kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space aliens, space warfare, battle suits
In Cobra Guardian, the second book of the Cobra War trilogy, Timothy Zahn presents not one, but two ways to make a super-warrior. The drama revolves around Cobras, men and women implanted with servomechanisms for extra strength and speed, enhanced senses of hearing and vision, and a variety of laser, electrical and sonic weaponry. These make a single Cobra roughly the equivalent of an Abrams tank. It required the might of hundreds of Cobras to defeat a warlike branch of the Trofts, some of whom are more inclined to get ahead by trade and treaties, while others prefer conquest. The Tlossies are a Troft demesne of traders who are allies of humans, but reluctant to go to war against other Trofts on our behalf.
A sometime rival planet of humans, denied knowledge of Cobra technology, has developed warriors they call Djinni, who wear external robotic strength-enhancing and sense-enhancing technology and weaponry that makes them quite equal to Cobras, and in certain ways even more deadly.
In the middle of the mix is the planet Caelian, which has fascinating biology. In a ramped-up Darwinian system, the plants are bad enough, but even the mildest animals are downright nasty. "Flossies" look a little like sheep, though their curly pelt is more like steel wool. A large contingent of Cobras is required to guard the ordinary humans on the planet, a never-ending assignment.
On the other four planets that host Cobras, though, they are seen as anachronisms. It has been a few decades since the warlike Trofts were beaten back, and they are being seen as an unneeded expense. Politicians argue "austerity measures" that include cutbacks in Cobra funding. Then Troft warships attack all five Cobra-bearing planets.
As it happens, unknown to the Trofts, automated surgical machinery has been developed that can reduce the time needed to augment a human to Cobra in five days, and in another breakthrough, cognitive-enhancement drugs enable them to be trained in just a few more days. If the allied worlds can beat back the Troft invasion long enough to produce a few hundred new Cobras, they can win this phase of the Troft wars.
I was most fascinated by the extreme biology of Caelian. It is a wonder anything stays alive. Wind-blown plant spores turn any organic material into a green forest of rapidly-growing, and carnivorous, plants. That includes the clothes you are wearing, but fortunately not your own skin (while you are alive). Once a few plants take hold, insects follow, and they all seem to be hungry for blood. Bigger animals follow the insects, and if you don't keep the plants scraped off your clothing, you will soon be eaten by the bigger bugs and their predators. Then there are the larger predators; anything over ten pounds in size will gladly take on a human.
The humans on the planet have developed a silicon-based fabric called silliweave that denies the plants a foothold, as long as they keep plant spores wiped or scraped off it regularly (blown-in dirt can feed the plants—and it is always windy). That's a chemical technology I find interesting. What they really need is some way to keep the plant spores from gaining that first foothold, even if a little dirt has blown onto a garment. They are working on that…
I find Caelian more plausible than Cobra or Djinn, however. The energy source for their acrobatics is left unstated. An armor piercing laser hidden in a leg bone (or alongside it) needs to dissipate a few megawatts, if briefly. Even a "fingertip" laser that can zap mere mortals will cook the finger in which it operates. And jumping ten or twenty meters, straight up? I'll wait until I see it. Of course, these capabilities make for some truly rollicking fight scenes.
The book ends with an opening for Cobra Gamble, due out in another year or so. In that book the author will have to bring together all the threads laid out so nicely for us in this one.
Showing posts with label space warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space warfare. Show all posts
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Beyond the game
kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space fantasy, space warfare, video games
My son has been playing the XBox game Halo, in several versions, almost since its inception late in 2001. I am sure the main draw for him is the combat and its realistic venue. What I didn't know until recently is that its developers and fans have together created quite a backstory and universe in which the combat game unfolds. Nor that it has become a multi-faceted franchise, managed by 343 Industries, a unit of Microsoft.
One facet is several series of novels, and the one that came my way is Halo:Cryptum by Greg Bear, the first of a projected trilogy. The cover proclaims it "Book One of the Forerunner Saga". To get a better grasp of the covering story and backstory, see this Wikipedia article. Here I concern myself with certain ideas.
Interstellar and intergalactic travel in the Halo universe is accomplished by travel through "slipspace", and "slipspace chips" seem to answer to the trilithium crystals of Star Trek, as an energy-conversion mechanism to retrieve vacuum energy, and as an access mechanism to the variety of subspace or hyperspace the term connotes.
The Forerunners themselves begin much as humans do, and are of similar size and shape, but go through a series of changes, as many as four, which in the book are called Mutations. This is a misuse of the word, and Greg Bear ought to know better, though he is probably constrained by the language of the franchise. Such a change to an individual is more properly termed a metamorphosis, making the protagonist of this novel, with the first name Bornstellar, a first instar who metamorphoses to the second instar halfway through. This second instar is called his First Form, and his height then exceeds two meters. His Third- or Fourth-Form father is some four meters tall, and has changed aspect almost beyond recognition. This is the way of Forerunners. (By contrast, human metamorphosis, like mammalian growth in general, occurs gradually, or we'd more readily compare ourselves with locusts or butterflies.)
A particular emphasis is placed upon the armor all Forerunners wear nearly all the time. It is an active agent, controlled by them through an AI agent called an ancilla ("female slave" in Latin), and the term is used for all AI agents, of all levels of power. Nearly all speak with female voices. This probably answers to the human prejudice in favor of being served by women in most personal matters. The armor cares for its wearer, and can keep a person alive—for not only Forerunners wear such armor—even in vacuum for a time, and even when gravely injured.
This young person, Bornstellar, has defied his family, visited the home planet of humans, and accompanied by two humans, including a re-engineered Florian ("hobbit" in recent scientific literature), goes a-treasure hunting, only to encounter the cryptum (not a crypt, which would hold a corpse, but a suspension chamber to retain an exile in time) of an ancient warrior named the Didact. The Didact kidnaps him and the humans, later guides him through a "Mutation" that eventually converts him to a sort of clone of the Didact, and then leads them all into an adventure that gets them crosswise with the highest Forerunner authority. The book ends with Bornstellar, exhibiting a mixture of First Form types, replacing the Didact, who has been executed. I find it ironic that the most powerful figure in this saga (so far) is a Librarian, and wife of the Didact/Bornstellar. Located for the time being in an intergalactic Ark, the protagonists are now in position for the opening of the second novel, due out in a year or less.
While the author has a compelling writing style, this is less of a page-turner and more of a book to keep you thinking. It bears some resemblance to the work of Olaf Stapledon, who wrote of galaxy-spanning civilizations and star-building and -destroying cultures of future men. While many epic SciFi works and series owe their vision to one writer or to a small collaboration, this is Microsoft at work, and their stable of fantasists. So far, the Halo universe hasn't become the "camel" most committees tend to create. May it remain so.
My son has been playing the XBox game Halo, in several versions, almost since its inception late in 2001. I am sure the main draw for him is the combat and its realistic venue. What I didn't know until recently is that its developers and fans have together created quite a backstory and universe in which the combat game unfolds. Nor that it has become a multi-faceted franchise, managed by 343 Industries, a unit of Microsoft.
One facet is several series of novels, and the one that came my way is Halo:Cryptum by Greg Bear, the first of a projected trilogy. The cover proclaims it "Book One of the Forerunner Saga". To get a better grasp of the covering story and backstory, see this Wikipedia article. Here I concern myself with certain ideas.
Interstellar and intergalactic travel in the Halo universe is accomplished by travel through "slipspace", and "slipspace chips" seem to answer to the trilithium crystals of Star Trek, as an energy-conversion mechanism to retrieve vacuum energy, and as an access mechanism to the variety of subspace or hyperspace the term connotes.
The Forerunners themselves begin much as humans do, and are of similar size and shape, but go through a series of changes, as many as four, which in the book are called Mutations. This is a misuse of the word, and Greg Bear ought to know better, though he is probably constrained by the language of the franchise. Such a change to an individual is more properly termed a metamorphosis, making the protagonist of this novel, with the first name Bornstellar, a first instar who metamorphoses to the second instar halfway through. This second instar is called his First Form, and his height then exceeds two meters. His Third- or Fourth-Form father is some four meters tall, and has changed aspect almost beyond recognition. This is the way of Forerunners. (By contrast, human metamorphosis, like mammalian growth in general, occurs gradually, or we'd more readily compare ourselves with locusts or butterflies.)
A particular emphasis is placed upon the armor all Forerunners wear nearly all the time. It is an active agent, controlled by them through an AI agent called an ancilla ("female slave" in Latin), and the term is used for all AI agents, of all levels of power. Nearly all speak with female voices. This probably answers to the human prejudice in favor of being served by women in most personal matters. The armor cares for its wearer, and can keep a person alive—for not only Forerunners wear such armor—even in vacuum for a time, and even when gravely injured.
This young person, Bornstellar, has defied his family, visited the home planet of humans, and accompanied by two humans, including a re-engineered Florian ("hobbit" in recent scientific literature), goes a-treasure hunting, only to encounter the cryptum (not a crypt, which would hold a corpse, but a suspension chamber to retain an exile in time) of an ancient warrior named the Didact. The Didact kidnaps him and the humans, later guides him through a "Mutation" that eventually converts him to a sort of clone of the Didact, and then leads them all into an adventure that gets them crosswise with the highest Forerunner authority. The book ends with Bornstellar, exhibiting a mixture of First Form types, replacing the Didact, who has been executed. I find it ironic that the most powerful figure in this saga (so far) is a Librarian, and wife of the Didact/Bornstellar. Located for the time being in an intergalactic Ark, the protagonists are now in position for the opening of the second novel, due out in a year or less.
While the author has a compelling writing style, this is less of a page-turner and more of a book to keep you thinking. It bears some resemblance to the work of Olaf Stapledon, who wrote of galaxy-spanning civilizations and star-building and -destroying cultures of future men. While many epic SciFi works and series owe their vision to one writer or to a small collaboration, this is Microsoft at work, and their stable of fantasists. So far, the Halo universe hasn't become the "camel" most committees tend to create. May it remain so.
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