Revived Review: Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card's reputation has taken a rather well-deserved hit over the past few decades in great part because of his repellent views about homosexuality, but also because the quality of his writing has not quite held up in recent years. As for the first, well, his views are truly repellent. As for the latter -- all I can say is that has happened to many writers over the years, and it should not cause us to denigrate the earlier, greater, work -- and for Card, I would hope readers don't ignore his brilliant Foundation novella "The Originist", nor the "good parts" of his Ender novel Xenocide (mostly included in the Analog story "Gloriously Bright".) 

He also did some fine work as anthologist with the pair of anthologies discussed her (in a review I did for SF Site in 1999), and as a publisher with the nice online magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, which ran from 2005 to 2019.

Indeed, looking back on these anthologies -- the one I review here (Future on Ice) as well as its companion (Future on Fire) I have to say there truly represent an excellent portrait of the best SF of the 1980s.

Revived Review: Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card

This anthology was planned as a companion to Card's Future on Fire (1991), and together the two were meant to showcase the best short science fiction of the 1980s. However, for one reason or another, some eight years have elapsed before publication of Future on Ice. Immediacy is thus lost, but a certain perspective is gained: it's valuable to reread these pieces more than a decade after the latest of them was first published. Apparently Card made the selections in 1989 (and, in fact, the stories are all from 1983-1987, with fully half of the 18 first appearing in 1985 alone), but for the most part, his choices stand up brilliantly. This is quite legitimately an anthology which can stand on its own as a "Best of the 80s" (even though Card intended it to stand not on its own, but rather to be paired with Future on Fire): no doubt these aren't the very best 18 stories from that decade, but on any given day, they'll do.

It's not clear to me whether Card meant the titles of the anthologies to reflect the nature of the stories within, but these 18 may, perhaps, have a cooler effect than the "hotter" stories in the earlier anthology. And, perhaps, it's no coincidence that this book includes a story called "Snow," while Future on Fire included "Fire Zone Emerald" and "I Am the Burning Bush."

My favourite story here, and in my opinion one of the best SF stories of all time, is Nancy Kress' "Out of All Them Bright Stars" (winner of the 1985 Nebula for Best Short Story). This quiet, quiet, story, about a waitress in a diner and her encounter with an alien, illustrates as clearly as I can imagine the use of SF to examine human nature. It's a story that simply wouldn't work without being SF, without aliens, or without the implication of star travel, but its theme is all about what's within us. Lovely writing, perfect characters: it's one of those stories that just stops me dead and makes me think for some time after I finish it.

Several other stories included won major SF awards. Among them, I think Greg Bear's "Blood Music" (winner of both Hugo and Nebula for Best Novelette), a truly terrifying story about the consequences of engineering bacteria-sized microchips and using them to maintain the body's health, holds up best. In this story, Bear took his idea and ran with it to the fullest extent, facing every implication. A story that is similarly chilling in implication, John Varley's novella "Press Enter []" (also winner of both the Hugo and Nebula), doesn't seem to hold up quite as well. His central notion of computers linking up and taking over really isn't very new (cf. Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" for just one example), and his mechanism, while well-depicted and creepy, doesn't convince. (The idea is still being used, in one form or another, and a much newer example which convinced me a lot more is in Ken MacLeod's novel The Star Fraction (1995).) Nor does the (well-depicted and engaging but also rather creepy) love story quite convince. But, the story is still a great read.

Also among my personal favourite 80s stories are "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler, "Snow" by John Crowley, and "The Pure Product" by John Kessel. The first is a moving story of life in near-future Los Angeles, after a plague has destroyed the speech centers of everyone. The horror of the loss of communication with other people is very well portrayed. "Snow" is a beautiful fable about memory and love. A woman of the jet set records incidents from her life over many years, and her one-time gigolo/lover/husband plays them back after her death. But the technology only allows random access to these "memories", and the memories degrade over time. The effect is quiet and profound. "The Pure Product" is quite another thing. A man (apparently from the future) goes on a rampage through 80s North America. The story is fast moving and scary. At one level, it's a harder-edged take on the same theme as C.L. Moore's classic "Vintage Season," but at another level, we worry that the empathy-deficient people from the future are us.

Any anthology which aims to be "definitive" will surely include prominent stories like those mentioned above, and like George R.R. Martin's Nebula winner "Portraits of His Children" and Isaac Asimov's well-known late story, "Robot Dreams". But I like an anthology to include some surprises, as well. S.C. Sykes has only published a couple of stories and one novel (Red Genesis (1991)) to my knowledge. "Rockabye Baby" is included here, and it's a fine story about a man who becomes paralyzed in an accident. He adjusts to his condition, and develops some unexpected facets. Then he has a chance to regain the use of his limbs, but at a surprising (and logical) cost. The story worked very well for me right until the end, where I thought there were a few missteps, but the central dilemma is brilliantly presented.

Another writer who hasn't published a whole lot (only one novel, (Station Gehenna (1982)), is Canadian Andrew Weiner. His quirky short stories, however, appeared with some regularity throughout the 80s, and Card has chosen the intriguing "Klein's Machine" for this book. It's about a science fiction fan who becomes obsessed with the idea of time travel, finally convincing himself that he has travelled far into the future. Upon his return, a psychiatrist cures him, and he becomes "normal." Ultimately, it's a meta-fiction meditation on what makes SF readers dream.

Card also chooses stories by Lisa Goldstein, Gregory Benford, David Zindell, C. J. Cherryh, Walter Jon Williams, Karen Joy Fowler, Lewis Shiner, and himself. Probably the only story in the book which doesn't quite seem to me to belong is Asimov's slight, gimmicky, "Robot Dreams." Of course, one could quibble about some other choices: likely, I'd have taken Fowler's "The Faithful Companion at Forty" or "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" over Card's pick of "Face Value," and I'd have taken Card's own utterly wonderful Foundation story "The Originist" over "The Fringe," but in neither case has he chosen a bad story. This anthology eminently succeeds in presenting a selection which represents the short SF of the 1980s at its best, and at its widest variety.

Reinstituted Review: The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford

This is another review I did for SF Site, and thus am recovering after that wonderful pioneering website went dark. As ever, I note that it's about a quarter century old, and I haven't updated the references within the review -- so I note for example that the "new English small press" Big Engine has, alas, long been defunct -- it was a brave effort (led by Ben Jeapes) but it's cruel world out there for small publishers.

Reinstituted Review: The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford

a review by Rich Horton

David Langford is justly famous in the SF world for his critical writing and his fan writing, much of the latter done for his fanzine Ansible. Both Ansible and Langford have won multiple Hugos in the fan categories. But an odd side-effect of Langford's many fan writing awards is that people often seem unaware that he is a very accomplished "pro" writer. He has published several novels and quite a number of short stories, many of them very good, like his wonderful G. K. Chesterton pastiche of a few years ago, "The Spear of the Sun". But we can't say any more that Langford's pro writing goes unnoticed, for he won the 2001 Hugo for Best Short Story for "Different Kinds of Darkness".

Some time ago I decided to rectify my own failings in appreciating Mr. Langford's fiction-writing side by searching out one of his novels, and the first one I chose was The Leaky Establishment. This novel intrigued me because I've worked my whole life in places which have points of resemblance with the nuclear research center where the novel is set. (Especially over college summers, when I worked at both Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.) At the time it was out of print, and in fact I got my copy directly from the author, but happily it has been made available in a nice new edition from Big Engine, a new English small press which has begun a rather intriguing line of SF, some reprints and some new novels and story collections. [The novel was first published by Frederick Muller in the UK in 1984, and reprinted in 1985 by Sphere (that's the copy I have), and after Big Engine went under in 2003 it was reprinted again by Cosmos Books.]

This novel, it should be mentioned, is not strictly speaking SF, though it is fiction about science. It is more generally in the comic tradition of Kingsley Amis, to name just one writer. The novel features Roy Tappen, a cynical scientist at NUTC, a fictional British nuclear center. By mistake, he manages to smuggle a warhead out of the place, and takes it home. When he finds it he realizes he needs to take it back, but security has been tightened, and he can't just waltz back in with it.

The story follows his constantly foiled attempts to sneak it back in, unwillingly abetted by his computer programmer friend, annoyed by his wife walking out (not too pleased at sleeping in the same house with a nuclear warhead), by a suspicious but stupid security officer, by his nutty neighbor, an active anti-Nuclear campaigner and alternative energy enthusiast, by a moronic newsman who keeps swallowing his hoax stories whole, and of course by a parade of silly bosses. Page by page the book is hilarious: almost too densely so, in that as a novel it loses momentum. Still, it's neatly plotted, with a particularly nice resolution. And the bureaucratic tics of a government facility, exacerbated by nuclear security requirements, ring very true indeed.

Langford's writing is very fine in general, and this particular novel is a delightful example of his abilities with fiction. Definitely recommended.

Repaired SF Site Review: Strange Trades, by Paul Di Filippo

Here's another review risen from the ashes of SF Site. The review itself didn't really need "repair" -- but I'm posting it in part to comfort (?) the author of Strange Trades, who will soon be in possession of a brand new hip. Get well quick, Paul!

Repaired SF Site Review: Strange Trades, by Paul Di Filippo

a review by Rich Horton

Strange Trades, Paul Di Filippo's fifth collection of short fiction, is one of the most satisfying SF single-author collections I have read in some time. As the title announces, the stories are concerned with people at work. Di Filippo explores a variety of science-fictional jobs, some strange due to technological advances, others due to marginal or experimental economics, others because they're set in unusual milieus.

One of Di Filippo's favourite themes is people living on the edges of society, or in the cracks. In several stories in this book, he depicts, with sympathy, a cooperative economy built in those "cracks." One story, "Harlem Nova," mentions Levi-Strauss' term bricoleurs, for "a class of people who live as scavengers, living on the odds and ends the rest of society discards." And the heroes of "Harlem Nova," "Spondulix," "Karuna, Inc." and maybe even "Conspiracy of Noise," four of the best stories in the book, are to one extent or another bricoleurs. "Harlem Nova" looks straightforwardly at the clash between the utopian impulse and the wishes of people who really don't function well in society, as the project leader of an urban renewal effort in what appears to be a very positive future encounters some people he will be forced to evict. "Conspiracy of Noise" is a bit odder, featuring a shiftless young man who gets a job working for a mysterious company. The secret is in what the company is working towards, hinted at nicely by a series of misreadings of simple messages as the story proceeds. Ultimately, the message here is that a truly healthy economy must have a chaotic, or at least noisy, element, though in this story the message is rather ambiguous in nature. "Spondulix" is a rather sunny story of a 40ish man, the owner of a small sandwich shop, who gets involved in an extended scheme to create an economy based on scrip. And "Karuna, Inc.", one of my favourite stories of the year 2001, is, as Di Filippo says, a "dark cousin" to "Spondulix": dark because of some real tragedy, and because it features some truly (even cartoonishly) evil villains. But it's also an optimistic story, in its view of basic human nature, and in the depiction of the title corporation, with its mission:

"the creation of environmentally responsible, non-exploitive, domestic-based, maximally creative jobs... the primary goal of the subsidiaries shall always be the full employment of all workers... it is to be hoped that the delivery of high-quality goods and services will be a byproduct..."

Di Filippo also indulges in some classical SFnal extrapolation. "Agents" looks at computer-based personality simulations which handle interactions in the "net," and at what might happen if one such "agent" became autonomous. "Skintwister" and "Fleshflowers" follow the career of Dr. Strode, a very talented "peeker": a man who uses psychokinetic powers to heal people by manipulating them at the cellular level. The first story deals with a crisis in his career as, basically, a plastic surgeon; the second with his subsequent time on Mars dealing with an alien infestation. "SUITs" is a mordant and effective fable about robotic security personnel.

The other stories are perhaps less easy to fit into categories. "Kid Charlemagne," as the author acknowledges, is a story strongly influenced by J.G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands stories: it's set in an isolated lush resort, and features the inevitably doomed romance of a mysterious musician and a spoiled rich girl. "The Boredom Factory" is a cynical fable that is pretty well described by its title. And "The Mill" -- well, for one thing, "The Mill" is my favourite story in this book: I read it and loved it in Amazing Stories back in 1991, and I loved it as much on rereading it just now. It's a long story that in some ways seems reminiscent of Jack Vance. It follows, sometimes indirectly, the life of a man named Charlie Cairncross, as he grows up in the valley of the Mill. The Mill is a series of factory buildings devoted to producing "luxcloth," which is bought by the immortal Factor for interstellar distribution. In the background are such nice SFnal ideas as the interstellar milieu into which this colony planet obscurely fits, the true nature of the Factor, the "luxcloth," and so on. But the centre of the story is the close depiction of the circumscribed society of the factory villages. This society seems real, and its eventual fate is well-portrayed, the characters are sympathetic and worth reading about, and the concluding scene is truly moving. You couldn't call this story ignored -- it did for example make the Locus Reader's Poll list of Best Novellas of 1991, but it does seem under-appreciated (perhaps because of its publication in Amazing: at that time a beautiful large-format magazine which published some striking material, but which never really achieved much success as far as circulation is concerned).

I recommend this collection of stories very highly. Di Filippo is a compulsively engaging writer -- witty and imaginative, and fond of his characters, so that they are fun to spend time with, and fun to root for (mostly!). This book delivers on its implicit thematic promise, offering a nice distribution of SFnal explorations of people at work, even while collecting stories from all phases of the author's career. Excellent stuff.

Revivified Review: Crown Duel and Court Duel, by Sherwood Smith

This review was written originally in 1999 for SF Site, about two YA novels by Sherwood Smith, one called Crown Duel (1997), the second Court Duel (1998). At the time I rather grumpily concluded my review with a plea to buy the books quickly as they might go out of print soon. The publisher's representative politely but a bit peevedly responded that they actually were pleased with the novels and would be keeping them in print. And they were true to their word -- in 2002 the two novels were rereleased in a single combined volume, simply called Crown Duel. (Apparently, Sherwood originally wrote the novels as one unified story -- though it's fair to say that original two parts are divided sensibly, and really do work has halves of a diptych.) As far as I can tell, the books remain in print -- at least, they are available at Amazon -- and they are considered among Sherwood Smith's most popular novels. (For me, they rank that the top of her work, along with Inda. They really are immensely pleasurable reads.)

I've made mild revisions to the text below, mainly to avoid really out-of-date remarks.

Revivified Review: Crown Duel and Court Duel, by Sherwood Smith

by Rich Horton

Many longtime readers of SF and fantasy cut their teeth on young adult or juvenile novels: for SF, perhaps Robert A. Heinlein, or Andre Norton, or Sylvia Louise Engdahl; for fantasy, The Hobbit, or Norton again, or perhaps Lloyd Alexander.

I remember with fondness the days of the so-called "Juvenile to Please Adults" books, and I still read with pleasure Heinlein's juveniles, for instance. I celebrate all attempts to publish full-fledged SF/fantasy for young adults which will still be good reading for, say, me. [To this end, Tor's Jupiter series of YA Science Fiction deserves praise, and Jane Yolen's now defunct series of YA Fantasy, published by Harcourt Brace, deserves praise, and lamentations at its end. -- The Jupiter series is also long gone, and really didn't last very long, alas!]

Sherwood Smith, co-author (with Dave Trowbridge) of the much prized, hard to find, space opera series collectively titled Exordium, and of a few novels with Andre Norton, wrote five YA fantasies for Jane Yolen Books. The Wren Trilogy is an engaging series of books about 12-year old Wren, and her discovery of her magical abilities amidst threats of war. Better still are The Crown and Court Duet [now simply the one book Crown Duel (with one pendant short story)]: two books set apparently in Wren's world [actually the Wren books are set in a different universe] featuring 16-year old Countess Meliara Astiar, and her bumbling but passionate entrance into the worlds of politics and war.

The first book is Crown Duel. Meliara, who narrates the books, and her brother Bran are struggling to make ends meet after the death of their father. They are now Count and Countess of Tlanth, a remote hilly portion of the Kingdom of Remalna. The corrupt King is raising taxes, and, worse, appears to be ready to violate the Covenant humans have with the mysterious hill folk. Humans have agreed to leave the forests undisturbed, especially the beautiful colourwood trees, and in exchange the Hill Folk supply the humans with magical firewood.

Meliara and Bran are very poor, partly from trying to deflect the burden of taxation from their people--thus, they live more like peasants than peers. The two are just reaching the age at which they will start to pair, and eventually marry. But Meliara, at least, evinces no interest in such things.

As the book opens, the political situation comes to a head, and Meliara, Bran and their people rise in revolt. Smith entertainingly describes an ill-run war, which after some early success leads to humiliating defeat for the undermanned Tlanth people. Meliara is captured, and taken to the Remalna capital city. She encounters the Marquis of Shevraeth, proud commander of the King's forces, whose skill had turned the tide against Tlanth, and takes a sudden fierce dislike to him. The book continues with harrowing escapes, nicely described wandering through the backroads of the country, and a final confrontation with the King's forces.

Court Duel takes up after the war. The bad King has been vanquished, and the Marquis of Shevraeth is the leading candidate for the throne. The court is full of political wiles, however, and some people think Meliara or her brother should either push their own claims or support another.

Meliara at last consents to spend some time in court and we are treated to some entertaining descriptions of artificial court life and manners, including details resulting from things like not being able to use wood for furniture. She is a fish out of water, and finally finds a secret friend, with whom she exchanges a series of letters in which she is able to express her concerns about the false nature of court life, even as she begins to understand the reasoning behind the rules.

Meliara remains confused about who her real friends are, and about whether the Marquis -- who is clearly capable but whom she still distrusts -- or some other claimant, should be King. The matter is pushed to a head by a very interesting, slightly underused (I thought) character, a man named Flauvic who also has a claim to the throne, and who has spent some time learning powerful magic in a foreign kingdom. The general shape of the ending is easy to see in advance, but the details are nicely revealed.

Both these books are, first of all, great reads. Very few books keep me up at night to finish them, but Crown Duel did, and I took an unplanned extended lunch break to finish Court Duel. They are nice formal contrasts: the first almost all action and war, the second more magic and formal court life. If I had a mild complaint, it would be that in both books the Hill Folk serve as sort of dei ex machinae. But this is minor, and does little to detract from the pleasures of reading these two books.

I'm not quite ready to rule on how these would appeal to the supposed target age group (teens, I would think), though I'm sure I'd have loved them then, just as I did now. Among other things, they feature a well-done, very understated, sexual tension, never vulgar, that greatly enhances our interest in the main characters. The world they inhabit isn't quite fully-furnished; I don't think books these short can do that, but the odd details are telling and nice. Highly recommended. [I do believe these have proved popular with younger readers as well as adults -- and the details of the world they are set in are very much filled in in a long series of novels Smith has published, set in various places in this world, and set over a long time. There is one prequel to Crown Duel: A Stranger to Command (2008).]

Repurposed Review: To the Stars (aka Return to Tomorrow), by L. Ron Hubbard

This an extended review I wrote back in 2001, on the occasion of the nomination of L. Ron Hubbard's short novel "To the Stars" for a Retro Hugo. I go into some detail at the end to explain why I found the novel both better written than anything else I've read by him, and also morally vile.

It appeared, interestingly, in the February and March 1950 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. The April issue featured another  Hubbard story ("Greed"), and then the May issue featured "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science". A few more stories appeared in other SF magazines in 1950, but, essentially, the Dianetics essay marked a very sharp divide in Hubbard's career: he wrote no more science fiction after than (until Battlefield Earth.) His only later appearances in Astounding were Dianetics-related articles. "To the Stars" itself was published in book from by Ace in 1954 as Return to Tomorrow. I've only read the Astounding serial, so I don't know if the book version differed. In 2004 it was reprinted under the original title and subsequent editions have retained that title.

To the Stars (aka Return to Tomorrow), by L. Ron Hubbard

by Rich Horton

As I've been reading late '40s and 1950 issues of Astounding, I've come across several Hubbard stories. They are bad -- that's all I can say. Very carelessly written, very silly in plotting and very stupid as far as the SFnal content. The worst of the bunch are the putrid "Ole Doc Methusaleh" stories -- an unsympathetic and uninteresting lead character, with a servile alien slave (who just loves being a slave -- hates it when Doc tries freeing him), and with an insipid beautiful girl per story, plus just idiotic "medical" mysteries for plot material.  Gaah!  

Basically, I expected the same of "To The Stars". I have to admit, I didn't get that. "To the Stars" is much more tightly written than the rest of the Hubbard I've read. The characters are implausible and stereotypical, but still more deeply felt, more lived in. The story is actually gripping, and Hubbard takes on some intriguing philosophical ideas, with some interesting twists on them. And at times it's genuinely moving.

So, is it good?  Here I have to depart somewhat from the purely fictional values. Though I will say that the above paragraph may overstate things a bit -- to some extent the above is a reaction to my low expectations, which were exceeded, and while the story is what I've said, don't forget the caveats -- stereotypical characters, in particular.  And while the prose is better than Hubbard's average, it's not great stuff. And the ideas -- well, it's perhaps necessary to discuss the story, and spoil it, to deal with those. For those who don't wish to have the story spoiled (though why would most people care about this one?), I'll say briefly that in the end I found some of the ideas presented sufficiently repugnant that even if the story were wholly successful on craft terms I wouldn't recommend it.

I'll describe the story in more detail, then, below, after some spoiler space.

--------

Spoilers follow.

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The story opens with a bit of infodump. Humanity has more or less spread to the stars, but light-speed restrictions apply. As a result, colonies are formed, but mostly abandoned. Only a few ships make what is called "The Long Passage". The main drawback is that the crewmen of the long passage find themselves isolated from their home cultures -- by the time they've made a loop around a few planets and returned to Earth, though they may be only a few months older, decades will have passed on Earth. For that reason, while insystem spaceship jobs are somewhat prized, very few people sign up for interstellar jobs.

This setup is not unfamiliar -- it's just a step away from implying Anderson's Kith, or Heinlein's Free Traders, or, much later, Vinge's Qeng Ho. But Hubbard doesn't go quite that far -- his long passage folk seem on the verge of creating such a society -- a society of space-based nomadic folk -- but they don't quite do that.

Anyway, the main character of "To The Stars" is Alan Corday, described as an Engineer Tenth Class. Apparently, Engineering is a hereditary position, and an Engineer Tenth is high status, but Alan's father has blown the family fortune, so he's kind of stuck -- he has a certain position to maintain, which he can't afford. He wants to marry his girl, but her family won't let him as long as he's broke. So he tells her he's going to work his way to Mars, and make his fortune there, then return in 5 years and they'll get married. We meet Alan at the spaceship yard -- every ship turns him down, as an Engineer Tenth Class is overqualified.  Finally he meets and down and out bunch, led by a charismatic captain, and before you know it, he's been drugged and shanghaied onto the Hound of Heaven. It's no surprise when we find that the Hound is on the Long Passage.

Alan finds himself designated something like Third Mate in Training. The captain treats him viciously, while Alan becomes motivated to repair the beatup ship, believing he'll turn it around in time to get back to Earth. He also gets involved in a mutiny attempt -- only to see it fail and one of the leaders be spaced. Eventually they return to Earth. Alan hasn't been paying attention to objective time -- he imagines only a few years have passed, but actually 60 or so years have passed. Alan's world is completely different -- two political upheavals have occurred, and now engineers are detested as former oppressors. Somehow he finds his fiancee -- she's completely nuts, apparently having constructed a fantasy in which Alan returned as promised and married her.

Bitter, Alan returns to the ship, as there is no place for him on Earth. The rest of the story follows his hardening into a potential ship captain, as the ship's crew exterminates an alien race on another planet, then returns to Earth, only to find Earth radically changed again -- and this time, the Earthmen try to steal the ship's cargo. After a bitter battle, the old Captain dies, but Alan manages to save the ship and vanquish the Earthmen. He finds himself promoted to Captain, and he finds a letter from the old Captain, telling him his mission. Oh, and then he tricks an engineer from Earth to get on the ship, knocks him out and kidnaps him to be a replacement engineer, despite the fact that this man is married.

Here's the deal -- the Long Passage is essential for humanity. So all this stuff is justified. The Captain's coldness and cruelty are necessary to create a new leader. The genocide of aliens is necessary to keep them from doing the same to humans. (Shoot first, try to make friends never.) And of course kidnapping is justified because new people are essential on the Long Passage.  It's all played perfectly straight -- I considered the idea that it was a satire -- after all, humanity is portrayed as pretty much thoroughly bad throughout -- maybe Hubbard was saying "All these evil acts are justified in order to save this evil species" -- if so, that didn't come through well.

The story itself, though broadly implausible in many places, is a pretty decent read, but the message is vile.

Reviews of Fitzgerald, Feeley, Kressel, Morrison, Fraser, etc.

Recent Substack Posts

Here are some recent reviews I've done on my Substack.

Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers

Cumberworld & Farther, by Gregory Feeley

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford

Moth, by James Sallis

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

The Rainseekers, by Matthew Kressel

Mr American, by George Macdonald Fraser

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

by Rich Horton

[I wrote this back in 1998, when the novel came out. I haven't revised it at all (save for a few bracketed additions] so what I say about the author is very out of date. It turns out that Jablokov took an hiatus from writing (or at least publishing) for nearly a decade after this novel appeared, Since he retunred, in 2006, he has published one more novel (Brain Thief (2010)) and quite a few shorter stories, which have continued to be very interesting.]

Alexander Jablokov's new novel [as of 1998] is Deepdrive.  I've been a fan of Jablokov's ever since reading his first short stories in Asimov's a few years ago.  I really liked his first novel, Carve the Sky, which was "baroque" and artsy, and his third novel, Nimbus, a kind of post-cyberpunk story.  And I've liked a lot of his short stories.

Deepdrive is his latest.  It's an Avon EOS hardcover, and I'd like to praise Avon for their practice of publishing lower-priced books.  Their pbs have been $3.99, and now I've seen a couple of hc's, in smaller packages, for about $15.  I think this is a good approach. [That comment didn't age well!]

Deepdrive itself is set in a busy, well-imagined future.  The solar system is occupied (mostly benignly) by several different species of aliens: the Bgarth are burrowing on Venus, assisting with its terraformation; the Gunners are on Mercury, shooting at the Sun; the Ulanyi are on Earth, living in symbiotic relationships with nomadic human tribes.  And there are plenty more.  But none of the aliens will give humans the secret of the "deepdrive", which allows faster than light travel.  An alien from another species, the Vronnans, has showed up, apparently a refugee from his own people, and he is holed up on Venus.  Rumor says he wants to be rescued, and he might have something important, even a deepdrive, to trade.  Sophonisba Trust assembles a team, somewhat ad hoc, to go after the Vronnan.  The novel follows her and the members of her team, as well as the Vronnan, as a series of disasters propels them willy nilly towards learning more than they might want to know about Vronnans, the lost Martian slowship interstellar expedition, their own motivations, and how Ulanyi, Gunners, and other aliens tie into this.  And also, maybe, the secrets of the deepdrive.

It's all pretty cool, and well-imagined, distinctly "Sterlingesque" (particularly reminiscent of some Shaper-Mechanist stuff, like "Swarm"), and certainly exciting, and yet ...  It never quite won me over.  I dunno why.  Maybe it was too hard to follow all the threads.  Maybe I didn't quite believe in most of the characters (Soph was well done, also her ex-husband Lightfoot, but I was never convinced by the beautiful lesbian Ambryn Chretien or the big bodyguard Elward Bakst, both of whose motivations and abilities seemed to change to whatever the plot required).  But, I'm sort of worried, is my "Sense of Wonder" dulling?  What I mean is, I think maybe 20 years ago all the cool stuff, the aliens, the biotech, the plots within plots, would have overwhelmed me and carried me along.  And it didn't do that for me now.

On balance, I'd still recommend Deepdrive.  But I can't give it full marks. [Which may have been more my fault than Jablokov's!]