don't know if I'd ever be able to read all of his work; how he ever wrote it all is a mystery! Many of his books, particularly in the past twenty years, take place in his Birthright Universe future history milieu. Starship: Flagship, the fifth of the Starship series, is a Birthright book that takes place almost 3,000 years into the future, according to a chronology in Appendix 3.

The Starship series concerns the fortunes of Wilson Cole, an aging military man who mutinied in the first book of the series. He has command of a former Navy starship, the Theodore Roosevelt, and in the current book he has come to be the leader of a force of about a thousand ships. With this ragtag bunch he takes on the Republic and its Navy of several million starships. Though one knows Cole will prevail, there is no anticipating how.

The tactics Cole uses must come from the later chapters of Lao Tzu's The Art of War, or perhaps a chapter or two he didn't get around to writing. His oft-stated aim is to win, if possible, without firing a shot. He shows admirable ability to get the enemies to fight among themselves, for example. But it is made clear that Cole does not consider the Navy men his enemies, but only their leaders, those who have made him an outlaw because of his integrity.

Well, I am a poor political commentator. The mechanisms make more sense to me than the hero's machinations. This wide-ranging space opera takes advantage of the idea of wormholes. Though they are not visible (and I don't know why not), there is an unmentioned detection technology so they can be found and even cataloged. They provide shortcuts all over the Galaxy, and are apparently numerous enough to provide a sort of celestial subway from star system to system.

In addition, there is an FTL technology that even fits in the lifeboats; the destruction of a certain super-weapon depends on the ability of a shuttle craft to swiftly reach light speed. Then, because of the ability to go a few light years within a few hours, even without a wormhole (they are used for longer jumps), humans and a number of alien races are variously trade partners and war adversaries.

Another notion I find amusingly interesting is the very rapid computer programming abilities of the technical crew. They frequently come up with powerful new applications in an hour or so; from my years (decades) as a professional programmer, one of the fastest on the planet if I do say so myself, I know that even modest applications take a few days or weeks to knock out with the most rapid prototyping methods known. I guess programming in the 3000's will also be FTL!

The book is also a morality play. One moral issue that permeates the book is one's attitude toward the foot soldiers (or navy men) who carry out the orders of one's real enemies. Another issue that takes just a short space but resonates deeply is how far an interrogator can go when a recalcitrant person holds the secret to saving or losing dozens of lives. In an epilogue the author states that this was motivated by recent events such as the waterboarding of "detainees". Is an "advanced interrogation method" torture if it leaves the victim physically unharmed? Yet how do you measure psychological harm?

This is the kind of book I like a lot. A ton of fun to read, with a scope as wide as one can imagine (well, only one Galaxy after all), and some food for thought in the bargain.

Is there a doctor in the galaxy?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, mysteries

One could make a career out of reading Doctor Who novels. In the past twenty years, according to data at the Tardis Library, 973 editions of a couple hundred titles have been published. Just in the past year 123 editions have been published, all based on the BBC program that ran from the 1960s to 1989, and has been running again since 1997. The ability of "the Doctor" to return in a new body from time to time gives the show quite a lot of latitude to introduce a new lead actor from time to time.

Published in April 2009 by BBC Books (which traces back to Random House), Judgement of the Judoon, written by Colin Brake, has probably already been followed by more than twenty newer volumes. There appear to be scores of authors willing to write under the guidance of the series editors and consultants…and many more who write "unofficial" volumes.

Based only on reading this one volume, I find a refreshing return of space opera, with its hyperdrive ships, giant spaceports, comely villains, homely heroes, and picaresque plotlines. In this case—as in most of the volumes—the Doctor has a mystery to solve> he also has an unlikely pair of co-sleuths: a rhinoceroid Judoon police commander and a teenaged human private eye. A series of apparent thefts, and now a mysterious murder, have crippled operations at a new spaceport terminal, and the Doctor has just one day to trace a mysterious "Invisible Assassin".

As the three work their way towards a solution, they get to know one another. A plot subthread is their growing regard for each other. There's plenty of comic potential in the antics of a quarter-ton humanoid with a rhino's head who is used to getting (or making) his own way. In between life-endangering events, though, understated humor flies all directions. The climactic tragedy aside, the book's tone is light-hearted.

I'll have to look up an episode or two to watch, to see how the show's tone matches the book's (or vice versa). And when I come across any of the companion volumes, I'll see what else the many authors are cooking up to confront the Doctor. Not that I want to make a career of that, now…

Niven's two-headed camels strike again

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera

More than thirty years ago, Larry Niven got tired of all the humanoid aliens, and the arguments that only "our" body type could evolve into an intelligent, space faring species. The Pierson's Puppeteer was his answer: an herbivorous, three-legged, two-headed cameloid (or centauroid) with three sexes and a brain in a cranial dome under the mane between the necks. The tripeds' name for themselves translates "Citizens."

This image is a negative rendering of a white-on-black image from Niven's web site (link above). I cannot discern the artist's name; should I find out, I'll give credit.

Many of Niven's novels are collaborations; his latest, with Edward M. Lerner, is Fleet of Worlds, set roughly midway in the timeline of Niven's "Known Space" series. I think I've read all the prior books, and I am relieved that this novel is the least "horny".

Niven's cameloid tripeds were, at first, the only non-bipeds in Known Space. Later, aliens based on other non-human body plans were added. In Fleet of Worlds he adds the Ch'own, sea-cucumber like critters that tend to group in fives (and thus look like starfish), but can "hook up" in myriad ways in larger groups to perform group computations, like a group mind. They can apparently think in both analog an digital modes with equal ease, unlike our analog-bound, digitally-handicapped brains. They don't need computers like we do; a couple dozen of them, suitably linked, are a super (or hyper) computer.

The Known Space books are also packed with ideas in a more scientific arena. Central to this and a few others is the gravitational rosette, initially five planets co-orbiting the Citizens' home star. Such a rosette is dynamically stable, but cannot arise naturally. The aging of the star (larger and hotter than Sol, and so going to red giant stage sooner) prompts them to propel the rosette away from it, and eventually on a path right out of the Galaxy. All the planets but the original home world, Hearth, are given groups of artificial suns to light and heat them; Hearth's ecology runs off the waste heat of more than a trillion Citizens.

Here the science falters a bit. A trillion bodies will certainly put out a lot of heat, but only by oxidizing foodstuffs. Where does the energy come from to produce the foodstuffs? No star lights Hearth now. Maybe Niven will explain better in a later book. Also, in a few scenes, the various planets co-rotating with Hearth about a mutual center of gravity are mentioned in various phases, as crescent or first quarter. At this point, the rosette is a light-year from the red giant, its former center. What star lights these phases? I suppose the artificial suns could do the trick, but it seems odd. I can't get my head around the dynamics.

Meanwhile, the main story is one of oppression and rebellion. Citizens consider bribery and blackmail to be early stages of negotiation. They are rather aggressive in "business". So it is no surprise that their explanation of the origin of a million or so humans on one of the rosette's planets, to those humans, leaves a bit to be desired.

Humans, called "Colonists", are more curious than even the most insanely curious Citizen. Citizens, being herbivores, experience a level of paranoia we'd consider pathological, but which is quite justified in the average rabbit or antelope. Curiosity is a way to become lion food (Pronghorns in Wyoming may still sometimes be drawn by curiosity to a handkerchief tied to a bush, but this common hunter's trick has pretty much eliminated the trait). As a result, the Citizens fail to account for just how driven humans are, on the chase for clues, so of course the truth is exposed.

Just how the humans survive once they have embarrassed their hosts closes the current Known Space book with quite a twist.

The cream of his earliest crop

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, anthologies, golden age

Robert Silverberg reckons (he can't determine exactly) that he has written about a thousand stories. At some 25 per volume, should he anthologize them all, it'll take forty volumes. In the introduction to To Be Continued: Volume One (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg), he makes it clear that isn't in the cards.

Unspokenly following Theodore Sturgeon's dictum that "90% of everything is junk", Silverberg presents the stories from the formative period of his career, 1953-1958, that best represent his growth as a writer. Should he succeed in his endeavor, we can expect two or three more volumes.

The 24 stories in To Be Continued display his explorations as he deliberately pushed the envelope of his growing talent. His writing paid the rent during his college years, and for two or three years after. He rapidly became known as a reliable "stable" writer, able to crank out a gut-buster space adventure in a day or two, to order, or to write a story to fit a painter's cover artwork. He'd gained the knack early of writing a readable story line and characterization, balancing action with background. He tried out various formulas, experimented with other authors' styles. He wrote for all markets, low (pulp), middle and high.
He didn't place many stories in the higher-paying glossies, but they didn't ignore him, either. Silverberg took tremendous advantage of the many outlets a SciFi writer had in the 1950s. It reminds me of the early Auto market. At one time, you could drive a Studebaker, a Reo, a De Soto, or a Stanley. There are fewer automakers worldwide today than there were just in America prior to about 1960. The popular magazine markets followed a similar trajectory.

The author prefaces each story with some autobiographical material. He was one of a lucky handful that had talent to spare in a decade that had hungry readers galore.

Legendary editor John Campbell used to say, "Present a problem, then solve it." That's still the best formula for storytelling, of any genre. Silverberg is still a master of the craft, and I appreciate a look into the roots from which the past fifty years of his work has sprung.

On the boundary between cyborg and human

kw: book reviews, science fiction, far future fiction, space opera, cyborgs, golems, androids, terraforming

Chris Moriarty is prone to leaving as much as he can to a reader's imagination and inference. For me, it is on the boundary between refreshing and irritating. Usually, when I can't figure out what his novel's characters just figured out, I get it within a page or two, sometimes because Moriarty explains, sometimes because my slow brain catches on.

Spin Control follows his successful novel "Spin State" with an equally readable, even more idea-packed story. The genre is hard science, far enough in the future that it verges on fantasy, but Moriarty has done his homework, and the technicalities are not-too-wild extrapolations of current trends and speculations.

Some four centuries hence, the human race has taken charge of its own evolution, and taken computing close to quantum limits, to produce a number of "near relatives" with various amounts of integrated machinery, from AIs of several kinds, to Golems (cyborgs with no childhood), to the all-biological but engineered products of several "syndicates", and at least one "Emergent AI" who has "lived" on the delicate edge of growth and destruction for a few centuries, partly due to its being "shunted" to a series of rented human bodies. Other AIs, that control groups of shunted human "volunteers" such as military squads, are found to be most stable when kept ignorant of what they are really doing, by being deceived that they are playing an elaborate game with really good virtuality; once one of these figures out what it is really doing, it promptly suicides...or is that self-destructs?

While many recent books have scene shifts nearly every page, thus resembling episodes of modern TV soap operas, each chapter in Spin Control has a venue and a cast, usually all centered on Arkady, the protagonist here. The chapters' scenes hang together better than those in most novels. Arkady is an A-level clone produced by the Rostov Syndicate. He is more victim than protagonist, only finding out what he was really sent to do in the closing pages of the novel.

Arkady begins by defecting from the Ring (space colonies in the synchronous orbit) to Earth. He'd previously been on a terraforming team to the well-kept-secret planet Novalis. Early survey and seeding probes had visited, and ten clones form four syndicates were sent to see how well the process is going. Seems it was going much too well, and some trouble ensued that Arkady doesn't know how to parse...yet. One result was a new kind of virus that enhances fertility, if that's all it does. Earth really needs that, because the population has crashed to the point that most people are walking ghosts—infertile and unlikely ever to reproduce.

Of course, there is more to it than that, and Arkady becomes a much coveted, much abused pawn in a high-stakes bidding war. It takes the long-lived Emergent AI Cohen and an old memory in a young commando to bring about the denouement: one really nasty character is eliminated, and the long-deceived military AIs learn not only what they are doing, but enough of what has kept Cohen alive, to take appropriate control of their own fates.

I like a hopeful ending...even if it is a setup for more sequels!

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.

If you cross Star Trek with the Dirty Dozen...

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera

In the middle of reading a number of heavier works, both fiction and nonfiction, Starship: Mutiny by Mike Resnick was pure escapist space opera for me. Heavy on the dualism: military discipline vs subversive righteousness; "the Republic" (which seems to be anything but) I vs an ill-defined "Toroni Federation" enemy; white hats and black hats all around.

I like the protagonist/hero, Wilson Cole, a thinker and doer. The byplay between him and various "by the book" adversaries makes any of them the poster child for my maxim (viz. M. Twain), "Someone who is unwilling to think is no better than someone who cannot think" and its corollary, "...and is probably much worse." Cole doesn't bother to outgun an adversary, but out-thinks him or her (boneheads of both sexes, and several species, abound).

Cole is assigned as a mid-rank officer on an aging starship staffed by malcontents. Sort of a halfway house. It doesn't take him long to make a tidy collection of both friends and enemies, nor to find "the enemy" active in a corner of space that nobody expected. As his successes pile up and his popularity (with the brass) plummets, Cole is in his element.

As someone who has built a career—a rather good one—by doing for customers what I've been ordered not to do, I know right where Cole is coming from. Like him, I've been tempted to hoist the Jolly Roger a time or two. Considering that the second volume in the proposed quintology is Starship: Pirate, it'll spoil nothing to tell you that Cole finally does just that.

Mike Resnick is just a couple years older than I am. I expect the quintology to get into print at a rate of about a volume each year or two. It's gonna be a fun decade.