BOOK REVIEWS

2000, Part L: December 2000

2000, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

As well as the inevitable year's-end reviews

 

 

Fatal Terrain
Dale Brown

Putnam, 1997, 448 pages, $33.95 Can., ISBN 0-399-14241-X

When do you say enough is enough?

When do you start giving up on formerly-good authors, despite repeated substandard works, an overall feel of staleness and, frankly, a lack of fun in their latest novels? What's "giving them another chance"; buying in used bookshops, tracking down cheap paperback copies, loaning at the library?

Dale Brown drove me to these questions with Fatal Terrain, the limp follow-up to Shadows of Steel, an already lifeless military thriller several notches below his earlier efforts. As Brown desperately tried to interest me in Chinese politics, I felt more fascinated by the mechanisms driving a formerly exciting author to mediocre output than with the actual plot of the novel.

So here is, in a few easy steps according to the Dale Brown corpus, how to become a has-been author.

One: Start your career with a few good books. That's essential to become a disappointment, otherwise you're just a mediocre author who keeps on churning trash. Dale Brown started his career with gripping high-concept novels such as Silver Tower, Hammerheads and what probably remains his career high, Day of the Cheetah. Good fun, fast reads, good characters. At that point, the sky wasn't even the limit for Brown.

Two: Settle in a routine. If you managed to invent a few original gadgets and characters, just keep re-using them until you've squeezed out all interest, and then keep using them some more. Brown had an fascinating gadget in his first novel; a high-tech, refurbished B-52 capable of almost all military feats. (A natural wish for an ex-B-52 crewmember like Brown) While its use was integral to Flight of the Old Dog and justified in Night of the Hawk, it became ridiculous to see Brown apply his "magic toy" over and over again in his latest novels. Snap out of it, Dale, and that also stands for the characters you so lovingly fleshed out in the first novels: Now that the readers know everything about them, stop propping them up one more time whether it's credible or not.

Three: Try to adjust your universe to fit the real-world. This works especially well if your earlier novels are wildly implausible. In Day of the Cheetah, a Soviet traitor pilot hijacks a thought-driven experimental plane and flies it to a Central-America country that is subsequently bombed by the Americans... in 1996. That's fine when your novel dates from 1988, but not as fine when your latest novel maintains that it all happened, while trying to integrate increasingly realistic real-world elements in the plotline... The Brownverse should diverge, not converge with the real world. (Also see the latest works of Tom Clancy for a further example.)

Four: Downgrade your writing and make it less interesting and far more verbose while ignoring sustained plotting. Whereas Brown's earlier novels were snappy, exciting, well-paced entertainment, his latest novels seem built around two or three key action scenes each requiring dozens of pages of laborious setup. Whereas his earlier novels moved quickly to the action, his latest are dogged down with useless techno-speak in an unconvincing effort to add more realism. It's not only tedious, it's exasperating.

Five: Stick with one plot, book after book. So... hmm... American interests are threatened and foreign forces led by evil generals attack and all hope is lost until one lone high-tech plane comes in and bombs them all away! Sounded good for Flight of the Old Dog. Sounded increasingly worse for Skymasters, Chains of Command, Shadows of Steel and now his latest.

Fatal Terrain is the culmination of these threads, a limp "thriller" that spends too much time setting up and justifying battles than actually describing them. Only a significant character point and one neat concept (the underground airfields) save the book from total failure. As it is, the only thing driving me to read Brown's subsequent book, The Tin Man, is the promise that it's based on something totally different. Hey, wish me luck.

 

 

Back to the Moon
Homer J. Hickam

Island, 1999, 494 pages, $9.99 Can., ISBN 0-440-23538-3

There are thrillers and then there are superthrillers.

Thrillers are usually adequate beach reading, stories of evil conspiracies, military skirmishes or criminal affairs. They feature ordinary characters, plot puppets moved by an author writing as fast as he can to ship off the manuscript to his editor and make up payments on his mortgage. Thrillers are entertaining, but not much more; most of them will be undistinguishable only a few weeks after closing the last page. Thrillers abound on the shelves of your local bookstore; just pick'em up and you get instant entertainment.

Superthrillers, on the other hand, are another thing entirely. They are, most noticeably, bigger. Bigger in terms of scope and ambition, not necessarily in terms of stakes or length. They go to fascinating places we've never seen before, display prodigious amounts of well-integrated details, involve original gadgets and ideas, feature Cool Scenes and end on a succession of ever-more exciting thrills. Super-thrillers are thrillers that are a magnitude over and above what we can expect from a normal thriller. And Back to the Moon fits this description perfectly.

Oh, it doesn't start that way. The first hundred pages are fun but oddly reminiscent of other thrillers, as it looks like terrorists are getting ready to take over a shuttle flight. The fun starts when things go wrong and the "terrorists" explain their mission and their motives.

Like other superthrillers, Back to the Moon takes risks that might doom it to failure. It uses Cold War weaponry hidden at an unlikely place, a last-minute revelation, a secret conspiracy to control nations and reckless opponents willing to combine unlimited means with inexistent morals to stop the protagonist. Not all of these work perfectly (one last-minute revelation smacks of desperation; the secret conspiracy seems stolen from the X-Files) but they do bring extra interest to a novel that already have more than enough to sustain a quick read.

When Back to the Moon works, it works extremely well. The various battles keep on getting better and better, the power alliances keep shifting and reforming in every-threatening configurations, the hardware is ingenious, the technical details are convincing without being overwhelming and the characters are well-defined. In fact, the novel even manages to create an impressive sentimental moment three-quarter way through. It had been a long while since I've had a lump in my throat while reading a thriller.

This confessed, it must be said that Return to the Moon will work best on an readership of space nuts, technical enthusiasts and science-fiction fans. The same audience that loved the film OCTOBER SKY (itself a dramatization of Hickam's teenhood autobiography Rocket Boys) will respond most favorably to the novel's none-too-subtle pro-space propaganda.

But keeping aside the thematic goals of the novel, Return to the Moon delivers the goods in terms of entertainment. Readers lucky enough to get a copy of this book will turn the pages faster and faster as the action heats up. Homer J. Hickam vaults within the ranks of the best thriller writers with his first novel, and his next is eagerly awaited.

 

 

Gravity Dreams
R.L. Modesitt, Jr.

Tor, 1999, 468 pages, $8.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-812-56661-0

In his previous novel Adiamante, R.L. Modesitt Jr. proved his talent for taking a standard space-opera premise and turning it into an unusually thoughtful piece of true science-fiction. Readers enthralled by that novel were more fascinated by social moral dilemmas than with the inevitable pyrotechnics. One reviewer coined (or re-used) the term "intellectual suspense" in reviewing Adiamante, and it still stands as one of the best general descriptors of Modesitt's fiction.

With Gravity Dreams, he applies the same willingness to peer behind some of SF's standard gadgets to draw a wide-scale portrait of a new society built on better foundations than ours. If the plot is less satisfying than Adiamante, the book is nevertheless an improvement over his previous effort.

To immerse the reader in thirty-first century Earth, Modesitt begins by using the time-honored device of the innocent. Few would call Tyndel, Gravity Dreams's protagonist, an innocent in the confines of his native society. He is initially, after all, an apprentice Dzin master, a teacher/mentor of the fundamentalist state religion.

But keeping him in this state would make a rather boring novel. So Tyndel (through a somewhat bizarre set of events) is exiled outside his community to the neighboring Lyncol, a high-tech society that looks upon Tyndel's community as charmingly quaint. Unfortunately for him, his rescue from Dzin required expensive treatment, which he will have to repay.

Before he can even properly learn the rules of his new environment, Tyndel is exiled again, this time as a laborer in a distant space station. Don't worry, he'll eventually learn to cope. The novel is obviously a bildungsroman in which the author can indoctrinate both protagonist and readers to cool new social ideas.

I may sound flippant, but the truth is that I enjoyed Gravity Dreams a lot, especially the ideas that are brought forth by Modesitt. None-too-convincingly disguising his libertarian sympathies, Modesitt writes of a society where widespread nanotechnology has brought forth a non-negotiable need for personal responsibility. A large portion of Gravity Dreams's thematic strength is built on an exploration of a society that expects responsibility from truly adult citizens.

Tangentially, that strikes me as one of SF's next big themes. With emerging technologies putting ever-more powerful capabilities at the grasp of everyone, the need for everyone to behave responsibly. Call it the "polite society" argument of gun enthusiasts. Unfortunately, recent history has proven that there's still a long way to go before reaching this point, as numerous cases of vandalism, real or virtual (think spamming, online harassment or website defacement), continue to make headlines. Like it or not, increased power without increased accountability cannot depend on the assumption of good behavior.

While the above may not be explicitly mentioned in the book, it is the type of reflections inspired by Gravity Dreams, a novel that could have been a perfectly good space-opera without depth. Ironically, the most plot-driven moments of Gravity Dreams (with its late-coming revelation of interstellar Dangers That Must Be Conquered) are the weakest parts of the narrative, paling in comparison with Tyndal's training and relationship issues.

Moral lessons served as entertainment aren't rare, of course, but it's always pleasing to see a result so professionally realized. Instead of turning in run-of-the-mill space adventures, Modesitt chooses to inspire as much as he entertains, and the result is not only one of the best SF novels of 1999, but also another proof that Modesitt is one of our best SF writers around.

 

 

Revelation Space
Alastair Reynolds

Victor Gollancz, 2000, 476 pages, $22.95 tp, ISBN 0-57506-876-0

Any novel with the gall of putting "The first great science fiction novel of the century" on the cover upon publication in January 2000 is setting itself up for huge expectations. Things get more interesting when you realize that it's a first novel for British SF writer Reynolds. Portentous announcement, or mere marketing hyperbole? Let's find out.

The first hundred pages of the novel are both promising and disquieting. While Reynolds shows a comforting writing ability and packs a high density of concepts in a few pages, he deals with at least three different story at several different times. Though things eventually converge, they are cause for some confusion, especially when the narrative jumps in time.

Eventually, though, a story emerges, one of a dedicated (maybe mad) scientist named Dan Sylveste, who is much, much more important than he initially seems to be... or at least that's why an elite assassin and a spaceship crew are willing to cross light-years and realtime decades in order to get him. Of course, Revelation Space wouldn't be a grandiose space-opera without a few alien races, terrible galactic dangers and shattering betrayals. Those come in time.

Fortunately for its own good, the book's pace accelerates in time, and while it might take some work to get going through the first half, the rest of the book is as compulsively readable as anything published in the genre. Even clocking at nearly 500 dense pages, Revelation Space almost feels too short at times. The intricate detail in no way detracts from the pleasure of reading once all the necessary pieces have been assimilated by the reader. There is a lot of setup, but also a lot of sustained payoff. (Though the action often skips too quickly over dramatic moments, then settles down for long stretches of exposition. First novel technical faults.) Interactions between the characters are complex and multi-layered, often changing dramatically over time. Gadget freaks will find a lot of those, and even more socio-technical concepts scattered here and there.

This might be Reynolds' first novel, but he already shows most of the skills required to compete with some of his best contemporaries. Indeed, Revelation Space has much of the same feel than recent novels from the Brit school of Hard-SF as practiced by such authors as MacLeod, Baxter, MacDonald or Banks. No wonder if many formerly-disappointed fans are coming back to the genre because of these writers: It's nothing short of a revitalization of the smart space opera / Hard-SF sub-genre that they're bringing forth.

As an SF novel, Revelation Space is very very good. Good enough to be, yes, "the first great science fiction novel of the century." As a first novel, it's so accomplished that it's almost scary. I was lucky enough to find a British edition only a few months after its initial release in England and well before its release in North America. You've been warned; don't miss it.

 

A few books read in 2000

December is usually the right time to do retrospectives, but as my reading output has decreased significantly in 2000 (buying a house and slogging through the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy will do that to you), I find myself unable to deliver a satisfying round-up of the best SF of the year. Still, I've got a few recommendations, and here goes:

My choice (so far) for the Hugo

It's been a long-standing truism in the field that all Arthur C. Clarke collaborations have been uniformly awful, but there's nothing bad about The Light of Other Days, a very satisfying entry from Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. While the gadget (a viewer that allows access to any moment in time and history) isn't new, the treatment of the idea is exhaustive, and packs in a great last-chapter punch. Just ignore some weaker soap-operatic moments and you get the surest SF choice of the year.

Also on the ballot

Now in paperback!

Recommended 1999 releases:

Without Forgetting...

A few of the best (older) books I've read in 2000, not limited to SF:

 

 

SF MOVIES OF 2000

(The assistance of the Internet Movie Database at http://www.imdb.com/ was invaluable in the making of this essay.)

After the dizzying SF heights of 1999, 2000 proved to be more like business as usual for Hollywood as it continued to turn out both good and atrocious SF films in comparable numbers.

The good

The best SF film of 2000 is probably FREQUENCY, a rather smart SF "time-travel" thriller that deftly mixed two time periods, a serial killer, baseball and a heartfelt homage to fatherhood in a film that should please everybody. Though the SF devices are a bit wonky (don't think causality), the overall result is good enough to highlight.

The big surprise, and relief, of the year is undoubtedly X-MEN, which broke from tradition and actually turned out to be not only a good comic book adaptation, but also a good SF film! See what superficial symbolism and allegories can do? Good action scenes, excellent acting, good direction and okay special effects... can't ask for much more.

Finally, halfway between SF and technothrillers, SPACE COWBOYS delivered solid entertainment late this summer. Though it might appear to be straight comedy at first ("Old guys in space, ho-ho!"), the film becomes increasingly SFish until a final shot that could have been reprinted straight from the cover of Analog. Not perfect, but rather good.

The average

We awaited much from the two Mars movies of 2000, but even if RED PLANET turned out to be the best of the two, it still wasn't very good. It tries to be hard-SF, but it fails so miserably at it that it's surprising to even see them try. Bad dramatic development, huge logic holes and a waste of several good actors...

At least PITCH BLACK has the merit of being honest and not pass itself as anything more than a classical B-movie about human-eating aliens. It works fine as such, despite an ultimately unsatisfying script and some seriously flawed scientific details.

THE SIXTH DAY was a return to... er... adequacy for Arnold Schwarzenegger. While one can appreciate the willingness to create a different future and explore a few issues while delivering an action film, the end result turned out a bit too bland to be remarkable.

The disappointing

While animation should be a natural medium for SF, it takes more than pretty pictures to be good, and if TITAN A.E. delivers some pictures, it can't be bothered to tell a good story, and the result is a let-down.

It's still better than THE HOLLOW MAN, which used the best special effects of the year with one of the worst script of the year to produce a film that's, in a word, hollow.

And THE HOLLOW MAN was still more satisfying than THE CELL, which promised so much in terms of visual invention and yet went in production with what was probably the weakest script of the year. Boo!

The awful

At least masochist SF fans had a good year. Things started looking pretty good for them in January, when SUPERNOVA crashed onscreen, though leaving many viewers disappointed that it wasn't as bad as predicted.

But no masochist went disappointed by BATTLEFIELD EARTH, which is, by a significant margin, the worst film to be widely released in theaters in a looong time. Stinking up megaplexes across North America, BATTLEFIELD EARTH will remain in memory as a singularly perfect example of overall mediocrity in cinema: All aspects of the production, from directing to set design to editing to special effects all suck at the same tremendous degree. Don't miss it, but don't pay for it; it's a supremely unpleasant film.

After that, even the hilariously awful MISSION TO MARS was almost an improvement, as even the nauseating conclusion, limp directing and terrible score couldn't be any worse than BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

In related genres

Horror and fantasy had a fair year, with UNBREAKABLE (an unexpected gift to comic-book fans), THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS (well, maybe more remarkable for its comedy that its fantasy elements), CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON (exceptional Chinese heroic fantasy) and FINAL DESTINATION (a teen horror film far more unnerving that the norm).

Middle-of-the-road B-releases included BLAIR WITCH 2 (sort of a meta-horror film), BLESS THE CHILD (entertaining fluff about Satanism and all that good stuff), and BEDAZZLED (Satan in a whole other set of outfits).

Then you had the pretty bad stuff such as DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (eek!), SCREAM 3 (zzzz) and WHAT LIES BENEATH (grrr!).

Next Year?

Hope for 2001 springs eternal, as we're promised films such as AI, FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRIT WITHIN, JURASSIC PARK 3, THE GHOSTS OF MARS, PLANET OF THE APES and PLUTO NASH (well, okay, these last two have a high suck-potential)

Less certain, and certainly as chancy, are ARAC ATTACK, EVOLUTION and JASON X. As ever, wilder rumors surround such vapourware titles as BARBARELLA, BEER MONEY, COLONY 12, COSM, DONNIE DARKO, EQUILIBRIUM, GREATEST INTERGALACTIC HERO, HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN, HARDSHELL, PLANET ICE, K-PAX, MARTIAN CHRONICLES, MEFISTO IN ONYX, MEN IN BLACK 2, METAL, MINDSTORM, MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, NEVER DIE TWICE, OTHERS, PHAROAH PROJECT, RESIDENT EVIL, THRASHER, TIME MACHINE, TOTAL RECALL 2, TRON 2.0 and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES. Whew! How many of those will actually make it all the way to theaters? Your guess is a good as mine, and seeing how IMPOSTOR's been delayed all the way through summer 2000 to sometime later than spring 2001, don't hold your breath...

In any case, see you in twelve months, as we'll survey the wreckage of the year that'll be.