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OtherRealms Issue 22 Part 07
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
