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Book Review: Downbelow Station

C.J. Cherryh
1981
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is a pretty complicated book about the economic and military conflicts surrounding the colonization of Pell’s World – the first habitable planet to be discovered outside our solar system.

In this story, space exploration is financed by The Company, an Earth-based corporation with Earth-centric views of how the natural resources of other planets should be used. The Company maintains their own military Fleet to protect those interests.

For years, missions to other solar systems have been limited because they could only travel so far from Earth, the only resupply center. But when Pell’s World is discovered, everything changes.

The Company builds a space station orbiting Pell and then a station on the surface of the world itself (which becomes known as Downbelow Station). Once they do this, spacefarers no longer have to rely solely on Earth for resupply, and can explore farther and farther out into the galaxy, which allows them to discover even more habitable worlds. And once there is a critical mass of humans living on planets other than Earth, they begin to question whether space exploration should still be entirely about exploiting other planets for Earth’s benefit or whether these other planets deserve to be self-supporting worlds of their own.

The Company doesn’t like this kind of thinking, of course, and it inevitably leads to tension between the Company, its Fleet, the union of non-Earth planets, and the independent merchant ships that fly between them, all of which culminates in a huge battle at Pell.

I have to admit that I didn’t really get into all the clashing ambitions of the various interest groups. The story was okay, but not always exciting enough to keep my attention through 500+ pages.

I also didn’t find many of the characters all that likeable. My favorite character, Emilio, was in Downbelow Station on the surface of Pell and most of the action took place in the space station orbiting the planet, so unfortunately I didn't see too much of him. There were also the Hisa, an intelligent species of animal indigenous to Pell, who are a little like chimpanzees and who are hired and/or exploited as workers by the humans. The Hisa were very nice and gentle but maybe just a little too annoyingly naive.

Cherryh does, however, do a great job constructing a realistic universe on a large scale and vivid settings on a small scale. The station orbiting Pell was well thought-out and well described; I could practically draw a map of it. The environment on the just-barely-habitable planet of Pell was also believable; it’s not a ridiculous Eden. Humans have to wear special breathers and the weather is chilly and dank.

And I think the greatest strength of this book is that it paints a believable picture of humans in the first stages of space colonization. It made total sense to me how the discovery of one habitable planet (and then another, and another) would fundamentally change both commerce and psychology. I could see how people would naturally start to split into those still attached to Earth and those who want to look beyond it.

It was what I imagine the early conditions would be that would lead up to Asimov's Foundation universe. It makes it seem entirely possible that over thousands and thousands of years of exploration, Earth could get left farther and farther behind until it is eventually forgotten. 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede

Bradley Denton

1991

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I’m torn between two reactions to this book. On the one hand, it was funny and, overall, a good read. On the other hand, its boisterous tone sometimes felt slapsticky and forced, and the final climactic confrontation was a bit disappointingly predictable.

I liked the hapless main character, Oliver Vale, and I was moved by his sad backstory, told in flashbacks throughout the novel. Oliver's bad luck started when he was accidentally conceived by his teenage parents on February 3, 1959—the night Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper were all killed in a plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa. Oliver’s father killed himself the next morning when he found out about the crash, and Oliver’s mother began a descent into insanity; she began to believe in aliens and Atlantis and that her son was the reincarnation of Buddy Holly. I sympathized with her, trapped by an unexpected baby at the age of seventeen, even if I didn’t like her very much. Her mental instability reached a sad peak when she, too, killed herself—on February 3, 1984, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the night Buddy was killed.

The book’s narrative starts five years after Oliver’s mother’s death, in 1989. Oliver is in his house in Kansas, watching a John Wayne movie on TV, when the program suddenly switches to a broadcast showing a man who looks very much like Buddy Holly standing on what looks very much like the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter (you can tell it's a moon of Jupiter because Jupiter and its big red spot are hovering in the background). Buddy looks bewildered and is carrying a guitar.

Buddy doesn’t appear to know what else to do, so he starts talking to the air. At one point he says there is a sign hanging on the camera pointed at him that says he should contact an Oliver Vale in Kansas for help.

                                     

It turns out that the Buddy Holly broadcast is preempting programming on all channels all over the entire country. And it goes on and on for hours, with Buddy Holly variously singing songs and talking to the camera and repeating his request for somebody to contact Oliver Vale for help. Eventually Oliver realizes that the disturbance is nationwide, and that everyone will think that he is to blame and will come after him. So he decides to take off for Buddy's grave in Lubbock, Texas, to prove whether or not Buddy is really in fact buried there, or if there is a chance he really is alive. (Oliver hasn’t yet thought about how to prove whether or not Buddy is really on Ganymede, if he turns out not to be in his grave.)

What follows, and takes up most of the rest of the book, is a sometimes funny, sometimes plodding cross-country ride across the plains of Kansas and Oklahoma. It begins on Oliver’s Ariel motorcycle (which may or may not have originally been Buddy Holly’s) and continues on various other modes of transportation as Oliver runs into setbacks. He is chased by a motley collection of pursuers, including his therapist and her boyfriend; a homicidal FCC agent; a hot-headed woman he runs afoul of in a gas station; his irate TV-loving neighbors and their doberman pinscher, Ringo; and numerous followers of preempted and vindictive televangelist Reverend Bill Willard. 

Oliver is also helped out by a few people over the course of his journey, and I liked most of them, especially Boog, a motorcycle salesman; Pete, Oliver’s uncle’s buddy from Vietnam; and Pete’s children. But Ringo was by far my favorite character.

During Oliver’s ride to Lubbock, things get weirder and weirder. For one thing, the FCC determines that the broadcast really is coming from Ganymede. To Oliver, this proves that he is innocent, but to the FCC, it proves that he is something far more dangerous. And after Oliver has Ringo chase him down the highway at 70 miles an hour and chomp off the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle without batting an eye, leaving behind a mechanical tooth (and, later, popping out a robotic eyeball), he realizes that perhaps the dog and its owners aren’t what they seem, and that maybe his mother’s talk about UFOs and aliens might not have been that crazy after all.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Sometimes Denton’s humor came close to a good Vonnegut-like dry wit, but in the end he always veered more toward more obvious jokes than Vonnegut would have done. The rollicking chase that takes up most of the book reminded me of Smokey and the Bandit or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; fun and breathless but maybe a bit over the top for the tone of this novel. About halfway through I began to have a sinking feeling—which turned out to be well-founded—that, like those movies, all of the various travelers traveling at breakneck speed across middle America would inevitably have to meet up at the end in one big Great Reveal scene which would tie everything up in a neat but anticlimactic bow.

Astrophysics Kitteh

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Book Review: Forever Peace

Joe Haldeman
1997

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ ★ - -

SPOILER ALERT

In the preface to Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman explains that it is not a sequel to his earlier novel, The Forever War. But the two books are related to each other, in that they both deal with similar issues of war, and peace, and human beings’ apparently inherent and inescapable violence towards other human beings. 

I didn’t enjoy Forever Peace as much as I did The Forever War. The emotions are not quite as raw and the plot is a bit more goofily over-idealistic. It is also less of a complete whole; the first and second halves of the book are two almost completely separate stories stuck together with the most slender of links.

The first half of Forever Peace—the better half—tells the story of a war between richer and poorer nations, in which the richer nations are able to do most of their fighting by remote control. The U.S. and its allies are at war against the Ngumi, an alliance of various Asian, African, and South American countries. The Ngumi, who generally come from poorer nations, use human beings to do their fighting. For the U.S., the war is primarily fought remotely by “soldierboys,” which are giant heavily-armored humanoid semi-robotic machines.

Each soldierboy is controlled by a “mechanic,” an individual human soldier who, from a chair in a U.S. military base, is “jacked in” to his or her soldierboy’s command matrix through a neural plug at the base of his or her skull. The sensory connection is powerful enough that the mechanics feel what happens to their soldierboys as if they were inside them physically.

The mechanics are used in platoons of ten for rotations of ten days. While platoon members are all jacked together they can see, feel, and think what the others are seeing, feeling, and thinking. This makes for extremely rapid and effective communication but it also means there is basically no privacy, and it also means a lot of deep trauma when one of their soldierboys is wounded or killed in the line of duty.

The main character, Julian Chase, is a sergeant leading one of these mechanic platoons in a remote war in the jungles of Costa Rica. He has been trained and conditioned both physically and mentally to be able to do his job, but the carnage and destruction still get to him; he wages a continual battle with depression and suicidal thoughts. Eventually this reaches a crisis point and Julian has a breakdown. This is where the first story stops and the second (weaker) story takes over.

In addition to being a soldierboy mechanic, Julian is also a physics post-doc at a university in Houston. He’s dating one of his co-professors, Amelia Harding, who is working on a project to create the universe’s largest particle accelerator around the planet Jupiter.

After Julian has his breakdown, he is put on leave from the military and joins Amelia in her work. They do a bunch of calculations and discover, to their chagrin, that when the Jupiter Project is finally finished and turned on, the accelerator will replicate the conditions of the Big Bang and will thereby cause the destruction of the entire universe, starting with our solar system.

Simultaneously, some of their researcher friends find out that if you leave soldierboy mechanics jacked in to each other for two weeks or longer, they become completely empathic and can no longer bring themselves to harm any other person.

The rest of the book becomes a race against time in which Julian, Amelia, and a small group of their friends fight to get the Jupiter Project stopped. Faced with powerful sinister and lethal interests who either don’t believe them or want the project to continue anyway, their plan is to install jacks in everyone on earth’s head and turn them all into involuntary pacifists, starting with the army, before the accelerator can go live.

I always like the clarity of Haldeman’s writing and thinking. I also appreciate the questions Forever Peace raises about why we fight our wars in the first place, and the fairness of a drastically unbalanced battle between the world’s haves and the have-nots. His drawing on his own experiences as a soldier in Vietnam give a hefty weight to his clear desire for peace.

The first half of the book explores these issues with a lot of potential, but the second half seems to lose its way. We exit the jungle battlefield, which is the most interesting part of the book, and enter a world of academic theory and political sniping. The universal jacking plan seems contrived and tenuous, and everyone seems a little too eager to jump right in and implement it. And I’m also not a hundred percent sure I actually would want a world in which everyone on earth was forcibly made into a pacifist.

Book Review: The Gods Themselves

Isaac Asimov

1972

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

One evening, second-rate physicist Frederick Hallam accidentally leaves a vial of Tungsten-186 out on his desk. The next morning, to his and his colleagues’ amazement, they find that the tungsten has been transformed into plutonium.

Plutonium-186 is a theoretically impossible isotope; any created in our universe would be so unstable it would fall apart almost instantly. But Hallam’s sample starts out completely stable, and then begins emitting energy in the form of protons at a steadily increasing rate until it turns completely back into tungsten. And the process is repeatable; when they leave more tungsten out at night, it is also turned into plutonium-186 by the next morning.

Hallam is a poor physicist, but a consummate opportunist. And he is just smart enough to be able to take credit for, and advantage of, his brighter but less commercially-minded colleagues’ insights about his tungsten-plutonium. Within a matter of months, he has used their ideas to parlay his little accident into an enormous, government-funded Electron Pump, providing free, unlimited energy to the world’s population, and earning him accolades and prestige beyond measure.

Of course, most everyone in the world is so glad to have free, unlimited energy that no one really wants to investigate to see if there are any down sides to the Pump. Least of all Hallam himself.

The first thing that Hallam discourages is discussion about how it works. It is not Hallam but one of his co-workers who comes up with the correct answer: the tungsten is being replaced by the inhabitants of a parallel universe in which the laws of physics are different than ours. These “para-men” have somehow been able to open portals into our universe large enough to do the replacement. And they are doing it for themselves, not for us; as our plutonium-186 decays, it pumps electrons into the parallel universe which they can use as energy. The protons we get from them in return are just a fortunate byproduct.

The threatening thing about this to Hallam is that it means that he didn’t actually invent the Electron Pump. The (smarter) parallel-universe people did.

And it takes a disgruntled colleague with a major vendetta against Hallam to discover the other, more serious down side to the Pump. While we use it, he learns, our universe steadily acquires more and more of a positive charge. It makes fusion reactions easier and more likely, speeding up the nuclear reactions in our sun. And eventually, perhaps within a matter of years, it will cause our sun to explode and destroy our solar system, if not our whole arm of the galaxy.

                             

The scientist who figures this out, though, is unable to convince anyone to stop the Pump. Hallam, threatened by any criticism of the “invention” on which he has staked his entire reputation, pushes any nay-sayers to the fringes of the scientific community, discredits their work, and uses his influence to prevent them from getting anything published. And international governments won’t listen to anything that might endanger their supply of free energy. Our desire for immediate comfort trumps our long-term logic, even if there is strong evidence that there will be catastrophic consequences down the road. (This book was written in 1972, before global warming was thought of as much of a problem, but you can draw your own parallels.)

                                               

This book is, in many ways, Asimov at his best. First of all, the premise itself is just terrific. And, while the science behind the Electron Pump is complicated, the clarity of his writing makes it understandable and seemingly plausible. And, as is typical for Asimov, the plot trucks along engagingly even though the story just consists mostly of conversations between the characters and very little actual action.

Asimov creates three very different communities for this book and he makes them all feel tangible and believable. The first is the physics lab that is the setting for the beginning of the book, along with all its realistic internal politics. The second is the parallel universe, which is populated by alien beings who live in partner triads and who eat their sun’s radiation as food, but who also have a compelling human interest story we can relate to. And the third is a rebellious, freedom-loving, technologically curious society on the moon (perhaps a nod to Heinlein), where one scientist goes in a last-ditch effort to stop the Pump.

This book is also, in some ways, unfortunately, Asimov at his worst. Inevitably, he resorts to his usual annoying love pairing between an aging, gruff-but-lovable, highly-educated but convention-flouting male scientist and a young, sassy, beautiful, convention-flouting, tiresome young woman who has never been formally scientifically educated but is nevertheless smart as a whip and has enough curiosity and natural intuitive ability to follow and contribute, muse-like, to the man’s scientific pursuits. She also tends to go around barely clothed most of the time.

Recharging

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