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OtherRealms Issue 19 Part 09
Electronic OtherRealms #19
Winter, 1987
Part 9
War Stories
Reviews by Alan Wexelblat
wex@mcc.com
Copyright 1987 by Alan Wexelblat
Reviewed in this issue:
Berserker Base
Fred Saberhagen
[****]
Armor
John Steakley
[****+]
War for the Oaks
Emma Bull
[***+]
Combat SF
Gordon R. Dickson
[***+]
One of the joys of planning ahead is that you can make all the pieces
fit together. Or, at least, you can try. Last month's bunch of odds and
ends convinced me that I ought to plan out in advance what my theme
would be for this month and select books to be read according to that
theme. Goodness knows I have enough unread books on my shelves to keep
me busy for years.
I set out first to balance the poor marks I gave Saberhagen's Pyramids
by reviewing something of his that I liked. The Berserker Base
collaboration is not exactly a Saberhagen novel, but it bears his
indelible stamp. Then my wife insisted I read Emma Bull's first novel,
War for the Oaks. With that in my hands, the theme for this column
became obvious -- I would talk about war stories.
Of course, that's still a lot of ground to cover. The science fiction
end of the spectrum offers space operas with grand armadas streaking
across the stars, space-ship combats with daring pilots recreating the
glory combats of WWII, armored ground troops with high-powered
blasters. On the fantasy end there are armies of elves and orcs, bands
of brave soldiers, hand-to-hand duels and fantastic monsters.
Obviously, I can't cover this in one column, and probably couldn't in
ten. So, instead of trying to cover everything, I decided to give you
a sampling - - something that will allow you to get a taste of what's
available and then go out and find more of what you like.
Fortunately for my plans, Saberhagen and Bull are at pretty close to
the opposite ends of the spectrum. To fill in the space in between a
little, I chose Combat SF, an anthology edited by Dorsai master Gordon
Dickson, and John Steakley's Armor, another first novel by another
promising author.
Berserker Base [Tor Hardcover, 218 pp] is an unusual collaboration. The
berserker series of books had been Saberhagen's exclusive preserve for
many years. Unlike Marion Zimmer Bradley with her Darkover universe,
Saberhagen has not coauthored any novels nor had he allowed related
stories to be professionally published. In this book, however, he has
brought together short stories by six excellent authors and written
linking pieces to tie the shorts into a coherent whole.
Saberhagen has also written beginning and ending pieces completing a
kind of umbrella tale which arches over the other works. In this cover
tale, human Lars Kankuru is forced into a telepathic link with nonhuman
Carmpan who are also prisoners at the berserker base. The bonded duos
observe the six shorter stories which are woven back into the umbrella
story by Saberhagen.
The first short is Stephen Donaldson's "What Makes Us Human." It is the
story of a generation ship launched from a world that has never heard
of berserkers. Protected by her designers' conviction that nothing can
go faster than the speed of light and by a supposedly-impenetrable
shield, Aster's Hope has no weapons with which to fight the berserker.
Worse, the home world Aster is totally unprotected. Somehow, Temple and
Gracias -- the only awake crew members -- must stop the berserker from
destroying both ship and planet.
"What Makes Us Human" is a classic man-versus-machine story solidly in
the Saberhagen tradition. Donaldson quickly sets up two likeable characters
in an 'impossible' situation and then lets the action flow. The ending is
a little predictable, but that doesn't seriously hamper the story.
"With Friends Like These" is Connie Willis' entry into the collection.
She tells the story of Pat, a company mining engineer, and Gemma, the
representative of the Cotabote race -- natives of the planet being
mined. The natives are "belligerent, spiteful, evil-minded ... and
sneaky" -- to say the least. They continually interfere with the mining
operations and with Pat's attempts to bed Gemma. They are also less
than helpful when a berserker shows up.
At first reading, it's hard to see why Saberhagen chose to include
"With Friends Like These." The berserker is really not that important
to the story, which is a fairly straightforward humor/love story. But
it is important to realize that, even in a universe threatened by death
machines, life goes on. Willis' story reminds us of this in a humorous
way and helps round of the Berserker Base collection.
In "Itself Surprised," Roger Zelazny takes us aboard a smuggler's space
ship. Dr. Juna Bayel is the illicit cargo -- a robotics and cybernetics
expert hired to teach classes on those topics on the planet Corlano.
The rulers of that planet want to forbid any knowledge of those topics,
thus the secrecy.
Dr. Bayel's expertise is called into play earlier than expected when
the smugglers come across an ancient artifact floating in space. It
appears to be some kind of robotic warship, perhaps even a berserker.
Unfortunately, the smugglers also come across a berserker which wants
the artifact. It's a race against time as the crew tries to stall the
berserker long enough for Bayel to figure out what the artifact really
is and why the berserker wants it so badly.
Zelazny writes a tight, suspenseful plot which I'm not going to spoil
by saying any more about. "Itself Surprised" is, I think, the best
story of the collection.
Zelazny is followed in the collection by "Deathwomb," Poul Anderson's
entry. Once again, the story concentrates on the humans and aliens
inhabiting a planet under berserker threat.
Dr. Sally Jennison is a researcher at University Station on Ilya. One
day she returns from the field to find that the human military has
'invaded' Ilya. They have removed all the other University personnel
and are in the process of demolishing the station.
Dr. Jennison at first sees the military as a monolithic monster, bent
on the destruction of her and her comrades' life work and uncaring
toward the natives.
However, Captain Ian Dunbar -- the enemy personified -- is no monster.
He is the quintessential concerned soldier, following orders. The
military is on Ilya for a purpose and Sally Jennison slowly discovers
what is up.
Anderson handles the denouement with his usual talent. "Deathwomb"
ranks a close second behind Zelazny's story.
"Pilots of the Twilight" by Ed Bryant is another somewhat-unusual
story. Although casual mercenaries are a standard fixture in future-
and space- oriented SF, Saberhagen had not written them into his
universe before this.
Bryant creates a pair of worlds with frequent continental low-intensity
conflicts. In this environment, a class of fighters for hire has grown
up. Operating in semi-symbiosis with their spaceships, they are the
mercenaries of this system. Holt Calder is a special member of this
group. Although young and fairly inexperienced, he has a natural
talent for warfare. He also has an unusual heritage.
Teamed with him for the fight against the berserker is Morgan Kai-
Anila. She too is a natural talent, but she has age and experience as
well. So does Tanzin, the third member of Bryant's main cast.
However, all the skill and experience of all the pilots on the planet
is not enough to stop the berserker. The team must call on the 'Reen --
the original inhabitants of the planet. They raised Holt Calder when he
was abandoned as a baby to die in the wilderness. Most humans regard
the 'Reen as animals because they superficially resemble large badgers
and live in a simple hunter-gatherer tribal culture. The 'Reen have
been hunted and driven off most of the planet by humans. However, they
have a power that just might stop the berserker if the two races can
cooperate in time.
Bryant sets up and executes the story nicely. However, he does get a
bit preachy at times. "Pilots of the Twilight" is a lot like a modern
cowboys- and-indians story, with the humans as Indian-hating cowboys
and the 'Reen as unexpectedly civilized and strangely powerful Indians.
Nevertheless, it's still a fairly good story.
The last short story in Berserker Base is Larry Niven's "A Teardrop
Falls." This story revolves around the fact that the berserkers'
builders equipped them with an intelligence equal or greater than that
of human beings. Man cannot yet build a machine that smart.
However, Niven postulates that we could capture a human mind and encode
it into a computer. "A Teardrop Falls" tells the story of a battle
between a berserker and the computer with the mind of Hilary Gage.
Hilary has only two weapons with which to fight the berserker. The
first is his human ingenuity and cunning. Functioning at the same speed
as the berserker's brain, he can match its thought power. His second
weapon is a program called Remora -- a program he has carefully crafted
over the two centuries since his mind was transferred into a machine.
Niven turns these simple elements into a tight, exciting story of
computer-versus-computer conflict.
Berserker Base has no bad stories. The only flaw I could find was an
overall sense of hurriedness, as though Saberhagen put the book
together under deadline pressure. Still, it is an excellent anthology.
I recommend it to newcomers to the berserker universe and to lovers of
Saberhagen's previous works.
I have an autographed copy of Armor [Daw SF paperback, 426 pp, ISBN
0-87997-979-8]. It reads "For Alan & Jennie -- hereby absolved of
guilt." The signature and the book were obtained at a little con held
here Austin. John Steakley was a Guest of Honor, but so was Robert
Asprin. And Robert, being his natural self, dominated the scene.
After the last panel late Saturday afternoon, Asprin retired -- in a
crowd of autograph-seeking fans -- to the hotel bar, where he proceeded
to hold court. After getting my Myth book signed, I retreated to a corner
of the pack where a good-looking fellow was sitting morosely drinking
gin and tonics which were brought to him by a good-looking lady.
Since the gentleman seemed bent on getting drunk, I struck up a
conversation with the lady, who revealed that they were from Dallas and
when we finally got around to exchanging names I found that I was
talking to Steakley and his girlfriend. And it quickly became apparent
that not only did I not have a copy of his book, no one else in the
room did either.
I immediately excused myself and rushed off to the dealer room where I
bought myself a copy of Armor, then brought it back for Steakley to
sign. Thus, my guilt was absolved.
Armor is Steakley's first novel, but he has been a writer for a long
time. For most of his writing life, he has been creating scripts for
Hollywood movies. Studios like to have several dozen scripts on hand at
any given time. This helps insure that their highly-paid actors and
directors don't sit idle (or get bored and go elsewhere). These scripts
are commissioned and paid for in advance, and 99.9% of them never see
the light of day.
Steakley was making good money doing these scripts but, like other
authors, he wanted to make it into the public eye. The final straw, he
says, was when his script for "Texas Chainsaw Massacre II" finished
second in the race to see whose script would be used. Frustrated with
comfortable anonymity, Steakley gave up taking Hollywood commissions
and sat down to write Armor .
Armor is an unusual book in that it is not really a book about a person
or persons. Rather, it is the story of a suit of high-tech battle armor
and what it does to and for the people who possess it. Steakley's
cinematic talents work well in this kind of setting.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section is clearly
Steakley's homage to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers -- a major
source of inspiration for the book. This first part is the story of
Felix, the wearer of the armor, and his first drop onto Banshee, the
aliens' homeworld.
As in Starship Troopers, the aliens are hive creatures with no
individual minds. Most are workers, a few are warriors armed with
weapons that are crude compared to the sophisticated armaments of the
troopers. However, Steakley's "ants" all have claws and mandibles and a
strength capable of opening a person's armor the way a human cracks
open a lobster. Thus, each ant is a threat.
There is also another critical difference. Where Heinlein gave us fast-
moving troopers in constant individual combats, Steakley gives us waves
of thousands of ants, swarming everywhere over every trooper.
Though their blaze-guns and blaze-bombs kill hundreds and thousands of
ants, the troopers quickly run out of power and are forced into
hand-to- claw combat with the ants, clubbing and killing with their
armored bodies. Combat is a very direct and very personal thing when
you must face each opponent at that range. Some troopers can't handle
it and go under immediately. Others fight until they are overwhelmed by
sheer weight of numbers.
Felix is thrust into this living hell in scout's armor -- lighter and
faster than a regular trooper but with less armament. We quickly learn
that Felix is different from the other soldiers around him. First and
foremost, he hates. He hates the "Black Suit" and being imprisoned in
it and what he must do while in it. He hates the ignorant and
incompetent commanders of Fleet who send him and his comrades onto
Banshee unprepared. He hates the fact that he will have to watch his
comrades die. He hates the War and the ants he must fight.
Second, Felix fears. He fears dying. Fears it in a close and personal
way. Out of this hatred and fear is born "The Engine," a kind of
alter-ego within Felix. The Engine is the perfect warrior. It neither
hates nor fears. It merely psyches itself up to do what it must -- kill
ants and keep Felix alive.
The first part of the book follows Felix/The Engine as he descends into
the carnage of Banshee. It tells what they do there, who they meet and
what happens to them all. Steakley is good at making characters 'live'
with a minimum of verbiage. We see these people as we see the battles
-- through Felix's eyes. Steakley is careful not to let the focus
wander, a danger when writing cluttered and active battle scenes.
The second part of the book is the story of Jack Crow. Rogue, pirate,
semi-hero -- Jack is a man trying to live up to the myths about him,
his public image.
The second part of the book opens with Jack's escape from prison.
Unfortunately, he falls into the clutches of Borglyn, leader of a band
of mutineers.
Borglyn and his crew have a ship, but they need fuel. The only place
they can hope to get it with all of Fleet looking for them is at a
remote scientific colony. Borglyn does not have the power to blast his
way in and take the fuel. What he does have is spies on the planet -- and
now he has Jack Crow. Borglyn wants Crow to use his wiles and charm to
infiltrate the project and take down the defenses from inside. If Crow
succeeds, he gets to keep an abandoned Fleet courier ship Borglyn found.
If he fails or refuses, he dies. Being a practical man, Crow agrees.
At the last moment, Crow decides to take with him to the planet a suit
of scout armor found in the courier ship. Of course, he can't wear it;
it's customized for its one original wearer. But it's an interesting
artifact and his agile mind can surely make use of it.
The rest of the novel revolves around Crow's adventures on the planet,
what's recorded in the suit, and what it does to the people who come
into contact with it.
Steakley's writing is quite good. He has smoothness and polish that are
rare in first novels. Four-hundred-plus pages is also hefty for a
first-timer, but the action is so well-paced that the reader's interest
is continually held. Steakley builds good characters and ties them into
their setting very well. I also liked the ending which -- although a
bit cinematic -- is very satisfying.
There is a war brewing in the streets of Minneapolis. Unknown to most
of the city's human inhabitants, the two major powers of Faerie -- the
Seelie and Unseelie courts -- are about to embark on one of their
seasonal wars for territory. This time, however, it's going to be more
serious. The Seelie court is going to 'recruit' a mortal -- Eddi
McCandry. Her presence on the battlefield and the spells woven around
her will turn sport into deadly earnest; with her there, the deaths
suffered by the beings of Faerie will be permanent. Immortals will die.
The Unseelie court, being quite fond of their immortal existences,
would like nothing better than to destroy Eddi and thwart the Seelie
court's plans. So Eddi is assigned a protector -- a phouka, one of the
most infuriating creatures in existence. As he says "I am a phouka, my
sweet, and by nature a tricksy wight. I cannot be otherwise."
Eddi wants none of this. She doesn't care about Faerie wars, even when
convinced of their reality by the phouka's shape-changing and an
assassin's arrow. What she wants is to be left alone with her best
friend Carla to form a band and forget about Stuart Kline, ex-boyfriend,
ex-lover, and currently number two on the pain-in-the-ass list (after
the phouka). If you're beginning to get the idea that this is a
basically fun story with serious overtones, you're on the right track.
The last time I read something by Emma Bull, it was her co-authoring of
"Danceland" in the Bordertown anthology. Many of the elements of War
for the Oaks [Ace Fantasy, 309 pp, ISBN 0-441-87073-2] are reminiscent
of that earlier work. There are dance clubs, rock and roll bands, and
fey characters mixing with humans.
This is Bull's first novel and it has some first-novel weaknesses. The
pacing is somewhat uneven and the air-of-band-practice is done to
death. Nevertheless, Bull succeeds in drawing the reader into an
increasingly- interesting story. Eddi is well-drawn and well-motivated,
even if she is a little slow to pick up on clues that are obvious to
the reader. The phouka is also well presented. At first I, like Eddi,
wanted to take his head off with a blunt axe. As the story progresses,
though, he becomes increasingly likeable.
My major gripe with this book is with the ending. Without spoiling the
plot, I'll just say Bull sets up what ought to be a tense, gripping
ending. But it fails -- it doesn't build properly. The reader never
doubts the outcome -- never feels the tension that ought to be present.
The whole affair seems hurried and somewhat choppy. There are two
possible explanations. One is that Bull is not confident enough to give
full rein to her stories. The other is that someone talked her into
cutting too much out of the ending. Either way, it seems a flaw in this
particular book, not in the author. I don't think it will happen
again.
War for the Oaks is not bad for a first novel. I expect Bull will get
better with practice and I will be sure to get a copy of her next
novel, when it comes out.
This is an updated reprinting of an old anthology, first published in
1971. It contains thirteen stories, dated between 1949 and 1979. (Obviously,
the reprint added stories not in the original.) As Dickson explains in
the introduction, it is an attempt to survey a small segment of the
war-stories spectrum. According to Dickson, Combat SF [Ace SF, 266 pp,
ISBN 0-441-11534-9] concentrates on what we would call "hard SF."
However, that emphasis does not overly restrict the pieces that Dickson
has selected. There are pieces that we traditionally associate with
hard SF, such as Arthur C. Clarke's excellent "Hide and Seek" and Hal
Clement's abysmal "Fireproof." These stories turn on key elements of
physics, especially the physics peculiar to space. However, there are
also pieces that cheerfully violate known physical laws, such as Fred
Saberhagen's "Patron of the Arts," a berserker story with FTL drives.
There are also a couple of surprisingly human-oriented pieces, notably
Dickson's own "Ricochet on Miza" which tells the story of a brutal
human hunter and the wily animal he hunts, and Keith Laumer's "The Last
Command," an interesting Bolo story.
There are also a couple of pieces that are hard to classify. "The
Horars of War," by Gene Wolfe is a disturbing look at the psychology of
soldiering. Although it has a futuristic setting, the feel is like the
stories that Vietnam vets tell. Frank M. Robinson's "Situation Thirty"
is another mind-game story, this time about a duel of wits between
spaceship commanders.
There are a couple of very short entries. "Men of Good Will" is by Ben
Bova and Myron Lewis. It is a cute little ditty about physics on the
moon. Joe L. Hensley's "The Pair" is a pulpish piece from 1958 about
the end of a war between humans and aliens.
Some of the pieces express an author's sadness about the combat
depicted. David Drake's "The Butcher's Bill" and James White's "The
Scavengers" are in this category. White's story has an ending twist
that really surprised me, something that hasn't happened in a while.
And finally, there are two stories that use hard-SF settings to create
a situation of personal one-on-one combat. Joe Green's "Single Combat"
shows how a modern man might cope with the treacherous realities of an
uncivilized tribal culture. Poul Anderson's classic "The Man Who Came
Early" shows just the opposite -- how a modern man might fail to cope
with a tribal culture he does not understand.
It's hard to assign a single ranking to any collection with this many
stories. Two are downright awful, some are classics, most are good. In
all, it's an average book which gives a fairly good overview of what
the field of Combat SF has been like over a thirty-year stretch. I
recommend it to readers new to the field; more experienced readers
should buy Bull's and Steakley's books instead.
Mindplayers
Pat Cadigan
Bantam, $3.50, 0-553-26585-7
Reviewed by
Fred Bals
bals@nutmeg.dec.com
Copyright 1987 by Fred Bals
It's amazing how quickly Mindplayers goes bad, the story souring like a
bowl of ptomaine-laced tuna left out in the sun too long. After an
explosion of an opening section that could have been Hugo material if
published as a novelette, Pat Cadigan's first novel ratchets its way
downhill like a cheesy one-minute roller coaster ride. You plow through
the book and keep expecting the machinery to start up again, the chain
to catch, the car to begin jerking forward and carry you to the next
peak. After all, you brought us up there at the beginning, didn't you,
Pat? You told us about the view, quickly let us see some things we
never saw before, teased us with glimpses of the sights on the midway
from your beautifully warped perspective. But somewhere in Mindplayers,
the reader begins to realize that the tease of the first few chapters
is never going to be fulfilled, at least not on this trip. You find you
only have 100 pages left to finish, then 50, then 10, and you're still
waiting for something more to happen. But the machine has stopped, and
there's a kid on the walkway waiting for you to lean the bar away from
your seat and get off. "Ride's over," he tells you. "What do you want
for three bucks and a half anyway, buddy?" Well, whatever you want --
or expect -- from your reading, I suspect you'll feel short-changed by
Mindplayers. The initial concept of the book is beautiful, the sort of
promising idea that many burnt-out authors would sacrifice a year's
worth of royalty checks to come up with. Alexandra Victoria Hass, known
as Allie, and sometimes (in what rapidly becomes an overworked
one-liner) as Deadpan Allie, is a woman convicted of deliberately
inducing an unlicensed psychosis in herself, one of the few No-Nos of
the future society Cadigan postulates. Offered the alternatives of jail
or "community service," Allie opts for the latter choice. In her case,
the community service is to become a mindplayer -- a specialist who
enters other people's minds through a groddy technological hookup
(groddy due to the necessity of popping out your eyes in order for it
work. Gag me with a detached retina.). Mindplayers come in all sorts of
flavors -- thrillseekers, who can help you discover what *really* turns
you on; belljarrers, who use sensory deprivation as therapy;
dreamfeeders, who do what the term implies; neurosis peddlers, who will
give you that special fetish you've always wanted; and pathosfinders.
Allie chooses the last as her profession. Pathosfinders aid creative
people -- artists, musicians, writers -- in realizing new works of art
or in breaking past blocks through controlled mind therapy. Mindplayers
opens with Allie's arrest and a walk through her own mind with a
professional mindplayer. In this opening section Cadigan's talent
really shines through. Especially well-handled are the descriptive
passages describing Allie's mindscape. The inner scenery of Allie's
mind is both weird and strangely familiar at the same time, as if
Cadigan somehow had tapped into a block of racial memory shared by the
reader. The world of Mindplayers is also fully developed in the space
of a few pages, a Cadigan strength she's previously developed to good
ends in her short story writing. She spins off ideas like a rapid
barrage of Roman candles, probably offering more to spark the reader's
imagination in any given paragraph than the total of any 10 other
science fiction novels you'll read this year. Given all that, why does
Mindplayersgo wrong? The largest problem is the lack of plot in the
book, a failing Cadigan shares with many other good short story writers
who have tried to make the transition to novels. The story begins to
sputter in the second section, when Allie enrolls in an institution to
develop her mindplaying talent. The distinctive landscape of her mind
that Cadigan used to such good effect in the first section is barely
referred to again. Instead, we have wretchedly boring narrative as
Allie struggles to become a "lucid dreamer" and develops a strange
relationship with someone who may be real or may be a product of her
imagination. Ultimately, the reader doesn't care. You just want
something -- anything -- to happen rather than the endless arguments
between Allie and her tutors that make up the bulk of this section. The
plot does pick up somewhat in the latter half of Mindplayers, but
nowhere achieves the promise offered in the beginning of the book. In a
series of encounters, Allie works as a professional mindplayer, delving
into the minds of actors, poets, and musicians. But the separate
stories seem to be variations on a single theme. While the different
characters Allie works with are distinctive enough, their problems all
seem too similar, the resolutions all blandly the same. There's an
interesting little subplot worked through Mindplayers concerning an
acquaintance?/friend?/lover? of Allie's with the cyberpunkish name of
Jerry Wirerammer. Wirerammer is the cause of Allie's arrest and
continues to make cameo appearances through the rest of the book as he
scrambles through his sleazy existence. Cadigan seems unsure whether
to use the Wirerammer character as a counterpoint to the main storyline
or to develop his role into a separate story. In the end, she straddles
those two choices, leaving the reader wishing for more. In many ways,
Mindplayers succeeds better when read as a series of linked novelettes
which share common characters and backgrounds. Looking at it from that
perspective, parts of Mindplayers are excellent indeed. But as a novel
it doesn't work. The promise of better things to come is there though,
and I'll have ticket in hand the next time the Cadigan carnival comes
to town.
OtherRealms #19
Winter, 1987
Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.
OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written
permission of Chuq Von Rospach.
The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety
as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain
intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or
republished in any way without the express permission of the author.
OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:
Chuq Von Rospach
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Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.
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