Electronic OtherRealms #22 Fall, 1988 Part 7 Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced only in its entirety and only if all copyrights, author credits and this notice, including the return addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author. Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Copyright 1988 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Not for Glory Joel Rosenberg NAL books, 1988, $16.95, 0-453-00580-2 [**] The Legacy of Heorot Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes Pocket Books, 1988, $4.50, 0-671-64928-0 [**+] Peacekeepers Ben Bova TOR books, 1988, $17.95, 0-312-93080-1 [**+] Heaven Cent Piers Anthony Avon Fantasy, 1988, $3.95. 0-380-75288-3 [**} Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain Isaac Asimov Bantam Spectra, 1988, $4.95 0-553-27327-2 [***-] The Heechee Saga Frederik Pohl [***+] Araminta Station Jack Vance TOR 1988, $19.95, 0-312-93044-5 [***+] High Society Dave Sim and sometimes Gerhard Aardvark/Vanaheim [****-] There will always have to be bad writers, for they reflect the taste of undeveloped, immature age groups, who have needs as much as the mature do...these people demand satisfaction of their needs with the greater vehemence of youth, and they force the existence of bad authors. -- Friedrich Nietzche Episode 7: Off Come the Kid Gloves The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. For example, some books here that need attention. Look at this world. It's "a poor world. We have to import all too much; we don't import fur coats. Luxury would be reducing the number of young boys we send offworld to die in other people's wars." And it "relies on credits we earn offworld, and that depends on our reputation. Simply: if nobody will pay [us] to fight, my children will not eat." And, let us not forget, they begin their soldierly careers as teens. What's that in the back? Jerry? No, Jerry, I'm sorry. It's not a new Dorsai book by that nice Mr. Dickson. But it might as well be. Oh. Yes, David? Oh, you say it's not a rip-off of Dorsai? Why's that? Because they're all Jewish? Why, how original. And they named their planet after Masada, where the brave freedom fighters went to death rather than face the oppression of the Romans. How heroic of them, I'm sure. Only these folks aren't fighting oppression; they're fighting an inhospitable planet because they were too dim to keep going until they found a better one. Yes, David, I haven't forgotten. I was sort of saving it for last. See, they're not just Jewish Dorsai. Our hero is named (are you ready for this?) Tetsuo Hanavi, and he's part Japanese, as is the entire culture. And Tetsuo is not just a Jewish-Japanese mercenary soldier; he's a member of a society of highly trained assassins, famed and feared for their secrecy, silence, and deadliness. That's right, boys and girls, this is a book about Teenage Jewish Ninja Dorsai. I wish I were kidding, but I'm not. I'm sure it's got simply oodles of interesting things to say about honor and the military nature of mankind and so on, but I couldn't help chuckling and giggling all the way through it. Especially when Hanavi kept trying to impress us with how tough-minded he had to be. Lest I forget (much though I'd like to), it's by Joel Rosenberg, who is normally a much better writer than this, and it's called Not for Glory. Give it a wide berth. As long as we're in the neighborhood, let's drop in and say hello to Jerry Pournelle. Hi, Jerry. And, oh, look! He's got company! Kids, this is Steven Barnes, and I'm sure you all know Mr. Niven. They've written a book together. It's called The Legacy of Heorot, and I'd like to tell you it wasn't half bad, but that's exactly what it is. Beginning with the cover, which depicts a man raising on high a weapon whose weight should break his arm off at the shoulder from the way he's holding it, Legacy caused me grave doubts. Given the length of time involved in researching, writing, and bringing a book like this to press, I want to emphasize that it is not a rip-off of Aliens. Yes, it's about a colony menaced by incredibly fast, powerful, and cunning killing-machine monsters, but that's a tradition in SF that goes back to when Dan O'Bannon was in diapers. It's an original, tightly and well-plotted book that stands on its own very nicely...on those grounds. As long as I'm in the praise department, let me mention the monster. Or monsters. They're called "grendels" (eventually) and they're about the nastiest suckers I've run across. They make Coeurl, the generic original of this type, seem like a piker. They're smart, they're ugly, and they like to hurt things. Their biology is also original. If it weren't based on a real Earth critter, I wouldn't believe their reproductive cycle. (And I'm still not sure I believe their "supercharger," but I don't know enough biochem to do more than doubt it). My gripes are mostly about the characters. I've never read any of Barnes' solo stuff, but the characters are what I think of as archetypical Niven characters, designed to fit a plot worked out in detail before any real thought went into character...if, indeed, any ever does. All but the protagonist, Cadmann Weyland, who is rather more an archetypical Pournelle hero, the Soldier Without Portfolio. The plot and other characters are repeatedly manipulated to allow him to Demonstrate The Value of Soldierly Virtues. The non-military types in the colony are repeatedly Shown The Error Of Their Ways. Add an otherwise exciting, if not artistically brilliant, adventure story with some excellent and original ideas is dragged into the mud as the writers sell their birthright for, as Ted Sturgeon was wont to say, a pot of message. Speaking of polemics, here's Ben Bova. Say hi, kids. Now, Mr. Bova is a better writer than the first four we've been talking about rolled up all together and tied up with a pretty pink bow. So his book Peacemakers makes an excellent case study of what happens when you get too busy writing propaganda for your favorite causes to remember that this is a novel, designed to entertain. Peacemakers is another approach to "We need SDI now!!!", which Mr. Bova handled so entertainingly and well in his marvelous Kinsman Saga. But here the cause he's pushing takes over and small things are forgotten...small things like plotting, characterization, etc. Each of the characters in Peacemakers is a one-dimensional stock character, each with motivations so simple they could have come out of a Doc Savage novel. There's the Fanatical Moslem Terrorist. There's the Wise Old American Indian. There's the Soviet Spy with a Heart of Gold. There's the Mouse who Finds his Manhood to Seek Revenge. There's the Young Man with a Terrible Mistake in his Past. And so on. Each of these is driven by a single purpose, and other bits (love, etc.) are plastered on them as so much decoration. The plotting is choppy at best. The book is designed as an "unofficial history," which is an excuse for Bova to skip around chronologically, putting glimpses of the late plot in at places where they make no sense but are probably supposed to be tantalizing, and commented on by an anonymous, faceless "official historian" who keeps apologizing for getting ahead of himself. Clearly, Bova understood that his messing around with the order of events was confusing; but for some reason, he chose to patch it rather than fix it. I suspect that the reason was overinvolvement with the message of the book, which can leave the best of writers completely free of objectivity. Also, Bova managed to mix in other Issues (e.g., the drug trade), thus diluting the impact of the message he was aiming at. Look what happened when Heinlein made the same mistake: we got books like Farnham's Freehold. Bova's Peacemakers, fortunately, is nowhere near as offensive as Freehold -- but it's otherwise nearly as disappointing a book. Go look up the first Orion novel instead. Lately, I've been treating Piers Anthony's books to Invidious Comparisons. Now, I think, I'll complete my little "invidious trilogy" by comparing his newest, Heaven Cent, to... Heaven Cent, by Piers Anthony. You see, there's a book in there, screaming to get out. But Anthony wasn't sure what sort of book it was. For years, he's been at those grinks and groinks, the critics, to ignore the light material and take his serious books seriously. And for years, Xanth has epitomized the light material while classics of modern literature like Bio of a Space Tyrant gave us a good idea of what Anthony could do when he really buckled down. (Which gives you a good idea that something has happened to him since he wrote Macroscope, Orn, AND Cthon.) Well, Heaven Cent is the latest cute furry little Xanth novel, and we grinks and groinks can ignore it. Except...except...oh, except, Anthony, you has blew it. You actually included some philosophical stuff in there about free will and the relativity of morality that belonged in a serious book. And if you're going to include that kind of stuff, Anthony, you have a moral and artistic responsibility to take it bloody seriously, in which case you have written a serious book, but a bad one; and if you don't want the book taken seriously, you have done the readers who pay their good money to be entertained with mindless fluff a serious disservice. In other words, Anthony, make up your mind. You can not have it both ways. This ain't Burger King. Things get better as we progress down the pile. I've planned it that way, actually. From the realm of the half-bad book, we moved up to the merely mediocre, and now we've got a book that's really halfway-decent: Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain. I approached this with considerable trepidation. Asimov's recent attacks of sequelitis have been nastier and nastier, and I feared that this would be an attempt to tie in the universe of the original Fantastic Voyage with the Robot/Foundation/whatever universe he's been potchkying around with for the past half-dozen or so novels. No fear. FVII doesn't tie in with anything. It's a much more acceptable book, in many ways, than the original (left to his own devices, Asimov comes up with a decent explanation for miniaturization), and does away with the silly Cold War subplot in favor of a much more believable set of future superpower relationships. It's not all good. There is an extreme overdose of what I call "the third-order expository lump," and that requires a slight digression. The classic expository lump is when an author stops the story to tell you what need to know, but wasn't clever enough to work into the plot. The second-order expository lump is when a conveniently well- educated character stops the story to lecture a conveniently ignorant character something the author needs the reader to know. The third-order expository lump is actually more artificial than the second-order: two knowledgeable characters are talking, and one starts to tell the other stuff the other already knows...and the second character interrupts half-way, and says something like "Don't insult my intellect!" -- and proceeds to finish the lecture. When your entire cast of characters are defined as knowledgeable, you have only first- and third-order lumps to lean on, and this is what Asimov has set up for himself. Unfortunately, he's long-since learned that the first- order expository lump is a Bad Thing, so a good ten percent of FVII's bulk is third-order lumps. Sigh. But it's all worth it for the punch line. Trust me. Begin at the beginning," the King said, gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Jack Vance followed two-thirds of this advice in writing Araminta Station; the problem is that the part he left out was the part about coming to the end. Araminta is a typical Vance novel -- that is, fascinating, complex, and written in a language that is to English what English is to the grunts of prelinguistic cave people. His words, and those of his characters, positively drip from the page into the reader's ear; if any SF writer alive deserves to be read aloud, it is Jack Vance. And it's typical in deeper ways. Vance recombines here some of his classic themes: the decadent humans faced with a rising of non- human servants; the secret ruler; the Galaxy that seems to exist for the sake of human tourism. But none is merely repeated, and they come together in ways that you don't and can't predict. Vance's characters are probably his weakest point as a writer. They all talk exactly alike, in a beautifully stylized and maliciously polite diction which I would happily die to be able to talk in. Araminta is a story of crime and detection, rebellion and restoration, and coming of age. It is also incomplete. The principle plot lines are, technically, resolved, but when the book ends it is not over, and the result is disturbingly unsatisfying. Still, that is nearly the only flaw in an otherwise marvelous read. Have fun. And the best for last. Frederik Pohl keeps writing sequels to his marvelous novel Gateway. From a lesser writer, this would be a disaster. Pohl, however, makes sure he actually has something to write about before he starts sequelizing. The Annals of the Heechee is the latest in the occasional series. It stands quite nicely beside its predecessors, and it's about abstract life forms, post-human evolution, and other good stuff. For those who haven't followed the series, you need to know that an incredibly dangerous enemy has been discovered living inside a black hole. For those who have... the Assassins come out. What they do when they get into "normal" space proves most surprising, and brings out hitherto unsuspected possibilities inherent in Rob Broadhead's vastened state (no, that's not a typo), and proves once again that Fred Pohl really believes that you can solve problems if you just stop and bloody well think. (I think so, too, but no novel is ever going to prove it -- only that the author thinks so.) The story begins with a party that (a) reminds me more than a little of Frank Baum's OZ parties, not least because it (b) goes on so long that it drags the plot a bit. After that, things start happening fast and furious, and then people settle down for a space trip and the plot bogs down a bit and then they get there and the story ends. So the plot is stopped twice -- and you won't mind, because when you come right down to it, Pohl isn't writing a plot, he's writing a by God novel about people, and what they think and do when they aren't being part of a "plot" is at least as interesting as any plot. Things lapse occasionally into "comic book cosmic," but not so badly that any seasoned reader of, say, Arthur C. Clarke can't handle it easily. Good reading. Instead of a Closet Classic: I instituted the Closet Classics to bring books to your attention that had gone unnoticed by the SF community at large. This time, I'd like to do the same, but for a book that's still in print but won't get much attention from the SF community because it's from "outside." It's Church and State, and it's a 1200-page comic book. See, back in the '70s, a Canadian fellow named Dave Sim decided to enter the burgeoning field of "Conan satires," and launched a barbarian book called Cerebus the Aardvark. In black and white, the vicious little Earth-Pig's antics quickly won him quite a following, both because he was himself a very funny character and because he tended to be surrounded by characters everyone loved. For example, there's Elrod of Melvinbone (imagine if Elric talked like Foghorn Leghorn); Lord Julius of Palnu (Groucho, in charge of a medieval city- state); and the more obvious barbarian parodies like Red Sophia (a valley Amazon) and Bran Mak Mufin (lord of the Pigts). So Sim had himself a happy little readership, and was making a little bit of money on his ha-has. But he couldn't leave well enough alone. He started longer, more complex and serious stories that included the light-hearted characters he'd created -- and soon, by gum, he'd done a story twenty-five issues long, called High Society, in which he dealt with the complex politics of a world emerging from barbarism into early bureaucracy. And no sooner did he finish that, then he launched into something even bigger and more complex: Church and State, sixty issues long, dealing with political ramifications left over from the first, plus the war between male and female deities on a level that, ultimately, would make "Doc" Smith green with envy. Church and State is available in two volumes from Aardvark/Vanaheim. You have to order it by phone (from 519-576- 0610), and they cost about $30 a pop (ask them; they'll tell you the current price), but it's worth it. For one thing, it's amazingly well drawn. We're not talking about Picasso or Van Gogh here, but we're talking about two guys who between them write and draw twenty pages a month, quality black- and-white work. For another, the individual issues of the comic book cost twice that new and a whole lot more on the back issue market. And for a third and last, it's the richest and most complex fantasy story of any sort I've seen in a long, long time. The story is easier to understand if you've read the first fifty issues of Cerebus, also available in these telephone-book-like volumes, but that's far from necessary. Church and State is an excellent introduction to the state of the art in comics (or as the snobs call them, graphic novels). Give 'em a try. ---- End of Part 7