Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
OtherRealms Issue 24 Part 03
Electronic OtherRealms #24
Spring, 1989
Part 3 of 10
Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach.
Permission is given to electronically distribute this
issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return
addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used
without permission of the author.
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1989 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Episode 9: Not Yet a Vast Wasteland
Molly Dear: The Autobiography of an Android
Stephen Fine, St. Martin's, 1988, 0-312-02254-9, $18.95
Helen O'Loy never had it so good.
Science fiction is often a powerful medium for social comment. This is
why non-genre writers frequently step into the genre briefly to write
their own visions of utopia, dystopia, or what-have-you: and, depending
on the writer, the results can be as good as Nineteen Eighty-Four and
The Sentimental Agents or as bad as The Terminal Man and Shikasta.
Similarly, many genre writers, from Philip K. Dick to Fredrik Pohl and
C.M. Kornbluth by way of Robert A. Heinlein and Joanna Russ, have taken
advantage of the genre's built-in ability to mess around with the
reader's perception of society.
Science fiction is also a powerful tool for examining fundamental
questions, and particularly the question of an operative definition of
humanity. Examples of this examination abound, from The Caves of Steel
to A Case of Conscience.
Alas, the two rarely mix. This is, perhaps, the signal flaw in Stephen
Fine's first novel. The book is entitled Molly Dear, to which my mind
keeps trying to append an -EST, and is frustrating from start to
finish. It promises much; and while it delivers what it promises, the
goods delivered are damaged and muddled.
The story is an old one, what you might call "robot picaresque." An
android or robot comes to full sentience; its innocent actions are
taken for rebellion; it has a series of adventures and misadventures,
including capture for reprogramming, contact with the genuine rebel
underground, interludes with the highest and lowest levels of human
society, etc., etc. The implementation of the story is rather more
original. The rebel underground are actually a bunch of zoned-out space
hippies trying to bring about the perfect human-android world through
interbreeding -- between humans and sentient fungi, ferchrissakes;
might as well have them fucking rutabagas -- and, believe it or not,
meditation and tantric yoga.
The story's science is rather more wonky. I've already glanced off the
biological problems with Fine's idea of androids; to that, I'll add
only that he seems deucedly unclear at times whether they're living
things or machines. (I don't mean that the narrator seems unclear on
this issue. She is perfectly well-versed in the science of her own
creation. It's the science itself that's so pseudo that my brain hurt.)
Fine also treats us to a ship that can handle an Earth-to-Mars trip in
three days without smooshing its passengers. Implicit in such an
arrangement is either gravity control or the infamous inertialess
drive; but no other sign of either of these technologies is to be seen
anywhere. Indeed, the ship itself is mentioned for the first time only
a few seconds before Molly Dear boards it, and its presence at that
moment is more in the lines of a failed deus-ex-machina than logical
extrapolation from the culture at hand.
Molly's focus is her treatment by her human masters/creators. As such,
it might be an interesting social-commentary novel on the treatment of
subject groups by society as a whole, whether blacks (hispanics, women,
subject group of your choice) in America or Arabs in Israel. But the
actual relationship between humans and androids in Fine's postulated
society is so lacking in any analogy to any real human society that it
loses all bite, and degenerates into mere flailing.
Similarly, Fine has some fine moments of focus in which Molly is
clearly more human than her human intimates. But these fail to gel into
an examination of humanity, in large part because they keep getting
mixed up with the political issues of the novel.
In all, Molly Dear is a failure, but a failure more interesting than
many writers' most successful works. Stephen Fine has an excellent
sense of language (Molly Dear reminded me of an abnormally well-written
19th century "confessional novel") and vision that may lead him to
create some excellent work in the future. I'll be looking forward
eagerly to his next book, and hoping he learns from the experience of
Molly Dear; but I fear I can't in good conscience recommend Molly Dear
to you.
There Are Doors
Gene Wolfe, TOR, 1988, 0-312-93099-2, $17.95
Happily, I can recommend Gene Wolfe's latest, There Are Doors, without
reservation. It's a romp, a frolic, a sheer pleasure, and it's also the
best novel Philip K. Dick never wrote.
Doors has a lot of the same something-is-going-on-outside-the-frame
weirdness that made Free Live Free such a treat. Our hero, unnamed (or,
rather, given a series of false names by other characters. His real
name *may* be Mr. Green), meets a woman and falls in love. She leaves
unexpectedly. He follows her as best he can, and finds himself in a
world so much like ours that it takes him a while to understand the
differences. (Indeed, "Green" is rather an innocent; the reader is
generally three steps ahead of him in understanding his circumstances.)
This world-shift leads to the sort of disorientation Dick was famous
for. At one point, "Green" reflects on his encounter with Sheng, a
Chinese-born American citizen who acts exactly like a '40s stereotype
of a "Chinaman." In the world he knows, he thinks, Chinese folks simply
do not act like that.
To reveal much more would be to spoil the book. Let me simply say that
"Green" does indeed find his love -- indeed, finds her several times
over -- and that the ending, while ambiguous, is quite pleasant.
Justice is done, virtue is rewarded (or is its own reward), and
villains get exactly what they deserve.
Dancing at the Edge of the World:
Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Ursula K. LeGuin, Grove Press, 1989, 0-8021-1105-X, $19.95
What can you say about a collection of essays on topics ranging all
over the map, from menopause to book reviews to travelog to the making
of a TV movie?
The easiest thing to say, I suppose, is to say "it's by Ursula K.
LeGuin and you should go and read it right now." For an awful lot of
people the name LeGuin alone is sufficient cause to go and toss $20 on
the counter at their local B. Walden chain bookstore and demand a copy.
For the reader who simply refuses to be intimidated by the mere name of
one of the finest craftspeople and artists in American letters today,
then, I added the second half of that statement. This is LeGuin's
selection of her essays and book reviews from the past decade (more or
less). Even if you don't agree with everything she has to say, and I
don't always, her saying it makes it worth listening to: both because
she has thought long and deeply upon the topics at hand, and because
the essays themselves are a pleasure to read.
If you're not convinced, at this point, there's simply no hope for you,
and I suggest you go read a novel by Piers Anthony.
Memories of the Space Age
Ballard, J.G., Arkham House, 1988, 0-87054-157-9, $16.95.
I think I've mentioned J.G.Ballard in these pages once or thrice
before. Yes, Carroll & Graf are still at it, and, no, this isn't a
review of one of those.
Memories of the Space Age is a new book, but of old stories. Most of
them -- I'm tempted to say all but I'm not certain about two of them --
have been collected in some of Ballard's previous collections.
Therefore, I can't really say the Ballard fan should go out and buy
Memories. I'd recommend it highly to someone new to Ballard, however,
and the utter hard-core Ballard fan (me) will buy it anyway, if only
for the artwork. Arkham have outdone themselves, with a Max Ernst
wraparound cover and gorgeous interior illustrations by J.G. Potter, he
of the peculiar camera, the man who invented photo-surrealism.
So I suppose I'm addressing myself here to those who don't often read Ballard.
Much of JGB's work deals with decadence and decay. There is a charm to decay
that has fascinated science fiction writers all the way back to H.G.
Wells with his Morlocks and Eloi; the concept was picked up right away
by the pulp writers, notably the Don A. Stuart version of John W. Campbell.
Ballard, then, is working in a well-established tradition, one that
grows out of the very heart's blood of "hard sf."
Still, the "hard sf" reader generally has no use for Ballard, an
attitude that ceases to puzzle only when you realize that "hard sf" has
become, in the past few decades, a haven for unreasoning optimism --
usually right- wing optimism, at that. Ballard, while not by any means
a pessimist, doesn't paint lovely pictures of the glittering future. He
writes psychological tales with a language of sheer power that leads
some more braindead readers and critics to regard his work as the
ultimate triumph of style over content, sizzle over substance.
Memories of the Space Age is all substance. It is Ballard's first
thematic collection since The Atrocity Exhibition, combining into one
volume Ballard's many visions of the final end of space programs.
Beginning with "Cage of Sand" in the '50s, Ballard seems to have
understood far better than anyone the true significance of man's, and
especially America's, reach into space.
The US space program has been a megalithic process. Megaliths are
generally ruins; it was Ballard's genius to equivocate the two
megaliths and see the space program as a ruin. So we are treated to
repeated sights of Cape Canaveral buried in sand, endlessly orbiting
capsules containing the remains of their pilots, scavengers living on
the ruins of old craft. Ballard's obsessive characters live full lives
in such landscapes, and they and it illuminate each other.
Perhaps the most powerful story in the book is the most quiet, and one
of the oldest, "A Question of Re-Entry." A UN representative travels up
the Amazon in search of a crashed capsule, the first to successfully
land on the Moon and return. The interaction between space-age and
primitive man is, by itself, worth the price of Memories.
The space age may well be over. The US government talks of building the
equivalent of a wall between us and the Universe, ostensibly to protect
us from Russian missiles; but, as their own most optimistic estimates
indicate that the Space Defense satellites if completely successful
would allow massive numbers of warheads to detonate on US soil, the
true motivation for this system must be sought elsewhere. Looking back
from this vantage, a memorial to the time when humans walked, so
terribly briefly, on another world, is not at all a bad thing.
Closet Classic: Cinnabar
Ed Bryant, Bantam 1977, 0-553-10599-X
Like I said about decay. You can't live with it, you can't live without
it, so you may as well learn to love it.
Edward Bryant did, and wrote a series of strange and wonderful stories
about a city at the center of time, known (as is the collection of
these stories) as Cinnabar. In Cinnabar nearly anything can happen, as
long as it doesn't take too much energy; the people are very old
(though forever young) and time takes its toll on them.
Bryant acknowledges his debt to the history of decay in science
fiction, both by mentioning Ballard's Vermillion Sands in his
introduction and by reference in the stories. But the debt is
historical and his stories are his own.
The imagery is stupendous. From the first page, the reader is shown a
world where things have fallen apart; the road to Cinnabar is lined
with the hulls of burned-out school buses. The city's architecture,
ever vague, is something between Gotham City and the topless towers of
Barsoom.
Most of the action in Cinnabar is at parties and in laboratories. The
people are all artists and scientists; drudgery is (or seems)
eliminated. In a sense, Cinnabar is more of a resort than a city.
If you find a copy, read it and treasure it. Cinnabar is an ore of
quicksilver, rare and beautiful; when heated it transforms...
Behind the Scenes
A Look at Paradise
Mike Resnick
Copyright 1989 by Mike Resnick
[[Editor's note: this is a change of pace for the Behind the Scenes
series. Mike has passed along some background material on his book
Paradise (Tor Hardcover) and the Universe in which it and most of the
books he writes exists. There is no particular theme to this article,
just a collection of information Resnick fans should appreciate.-- chuq]]
Birthright was the first book I sold to Sheila Gilbert at NAL, though
it wasn't the first one she published. When she bought it, she suggested
that I set all my novels in that future, which covers 17,000 years and
a couple of million worlds. I agreed to do so IF the stories could fit
in; so far 11 of my 13 NAL novels and 4 of my 6 Tor novels have fit in
comfortably, and the next major piece of work I'm planning to do -- a
trilogy tentatively entitled Soothsayer, Oracle and Prophet -- will
also be set there.
I've divided the galaxy into major sectors. The civilized portion,
usually ruled by Man, is known, depending upon the era in which the
story is set, as the Republic, the Democracy, the Oligarchy, and either
the Monarchy or the Commonwealth (depending on who is using the term).
Then there is the Inner Frontier, that section of unexplored and
frontier worlds toward the core of the galaxy; the Outer Frontier, that
section of unexplored and frontier worlds out on the Galactic Rim; and
the Spiral Arm, our local environs.
I refer to so many worlds and races in passing that I can't keep them
straight at this late date, so every time I complete a manuscript I
give a copy to local fan Jackie Causgrove, whom I then pay to find all
references to races and worlds and add to the Concordance she has been
keeping on all my books. It runs to about 50 pages, single-spaced,
these days, and without it you would see one hell of a lot of
contradictions from one book to the next.
Universe Timeline
Year Era Story or Novel
1885 A.D. "The Hunter" (Ivory)
1898 A.D. "Himself" (Ivory)
1982 A.D. Sideshow
1983 A.D. The Three-legged Hootch Dancer
1985 A.D. The Wild Alien Tamer
1987 A.D. The Best Rootin' Tootin'
Shootin' Gunslinger in the Whole Damned Galaxy
2057 A.D. "The Politician" (Ivory)
2908 A.D. 1 G.E.
16 G.E. Republic "The Curator" (Ivory)
264 G.E. Republic "The Pioneers" (Birthright)
332 G.E. Republic "The Cartographers" (Birthright)
346 G.E. Republic Walpurgis III
367 G.E. Republic Eros Ascending
396 G.E. Republic "The Miners" (Birthright)
401 G.E. Republic Eros at Zenith
442 G.E. Republic Eros Descending
465 G.E. Republic Eros at Zenith
588 G.E. Republic "The Psychologists" (Birthright)
882 G.E. Republic "The Potentate" (Ivory)
962 G.E. Republic "The Merchants" (Birthright)
1701 G.E. Republic "The Artist" (Ivory)
1813 G.E. Republic "Dawn" (Paradise)
1859 G.E. Republic "Noon" (Paradise)
1888 G.E. Republic "Midafternoon" (Paradise)
1902 G.E. Republic "Dusk" (Paradise)
2154 G.E. Democracy "The Diplomats" (Birthright)
2275 G.E. Democracy "The Olympians" (Birthright)
2469 G.E. Democracy "The Barristers" (Birthright)
2911 G.E. Democracy "The Medics" (Birthright)
3004 G.E. Democracy "The Policitians" (Birthright)
3042 G.E. Democracy "The Gambler" (Ivory)
3286 G.E. Democracy Santiago
3324 G.E. Democracy The Soul Eater
4375 G.E. Democracy "The Graverobber" (Ivory)
4822 G.E. Oligarchy "The Administrators" (Birthright)
4839 G.E. Oligarchy The Dark Lady
5461 G.E. Oligarchy "The Media" (Birthright)
5492 G.E. Oligarchy "The Artists" (Birthright)
5521 G.E. Oligarchy "The Warlord" (Ivory)
5655 G.E. Oligarchy "The Biochemists" (Birthright)
5912 G.E. Oligarchy "The Warlords" (Birthright)
5993 G.E. Oligarchy "The Conspirators" (Birthright)
6304 G.E. Monarchy Ivory
6321 G.E. Monarchy "The Rulers" (Birthright)
6400 G.E. Monarchy "The Symbiotics" (Birthright)
6599 G.E. Monarchy "The Philosophers" (Birthright)
6746 G.E. Monarchy "The Architects" (Birthright)
6962 G.E. Monarchy "The Collectors" (Birthright)
7019 G.E. Monarchy "The Rebels" (Birthright)
16201 G.E. Anarchy "The Archaeologists" (Birthright)
16673 G.E. Anarchy "The Priests" (Birthright)
16888 G.E. Anarchy "The Pacifists" (Birthright)
17001 G.E. Anarchy "The Destroyers" (Birthright)
Peponi Character Kenya Analog
Fuentes F. C. Selous
Jonathan "Johnny" Ramsey Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt
Catamount Greene John Boyes
Ephraim Oxblood Nicobar Jones
Amanda Picket Karen Blixen/Elspeth Huxley
Buko Pepon Jomo Kenyatta
Commodore Quincy Lord Delamere
Caleb Crawford youthful L.S.B. Leakey
James Praznap Deedan Kimathi
Bago Baja Ogingo Odingo
Sam Jimana Tom Mboya
Nathan Kibi Tonka Daniel arap Moi
Joseph Buchanka Frederick Ndirangu
Mike Wesley Sam Weller
Ian Masterson Ian Henderson/Perry Mason
Stan Gardner Perry Mason
Location Kenya Analog
Berengi Nairobi
Balimora Isiolo
Maracho Nakuru
Capatra Mombasa
Mount Hardwycke/Mount Pekana Mount Kenya/Kirinyaga
Lamaki Nyeri
Greenlands White Highlands
Bzenzi Hills Ngong Hills
Sabrehorn Inn White Rhino Inn
Royal Hotel Norfolk Hotel
Thunderhead Bar Lord Delamere Lounge
Equator Hotel New Stanley Hotel
Equator Hotel's Message Tree New Stanley Hotel's Thorn Tree
Dalliance Club Muthaiga Club
Lake Jenapit Lake Bogoria
Villa Hotel Sparks (now Lake Naivasha) Hotel
Mount Pekana Lodge Aberdares Country Club
Keringera Game Park Buffalo Springs Game Park
Siboni Plains Park Masai Mara National Park
Independence Highway Uhuru Highway
Bukwa Enclave Lado Enclave (Uganda)
Bakatula Salisbury, now Harare (Zimbabwe)
Sentabel Game Park South Luangwa Valley
The Impenetrable Forest The Ituri Rain Firest (Zaire)
The Great Southern Desert The Kalahari Desert
Tribe Kenya Analog
Bogoda Kikuyu
Siboni Maasai
Sorotoba Wakamba
Korani Samburu
Kia Luo
Dorado Wanderobo
Braggi Meru
Begau Tigen
Kandabera Nandi
Bal Fosi El Molo
Kalakala (primarily Bogoda) Mau Mau (primarily Kikuyu)
Sentabels Mtebele (Zimbabwe)
Baroni Makonde (Tanzania)
Animals Kenya Analog
Landship Elephant
Sabrehorn Black Rhinoceros
Thunderhead African Buffalo
Demoncat Lion
Bush Devil Leopard
Silvercoat Wildebeest
Nightkiller Hyena
Treecrawler Colobus Monkey
Treetop Giraffe
Dust Pig Wart Hog
Dasher Zebra
Chatterbox Vervet Monkey
Wilken's Wildbuck Grant's Gazelle
Ngana's Wildbuck Thomson's Gazelle
Hardwycke's Wildbuck Peter's Gazelle
Water Pig Hippopotamus
Millipede Snake
Willowbuck Impala
Beefcakes Cattle (imported)
------ End ------
