Book Review: Cuckoo’s Egg

C.J. Cherryh
1985
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT...but does it really matter?

You just never know where your most excruciating reading experiences are going to come from. My most recent came in the form of Cuckoo’s Egg: a slim, 200-page novel that offers the reader a unique combination of boredom and pain, and which took me a good two months to force my way through.

Cuckoo’s Egg is purportedly the story of a rigorously dutiful, misunderstood warrior and the child he sacrifices nearly everything to raise alone. But it is really the story of a co-dependent, abusive relationship, thinly disguised by an abstract writing style and held together by the thinnest of plots.

On a distant planet orbiting a distant star lives an intelligent, bipedal dog-like species with nascent spacefaring technology and a highly developed social structure. Duun, one of our two co-protagonists, is one of these dog-creatures. He is a battle-scarred, tough-as-nails, high-ranking member of the hatani, a class of soldiers who are bound by tradition and duty to do the unpleasant but necessary work that more polite society won’t do itself. The hatani are on the fringes of respectability: needed and respected by the common folk for the work that they do, but, at the same time, feared because of their military skill, and resented for the fact that they have to exist at all.

For reasons we don’t learn until the very end of the book, Duun is assigned a human baby to raise as his own. The baby is called Thorn. Duun raises Thorn as his own son, on his country estate, with no one else around but the peasants he displaced to claim his ancestral lands, who are a bit ticked off about being displaced.

As Thorn grows from babyhood into teenagehood, Duun raises him to be tough—very tough. Dunn challenges him constantly, both physically and with tricky, hostile riddles. And the masters of the hatani also put Thorn through somewhat ridiculous Kung-Fu-like tests, which include things like having to scour his rooms for the tiniest pebbles that were put there to see if he could find them all. 

But Thorn is sensitive. He can’t really be as tough as Duun wants him to be. His heart is in his throat every time he is tested; indeed, his heart has been in his throat for almost all of his entire short life up to this point. And there is no obvious reason why his upbringing has had to be this harsh. He lives in seemingly pointless fear and suffers seemingly pointless cruelty from Duun and the hatani masters, all under the guise of it being for his own protection.

When Thorn is a teenager, he actually gets up enough gumption to run away. But he is almost killed by scared villagers, and Duun has to rescue him, and has to kill a villager to do it. Which, in turn, means that Duun and Thorn have to abandon the country estate for the city where there won’t be angry villagers at every turn waiting for either one of them to make a misstep.

I think Thorn believes that Duun loves and protects him. And I think Duun believes that he loves Thorn. And I think Cherryh believes that she’s portraying a loving and protecting relationship that has been forced into harshness by circumstance. But their relationship is really one of toxic abuse and manipulation.

When they move to the city, Thorn finally gets to have company his own age; he is put into an actual classroom with four classmates. But they are more his tutors than his peers; they stay aloof from him even as they teach him; and they reinforce for him just how different he is from everyone else. And when Thorn falls for one of his classmates and tries to kiss her, he gets in trouble and she is immediately removed. (To add insult to injury, she is also revealed to have been an agent of the ghotanin, unscrupulous mercenaries who are the rivals of the hatani and who are trying to gain information about Thorn.)

As the nearly irrelevant plot plugs along, eventually, as part of his education, Thorn is forced to learn to reproduce what seem to be nonsense vocalizations, played on tapes, sound for sound. Gradually, though, he realizes that the taped voices are actually speaking a strange language, and the only known source of that language is the tapes that they’re making him memorize. And the more he listens to the tapes, the more he starts to understand them. And his dreams start to match what he hears: he starts to dream about a space station, filled with people like him—humans.

Meanwhile, the ghotani step up their attacks against the hatani, forcing Duun to step up his Thorn timeline, and finally, mercifully, forcing Cherryh to reveal Thorn’s purpose. It turns out that the tapes Thorn was forced to memorize are indeed from humans. Apparently a ship of them arrived at Duun’s planet a very long time ago. Duun’s people accidentally killed them all, but the humans back on Earth are still sending messages in an attempt to reach their long-lost ship. So the hatani created Thorn as a clone based on genetic information taken from the original ship’s passengers, and they hope that he will be able to translate what the human messages are saying—so as to hopefully either serve as an ambassador to broker a peace, or at least warn them when more humans will be coming.

Duun takes Thorn up into space, to a space station, to interpret the new messages being received from Earth by the station’s radio. And there, after about 150 pages of the total 175 or so, Duun stops manipulating and playing needless mind games, and finally gives Thorn a little honesty.

But it is about 149 pages too late. And I barely was able to make it that far as it was. Most of the time, while reading this book, I would read one paragraph and then, before I got very far into the next one, find myself zoning out, looking up, reading the ads on the bus, making grocery lists in my head. 

Sometimes it was because of the unrelentingly, needlessly cruel relationship between Duun and Thorn. It was a life that kept Thorn constantly off balance, with Duun one moment seemingly on the verge of kindness and then the next moment spinning off into anger and violence. Thorn lives in desperation; he hates Duun, but is terrified of being abandoned on a world where he knows no one else. All of his needs for trust and friendship and kindness and love are denied and invalidated.

And other times it was because I just did not care. Neither one of the main characters is in any way appealing, and neither one gave me any reason to want to find out what happened to him. And, in fact, nothing ever really does. There is zero reward for sitting through the unremitting cruelty of this dysfunctional relationship.

Book Review: Millennium

John Varley
1983
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I made the mistake of starting to read this book while on a plane. This was a very bad idea. The plot revolves around a mid-air plane collision between a DC-10 and a Boeing 747 in the skies over Oakland, California. And the first two-thirds or so of the book describe various aspects of the crash in excruciating detail, from the charred, severed limbs of the victims to the play-by-play of both cockpit voice recorders as the crew realized the trouble they were in. I had to put the book down several times mid-flight before eventually giving up and finishing it after I’d gotten safely back on the ground.

Once I did, I found that Millennium is a compact, well-plotted, well-paced time-travel novel with big, prescient warnings for those of us living in the here and now. It predicts a horrifying potential future that is the natural result of our disdain for our planet, and the least advantaged people who live on it. And it does it in a hard-boiled way that doesn't come off the least bit preachy.

The book is told in the form of intertwining testimonies from its two major characters. One testimony is that of Bill Smith, the National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge who had the bad luck to be on call when the plane collision happened. He is a struggling alcoholic with the usual associated family troubles. But he's also doggedly determined to unravel all the threads of the crash mystery until he figures out what happened, and why.

The other testimony is that of Louise Baltimore, the leader of a time-traveling clean-up crew from forty thousand years in the future. Her job is to do “snatches,” during which they use a time portal to board airplanes before they crash, pull off all the still-living passengers through the portal into the future and replace them with staged, faked dead bodies—why, we don't know yet—and then go back and fix anything that went wrong during the snatch that could alter the timeline between ours and hers.

Louise and her staff are on board both of the planes, attempting to remove all the passengers before they collide, when they run into unexpected trouble: a hijacker shoots one of the Louise's crew members, and, in the subsequent confusion, one of them loses her stunner on the plane.

During his investigation, Bill starts to piece together things that make him realize that this crash is an odd one. On the bodies he has recovered, for example, all the watches are set exactly 45 minutes ahead. And on the black box recording, one of the crew is heard yelling about how everyone on the plane is burned and dead—before the crash happens. And then Bill sifts through every piece of debris and finds the stunner. Which means Louise has to go back and find Bill before he finds the stunner, and retrieve the gun from the debris before it screws up the timeline.

Inevitably, Bill and Louise meet and develop a sympathy and attachment to each other that prevent them from doing their jobs as dispassionately as they should, and the timeline starts to get more and more screwed up, and Louise's present starts to unravel.

In the process, we learn just how painful Louise's present is. The earth is next to unlivable, ecologically. And everyone suffers from all sorts of defects and degenerative organ diseases, so that the lucky ones don't die until their late twenties, having had most of their organs and limbs replaced and their bodies covered with artificial skin suits. And we learn that the stolen passengers from the crashes are part of the future's desperate, last-ditch attempt to save humanity.

The time travel in Millennium has plausible governing principles surrounding paradoxes: big events matter to the timeline, but little details generally don't, which allows Louise's clean-up crew some much-needed wiggle room. The settings, especially the future forty thousand years from now, have a bare-bones, Dashiell-Hammett-type grittiness. And so do the characters; Bill and Louise are both reluctant to get emotionally involved with anyone. If anyone in this pair is the sensitive one, it is Bill; Louise, raised in a nearly hopeless world, is a tough, hard-boiled cynic. But both of them have hearts of gold buried under their alcoholic and/or sarcastic exteriors, and they somehow are able to see that in each other and to join forces to try to save a future neither one will ever see. The result is an unexpectedly moving story.

Book Review: Probability Sun

Nancy Kress
2001
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – – 

Probability Sun starts three years after the end of Probability Moon. After losing three members of the original team that investigated the planet World in Probability Moon, Drs. Dieter Grüber and Anne Sikorski have convinced the Solar System’s governing body, the Solar Alliance Defense Network (SADN), to go back to World to investigate the “device” they discovered buried deep in the Neury Mountains.

Grüber wants to go for scientific curiosity. Sikorski wants to go for the natives, who she feels responsible for protecting from SADN. And SADN wants to for military reasons; they’re hoping the “device” will turn out to be a weapon that will help them win humanity’s war against the Fallers.

SADN Major Lyle Kaufman, a consummate diplomat, is chosen to lead the mission. Grüber convinces Kaufman to include the world’s greatest physicist and radical crank, Dr. Tom Capelo, who insists on bringing his two young daughters and their nanny. And the military insists on including Marbet Grant, a “sensitive,” who is so skilled at reading body language that her insights are often confused with telepathy. Capelo’s job will be to figure out how the device works. Grant’s job will be to interpret, in the event a Faller is captured alive for the first time.

Which, in fact, happens. While Kaufman’s team is in transit to World, another SADN ship captures a Faller, and it is transferred to the brig in Kaufman’s ship. There, Grant begins learning the Faller’s body language in unorthodox and controversial but effective ways.

While Grant is learning to communicate with the Faller, the ship arrives at World. Because of what happened during the humans’ first mission to the planet, the team is worried that the natives will view them as “unreal,” or not a part of the shared reality that all the natives feel, and thereby condemned to death. What they don’t realize is that because of the unintentionally self-sacrificing, life-saving actions of a deceased schizophrenic crew member from the last mission, the natives now think humans are “real,” and that they share reality. They are therefore surprised when they are welcomed and treated hospitably—and they are glad to be reunited with Enli, a native who they worked with on the original mission, and one who was unusually open to their ideas, even to her own acute distress.

Grüber, Capelo, and a small team spelunk through the caves under the Neury Mountains to examine the device in situ. Soon, the spelunking team runs into a problem: they learn that the buried artifact in the Neury Mountains (a) is probably a particle destabilizer; (b) could probably be made into a quantum weapon; and (c) is also probably responsible for the quantum changes in the Worlders’ brains that give them their shared reality, upon which their entire civilization is based. So they have to wonder: will happen to the Worlders when the Terran crew removes the device to make their weapon?

What happens, of course, is that the Terran military does remove it, and the Worlders experience an absence of shared reality. For most, it is terrifying; for some, it is liberating. And its removal is going to bring transformative change to Worlders’ society, whether for good or for ill, whether they want it or not.

In the end, Sikorski and Grüber decide to stay on the planet permanently—to be with each other, and to help guide the people of World through their societal transition. Capelo figures out how the artifact works, and the result brings terrible, potentially civilization-destroying capabilities to the humans. Practically everyone is thrown in the brig. And the reader is left with an extremely shaky detente between Earth, World, and the Fallers, setting us up for the final installment in the trilogy.

The implications of the ideas introduced in Probability Moon come to full fruition in Probability Sun. Sun allows Kress to explore the ways in which having an enforced shared reality enables a society to be cooperative, pleasant, and peaceful but, at the same time, limits and represses people who otherwise would be curious, creative, and different. The absence of shared reality means that violence, deceit, and crime are all possible. But it also means that for those who want to engage in it, so is independent thought. 

Enli is a case in point. In the absence of the device, and shared reality, Enli begins to realize that reality is subjective; that people can have different realities from each other, and that all of those realities may be true in their own way. But it is difficult for those Enli loves to cope with these new ideas, much less embrace them—or to embrace the new Enli. Shared reality has swaddled her in a blanket of comfort and protection. But as soon as she begins to question that shared reality, she suffers oppression and brutality. 

Enli’s struggles after the loss of shared reality, the implications of what the device on World can do, and, to a lesser extent, Grant’s attempts to communicate with the captured Faller are really where the action is in Probability Sun. These scenes have more dramatic tension in them than any of the actual action scenes in the book, like the space battles with the Fallers or the societal fallout after the removal of the device from World. In this, Kress’s writing reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s, in that the real focus of her books is not shootouts or chases or romance, but rather puzzles of logic and morality.

In Probability Moon, Enli has to go through a major, painful change in her perception of both herself and her people. She has to decide whether it is worth voluntarily accepting repression of thought in order to have peace; and if it is worth breaking away from those she loves, or possibly from the only planet she has ever known, in order to satisfy intellectual curiosity. And the Terran crew has to answer an array of similarly weighty questions, like: how can we communicate with a race wildly different from ourselves? How does the artifact work? What are our responsibilities towards others when we have the power to destroy them completely? Should we destroy their culture to save ours? The book’s drama is there, in the puzzle-solving, the logical dilemmas, the internal arguments.And, in general, because of this, Kress’s books are appealing in the same way that Asimov’s are. (Even if Probability Sun does suffer a bit with the absence of my favorite character, Dr. Ahmed Bazargan.)

Another aspect of Kress’s writing that is appealing—and also similar to Asimov’s—is that she is really good at looking through alien eyes. A sizeable chunk of the book, for example, is spent on Grant’s struggle to achieve some kind of connection with the incredibly peculiar Fallers. And Kress has a talent for explaining the things the Terrans do on World using concepts the Worlders understand. To the Worlders, the Terran spaceships are flying boats; elevators are carts with no one to pull them; almost any vehicle of any kind is a bicycle, and when a spaceship takes off, it makes a noise like “a hundred bicycle wheels grinding.” 

Kress is almost always sympathetic to the Fallers’ and Worlders’ feelings and reactions, even when they do terrible things out of ignorance or fear. She presents it all to us such that we are sympathetic to them, too. And maybe this is her central aim, in the end: to have us understand even those most alien to us.

Book Review: Probability Moon

Nancy Kress
2000
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book did not win any of the major science fiction awards, but it is the first book in the trilogy that includes Probability Space, which won the Campbell. And it should have won an award, because it is way, way better than either Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which won the Hugo that year, and The Quantum Rose, which won the Nebula. With the minor exception of the ending, it is a well-paced, accessible, engaging, relatively original story; almost a cross between an Ursula Le Guin alien-planet story and a Jack McDevitt space adventure novel. And it is quite effective in making you want to read its sequel, Probability Sun.

In the near-future setting of Probability Moon, humans have expanded throughout the solar system with the help of a series of wormholes connecting various parts of our galaxy, which were put there by some vanished ancient alien race as yet unknown, and whose technology is still not really understood.

These wormholes have led human explorers to hundreds of habitable planets and several sentient alien species. Most of these species are humanoid and peaceful, and one, the Fallers, is definitely neither humanoid nor peaceful. The Fallers simply want to exterminate us, without negotiation or diplomacy. Humanity is now in a constant low-level war with the Fallers, with each side trying to upgrade their weapons technology as fast as possible and thereby gain military advantage over the other.

Probability Moon opens after an initial human (Terran) recon team has returned from their investigation of a new planet recently discovered via the ancient wormholes. The team reported that the inhabitants, which call their planet “World,” are peaceful and have organized their entire economy and social culture around the cultivation and worship of flowers. They also reported that of the planet’s seven moons, one is not actually a moon, and may be of intense interest to the military.

This intrigues the Terran government, which sends a larger exploratory crew to investigate World at greater length. Half of the crew—the purported reason for the mission—is a natural science team, including an anthropologist, a biologist, and a geologist. They are deployed to the surface of the planet to learn as much as they can about the native culture. The other half of the crew—the real reason for the mission—is a military astrophysics team sent to investigate the “moon” of interest.

The surface team quickly discovers that the planet’s natives have an unusual characteristic: they share a common reality. All of them understand a single, uniform truth in any situation. If someone questions that truth, it gives the natives severe head pain, sometimes to the point where they cannot function. And if someone reveals that they do not share the same common reality with the others, that person is declared “unreal.” The best that can happen to an unreal person is that they are shunned by society until they have served some sort of penance; the worst that can happen is that they are condemned to death.

The surface team ingratiates itself into the household of one of the wealthier inhabitants of World, and becomes particularly close to one of the servants, Enli, who has been declared unreal for having killed her brother, and who is serving her penance by spying on the Terrans. This outreach goes relatively well at first for the team, but gradually their position becomes more and more dangerous, since it’s obvious they do not share the same reality with each other, much less the natives, and are increasingly at risk of being designated as unreal and being condemned to death.

Eventually they do have to flee to the comparative safety of a highly radioactive mountain range where they hope to be rescued by the spacebound half of their crew—and where they discover what just might be the source of the natives’ shared reality.

The problem is that while the ground team was involved with the natives on the surface, the spacebound team was getting itself in even deeper hot water in orbit. First, they discovered that the planet’s seventh moon is not, in fact, a moon at all, but a piece of technology left there by the original wormhole builders. Then, their testing revealed that it is a weapon: a powerful one that could potentially serve to turn the tide of the war with the Fallers. And then, of course, the Fallers show up, and there is a terribly tense game of cat-and-mouse as the humans and the Fallers both try to gain control of the moon-sized weapon.

Probability Moon is somewhat unsatisfyingly unresolved at the very end. And the characters aren’t terrifically charismatic; none of the aliens really caught my interest, even Enli, and neither did most of the humans. My favorites were Bazargan, the leader of the on-planet surface team, and Gruber, the surface geologist, who were the most individual and appealing; the others were either undistinctive or creepy.

But, in general, this book is fun. It has a plausible galactic political and military structure, a well-developed alien planet ecosystem, and a non-human sentient species with a unique social structure. The Faller threat adds dramatic tension. And although the surface plot gets much more narrative time than the space plot, both are well-paced and build up nice lines of parallel suspense and then intertwining action.

And it could be that the ending is ambiguous because Kress is setting us up for the sequel, Probability Sun—so I won’t judge too harshly until I have read that one.

Book Review: Earthquake Weather

Tim Powers
1996
Awards: Locus (Fantasy) 
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Earthquake Weather is the third novel in Tim Powers’ somewhat roughly connected Fault Lines trilogy. It is not really a sequel, but it continues some of the story lines from both of the previous two novels, Last Call and Expiration Date. And it pulls in several of the same characters, although the main characters in this one are new.  

It also takes place in the same world of magic as the other two books. Which is most definitely not the light, floaty, Disney variety; the magic of Powers’ trilogy is a hard-boiled, real-world, practical magic conducted using everyday objects. It is an impressive amalgamation of ancient gods, ghosts, spirits, religions, superstitions, rituals, faiths, totems, and traditions—old and new and east and west.

And it, too, is set against a backdrop of the grittiest parts of America: diners, bars, mental institutions, curanderías, big city streets. The cars are always big, old, beaten-up American models. The characters are people from the edges of society—the poor, insane, criminal, fugitive, orphaned, lost. They tend to drink a lot—mostly Coors, vodka, and cheap red wine. (It can tend to get a little gross.)

At the beginning of Earthquake Weather, Janis Plumtree, a woman with multiple personality disorder, has killed Scott Crane (the man who was crowned as the Fisher King in Last Call). She killed him on a lonely road near Los Angeles by jamming a trident into his throat.

A faction of Crane’s supporters and believers—the Fisher King’s army, if you will—found his body before the police did and are hauling it around with them, trident included, preparing for the day when they can perform the necessary rituals to resurrect him. They are also protecting a pre-teen boy, Koot Hoomie "Kootie" Parganas, who appears to have been spiritually designated as Crane’s successor to the Fisher King’s throne in the event of Crane’s permanent death, as evidenced by the constantly bleeding wound in Kootie’s side, and the fact that he needs to tie his belt in a Mobius strip and drink lots of alcohol to keep himself from being found and possessed by ghosts. 

Into this picture comes Sid Cochran, a man who checked himself into a mental institution because he keeps seeing random people turning into bull-headed gods, and hearing people speak in the voice of his dead wife. Except that he’s not insane; those things actually are happening to him, because he’s been chosen to be one of the vessels of the god Dionysus, after an accident he once had in a vineyard where he almost got his hand cut off trying to protect an old vine stump from being cut down. In the institution Cochran meets Plumtree, who was put there by the police when she came to them claiming to have killed Scott Crane (whose body they can’t find). 

Cochran and Plumtree strike up a friendship (she with him and him with most of her personalities), and eventually they break out of the institution, narrowly escaping the clutches of the evil chief psychiatrist Dr. Armentrout, who “cures” his patients by eating the parts of their souls that are misbehaving. Eating soul parts gives Dr. Armentrout lots of spiritual power, and the fact that it sometimes kills his patients doesn’t really bother him at all. 

Plumtree’s good personalities want to atone for the bad one that killed the Fisher King, so she drags Cochran with her to track down the band of people preparing for the Crane’s resurrection. It isn’t hard, given all the portents pointing to their house in Long Beach, and the people drumming and dancing in front of it twenty-four hours a day. 

Kootie and his adopted parents-cum-spiritual shields, Angelica and Pete Sullivan, and Crane’s old friend Arky Mavranos, take in Cochran and Plumtree as wary allies. They then go on a chaotic journey up to San Francisco filled with pretty random-seeming diversions and plot twists, to perform the king-restoring ritual. 

The whole time they are pursued by Armentrout, who has hooked up with some anti-Fisher-King zealot thugs. Armentrout’s aim is to capture Crane’s body and to keep it alive but in a perpetual coma, so he can feed eternally on the spirit of the Fisher King, making him super powerful in the magical world. He doesn’t mind the idea of kidnaping Kootie as well, holding him coma-hostage in the event Crane dies for good. And if Cochran and Plumtree die along the way as well, so much the better for him. 

The Cochran/Plumtree/Kootie allies race around San Francisco gathering the necessary materials to prepare for the awakening ritual. All kinds of things go wrong to cause them setbacks, not least of which is the fact that one of Plumtree’s personalities is the not-quite-dead ghost of her evil father--the personality that killed Scott Crane--who keeps telling Armentrout where they are. There is also a genuinely exciting car chase scene when a ghost steals the car that has Crane’s body in it, and Angelica and Pete and Arky have to race it down and leap on to it while hurtling down the highway to regain control (over the car and the body). 

It all eventually comes to a climax in a giant turbulent scene at the Sutro Baths, where the final battle for Crane’s life (or death) is fought out with both temporal and fearsomely magical weapons. 

One of the best things about this book is that Powers has a stupefying amount of knowledge of a hugely broad range of spirit world arcana. He brings in ghosts, spells, portents, charms, remedies, and rites from a wide variety of traditions from around the world. This is no American Gods lightweight gimmicky hack job. 

And the magic is cleverly done using practical, real-world objects; for a knowledgeable person in the world of Powers’ books, almost anything can have a magical use. His characters use wind chimes made of chicken bones and radio parts as alarms to warn of incoming malevolent entities. They hook up old television sets and record players to talk to spirits. They use ashtrays as substitutes for fireplaces to send ghosts, literally, up in smoke. They use clove and regular tobacco cigarettes as masking tools, but actual rubber masks (of clowns, in this case) can serve the same purpose, in a pinch. Wine is used for all kinds of purification, masking, and sacramental purposes—although Coors can work, too, sometimes. 

The main problems with this book (which was also true of Last Call) are that it is dense, complex, and seemingly, for the most part, unplanned. Although there was generally an anticipatory build-up, a climactic confrontation, and a resolution (of a sort), the plot trucks along largely haphazardly towards those ends. 

I rarely understood why any of the specific incidents over the course of the book happened; most of them seemed to come out of left field. It felt like the characters were dropped into situation after situation with little or no lead-up or connection to the next. They went from Chinatown to a maze-house to a car chase to a hotel with no apparent logic. 

I also didn’t understand why voices spoke to Cochran when they did, or why he saw the signs he did, or what the bull-headed god meant in any particular situation; it seemed like the god was just saying, “hi, I’m here, be afraid.” I didn’t understand why Plumtree changed personalities when she did, or how they knew to use this or that piece of equipment. 

I tried to go with the flow and let it all just soak into my head naturally. And that worked to some extent, but generally it was so hard to make connections and follow the characters’ non-logic—especially when so much of it was somewhat repellently fueled by Coors and vodka—that I ended up skipping a lot of text. 

And, at the end, it didn’t feel like everything finally connected together and made sense; it felt like it all fell together by accident, in spite of itself, and in spite of the chaotic actions of the characters. All in all, it was just too much reading whiplash.

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.