BOOK REVIEWS

1999, Part C: March

1999, Christian Sauvé

This month's book reviews:

Proteus Manifest
Charles Sheffield

Guild American Books, 1989, 406 pages
(Also later published by Baen as Proteus Combined)

Ever since the "New Wave" pseudo-revolution of the sixties, a segment of Science-Fiction has been quite content to push the boundaries of literary achievement at the expense of the story. Sometimes is works (Neuromancer), but second-hand bookstores across the nation are packed with the failures of the experiment. Arguably, the final result is a stronger, more mature and better-written Science-Fiction. But ordinary readers can't be blamed if they get the impression that a lot of the simple storytelling fun has gone out of today's SF. Even worse; they tend to accept this as a matter of fact, and so the impression that Written SF Can't Be Fun Any More If It Want To Be Serious subconsciously endures.

That's why it's such a breath of fresh air, from time to time, to re-discover solid works of SF that unashamedly bring back the simple joy of reading. It's not fancy to be conventional, but most of the time it works.

Charles Sheffield will never be misidentified as one of the genre's greatest stylists. A scientist by trade, Sheffield has turned to Science-Fiction late in life, producing works heavily inspired by the hard sciences, with only a perfunctory interest in characters.

His first novel was Sight of Proteus (1978), a short tale about a future Earth modified by the widespread use of nonsurgical techniques to modify the human body. These can be as innocuous as simple plastic modification or as fundamental as changing sex, etc... The hero of the tale is Behrooz Wulf (ie; Bey Wolf), a top investigator at the agency charged with protecting the Earth from illegal and dangerous modifications. It all begins as they suspect a famous scientist of forbidden experiments...

Sight of Proteus is, to be frank, a bit silly. Sheffield's body-shaping technology is a mix between fancy machines and almost wishful biofeedback mechanisms. Given that the real-world has invented nanotechnology since Sheffield's novel, let's just say that his techno-babble isn't as fresh or convincing as it was then even if the end results are more believable. The world-building is also slightly suspicious; one would expect more of scientific progress if, after all, they're able to shape bodies literally at will.

But even despite these quibbles, Sight of Proteus is fun. The writing is marvelously limpid, up to a point where one wonders how come most novels aren't as accessible, imaginative and entertaining as this one.

Things get less pleasant by the end, as our protagonists go an Nivenesque trip through the solar system and the story doesn't conclude as much as is dropped almost in mid-flight.

Proteus Manifest is one of the Science-Fiction Book Club's own omnibus editions, thus cleverly combining two book published at ten year's interval under a same cover. Unfortunately, a universe based on the body-changing premise and a protagonist with the same name are about the only things the two novels have in common: There are few linkages with the events of the first novel, and Sheffield's prose has evolved significantly in the decade dividing Sight of Proteus with Proteus Unbound (1989).

Even the plot is bigger, as Behrooz Wulf is asked to solve disquieting form-changing equipment failures in the Outer Solar System. At the same time, he's plagued with maddening hallucinations and a lost love. Oh, and there's also a rebel colony hidden inside the asteroid belt. Could all of these things possibly be linked?

The fun of the first volume carries through the second book, which is more satisfying than the first (though the conclusion is almost as abrupt). Good ideas, sharp writing, nice plotting and an effortless mastery of hard sciences; it's good enough to compare with Niven and Clarke, as well as make one wonder why they don't write that kind of SF any more.

Though Proteus Manifest is at time frustrating and not exactly completely successful, it is so wonderfully imaginative and clearly written that it's well-worth picking up in used bookstores. Who said that the New Wave had killed old-fashioned Hard SF?

Murder in the Solid State
Wil McCarthy

Tor, 1996 (1998 paperback), 277 pages, 7.99$C., ISBN 0-812-55392-6

Good examples of Science-Fiction crossed with Crime Fiction are nearly as numerous as crossovers between SF and Thrillers. Many SF authors have written a few mystery novels (Isaac Asimov, Stephen R. Donaldson, etc...) and for some reason, (solidarity among the ghettoes?) readers of SF are often fans of crime fiction. The basic plotline of thrillers, (One man confronting powerful forces conspiring against him!) on the other hand, has always been a natural way to develop the bigger-than nature plots of most grandiose SF. Murder in the Solid State will suck you in with a murder mystery, but ultimately evolves in your basic near-future conspiracy thriller.

It all begins, appropriately enough, at a nanotechnology scientific conference. David Sanger is a young physicist with things to prove to the world. Shortly after the beginning of the conference, he finds himself arguing against a rather unpleasant older scientist widely despised by his peers. Heated words eventually lead to sharp weapons and before long David is sword-fighting (!) against his nemesis. His martial arts training takes over and he wins the fight, but finds himself in custody the following morning as the older scientist is murdered during the night... A hundred pages in the novel, David's most trusted friends turn against him and he finds himself tangled in something much bigger than just a murder.

In time, the "Solid State" of the title assumes its full political importance and it's a bit of a surprise to find us cleverly slipped a message about the dangerous implications of comfortable safety. Like many pure-SF writers, McCarthy espouses libertarian (or at least vaguely anti-government) tendencies but exhibits them more carefully than most of his peers.

One of the cover blurbs is James Patrick Kelly saying "Think 'Hitchcock meets Heinlein'" and the comparison is apt. The narrative is lean and rarely pauses for its breath. The future technology is described plausibly, with some attention for the social impact of said technology. The protagonist is suitably sympathetic, with the result that we keep on rooting for him even as he is forced to commit unpleasant acts. The narration is suitably paced and the reader's interest rarely flags.

But if Murder in the Solid State is a perfectly competent thriller with the added interest of being peppered with solid nanotechnological details, it's also obvious that it's a bit pedestrian, a bit... well... ordinary. After the whirlwind first hundred pages, the novels comfortably settles down in a classical thriller structure, and it doesn't take a lot of perspicacity to intuit that the protagonist is eventually going to confront the Bad Guy.

But it doesn't really matter, because even if not every book can be a classic, we can always use another good competent SF adventure. And Murder in the Solid State more than proves that Wil McCarthy is an author worth examining. Who knows what else he'll come up with next?

 

aol.com
Kara Swisher

Random House Times Business, 1998, 333 pages, 35.00$C., ISBN 0-8129-2896-2

As an experienced computer user (I started in 1983 with the Commodore 64, graduated to the IBM PC five years later, went on the Internet in 1993, got a Comp.Sci. degree and never looked back), I'm the type of person who finds inner peace and contentment in poking around the Machine itself rather than to be simply contented with using it for other purposes. My computers are open more than half the time, my Operating Systems are customized, my head is full of intricate procedures to coax the last possible unit of performance from my system... I must face the blight of being a nerd, someone as interested in How It Works than What It Does.

I'm not the type of user that America Online wants.

This online service has made its fame and fortune by grasping what most technically-oriented companies were slow in understanding: The average users don't care about technology. They want the benefits without the hassles. They want everything to be as simple as possible. And, by most standards, AOL has delivered what users wanted, opening the Internet to hordes of users without the kind of hard-won civility that comes from accessing something after a considerable amount of effort.

For all of these reasons, I don't like America Online. They could disappear tomorrow with nary a qualm from me. But it's not essential to like AOL to like aol.com.

This "biography" of America Online begins at the very beginning, with the foundation of a company in the early eighties by an entrepreneur with too many ideas and too little common sense: Bill Von Meister. After an extended limbo where the company repeatedly changed names and incarnations, AOL finally hit it big in 1993, with more than 500,000 users. But the drama wasn't over: The following five years would find AOL struggling with growing pains, the arrival of the Internet, a more techno-savvy audience, a massive nineteen-hour shutdown and a huge commercial battle with Microsoft. Every year, another crisis seemed to engulf the online service, which has already been declared dead more time than it can recall. But AOL has always survived-for better or worse.

Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher brings this whole story to life in aol.com, meticulously chronicling the history of AOL up to the beginning of 1998. Despite Swisher's collaboration with American Online for research -she was reportedly granted unprecedented access to the company for more than a year-, the result is sharply critical of some of AOL's biggest blunders. She does know her material, even if the spin she puts on a few elements (like James Exon) tends to be grating to seasoned online veterans.

Though the book tends to concentrate on anecdotes rather than analysis, the writing is easy to follow and fun to read. The incessant crises that rocked AOL during most of its existence make for good drama and Swisher doesn't have to dig deep to find fertile material for her book.

The organization of the book is also irreproachable, at the exception of two chapters at the end, both detailing AOL's battles with the American government's efforts to censor the Internet. These two chapters are unexplainably split and offer repeated information, though their payoff is sweet: The diskette used to relay the Supreme Court's decision overturning the government's Communication Decency Act from the judges to the Internet was one of the ubiquitous AOL diskettes distributed across the country!

Despite all its virtues, aol.com couldn't manage to make me like America Online, but certainly convinced me to respect it. The Little Online Service That Could should, by all rational standards, be dead now. But it endured and the story of its success is well-told in aol.com.

 

Poison Pen: The True Confessions of Two Tabloid Reporters
Lysa Moskowitz-Mateu & David LaFontaine

Dove Audio, 1996, 208 pages, 24.99$C., ISBN 0-7871-0916-9

CRITIC SURVIVES SHOCKING TABLOID TELL-ALL!

"I thought I'd die!" says bespectacled reviewer!

ROCKLAND (CLS) -- Today, in a stunning display of willpower, noted book reviewer Christian Sauvé has finished reading Poison Pen, a 208-pages tome about tabloid reporting. In a press conference given to the press, he has agreed to share his impressions about the book.

Poison Pen, written by an ex-couple of scribes for national tabloid newspapers, contains numerous shocking revelations about this shady world of gossipy publishing. From snooping techniques of investigative dirt-digging to the back-stabbing office politics of tabloid papers, the subject matter of this tome is fertile ground for anecdotes. "Poison Pen is a portrait of the wild and wicked world of tabloid reporting" writes LaFontaine.

"And it is wild and wicked!" says Sauvé. Among other saucy anecdotes, you'll find in this non-fiction account are how Lafontaine impersonated a doctor to try to get access to Lisa Mary Presley's hospital room and how the couple ambushed Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg in a hotel during a weekend tryst.

"What's more, these guys are absolutely shameless about it!" exclaims Sauvé. Indeed, Lafontaine writes that "readers want to be told that celebrities are just as miserable as they are. Hate to spoil your cherished illusions, but by and large, celebrities are having a hell of a lot more fun than you ever will." "I was a quick study in this business of deceit." adds Moskowitz-Mateu. "I learned how to write catchy lead, how to exaggerate the truth... In the tabloid industry, being a good liar is considered a highly desirable trait."

"You would expect a book about celebrity gossip reporting to be entertaining" says Sauvé, describing his foolhardy presumptions, "and Poison Pen is simply hilarious. The tales of how they try to get scoops -and even those where they fail, like the Liz Taylor marriage, are incredibly funny. I thought I'd die laughing." Sauvé singled out the chapter on celebrity marriages as being most indicative of the book's madcap subject.

Readers should expect to find more serious material, however, in the coverage of some of Hollywood's biggest recent stories in the pages of Poison Pen. The 1989 California Quake is meta-covered by LaFontaine, who looks at the tabloid reporting itself in the face of the crisis. Similar material is assembled about the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson trial which, according to LaFontaine, changed forever the face of news-reporting in America: "Viewers have grown accustomed to hearing stories reported in the finest tabloid style, built around a kernel of fact and surrounded by a nebulous cloud of rumor, assumption and hype."

This type of honest self-assessment is one of the highlights of the book. However, as Sauvé says, "you end up with a book that's half-great, half-repulsive. Generally speaking, Lafontaine writes the most interesting parts of the book, providing both history, context, rationale and significance to the phenomenon of tabloid newspapers. Moskowitz-Mateu acts like a blonde bimbo by restricting herself to inconsequential anecdotes." The worst example, according to Sauvé, is in Chapter 7 -about addiction- where "Moskowitz-Mateu repulsively tells of a friendly chat with Paula Abdul about eating disorders, and then dumps her whole guilt on us by writing that she was sickened by the whole thing and decided not submit the story." Independent reports have confirmed Sauvé's adulation for Abdul.

"In the end, you have a good book that could have been even better." concludes Sauvé. "I would like to see another book by LaFontaine going even deeper in the business. But as for Moskowitz-Mateu, heck, leave her in the cesspool because she brings no valuable insight to her work."

 

High Concept:
Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess
Charles Fleming

Doubleday, 1998, 294 pages, 32.95$C., ISBN 0-385-48694-4

Everyone's fascinated by Hollywood.

Not that there isn't something to be justifiably fascinated about: The lovely, sunny weather. The movie business, with its public displays of fame and fortune. The glamour of the stars. The women, the men, the mansions, the cars... Who in North America -oh, even the world!- wouldn't jump at the chance to be part of the Known Universe's biggest Dream Factory?

But even then, most people will almost immediately add that celebrity doesn't mean happiness-as demonstrated by the sob-stories of the tabloids. How many times has Hollywood has been compared to a soulless ambition-devouring monster? How many people have failed miserably in their dreams and ended up broken by Tinseltown? Great power does not exist in a vacuum: it takes away from others.

The life and death of Hollywood producer Don Simpson is not as much the subject per se of High Concept as it is a springboard to examine the "culture of excess" that surrounds Hollywood. Prostitution, drugs, vanity or simple unbridled spending are staples of the industry and Don Simpson indulged in all of them.

To casual moviegoers, Simpson might best be remembered as one half of the Bruckheimer/Simpson duo of Hollywood producers. In almost fifteen years, they brought to the silver screen a string of "high-concept" blockbusters: FLASHDANCE, BEVERLY HILLS COP and its sequel, TOP GUN, DAYS OF THUNDER, CRIMSON TIDE, BAD BOYS, DANGEROUS MINDS and (posthumously for Simpson) THE ROCK. But at the image of these flashy, loud, often violent movies, Simpson lived a life in overdrive: High Concept follows Simpson from his childhood Alaska to sunny California, where he made his first big hit with AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN. Then he teamed up with Bruckheimer (Simpson was the hyperactive creative guy; Bruckheimer was the calm, nuts-and-bolts person) and went on to glory.

But if Hollywood magnifies success, it also extracts a terrible price from anyone with even the slightest moral flaw. Simpson found himself in the position of the high school nerd suddenly surrounded by money and debauchery. His downfall was inevitable.

Charles Fleming makes an icon out of Don Simpson. In successive chapters, he examines the excesses of Simpson and places them in a context "devoid of negative consequences... In another industry, Simpson's excesses would have resulted in a firing, a suspension, a forced stay in rehab, intervention by his superiors or abandonment by his peers. In Hollywood, though, Simpson simply became another show business character." [P. 11]

High Concept is the condemnation of an entire industry. Tinseltown created the false paradise that ultimately destroyed Don Simpson. "Hollywood fiddled while Simpson burned and after his final self-immolation, fiddled on." If you want dirt, Fleming dishes out the dirt. But this is well-documented (10 pages of notes), contextualized dirt. With the benefit of hindsight, we get full access to Hollywood's most notorious drug dealers, madams and over-indulgers. If Don Simpson is forgotten for a few pages, well, that's the way the town is all interconnected. Because it always comes back, one way or another, to Simpson.

Fleming's style is wonderfully readable, mixing anecdotes with more pondered insights and tentative conclusions. While certain chapters are weaker (Doctor's Orders) than others (Hollywood High), the whole book is solid, crunchy reading. This isn't tabloid gossip; this is a serious look at a diseased industry racing to destruction, much like Don Simpson.

Ultimately, though, High Concept is a powerful cautionary tale. I can see this book being used, much like Peter Biskind's Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll, as a source-book for every Hollywood-hating fundamentalist. The remainder of us will be reminded of the price of success... and what if we found ourselves in the same situation?

Because at the end of High Concept, I'm still a guy from Ontario who would jump at the chance of making a few million dollars in Hollywood. As, I suspect, would anyone.

 

Man o' War
William Shatner

Ace/Putnam, 1996, 256 pages, 30.95$ Can., ISBN 0-399-14131-6

I must have Lemming genes somewhere in my DNA.

Otherwise, who else to explain me reading this book? I have heard, time and time again, the maxim that novels "written" by Star Trek actors are generally beyond bad. Heck, I even wrote that in a previous review.

And yet, I still bought Man o' War. The fact that I paid 50c for a good-quality hardcover at a charity sale is a pretty sad rationalization for what was, after all, an unexplainable poor choice.

Let's review facts, shall we? William Shatner is a Montreal-born actor whose greatest claim to fame is the starring role of "Captain Kirk" in the most famous Science-Fiction television series, "Star Trek". Even though the series lasted only three years, it gained a huge cult following that eventually made it a cultural icon, along with Shatner.

In the early nineties, Shatner "wrote" a rather fun novel called "Tekwar". The quotes around "wrote" are important, given that most insiders credit SF author Ron Goulart with the novel and subsequent series. To say that the first novel was fun in no way implies that it was good; the sequels went downhill from there, both in quality and enjoyment.

Man o' War is not related to the Tek series. Here, the hero is Benton Hawkes, ace diplomat. As the book begins, he's just made the biggest mistake of his life: taking the side of the poor oppressed people against the big evil corporation in delicate negotiations. As punishment, Hawkes is sent to Mars, where colonists are allegedly revolting against the government. Gee! Is he going to be able to defuse the situation?

There's nothing terribly original in the above outline, and there's even less originality in the actual novel. Between the nicely-designed cover minimally illustrated by Bob Eggleton, we don't get much more than ink on paper in actual real value.

It's a real sign of trouble when the action scenes in an action-oriented book are more boring than what surrounds them. In fact, they're handled with so much ennui that we practically feel revulsion for the protagonist while he's dispatching the opposition: Why so much bloodshed when Hawkes himself isn't worth our interest?

And so on and so forth: There's nothing remotely interesting in Goulart's, er, Shatner's future, neither on Earth nor Mars. Man o' War is a complete waste of time.

But the novel descends even further in mediocrity by a blatant disregard for anything resembling solid economics, basic physics or simple logic.

Economics: The novel will try to make you believe that Mars is able to produce vital quantities of foodstuff for Earth. Uh? What about the costs of shipping the stuff? Why should the colonists be oppressed if they hold Earth's stomach in a grip?

Physics: The Earth-Mars trip takes a dozen days. Uh-huh. Right. Wait, there's more! Like unexplained artificial gravity on the ship. Or even -that's where my already-well-stretched suspension-of-disbelief snapped-, in Chapter 37, Hawkes phones up an acquaintance on Earth... and start talking in real-time. Okay, everyone associated with this book: it's time to go back to high-school physics!

Logic: The Evil Guys ships hundreds of soldiers to Mars -casually disregarding expenses- in hope of fermenting a rebellion. Why the heck? Why not just pay the darn colonists?

Anyway... Stay away from Man o' War. It's one of the best example of pure garbage produced by a gaggle of people without the slightest respect for A> Science-Fiction, B> Your Money and C> Your Intelligence. This goes far beyond the Curse of Star Trek Actors-cum-Novelists: It's a literary debacle of INDEPENDENCE-DAYesque proportions. There are no redeeming features to this book. And my review will stop there, because now I'm getting really angry.

 

Beggars in Spain
Nancy Kress

Avonova, 1993, 407 pages, 5.99$C., ISBN 0-380-71877-4

All together now: Science-Fiction is all about studying the effects of change on human beings.

More succinctly put: What if, rationally?

The best novels of the genre usually spring from a good single premise. Something that, preferably, hasn't been done before. Then, the best novels explore the repercussions of this premise over human society, preferably using sympathetic characters to illustrate the repercussions on a personal level. Finally, the best novels do this seemingly effortlessly, with a lively style and a wonderful story to tell.

While Beggars in Spain isn't perfect, it certainly adhere to most of the criteria above. The result is an above-average pure science-fiction novel.

The premise is one of the most simple yet fascinating encountered lately: Due to genetic engineering, the gene responsible for sleep is eliminated from a few children. This leads, obviously, to individuals with far more time for work, study or play but also, more surprisingly, to happier, smarter, more balanced individuals. There are no disadvantages. Their abilities are such that they quickly graduate at the top of their classes, get good jobs and generally outperform their sleeping colleagues. As could be expected, this leads to strife and conflict between the Sleepless and the Normals. Beggars in Spain is the tale of Leisha Camden, a Sleepless which allies with neither side and tries to moderate the conflict.

Nancy Kress has been the "Writer's Digest"'s own fiction columnist for several years, and the technical mastery that has landed her this column is so well-practiced in Beggars in Spain that it shines by its transparency. The prose is simple yet effective. The plot goes effortlessly from one significant event to another. The characters are sketched rapidly and developed as Kress goes along; despite a rather large cast of characters, the personae dramatis is rarely confusing.

But if the characters are good, the plotting is only average. The novel is divided in roughly four parts, each of them chronologically distinct from the other. This gives the impression of four linked stories, not a single novel-or maybe a novel like those old-fashioned family sagas, spread over several generations and at least half a century. In any case, it does seems like the most interesting conflict of the novel is at the beginning, where the first sleepless have advantages so important over the remainder of humanity that sparks develop between the two groups, not the curiously anticlimactic three-partitioned conflict near the end.

It's important to note that the believability factor of Beggars in Spain is, all things considered, quite low. This would have been less of a problem if Kress hadn't attempted to couch everything in plausible-sounding biology. Her argument that sleep was an obsolete evolutionary trait is senseless (otherwise natural selection would have eliminated the oft-sleeping lions, etc...) and come perilously close to sinking the novel. But, again, the "What if?" predominates and the premise of a sleepless, all-around better human must be accepted. (It might have been better to assume quicksleep -thirty-minutes naps once every forty-eight hours or so- rather than sleeplessness.) Another curious oversight is the absence of comment on how boring it would be to live through the night every night and see all friends go to sleep; what is there to do?

Still, don't get the impression that Beggars in Spain is not worth your while. In fact, the various nitpicks are signs more of a stimulated intellect than a desire to dismiss the book. Kress vaulted in the big leagues with this novel (it was nominated for the Nebula Award, as I recall) and the ultimate result is a fascinating examination, according to the rules of the genre, of a very intriguing "What if?".

 

Mission to Mars
Michael Collins

Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, 307 pages, ISBN 0-8021-1160-2

I have always been fascinated by space. My parents are fond of reminding me -to my great embarrassment- that as a very young lad, I regularly pointed upward at night, repeating "The Moon! The Moon!" to everyone within earshot. As a slightly older lad, I practically cut my reading teeth on Apollo mission clippings and a used copy of Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon)

Is it any wonder I became a heavy science-fiction reader? After I had read all about the historical events and witnessed the first few shuttle flights, there wasn't much left to explore in the real-world. And, up to a certain point, fifteen years later that's still true: Humankind has ignored the promise of outer space, being content with circling the globe -if that- for strictly pedestrian reasons. It's intolerable that most people accept the fact that there hasn't been a human on the moon for twenty-five years.

Historical records show that once Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Nixon and Agnew were already talking of taking the next step; going to Mars. Of course, we know what then happened to Nixon and Agnew, but the dream of going to Mars hasn't fared much better.

However, the nineties have seen a renewed surge of interest in plans for Mars. Only in Science-Fiction, we've seen almost a dozen novels dealing with Martian exploration, from the definitive Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson to awful franchise novels which shall remain nameless.

But the book that arguably sparked this interest is Mission to Mars, by ex-astronaut Michael ("First Man Not to Walk on the Moon") Collins. In this 1990 non-fiction account, Collins exposes why and how we should go to Mars, as well as the problems to solve until then.

As could be expected, we get a solid description of the current state of our knowledge about the Red Planet, as well as practical considerations for making the trip. We don't have Star Trek technology: Our closed-loop environmental systems are imperfect at best, and the weight of the spacecraft we'll be sending there will remain a significant problem for a long time.

Collins is no armchair commentator; he's been up there and he knows what he's talking about. Mission to Mars is peppered with candid -often tough- advice about a myriad of small and big subjects.

The book really lift off, however, in its last third, where Collins writes a small docu-novella describing in fictional format the adventures of the first colonists. A testimony to the power of good science-fiction, this account repeats the arguments and issues of the first two-third of the book while making them more interesting and certainly more memorable. While no Hugo-winning piece of work, it is serviceable enough to serve as centerpiece to the book. (As for the "straight" non-fiction part of the book, the two highlights are chapters about submarines and Antarctica as related to a Mars Mission.)

Though not exceptionally well-organized, Mission to Mars flows well. The index ensures that it will be usable as reference material.

Where Collins fails, however, is to convince me that we should forego the Moon to go directly to Mars. I've suggested elsewhere that it's this attitude that made us go on the Moon before we were ready to follow up exploration by colonization. In my mind -and Collins didn't change it-, we should establish a permanent colony on the Moon even before thinking of going to Mars. If the goal is to move permanently into space -and I can't think of any other overriding goal for humankind-, it's far better to expand in the neighborhood than take a short trip in next country.

But, personal preferences aside, Mission to Mars is a succinct compilation of the whys and hows of going to Mars. It's worth the time for anyone who still looks above at night and wonder why we're not already up there.

 

Deepdrive
Alexander Jablokov

Avon EOS, 1998, 311 pages, 19.00$Can., ISBN 0-380-97636-6

Once in a while comes a book that's not easily reviewable. Whereas most books are easily criticized as being good/bad, some aren't as simply analyzed. Deepdrive is a case in point; a book with some terrific aspects that nevertheless fails at being a satisfying read.

One of Deepdrive's best characteristics is the setting: In a future far removed from us, the solar system has been colonized by both humans and aliens. Strange creatures are transforming Venus. Aliens on Mercury fire a gigantic gun at the sun for mysterious purposes. Dozen of races people the systems alongside humans, most often doing things that other races can't figure out. These aliens are here, but they can't go elsewhere: The faster-than-light engines ("deepdrives") they used to enter the system all self-destructed upon arrival, thus preventing these pesky humans from escaping. Spurred by suspicious rumors, several humans have tried to find out working drives, without success.

Wonderful setting; does Jablokov do anything with it? The plot eventually set in motion resides around an alien called Ripi, a lone representative of his race who's held in "protective custody" on Venus. Our story begins as a team of mercenaries is sent to recover Ripi. After all, maybe he knows the secret of the deepdrive...

But, as we could expect, things go wrong, Ripi is found, lost, retrieved and let go again. Our mercs fight the police, squabble among themselves, discover each other's secrets, disband, come together, etc...

The above might have been a superb space adventure in the most classical sense, a fast-paced action-filled SF story with the fun hallmarks of the genre's most enjoyable romp. Well, in the final analysis it is not.

And it's fiendishly hard to figure out why.

My first thought was that the prose style was somehow lacking in readability, but that doesn't turn out to be true: Though Jablokov doesn't grab our attention like the masters (Heinlein, Varley, etc...) can, he's similarly removed from the undecipherable prose of his more "literary" counterparts.

Things get more complex when we look at the characters. Despite assembling a motley group of different personalities as his mercenary team, Jablokov has given us no real hero. I had to keep reminding myself that his protagonists were human, because they didn't act in any manner similar to ours. In trying to be interesting, Jablokov might have gone too far in the realm of the bizarre and the alien. The result is that we can't focus on anyone and can't relate to any character.

It gets worse when considering the story from afar. The recovery of Ripi is only the beginning of the adventure. The problem is that everything that follows is less interesting than the first hundred pages. It's hard to be satisfied with a novel whose dramatic high-point comes at the beginning. I found myself scanning rather than reading because I just couldn't get interested in the various events.

The novel might have been too long to be snappy, it might have been too short to give us the chance to be interested in the characters. But whatever the reason, the result is not successful. Hollywood often has the tendency to recycle original premises in other films; I find myself wishing for a future novel doing exactly that from Deepdrive.