Book Review: Brute Orbits

George Zebrowski
1998
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Brute Orbits is set in the near future, in the middle of the 21st century. Beset by global warming, overpopulation, and rampant criminality, the governments of Earth have come up with a solution to their problems: they capture nearby asteroids, hollow them out, fill them with criminals, and use them as flying prisons.

It seems to be the perfect answer. As each rock is filled with prisoners, it is sent out on a long elliptical orbit timed to return that batch of convicts to Earth at the end of their sentences. The habitats are self-servicing and don’t need wardens, or guards, or maintenance staff, so they are worry-free and much cheaper than the existing supermax penitentiaries.

And if a rock is accidentally sent into an orbit that is longer than it was supposed to be, so that it has no chance of coming back before all its inhabitants are dead, so much the better. And if, among the rapists and murderers and thieves, there are also some political prisoners--insurgents and radicals whose only crime was advocating for alternatives to the governing regime--so much the better.

It is pretty clear that Zebrowski wrote Brute Orbits primarily as a vehicle for expressing his (legitimate) frustration with our current prison system. He was writing during the 1990s, but the problems he illustrates through his book are similar to those we have today. The majority of the book consists of not of plot or character development, but of exposition and backstory, which explain the history of the asteroid capture program, the thinking of the leaders who implemented it, and its failings.

There are a few characters whose narratives we follow loosely here and there. The one we follow most consistently is Yevgeny Tasarov, career criminal, political agitator, and philosopher. He is famous on Earth for masterminding the semi-successful Dannemora prison break, during which he escaped; after the breakout, he lived under a false ID for a while until authorities caught up with him and put him into rock #1. We also follow (very briefly) a couple of small-time crooks on some of the other rocks, and Abebe Chou, a political agitator on rock #3--the first one to allow women. (Chou is raped by a circle of high-minded intellectuals during a blackout, in what must be some kind of horrible statement on intellectualism.)

For the most part, however, the characters are incidental and irrelevant, except insofar as they further Zebrowski’s polemicizing. The themes that Zebrowski keeps coming back to--sometimes repeating in the exact same words, through the mouths or pens of different characters--are these: that ruling aristocracies think that they can perfect society by simply physically removing undesirable elements. That they think that by eliminating the criminals, there will be peace and safety for the perfect citizens remaining. But that it is impossible to separate criminality from humanity; it is inherent to who we are. And that even if you remove the most obvious criminals, more will invent themselves--whether overtly or more discreetly violent.

And, further, by treating criminals with incivility, as if they were less than other humans--such as sending them into unending orbits with no chance to connect to those back home, no chance of parole, and no chance of redemption--society is committing an irredeemable crime against the criminal, and become criminals ourselves. A true justice system, he says, is one where the criminal is tried and sentenced and then allowed to serve that sentence without the system perpetuating additional crimes against them.

Tasarov, the person who comes the closest to being the main character in this novel, is also undoubtedly Zebrowski’s representative in fictional form, since he is preoccupied with the same themes that recur in the exposition. As Tasarov writes in his journal:

“The arrogance of the Earth that had sent them out continued to astonish him. It worked its criminal justice systems with the illusion of clean hands, but they were not even moderately clean hands. The Earth was a mosaic of interlocking corporate societies and extortionist governments, where criminality was in fact the legal way of things. The system in fact created most criminals and then sought to punish them. For most of the human history he knew, social systems were the criminal’s true parents, whelping lawbreakers uncontrollably like the mythical salt mill which could not stop making salt. Certain kinds of criminality could be prevented, and that would eliminate most crime. But he was certain that even a very advanced social system, one that gave its citizens nearly everything they needed, leaving them nothing to covet, might still harbor the creative criminal, one who would undertake special projects simply because they were possible. Could that kind of enterprise be socially engineered out of human beings?

“It had always been clear to him that a sane criminal justice system was possible: one that would try the criminal, assess the prince he must pay, short of death, and strive to commit no crimes of its own against the criminal.”

I happen to think Zebrowski is right on about all of these criticisms. The problem is that it is all done as exposition, not embedded into the plot as it unfolds. The themes and how we’re supposed to feel about them are explicitly explained to us, rather than us being made to learn them or feel them ourselves. It is far too polemical and too didactic to make it a really readable story. And his points are repeated so often, in his own words and in those of his characters’, it reaches the point where even those who most agree with him may start getting a little tired of it.

Gradually, over the decades, Earthbound society does improve in Brute Orbits, mainly because humans hand over their governments to artificial intelligences who do all the planning and make all the tough decisions. Scarcity becomes relatively unknown on Earth, leading to plummeting crime rates.

Eventually, the first prison asteroid makes its way back to the vicinity of Earth, many decades after its promised thirty-year return. Two historians whose job it is to document all of humanity’s history (and seemingly drawn straight from Asimov’s Foundation series) go out to near-Earth space to investigate it. There they find Tasarov’s diary and read about the injustices he and the other criminals experienced.

It hits their consciences hard. “For thousands of years,” Justine the historian says, “we lacked the tools and knowledge to deal with social evils, so in place of tools and knowledge we applied religiously derived exhortations and enforced them as best we could with police forces.” They are so appalled by the asteroid strategy developed by primitive Earth that they decide that, in the name of justice, they must investigate all the other rocks as well.

What they discover is somewhat surprising. Some of the asteroids contained both men and women, which means that, even though the original prisoners are almost entirely long since dead, their descendents live on. And, after all the lectures Zebrowski has given us about how violence will only beget more violence, and how criminality is inherent in humanity, the space-traveling penal colonies that still house living humans have created their own peace out of necessity. What started out as ruthless gladiator arenas have all eventually settled into a curious, sustainable equilibrium of nonviolence.

And, in an ironic sort of fulfillment of the original plan, once they are contacted and given the option to decide their own fate, all of the rocks decide to break permanently from Earth. 

This ending feels abrupt, and maybe a bit naive, and entirely contradictory to the bulk of the rest of the book. But it is at least a lot less depressing than an ending in which they just lived in unremitting violence until their supplies ran out. It could be that Zebrowski was at last trying to give the prisoners some sort of final victory over the crimes committed against them.

Book Review: Brittle Innings

Michael Bishop
1994
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Using a somewhat Lovecraftian scheme, Brittle Innings tells a story within a story within a story. It is the story of a man (a sports reporter) telling us the story of another man (a former pro baseball player) telling him the story of yet a third man (another former pro baseball player…who has a terrible secret).

In the first (and most literally and figuratively parenthetical) of these stories, sports writer Gabe Stewart tracks down Danny Boles, a reclusive but brilliant scout for the Atlanta Braves, to write his life story. Boles agrees to be interviewed, but says he will only talk about his one and only year as a player in the minor leagues. Stewart is skeptical, but says okay.

For most of the rest of the book, Boles then tells the story of his year as a shortstop with the Highbridge Hellbenders, a farm team for the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1943. As he does so, he is able to get out the real story he wants to the world to know: the story of his former friend and teammate, Hank Clerval.

Boles’ own story is about baseball in the dirt-poor, racist and definitely not integrated American South during World War II, and it is the one that (unfortunately) takes up the vast majority of the book. Clerval’s story is much more unique and much more riveting, and (unfortunately) gets much less time. The two stories are told in almost completely separate parallel narratives for quite a while, barely touching until relatively late in the book.

In 1943, Boles is a big-eared, stammering, 17-year-old kid from a farm town in Oklahoma. He is recruited by the Phillies to play shortstop for the Hellbenders, a minor league team in Georgia that is filling out its ranks with high school students and hobbling has-beens now that all able-bodied male adults have gone off to the war.

Boles’ life is a miserable one most of the time, starting with him being raped by a G.I. on the train to Georgia, an incident which renders him completely mute for months afterwards. Once he makes it to Highbridge, Boles is bullied by most of his new teammates as well, who saddle him with the lovely nickname “Dumbo” because of his big ears and because of his muteness. It doesn’t make his social life any easier that he is a scrappy, speedy, base-stealing, great-fielding, good-hitting player who very quickly boots the existing shortstop out of a job.

One of the few players to treat Boles with civility is his roommate, 7-foot-tall infielder Hank “Jumbo” Clerval. Clerval is intimidatingly enormous and has a strangely misshapen body, but is also well-mannered and well-spoken (albeit in an oddly antique way). The fans are afraid of his appearance, but revere him as a local hero because of his home-run hitting power and his vacuum-cleaner-like fielding at first base.

We track the team’s slogging progress over the summer of 1943 as they rise (largely with Boles’ and Clerval’s play) from the basement to the top of the standings. Boles suffers one personal indignity after another off the field, only gradually proving himself to his teammates, the manager, and the fans. The daily sadness of his story is, frankly, pretty painful to get through most of the time.

Meanwhile, as Boles bonds increasingly with Clerval, he starts to notice strange things about him—like that he reads dozens of library books a week, consuming them like a house afire. And that he keeps all the retired game balls, peeling the leather covers off of them and keeping the stripped leathers in a box by his bed. And that the manager occasionally lets Jumbo use his own personal car, during a time of severe wartime gas rationing, to drive to Alabama, and that he takes the baseball covers with him when he goes, and comes back without them. And Boles also witnesses an odd incident where Jumbo is accidentally zapped when the electric lights are turned on before a night game at an away ballpark—but instead of killing him, the shock actually appears to give Jumbo a jolt of new energy.

About halfway through Boles’ agonizingly gritty narrative, the story finally starts to take on some real speed and interest when Boles finds Clerval’s diaries. The contents of the diaries are the third (innermost?) story line in the book, which is by far the most magnetic. Written in Jumbo’s antiquated voice, they reveal that Jumbo has had a very interesting past—a globe-spanning life, from Europe to the Arctic to America—stretching back more decades than would seem possible.

And Boles starts to realize why Clerval has such a misshapen—almost, one might say, patched-together-looking—body; and why his speech seems to come out of a much earlier era; and why electrical shocks seem to revitalize him instead of kill him; and Boles starts to realize that the unassuming, lonely Jumbo might, just might, be the real-life basis for one of the most famous monster stories of all time.

Bishop has done an impressive job of writing Boles’ and Clerval’s intertwining stories in utterly different and yet totally authentic and internally consistent voices. Boles’ writing is rural Oklahoma vernacular, and makes copious use of 1940s-era slang and colorful similes, metaphors, and adjectives. For example:

“A couple of players sniggered. Guys with sense, though, hung on bent tenterhooks and bided their time.” 

“They’d pull eight-hour second shifts and get back to their homes or to McKissic house around midnight, limp as boiled asparagus and almost as pale.” 

“We revved for revenge in the so-called nightcap and shellacked them three to zip in about ninety minutes. We got some nutritious shuteye that night and ambushed the poor saps again on Sunday.” 

Jumbo’s writing, on the other hand, uses the style, vocabulary, and even attitude of an exceedingly well-read and diligently self-educated 19th century gentleman. For example:

“I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.”

“Even had my face shone as comely as Apollo’s, my great size would always speak to the timid or the wary my undeniable potential for inflicting ruin.”

“Turning, he threw the ball in a low arc to a teammate at one congested corner of the ‘diamond.’ This disciplined heave and its skilled reception by a teammate excited the local enthusiasts to even louder approbation.” 

This double-voiced narrative is a true triumph of writing, and Bishop deserves serious kudos for it. The really disappointing thing about this book, though, is that it takes so long to get to its delicious meaty core. Far too much of it is focused on Boles' heartbreaking pursuit of an ultimately hopeless baseball career, and is filled with unrelenting cruelty. It didn't help that I didn’t really like Boles, or his teammates, or the setting, or the sweaty heat, or the idiotic and angry and defensive supporting characters. The hunt for the championship of the Highbenders' little minor league did wake me up a bit, but it wasn’t until a couple hundred pages or so had gone by that Clerval’s story really opened up and things got more exciting.

Because Jumbo’s diary entries are the absolute jewel of this book. They are suspenseful and engrossing, and he comes across as an intelligent, sympathetic, appealing character (or creature) struggling to get by in a world that rejects him. It’s a captivating misunderstood-monster story straight out of the Romantic era. It’s just too bad that Boles’ story sinks it, all but burying it in depressing, dragging peripheral context.

Book Review: Lincoln's Dreams

Connie Willis
1987
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Connie Willis is up to somewhat other than her usual time-travel tricks with this little novel. Or, rather, it is still sort of a time-travel story like many of her best, in that the past impinges on the present and perhaps vice versa, but this one doesn’t use actual time-travel machinery.

As in much of Willis’ work, the main character in Lincoln’s Dreams is always short of sleep, running around breathlessly trying to avert some sort of catastrophe, and obsessing over tiny details that seem trivial at first but turn out later to be critically important. The story is fast paced, funny at times and poignant at others, and filled with appealing, earnest, very human characters and impeccably-researched historical content.

Willis uses the novel-unifying device of starting each chapter with a little nugget of information related to the story. She has done this before, too; in Bellwether, for example, each chapter started with a funny paragraph about some ridiculous historical fad. In Lincoln’s Dreams, each chapter starts with a little anecdote about General Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller, who stuck with Lee throughout the entire Civil War. The vignettes are sweet and colorful, in themselves painting a picture of a tough-as-nails man and a tough-as-nails horse who were perfectly suited and devoted to each other. And the vignettes also turn out to be important to the plot—they are not just decoration. 

In Lincoln’s Dreams, our main character, Jeff Johnston, is a researcher working for a Mr. Broun, a novelist (some would say a “hack” novelist) writing a story set during the American Civil War. Jeff is perpetually haggard from traveling the country investigating the minutiae of Broun’s latest whims, and can’t ever get enough sleep to think straight. 

Jeff’s old college roommate, Richard, is a doctor working in sleep research. He calls Jeff because he has a patient/girlfriend, Annie, who has been having extremely vivid dreams about the Civil War, and she claims that the dreams aren’t actually her dreams, but are someone else’s.

Richard brings Annie to meet Jeff in the hopes that he will be able to prove to her that she’s not actually having the dreams of someone in the Civil War. But, of course, the more Jeff talks to Annie, the more he realizes that she is having the dreams of someone in the Civil War, and that someone is Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

She knows all the right details, like the kind of cat Lee had, and the messages that he exchanged with his troop leaders, and what he said at key moments in the war—none of which she knew about before the dreams.

When Jeff validates Annie’s dreams, Richard freaks out. Annie runs away from Richard to Jeff. Jeff takes Annie to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to keep her safe from Richard and also so he can finish his work on Broun’s galleys, which are of course due yesterday, in peace, and to try to figure out what’s going on with Annie. Annie also becomes interested in the galleys, and begins to help Jeff edit them.

They stay in Fredericksburg for a week, during which time Jeff realizes that the location choice is probably a mistake, because it was the site of a major bloody Civil War battle. Annie’s dreams become more intense, and Jeff stays up all night to calm her when she wakes and to prevent her from hurting herself, so soon both of them are (true to Willis form) worn out and addled from the lack of sleep.

The whole time, Jeff keeps calling in to Broun’s answering machine and getting messages, which are mainly from Broun and Richard. Broun is in California on a research trip and (also true to Willis form) is never there and has always moved on to another destination whenever Jeff tries to get in touch with him. Richard’s messages become more and more angry as he can’t get hold of either Jeff or Annie, and each time he comes up with a new scary diagnosis designed to get Jeff to bring Annie back to D.C. immediately (“she’s on the verge of a psychotic break”).

Jeff works out his own frustrations by yelling back at Richard’s messages in cathartic (and funny) one-way conversations. Jeff is furious with Richard for taking advantage of Annie—giving her powerful drugs and sleeping with her, a patient—and he expresses his rage in a way I’ve never seen Willis allow her characters to do before. Usually they are much more restrained and non-confrontational.

Annie’s dreams are confusing jumbles of past and present, with present-day people representing past people (for example, her boyfriend Richard always represents General Longstreet), but Annie can always make sense of it, and with Jeff’s knowledge of Civil War history, they confirm together that each new dream is, in fact, something that really happened to Lee. Jeff tries to figure out if the drugs Richard gave her in treatment caused them or affected them; whether they’re in chronological order; why she’s having them. Each time he thinks he has a handle on them, it seems to be frustratingly debunked.

Annie’s theory is that she’s having the dreams to help Lee atone: to assuage the nightmares he must have had about all the young men he sent to their deaths. But the more time goes on, the more Jeff starts to suspect that the dreams might be something more sinister, and that he and Annie might be in a race against time to figure out the puzzle before disastrous consequences result.

One of the great things about Willis’ best writing is that she creates parallels in every part of her story—and Lincoln’s Dreams is filled with parallels between the past, the present, and Broun’s book. Over time, Annie’s wrists begin to hurt her, just like Lee’s did after he broke one and strained the other at a key moment in the war. And at one point in Broun’s galleys a woman is reading, bent over her book so that Broun’s main character can see the part in her hair, when he realizes that he loves her. While reading this scene, Annie is bent over reading the galleys, and Jeff can see the part in her hair, when he realizes that he loves her. 

Lincoln’s Dreams is arguably less of a sci-fi novel and more of a bittersweet romantic tragedy, which may be why I wasn’t as drawn to it as I have been to many of her other books. But it is still an extremely well-crafted, endearing story with a ton of interesting historical color. It is also impressive in its very subtlety; Willis was able to create a science fiction story without resorting to actual time travel or space travel or any other concrete devices. And it’s particularly touching (in a way only Willis can pull off) to find out at the end the role that Jeff played throughout Annie’s dreams—a role that should have been obvious all along.

Book Review: Market Forces

Richard Morgan
2004
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Market Forces is set in 2049, in a grim future where unfettered capitalism rules the world. The few international regulators and overseers that do still exist have barely any power to check corporate behavior. It is a neoliberal’s dream—and a barbaric nightmare for the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants.

The icky world and the unscrupulous characters Morgan has created are also so repellent that much of the time it is difficult to keep turning the pages. No one is likable. Every interaction, every conversation is a competitive power play; everybody is always angling for some kind of advantage. It’s inhuman and depressing.

In this novel, corporations based in the developed world (which in this book includes primarily the U.S., Britain, and Japan) have taken over the foreign policy role formerly played by governments, with a free-market twist: any semblance of diplomacy or lip service to human rights is gone, and corporations are free to pursue “investments” in conflicts in the developing world in a completely bold-faced, profit-driven way. They provide capital support in the form of arms and surveillance technology to rebels and dictators alike—whichever side they think will bring them the greatest ROI. Whenever they feel they are not getting a good deal, they switch horses; their recipients’ political stances are irrelevant.

The CIA, too, has dropped all pretense of objectivity and has turned itself into Langley Contracting, a fee-for-service military contractor, for hire by anyone. (They are also unabashedly known as “the premiere distributors of illicit narcotics in the Americas.”)

The result of all of this is an exaggeratedly unequal world. The rich, developed countries call all the shots, while the developing countries scrabble for whatever deals they can get, usually brutally repressing their own people to appear to be the safest gamble possible.

And even within the developed world, populations are divided between tiny groups of lavishly-paid executive elites living in gated and armored enclaves, and the bulk of the populace living in the “zones:” crime-ridden, education- and health-care-free tenement districts where life is short, brutal, and hopeless.

And the violence inherent in the system inevitably touches all classes one way or another. Even the executives and partners at the wealthy firms all earn their rarified positions through ruthless driving competitions to the death. If you want a promotion, you file a challenge against someone whose job you want (and that you are qualified to have), and, with luck, you pulverize them on the highway or drive them off a cliff—in front of an ever-present media audience, of course—and take their job. Competitive battles for lucrative contracts between corporations are decided the same way.

These road-warrior battles are waged by the toughest of the tough corporate gladiator-drivers. These guys live the high life, with enormous salaries and bonuses, beautiful houses, and women at the ready. But they also live knowing that they may have to defend their lives from challengers at a moment’s notice. (It’s a little bit ridiculous that these guys would be good both at lethal driving and savvy investment management, but that’s how Morgan has set it up.)

Market Forces’ main character, Chris Faulkner, is one of these gladiators. At the start of the book he has just defeated a couple key opponents in gruesome road battles, and as a result has just been hired away from his previous company to the most ruthless, most high-flying firm of them all, a London firm called Shorn Investments. Shorn assigns him a key position in their “Conflict Investments” department. His co-workers are the hardest of the hard-hearted: his frenemy peers Mike Bryant and Nick Makin; his backstabbing boss, Louise Hewitt, and the sociopathic senior partner, Jack Notley. It would be hard to imagine a more unappealing group of supporting characters.

The only thing that keeps Chris from being a full-on cold-blooded killer is his wife Carla. She loves him intensely. She is his mechanic, and makes sure his car is armored to the teeth to try to keep him alive. But she also is the daughter of passionate left-wing human rights activists, hates everything Shorn Investments stands for, and lets Chris know it.

The thing is, Chris is torn. A very large part of him loves the money, the security, the glamor, and the power that come with his job. And yes, often, he has to admit, the thrill of the kill. But something deep inside him is simultaneously repelled by the bloodshed and the cruelty. It is what makes him refuse to carry his company-issued pistol and what makes him hesitate, every time, before actually killing one of his opponents. And Carla tries to reinforce that part of his conscience every time she can.

But Chris gets pulled farther and farther into Shorn’s hard-drinking, hard-drugging, legalized-murdering, porn-star-love-affair-having corporate culture. The world Morgan presents is violent, whiskey-ridden, and sometimes gets so disgusting it is often hard to turn the pages. And the world drives more and more of a wedge between Chris and Carla.

Chris’s rage escalates and he eventually finds himself almost uncontrollably beating a series of street hoodlums, wife beaters, and corporate clients to bloody pulps. With every kill, he receives more accolades from his firm, the media, and female hangers-on… and more of his soul is destroyed. Any chance he has for a low-key, ethical life starts falling to pieces, and the book becomes a close-up view of Chris getting torn apart by the warring desires in his head.

In what is perhaps a last-ditch subconscious effort to save his own soul, Chris agrees to help his co-worker Mike Bryant with a situation in Colombia where Shorn’s current investment, a brutal tinpot dictator named Echevarria, is turning out to be far more trouble than he is worth. Chris’s advice is to switch Shorn’s support to Echevarria’s opponent, an inspiring revolutionary named Barranco who models himself after Che Guevara. And Chris finds himself being swayed by Barranco, liking him, genuinely wanting him to succeed. Barranco really is a smarter business decision, which is how Chris justifies it to Bryant, but truly believing in a populist movement is a terribly risky thing in his job.

And, in time, Chris finds out that someone in his own corporation has it in for him and is going to take advantage of his many weaknesses and mess-ups to wreck him unless he can stop them. It finally (blessedly) all comes to a head (and an end) in one final road battle to the death.

The frustrating thing is that throughout the whole book you really want to like Chris, in spite of it all. You want him to step away from the foul Shorn Investments life and make up with his wife. You want him to redeem himself. And for an incredibly long time Chris tries to fight it—sort of—by trying to keep to some kind of vague, idealized samurai code. Carla also tries to give him a way out, using her parents’ contacts.

But he backslides one too many times, and eventually Carla gives up on him. And, eventually, you have to, too. You have this depressing feeling that the pull of absolute power is going to get him in the end (as it does). He is trapped. The more violent he becomes, the more there doesn’t seem to be any solution but more violence.

And Morgan constantly reminds us, through snarky incidents and commentary from supporting characters, that this is the way the game is played in real life, too. As one of his co-workers reminds Chris when he has a tidbit of remorse after a kill, “a practicing free market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly.”

And, as the senior partner in his firm explains when Chris shows signs of believing in the hope offered by Barranco:

“Do you really think we can afford to have the developing world develop? You think we could have survived the rise of a modern, articulated Chinese superpower twenty years ago? You think we could manage an Africa full of countries run by intelligent, uncorrupted democrats? Or a Latin America run by men like Barranco? Just imagine it for a moment. Whole populations getting educated, and healthy, and secure, and aspirational. Women's rights, for Christ's sake. We can't afford these things to happen, Chris. Who's going to soak up our subsidized food surplus for us? Who's going to make our shoes and shirts? Who's going to supply us with cheap labor and cheap raw materials? Who's going to store our nuclear waste, balance out our CO2 misdemeanors? Who's going to buy our arms?” 

So that’s really heartening.

The book seems to end with Chris’s assimilation into the world of violence and addictive indulgences and unfettered greed. But I like to think that Morgan left open the possibility that Chris might actually be a Trojan horse: that Chris surrenders himself to the lifestyle, but that he will use his position to bring more money and power to Barranco, and leaders like him, so that they may succeed in their corners of the world. That Chris will have sacrificed his own soul so that those with stronger wills can have a shot at winning in the end.

It’s a troubling book, to say the least, but if I rationalize the ending that way, it doesn’t eat at me quite so much.

Book Review: Ancient Shores

Jack McDevitt
1996
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I picked McDevitt’s Ancient Shores to read on a long flight because I loved his Alex Benedict novels Polaris and Seeker, and I thought any book by him had a good chance of being another fun page-turner.

The idea behind Ancient Shores was great. But its execution wasn’t nearly of the caliber of the other two books. This is one of McDevitt’s earliest full-length novels, and it seems that at the time he wrote it he hadn’t yet fully developed his nice snappy style or learned how to create solid, charismatic characters. It’s a bit sad, because with such a great premise, there’s so much he could have done with it.

The first half of the novel is the better half by far. Suspense and anticipation build naturally and effectively, with a good deal of humor, and it is mostly free from the lack of authenticity, slow plotting, and character stiffness that beset the second half.

The story starts in remote northeastern North Dakota, on a farm right on the Canadian border. Farmer (and amateur pilot) Tom Lasker is working his wheat field and discovers a complete sailboat—a ketch—buried in the ground. With help from neighbors, he digs the whole thing up and puts it in his front yard.

The fact that a fairly large boat was entirely buried in his wheat field is odd enough, in and of itself. Tom and Ginny Lasker have been farming this particular land for decades, neither of them buried it, and neither of them have any idea how anyone else could have done it without either of them noticing. 

What is odder is that the boat looks entirely new. Nothing seems to stick to the sails, or the boat itself. Nothing can damage it. Even sitting out in the weather, it doesn’t get wet or dirty. And there is writing on it where instructions and labels should be, but the writing is in incomprehensible symbols that none of the linguists at any of the nearby universities can identify. And then, one night while Tom is out of town, Ginny notices that the boat has running lights: eerie green glowy lights that go on when it gets dark.

Ginny calls their friend Max (also a pilot) to take a look, because she’s spooked out by the boat lights. Max, in turn, is spooked out by the whole boat. He sends a sample of the sail fabric to be tested at Moorhead State. April Cannon, the chemist who tests it, says that the sail material is nothing she’s ever seen before: an indestructible substance with an atomic number so high it shouldn’t exist—or at least should be highly radioactive (which it is not). 

April is the first person to suspect where the boat is really from. Her hypothesis—as crazy as it sounds—is that the boat isn’t new, but is rather thousands of years old, and that it was buried in the Laskers’ wheat field because it was abandoned there by its previous owners during the last ice age, at a time when North Dakota was at the bottom of a giant prehistoric inland sea called Lake Agassiz.

Max believes her. The two of them hire a ground-radar team to search the surrounding area for other artifacts. And they find a whole building, buried on Sioux reservation land, on what would have been the shore of a deep-water harbor on the eastern shore of Lake Agassiz. The building appears to be a port, and is made out of the same indestructible material as the boat. 

Up to this point, about halfway into the book, the story is relatively fun. The plot unfolds in a slow, steady, and pleasingly homespun way. Pages turn with somewhat gliding speed. But after the discovery of the prehistoric port, the narrative starts to get increasingly scattered and clunky. 

Max and April strike a deal with the Sioux who own the land where the port is. The Sioux let them bring in a troupe of student volunteers to dig it up, and provide a security force to protect it from the various nuts and UFO fans and generally curious people who have started to show up to see it.

Eventually, Max and April’s team finds a way inside the building. There they discover a set of controls that can transport them to a variety of beautiful, spectacular, and occasionally lethal locations around the galaxy. 

Meanwhile, everyone in the wider U.S. population starts to freak out. Scientists and artists and explorers come in droves begging to go through the portal. Deranged people try to destroy it. Local businessmen want to use it to their own financial advantage—as do the local tax collectors.

A large number of individual freak outs are described in inserts and side narratives that are disjointed, disruptive to the main plot line, and not very interesting. The press releases, FBI memos, on-screen field reporters, and official broadcast announcements all sound too conversational and informal, and, to be honest, a little dorky. 

But by far the part of the novel that rings the most hollow is what happens to world economics as a result of the discovery of the boat and port. McDevitt’s take is that when all businesses—from local retailers to global corporations—get wind first of the sail fabric of Tom Lasker’s buried boat, and then the portal to other planets, their reaction is complete and total panic. They are all convinced that they will go out of business when the technologies behind the sail fabric and the transport controls become generally available. 

Markets tank. CEOs lobby politicians aggressively to the point where the otherwise calm, pragmatic, Trumanesque U.S. president becomes convinced that the port must be blown to smithereens. And even the United Nations eventually comes calling, telling the Sioux they have no choice but to give up control of their land to the international body to preserve the economic stability of the entire world. 

Which is all a bit ridiculous. First of all, the president—at least not the theoretically pragmatic one in this book—wouldn’t bomb an Indian reservation, including killing potentially hundreds of innocent U.S. civilians, just because a few textile and transportation companies are worried they’ll go out of business. 

And, more importantly, for every corporation that sees doom and gloom in the event of a major technological breakthrough, I guarantee you there will be twice as many entrepreneurs who see potential for huge profit in it. Yes, major technological advancements have the potential to make some businesses go out of business. But others can prosper immensely. I doubt any sane national leader would  have actively tried to prevent the development of the internal combustion engine, no matter how powerful the horse-and-buggy lobby. 

Anyway, it all culminates in a heroic Standing-Rock-type stand-off at the port site between the Indians and the U.S. Marshalls. McDevitt does inject a little excitement, and almost rescues the ending, by having Max fly Tom Lasker’s antique World-War-II-era fighter plane into the fray. But he ruins the finale with a silly, fawning, deus ex machina stunt in which a small group of eminent real-life astronauts, authors, and scientists come in at the last minute to risk their lives to save the portal.

Book Review: Trumps of Doom

Roger Zelazny
1985
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Trumps of Doom is the sixth novel in Zelazny’s ten-novel Chronicles of Amber series, and it is the first novel in the second five-novel sub-saga of that series. So it’s really not a stand-alone book; you have to have read the first five novels to make heads or tails of it, and you have to read this one before being able to make heads or tails of any of the subsequent books. Zelazny is no fly-by-night author.

In spite of the fact that it comes smack in the middle of the Chronicles, Trumps starts out as if it is a whole separate story, unrelated to anything Amberific. The main character is different; it has a different tone, almost like a murder mystery; and—at least at first—there are no trumps, no mythic creatures, and no psychedelic hellrides.

The main character of Trumps of Doom is “Merle Corey.” To all appearances, “Merle” is just an everyday guy on contemporary Earth. When the book opens, it is the day he has quit his job of eight years to do some “wandering.”

It is also a day when he also feels certain that someone will try to kill him. Because it is April 30, and someone has tried to kill him (unsuccessfully, of course) on April 30 for each of the past seven years.

Before he heads out of town, he has drinks with Luke, one of his former coworkers, who is convinced that Merle has been working on a special secret new product idea outside of work, and he wants in on it. In spite of all Luke’s pumping, Merle denies any knowledge of such a thing. Luke then suggests to Merle that he might want to say goodbye to his old girlfriend, Julia, too—and then slips in, oddly, that Julia has become involved with some weird people and may be “in trouble.”

Merle goes to Julia’s building and finds her dead on the floor of her apartment. And then Merle is attacked by the beast that killed her: an outsize, three-toed, wolf-dog monster. This is the first clue we have that we’re not really dealing with an everyday Earth murder mystery.

Merle kills the wolf-dog and then searches Julia’s apartment for clues, only to find a pack of trumps. He pockets the pack and goes to see her current boyfriend, who tells Merle that Julia had recently joined a sort of cult. This cult is apparently into dark magic and is led by a guru of sorts, a painter named Melman, who starts to sound suspiciously like another magic painter we know.

At this point, Merle realizes he probably has started this whole thing, and flashes back to a time when he showed Julie around Amber. For Merle is, of course, not an ordinary human, but is actually Merlin, the son of Corwin of Amber and Dara of Chaos. He took Julia on a trippy trip around Amber in a fit of romance, and, after that, she was perfectly aware that magic was real, and went in search of somebody who could put her in touch with it again.

Merlin goes to see Melman to find out who killed Julia (and who likely wants him dead as well). And, of course, Melman tries to kill Merlin by pulling him into swirling Chaos, and Merlin has to kill Melman in self-defense before he can find anything out. At this point we go into full-blown Zelazny mode, with a scorpion woman coming in from Chaos to try to disable Merlin with a paralyzing sting; she almost succeeds, but he escapes through a trump of a Shadowland sphinx. After beating the sphinx at its riddle game, he runs through a dreamscape of trees, flowers, and streams back to Earth.

Troubled and annoyed, he tracks down Luke again. They dance around for a while, pretending they’re talking about normal non-magical Earth stuff, but finally they drop the pretense and Luke describes a crazy evening with Julia and Melman, in which Melman conjured monsters out of nothing. They are then shot at by somebody; Luke kills the shooter, but is then possessed by something and tries to kill Merlin himself, and Merlin has to escape again.

Merlin really would like to consult with his father, but Corwin went missing after the great “Patternfall Battle” at the end of the previous book, and nobody knows where he is.

So, to get his head on straight, Merlin goes to see someone he trusts—Corwin’s old friend and neighbor in upstate New York, Bill Roth. (At this point, because of his connections, Bill is now not only a country lawyer on Earth, but also the Counsel to the Courts of Amber.) They have a good time; Merlin amuses Bill (and us) by pulling cigars and cold beers out of Shadow for both of them, and Bill tells him everything he knows about Corwin, including some funny reminiscences about digging through his old compost pile with a fine tooth comb for some fancy jewel.

Merlin reveals to Bill that, as a child of royalty of both Amber and the Courts of Chaos, he has some advantages that the regular Princes and Princesses of Amber may not have. First, he has sets of trumps from both kingdoms. And he has also walked both the Pattern and the Logrus, the Pattern’s equivalent in Chaos. Theoretically you can’t keep both patterns in your head at the same time without going crazy, but apparently that doesn’t apply to Merlin.

At this point, they answer an emergency trump call from King Random of Amber. Someone has been taking pot-shots at princes and has killed Merlin’s uncle Caine. Everyone is wondering if it is yet another internal family vendetta—after we thought that had all been resolved!

Thinking it may help the king, Merlin shows him the special secret project he actually has been working on outside of work. He calls it a “Ghostwheel,” and it is a sort of computer that monitors all activity in the Shadowlands. It can be accessed by remote terminals, and can be used to observe or to conjure up storms and other forms of energy from anywhere, to anywhere in Shadow.

Random is appalled and tells Merlin to shut it off. But when Merlin then tries to approach his Ghostwheel, which has been running for months on its own, he is attacked by a crazy assortment of phenomena: nasty purple and red beasts, a living prison made out of giant coral-like crystals, an earth-shattering earthquake. The whole time, he hears voices warning him to go back. What has happened is that the Ghostwheel has become sentient; it doesn’t want to kill its creator, but it doesn’t want to be shut down, either.

Just as Merlin is just about to reach the Ghostwheel, who should appear again but… his old coworker Luke. For Luke is actually his cousin Rinaldo, and he’s the one with a vendetta against the royal family of Amber, because Caine killed Rinaldo’s father. Luke is hoping the Ghostwheel will be the weapon he needs to destroy all of them. He is unable to get the Ghostwheel himself, fortunately, but he imprisons Merlin in a cave nearby, and Trumps of Doom ends somewhat anticlimactically with Merlin pacing and pacing around in his cell.

It’s no wonder Trumps of Doom is the one in this series that won the Locus award. It is a more solid and consistent story, with a tightly crafted plot, and better pacing and characters and action than the other five so far.

And, for all that, it is just as beautiful and imaginative and totally out of left field as any of Zelazny’s other work, and contains plenty of the trademark synesthetic imagery that makes Zelazny’s work into art. Here is just one small portion of Merlin’s journey to the heart of the Ghostwheel:

    Three days in as many heartbeats…I breathe the air spicy…Swirl the fires, descend to purple earth…Prism in the sky…I race the course of a glowing river across a field of fungus the color of blood, spongy…Spores that turn to jewels, fall like bullets…
    Night on a plain of brass, footfalls echoing to eternity…Knobbed machinelike plants clanking, metal flowers retracting back to metal stalks, stalks to consoles…Clank, clank, sigh…Echoes only, at my back?
    I spin once.
    Was that a dark figure ducking behind a windmill tree? Or only the dance of shadows in my shadow-shifting eyes?
    Forward. Through glass and sandpaper, orange ice, landscape of pale flesh…
(p. 683)

In spite of the fact that the major battle for the survival of Amber happened in the last book, The Courts of Chaos, to me it also feels like this one is the novel where every major piece of the previous five actually comes to fruition. It is the culmination of everything we have learned about so far: Amber and Chaos, the royal families of both, the Shadowlands, the trumps. I might even venture to guess that this is the one Zelazny may have thought of writing first, and then wrote the others to set this one up.

Book Review: The Many-Colored Land

Julian May
1981
Awards: Locus (Science Fiction)
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Many-Colored Land opens with the spectacular crash-landing of an alien spaceship carrying alien colonists to a prehistoric Earth. The passengers escape in pods that bring them safely to the ground while their ship is smashed to bits.

The scene is riveting. But for a long time yet we won’t know what it means, which turns out to be a bit frustrating. Because the next thing that happens is that we fast-forward into our near future, to a time when Earth is part of a Foundation-like set of colonized planets and moons, and has tolerably civil relations with several alien races.

It is also a future in which a French scientist, Théo Guderian, has invented a time portal. The portal is a huge scientific breakthrough, of course, but there is a catch: it only goes one way. Once you go through, you can’t come back.

This would seem to be an insurmountable down side. Especially when you also find out that his portal goes to only one place and time: France in the Pliocene Epoch. In the Pliocene, Europe was closer to the equator and much hotter than it is now, covered with lush jungle, and populated by man-eating sabretooth cats, giant rhinos, and our early ramapithecine ancestors.

But for many hopeless and desperate people, the portal seems like the best option short of suicide. After Théo dies, in response to overwhelming demand, his widow Angélique starts to let people go through the portal in very small batches, after a rigorous screening and preparation process. And after she herself goes through the portal, an oversight committee continues her work.

Over the next hundred or so pages we then meet a series of eight people, from various parts of Earth and its outlying colonies, who are all at the ends of their ropes for one reason or another. All of them have decided to leave their current lives for whatever awaits them beyond the portal—popularly known as Exile.

These people include a profit-driven, reckless cargo ship captain alienated from his family; a Canadian ring-hockey champion shunned by her teammates; a nun questioning her faith and her purpose; an anthropologist who has just lost his wife of decades; an impish criminal; a heartsick man whose beloved went through the portal a while before; a telepath who lost her abilities in an accident; and an anger-prone Scandinavian who has proven himself too violent to last long in any Earthly job.

It takes a long time to meet all these people, and they are introduced without much sense of why they’re important or what their relationship is to each other. It was interesting for a while, but eventually I started getting fidgety and bored with all of the backstory.

Finally, though, the book moves to the next stage and the action starts. All eight of the people we’ve met go through the portal together…and run smack into the clutches of the aliens who crash-landed in the opening scene.

Because, as it turns out, there is already a society on the Pliocene side of the portal: a society of ruthlessly tyrannical aliens. These aliens call themselves the Tanu. Every time a new group of humans arrives, the Tanu capture them, confiscate their weapons and tools, evaluate their abilities, and slam a mind-controlling metal torc around their necks to ensure their obedience.

The torcs amplify the aliens’ telepathic abilities, enabling them to control humans (and our ramapithecine relatives) with psychological punishments and rewards. There are three tiers of torcs: iron, for low-level people the aliens just want to control like automatons; silver, for somewhat useful middle-manager-type humans who need to retain some level of initiative; and gold, for a privileged few who have particularly valuable skills and who proven their loyalty, but who still need to be kept under the threat of punishment or death just in case they stray. The golden torcs also have the ability to enhance telepathic abilities for those humans who have them naturally.

This psychological enslavement might actually not be worth fighting against most of the time—since many of the humans lead relatively pain-free lives and most are provided with free food and shelter—if it wasn’t for the fact that the aliens are also forcing the female humans to be incubators for their alien children. When they got to Earth the Tanu found that they were sterile, so they use the women as surrogate mothers against their will. So this sets up a nicely appalling reason for all but the most self-interested humans to unite and rebel.

After the eight humans we have been following are snatched by the Tanu they are provided with appropriate torcs, split into two groups of four, and sent off to two separate cities with many other captives. For the rest of The Many-Colored Land we mainly follow only one of the groups (the other group is the focus of the sequel, The Golden Torc).

Our primary group includes the cargo ship captain, the nun, the anthropologist, and the ring-hockey champion. As they are being transported, they plot and execute a courageous, creative escape using keen observation of the Tanu’s weaknesses, and what few tools and abilities are left to them. They break away, only to be faced with a back-breaking (and arm-breaking) slog through the Pliocene jungle to a safer location.

After they have been on the run for a while, they run into a band of free, underground humans, and are convinced to change their goals from simply escaping to defeating the Tanu and freeing all enslaved humans. And they also encounter face to face for the first time the dreaded, mind-warping Firvulag, the lower-status mutant kin of the Tanu, who might be, just possibly, more aligned with the humans’ goals than they think at first.

Humans and Firvulag embark on a daring plan to acquire the weaponry and allies that may enable them to defeat the seemingly undefeatable Tanu. The build up to the confrontation is suspenseful and nerve-wracking in the best way; it is complex and hard, but if it all works, they might—just might!—be able to save humanity.

The whole thing culminates in a satisfying onslaught on one of the largest Tanu cities. The climactic battle is impressively well done. Wars in novels too often end up being either overdramatic or incomprehensible or both, with vague micro-fights and ill-defined macro strategy, and often ridiculously magical reprieves from defeat. But May’s attack on the city has none of these weaknesses; he paints a very clear picture of the execution of the overall strategy (so you know exactly why each person is participating in the way they are), and at the same time he spices the fighting up with exciting details of individual bravery and creativity. I particularly liked the scene when a group of humans taught their Firvulag allies how to fight a mounted opponent, and the molten destruction of the barium reserves used in torc-making.

All in all, this novel tells a unique, exciting story. May has an easy-to-follow, almost Ursula-LeGuin-like, psychologically-oriented, deceptively calm style of writing. And he has clearly carefully structured his plot at all levels.

But the book did give me a number of stumbling blocks to get over. One was, of course, the slow start. Another was that the periodic deliriously rapt descriptions of French goose liver pate and fine burgundy wines were more of a turn-off for me than the turn-on they clearly were for May.

And, most importantly, I kept being bothered by the potential for paradoxes and otherwise screwing up the time continuum. Isn’t it potentially endangering the course of evolution to send cuttings of modern plants and pregnant sheep and dogs through the portal? Not to mention the interbreeding of humans, ramapithecines, and Tanu? Can we really rely on the natural preservation of the timeline to prevent all this from changing Earth’s future (our present)? And the biggest question of all is, of course, what happens six million years from now if the Tanu still exist on Earth? And, if they are not there, how could they all possibly have been eradicated?

I guess that since this is just the first installment of May’s four-volume Saga of Pliocene Exile, I am probably going to have to read the sequel to find out.

Book Review: Beyond Apollo

Barry N. Malzberg
1972
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Do not expect a tidy, traditional science fiction novel when reading Beyond Apollo.

For one thing, it is a metafiction. Which is, as the study questions explain at the end of the 2015 paperback edition, “a narrative about narratives that is conscious of itself as a narrative.” It is a novel about a man—our main character—who is writing notes in preparation for writing a novel about a traumatic event that happened to him. And, since our main character is insane (at least at the time he is writing about writing his novel), this leads to quite a bit of surreal twisting of points of reference.

Beyond Apollo is also a story of mental exploration, rather than a story about concrete events. It is ostensibly about the death of another man, but the circumstances surrounding the other man’s death are only described after the fact by our main character, who is either this other man’s murderer or the only witness to his suicide. And our main character’s descriptions are so schizophrenic it makes you question which parts of his story are real—or if any of it is.

Our main character is Harry M. Evans, an astronaut in the early 21st century, who is the co-pilot on the first manned mission to Venus. At some point during the voyage, Harry and the Captain appear to have both gone insane. The Captain eventually ended up somehow getting into the toilet disposal module and then being ejected into space with the refuse, headed straight for the sun. It is unclear if the Captain ejected himself or if Harry did it, and, if the latter, whether Harry did it in a murderous state himself, or in self-defense against a murderous Captain.

After the Captain was ejected (or ejected himself), Harry was able to pilot the capsule back to Earth by himself, alone, and is now being held in a mental institution while the therapists try to get him to tell them what happened. They are growing increasingly frustrated because Harry tells them a wildly different version of events each time.

During his stay in the institution, Harry is taking notes and planning to write a novel about his voyage to Venus. He keeps saying in his notes—which make up many of the chapters—that once his novel is complete, it will set the record completely straight. But after so many tales, you don’t really believe it.

Some of the chapters are written in the first person, as if Harry is telling us his memories from the capsule. Some are written in the third person, as if he is telling a fiction story about some other astronaut. Some chapters are about the asylum and the experiences he is having there; some are about the voyage; and some are flashbacks to the weeks just before the voyage, when he and the Captain were going through training and still (relatively) sane (although it becomes clear that the seeds for insanity were clearly planted in both of them before they even stepped into their ship). It all gives the novel a jumbled, disjointed feeling, paralleling what is going on in Harry’s brain.

There are definitely parts of the novel that are enjoyable. The alternate versions of the Captain’s death, as told by Harry to his therapist, are usually the best parts. Malzberg also write some funny “histories” of the solar system (which usually present the solar system as coming into being at some point in the 20th century) sprinkled throughout the book. And when he is at his best, Malzberg has a cynical, absurdist sense of humor along the lines of his chronological compatriots Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. For example, at one point during their mission training, the Captain tells Harry that he has discovered that their charted course will cause the ship to miss the orbit of Venus and head directly into the sun. But he is not going to tell the technicians, because “there’s no point in making complications for them.”

For the most part, however, the book feels like frustratingly pointless, overly clever free association at the expense of the reader’s mental energy. The book sets out tantalizing mysteries—both the Captain’s murder and allusions to a similar Mars mission disaster—but never really tells us what happened in either one. Nothing ever really changes or resolves throughout the storyline; we are told one kooky version of the Captain’s death after another, and we live through flashbacks in Harry’s life that do provide us with clues as to why he might have gone mad in such a crazy-making environment, but neither he nor the plot ever really change or develop from beginning to end.

All of this would be perfectly okay if the writing was rivetingly descriptive, or funny, or artful… or if the characters were likeable, or clever, or in the least bit appealing. But unfortunately it is not, and they are not. It’s all about what is going on in Harry’s mind, and we find that it’s draining to be hitched to the mind of a psychotic.

I also found it a bit grade-schoolish that Harry (or perhaps Malzberg) seemed obsessed with the effects of various stimuli on his genitalia. We constantly had to hear how heat, cold, G-forces, fear, anger, or desire were affecting Harry’s private parts. And, in a similar vein, there are what seemed like dozens of flashback scenes of depressing, unromantic, unsexy sex between Harry and his wife, which his wife has absolutely no interest in or response to. Each incident is completely non-sensual and impersonal, with her just waiting him out. She often keeps up a running commentary the whole time about how he needs to quit the space program, and he tries to ignore her. It’s pretty repellent.

Harry obsesses about games and puzzles—crosswords, cryptograms, chess problems, anagrams, bridge hands—in an effort to find the code, the clue, the combination of logic that will help him regain his sanity. None of them work, of course, and Malzberg has Harry jump from one to another type of puzzle haphazardly, so they end up seeming just like fun games that the writer wanted to play with for a time, rather than anything meaningful to the story line.

The whole book, in fact, feels very much like a mental exercise for the benefit of the writer. And it is perhaps an exercise that is most enjoyed by other writers, who understand and appreciate the games Malzberg is playing, rather than the science fiction reader who is probably just in it for a fun story.

Beyond Apollo was written in the early 1970s, at a time when dramatic scientific discoveries were being made in outer space in real life. According to author James Reich, who wrote the introduction to the 2015 paperback edition, many writers of the time felt that real scientific discovery was killing traditional science fiction. Once we found out that Venus was utterly uninhabitable, for example, it made it impossible and pointless to write an exciting novel about discovering life on Venus. The only solution, Malzberg and other like-minded authors felt, was to turn inwards, and to write stories about adventures of the mind, rather than the physical world.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this theory is a complete cop-out. There definitely are good novels from this era that are largely journeys of the mind (like much of Roger Zelazny’s work, or Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus). Some of these good novels are even about a similar sort of post-traumatic-space-journey therapeutic recovery, like Pohl’s Gateway.

But I beg to differ with the conclusion that this kind of inner-mind focus is the only way to write science fiction in an age of scientific discovery. Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke are just two stellar examples of how increased scientific knowledge actually can provide even more fodder for beauty and inspiration in science fiction.

And, at its worst, Malzberg’s variety of inner-directed storytelling can all too often descend into self-indulgent noodling. Which is what most of Beyond Apollo felt like to me.

Book Review: The Child Garden

Geoff Ryman
1989
Awards: Campbell, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I don’t really know what the Campbell and Clarke committees were thinking when they gave these awards to this book.

I’ll grant that the premise and some of the scientific and setting details are great potential sci-fi fodder. But actually reading the novel is like being dragged along on someone else’s disorganized, depressing, maudlin trip that you desperately want to sober up from.

~~~~~

The Child Garden starts out well. It is set in a London of the relatively near future. The world lives under a single Marxist-Leninist regime governed by an amorphous body of pure thought called the Consensus. Citizens are “Read” by the Consensus at an early age, and their “Reading” determines where they will live and what their profession will be.

A revolutionary war in the recent past destroyed all electricity, most of the metal, and much of the other advanced technology on Earth. People use candles for light, walk as their main mode of transportation, and use couriers to deliver messages.

The only advanced technology society has left is biotechnology—but that is extremely advanced. Consensus-approved scientists have developed viruses that have not only cured all diseases, but are also used for assimilation and education: the viruses “infect” people with everything they need to know. Nobody needs to learn anything on their own anymore; they now learn everything—history, science, art, specific job skills, morality, happiness—through viruses.

As it turns out, one of the unfortunate side effects of curing all disease—specifically, cancer—is that it destroys something in the human body that had enabled people to live a long time. Now, people only live to be about 30 or 35 at the most. Children, with their brains pumped up by teaching viruses, start acting like adults and working at jobs when they are only 5 or 6, and don’t ever really have a childhood.

The book’s main character, Milena Shibush, is a Czech immigrant who lost her parents very young. She is also somehow physically unable to be Read. Her cells rebel against the viruses, taking them apart before they can teach her what she is supposed to learn. She lives in fear that she’ll be discovered to be Unread by the Consensus. And she is constantly made to feel stupid by smaller children who know more than her, because of their viruses.

The other disadvantage that Milena has is that she is a lesbian, which is not looked on kindly in this book’s society. If the viruses had worked, her lesbian orientation would have been programmed out of her, but of course it was not. So she lives in fear of being found out for that reason, too.

Milena’s Consensus-assigned job is in the theatre. Searching in a warehouse for a costume, she runs into a “polar bear:” a genetically modified woman who is large, furry, and engineered for cold, dangerous jobs in the Antarctic. She and the polar bear, whose name is Rolfa and who is also Unread, fall in love. Rolfa, as it turns out, is a beautiful singer and a brilliant composer. She has secretly set many famous manuscripts to music, including Dante’s Divine Comedy. But no one will listen to them or put them on, because they were composed by a genetically-modified polar bear who hasn’t been Read and whose artistic standards therefore don’t conform to those of the Consensus.

So far, so good, Child Garden. But the book becomes increasingly random and goes rapidly downhill from here on (with, unfortunately, about 250 pages still left to go). So, to try to make an agonizingly long remainder of a story short:
 
Rolfa runs away from her family. Her angry father sends a mind-reading “Snide” investigator after her to find her and Milena. Realizing there is no way for Rolfa to avoid being dragged back to Antarctica with her family, they strike a deal: the Consensus will be allowed to Read Rolfa, as long as they agree to put on Rolfa’s Divine Comedy. The Consensus agrees, and, to boot, will present the Comedy via hologram in the sky all over the world, so the entire planet can see it. 

However, the Reading “cures” Rolfa so she is no longer in love with Milena. Rolfa runs away, leaving Milena heartbroken.

The rest of the book descends into a herky-jerky set of disconnected and seemingly pointless remembrances, flashbacks, and flash-forwards while Milena doggedly goes on preparing to force her production of the Divine Comedy on the entire world, and then after she gets cancer and doggedly prepares to die (which is drawn out over about the last 100 or so interminable pages). 

Milena variously relives: her entanglement with a power-hungry rival holographer who makes her life a living hell for a while; glimpses of her very young childhood with her real mother and father; her friendship with an orphanage caretaker that is cut short simultaneously by a hurricane and the discovery of her lesbian nature; and her unique but caring relationship with the male astronaut who transports her into the upper atmosphere to project the Comedy’s world-wide holographic images and then later carries their baby.

In the end, the cancer kills Milena, but in this she feels victorious: she has brought back cancer so that people can live long, healthy lives, and children can be children again. 

It is all told in a disconnected, free-associational, hazy style, which I think is meant to make us feel like we are in the same dream state as Milena. But it felt instead like a collection of unrelated, haphazard, groundless micro-stories. For the most part, all of the stories have uninteresting plots, dippy characters with little or no character development, little apparent connection to or convergence with the other stories, and no real resolution or meaning in themselves.

~~~~~

As I said, this book definitely had potential. It had the elements of a groundbreaking science fiction novel, with its complex, Marxist-Leninist, Consensus-run dystopia and its highly advanced biotechnology. 

One of my favorite details was that to solve the post-war food crisis, people had been genetically engineered to be able to use rhodopsin in their bodies to photosynthesize food—which made their skin purple. The more they sat in the sun to eat, the more purple they got. I also liked that Ryman developed a way for men to carry babies to term. And viruses as tools of education and assimilation always add a nicely sinister spice.

So it’s sad that the novel ended up being such a loose series of seemingly aimless, ill-defined flashbacks with such low dramatic tension. And, as the story went on, it became more and more preoccupied with death, which I found depressing and hard to read. As she was dying, Milena found solace in the biological evolution of the human race—including a set of people who eventually begin transforming into plants, and one boy who seriously thinks he’s a dog. I think these were supposed to make me feel as much at one with the universe as Milena did, but they only made me feel hopelessness and disconnection.

~~~~~

Before reading this book, I’d just read the first three books of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series—all three of which are filled with Zelazny’s characteristic surrealistic, mind-bending imagery. The Child Garden made me wonder how one author can write such trippy scenes and also make them so vivid and riveting, while another can try to do the same thing but it ends up vague, scattershot and hard to follow.

Certainly part of it is that Zelazny is simply one of the best at what he does, and it’s hard for others to match him. I think part of it is also because, in the end, The Child Garden tells a prophet’s story, about a central character saving the world through self-sacrifice and passive martyrdom. While Zelazny’s Chronicles tell a hero’s story, about a central character saving the world through direct action and fighting bad guys and overcoming tough odds. And I have to admit I find the heroes far more intrinsically entertaining.