Book Review

  • Bloom, Wil McCarthy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 1998, 310 pages, C$24.00 hc, ISBN 0-345-40857-8

    Many Science Fiction authors are said to be heir to the grandmasters of the field. People are constantly trying to find “the Next Heinlein”, with the mantle passing from author to author, stopping by such choices as Spider Robinson, John Varley and John Barnes. Wil McCarthy hasn’t widely been recognized as the successor of any Grandmaster, but with Bloom, he evokes fond memories of Arthur C. Clarke’s best travelogues.

    Indeed, Bloom begins on Ganymede, an orbit away from Imperial Earth‘s Titan. But where Clarke traveled through a solar system dominated by humans, McCarthy has a much weirder -and dangerous- future in mind.

    By design or accident, some nano-critter (“mycora”) has managed to eat Earth in classic gray goo fashion. A small fraction of the human population managed to escape on the moon, and then farther out beyond the asteroid belt when it became obvious that mycora was also taking over the entire inner system. So Bloom opens on a solar system whose inner planets are all inhospitable and where humans are holed up here and there in the outer planets. Still, there are occasional incursions of mycora in the human settlements. There much be fought decisively, or else the bloom replicates until it destroys the habitat.

    In the middle of all this, high authorities decide that mycora has to be studied, so they send a starship in the inner system, ostensibly to drop off sensors. Our viewpoint character is John Strasheim, part-time journalist and full-time shoe manufacturer. He’s not the only one to ask himself what he’s doing with the spacemen and scientists making up the remainder of the crew. As they set out for their trip to the inner system, -battling the constant threat of spaceship bloom- the question of whether they can all be trusted is raised, and then precipitated.

    The atmosphere of constant paranoia -both external and internal- is part of what makes Bloom so special. The constant threat of mycora when the expedition enters the inner space system is convincingly claustrophobic, creating a real sense of dread for the characters. All of this leads to a few efficient sequences of almost pure terror as all hope seems to be lost and the crew has to fight a seemingly invincible array of threats.

    McCarthy sets up his world and his characters effectively, leading up to some interesting situations. The characterization is only adequate, however, as it does take some time to differentiate between the small cast of characters and even then they never really become fully realized. No matter; they’re still serviceable in the usual SF fashion.

    There are a lot of cool gadgets in Bloom, (like the tickle implant and the fear dolls) and McCarthy is scientifically-literate, so the jargon sounds right. Though not exactly an ultra-hard-SF novel, Bloom does play according to the rules of the genre, and is more convincing because of it. It simply makes sense, even in the action scenes.

    Better yet is the simple, direct and enjoyable prose style of the book. The viewpoint character is a part-time journalist used to writing for a layman audience, and the narrative reflects this superbly. Especially fascinating are the snippets of text sent by Stratheim, balancing humor and fear. (Or unsent; see Chapter 19) The book is compulsively readable… a civilian’s account of combat in deep territory, a Science-Fiction version of APOCALYPSE NOW.

    But like APOCALYPSE NOW it’s a slight shame if the conclusion is so disappointing. It would have been interesting to see McCarthy do something more with this predictable finale. As it stands, it’s almost as if McCarthy shies away from really interesting revelations.

    Still, Bloom is a pretty good SF novel. Fans of McCarthy won’t be disappointed by this, his best novel so far, and non-fans might take this opportunity to discover an interesting author. A worthwhile choice for a fun, quick, thoughtful and interesting read… just like the best Clarke novels. Definitely a 1998 core-SF essential.

  • Labyrinth of Night, Allen Steele

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1992, 340 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-46741-5

    Some books are sold by their cover illustration.

    I had been fascinated by Labyrinth of Night‘s cover art ever since I first saw it in a book collection of Bob Eggleton’s paintings. It shows, in warm reds and oranges, human astronauts peering over a Martian landscape complete with pyramids and human face sculpted into rock. Never mind that all that Cydonia stuff is silly beyond belief; the cover illustration was lovely.

    Both halves of the novel begin after the initial awed look at Cydonia. Humans have investigated the site, and found an interior labyrinth of deadly puzzles. The last one isn’t about mathematics or physics, but about music… and so authorities draft one rebel musician to come investigate. While he isn’t too pleased to make the Earth/Mars trip, everyone else has bigger problems as things are heating up on Mars between the Russian and the American military forces.

    This first part of the novel uses standard narrative segments intercut with pseudo-journalistic excerpts as Steele’s universe is introduced to the reader. This device disappears in the latter part of the book, which takes place two years later and could easily constitute a standalone novel by itself. Though Labyrinth of Night isn’t a fixup, it does feel like an expansion of an original novella. One could quibble with Steele’s unconvincing characterization of military personnel and his knee-jerk antigovernementalism, but the result is still decent hard-SF reading, and that is not something to be dismissed lightly.

    Clarke Country, Space doesn’t have the benefit of an eye-popping cover, but holds up fairly well on its own. It was published before Labyrinth of Night and technically presents anterior events, though there is not direct link between the two novels. (Even so, a single line in Labyrinth of Night pretty much sums up the aftermath of Clarke County, Space though the event described doesn’t happen in the earlier novel.)

    Clarke County is a space colony, comfortably hosting humanity’s first extraterrestrial community. Discounting the occasional Church of Elvis convention, things are going pretty well. But as it all too often happens with these space colonies, some think that independence would be a Really Good idea… So what do we expect to read? Another Independence-war-story in space, right?

    Wrong! For all its setup, back cover blurb and front-cover slogan (“It’s a piece of the sky worth fighting for”), Clarke County, Space ends up being a novel about a mafia assassin pursuing his victim on a space colony, and the Navajo sheriff tracking down the killer. Unexpected, isn’t it? This novel reads a lot like the first part of Labyrinth of Night, a fast-paced prologue to something bigger. But as most Steele fans know, this shouldn’t be interpreted as a rejection; Clarke County, Space is a good read in its own right, with plenty of bigger throwaway pieces cheerfully handed out to the reader in the framing story.

    As always, readers of Allen Steele novels can expect some fast-paced adventures, told in a clear and enjoyable prose. Both Clarke County, Space and Labyrinth of Night show very well the strengths (and weaknesses) of this underappreciated hard-SF practitioner.

  • A Good, Old-Fashioned Future, Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1999, 279 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-57642-9

    Readers already familiar with Bruce Sterling’s brand of Science-Fiction should smile at the misleading title of his latest short story collection. Because if Sterling is famous for something, it’s definitely not for writing “good, old-fashioned” futures.

    One only has to take a look at his third novel, Schismatrix (1985) to see the first glimpses of a major talent at representing new and unsettling vistas. Schismatrix was a bold departure for hard-SF at the time, presenting a future that was eerie yet believable, but never too comfortable. His latter novels fulfilled this early promise, from the globe-spanning Island in the Net (1987) to the political satire of Distraction (1998). Sterling was heavily associated with cyberpunk in the eighties, but metastased in the “Wired” crowd during the nineties, constantly staying abreast of the latest trends and technologies.

    A Good, Old-Fashioned Future is his third short story collection, and in some ways the best. Unlike Crystal Express, this collection represents Sterling working on his best playground, the globalized, info-rich, chaotic future of true tomorrow. Unlike other authors content to re-use standard SF devices to build up futures more related to past SF than present reality, Sterling is constantly original. The stories in this collection are usually sufficiently well-written to stay interesting all the way through, which wasn’t necessarily the case with his previous collections. Sterling’s narrative gifts are steadily improving, and with this collection he delivers a book that’s simultaneously interesting, colorful, literate and readable.

    The Hugo-nominated “Maneki Neko” introduces Sterling’s techno-vision particularly well. Here, the net has given rise to a “gift economy” that is undemanding, yet particularly powerful. You might not think too much of doing “one small favor”, but the chain of events set in motion by a series of small coordinated event is irresistible. What if every stranger you met did you some small annoyance… wouldn’t that be an unbearable day? This story -possibly the strongest of the collection- is a good old crunchy SF idea wrapped in some of the best stylistic packaging you’ll find.

    “Big Jelly”, a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, is less enjoyable, as if the sort-of-satire and the light subject matter somehow couldn’t be nailed down by the writing. It’s still enjoyable as a parody of infotech venture capitalism, but not much more. It ends in mid-story.

    “The Littlest Jackal” is almost a present-day story in terms of technology, but it plays with new sociopolitical ideas and manages to be enjoyable despite its lack of cohesion. The ending is also a problem, but the story isn’t bad. Rumor has it that Sterling’s next novel will take place in this particular “universe”.

    “Sacred Cow” is the weakest story of the volume, being neither particularly incisive nor innovative. Rambling and pointless but still readable, proving that even at his worst, Sterling still turns out worthwhile material.

    The last three novella-length stories form a loose trilogy. “Deep Eddie” is about the adventures of an American courier in Europe, where he’s dragged into a curious conflict between intellectuals, a confrontation that quickly heats up and becomes very physical. “Bicycle Repairman” is about a mechanic who finds himself the target of a government agent when he comes into possession of a subversive television decoder. The last story of the volume is “Taklamakan”, an atmospheric -but curiously unsatisfying- trip inside a closed-off top-secret facility.

    A Good Old-Fashioned Future delivers no less than four Hugo-nominated and two Hugo-winning stories (“Bicycle Repairman” and “Taklamakan”)… so there’s some quality to the mix. But the high price of the book coupled with the disappointing number of stories (Seven!) doesn’t make it a necessary buy. A good choice for Hugo completists and confirmed Sterling fans, but a library loan for everyone else.

  • The Martians, Kim Stanley Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1999, 336 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-80117-1

    All fans of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, please stand up and be counted. Now allow me to explain how the very number of you standing up constitutes an irresistible moneymaking opportunity.

    By Science-Fiction standards, the Mars trilogy was an enormously successful work, both popularly, critically and financially. All the books of the series won either the Hugo or the Nebula award and the paperback editions of the book are all well into further printings. All books were bestsellers and have already attained something akin to classical status.

    Which, of course, makes it irresistible for both publisher and author to milk out an little “extra”. The Martians is the first such extra, a 336-pages book that brings together several short pieces related to the Mars trilogy. You’ll find here a few short stories, essays, vignettes, poems…

    The book starts with “Michel in Antarctica”, a pre-history of the Mars trilogy that ultimately veers in alternate history. This particular parallel world is further explored in “Michel in Provence”, though -unfortunately- no more.

    Other pieces bring back the characters of the trilogy, often illuminating earlier actions, or simply presenting maybe outtakes from the original text. So we get “Maya and Desmond”, “Coyote Makes Trouble”, “Jackie on Zo”, “Keeping the Flame”, “Coyote Remembers” and “Sax Moments”.

    The Martians reprints two of Robinson’s pre-Red Mars Mars stories, “Exploring Fossil Canyon” and the lengthy novella “Green Mars”. Both of these stories are part of an alternate mini-cycle further explored here with “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars” (a slight, but fun story about Martian baseball), “What Matters” and “A Martian Romance”.

    There are also a few unconnected short stories here and there, including “Saving Noctis Dam”, “Sexual Dismorphism” and “Enough is as Good as a Feast”. We get twice as many unconnected vignettes, some evocative and some decidedly less so.

    There are also a few pieces commenting on the trilogy, whether it’s “The Constitution of Mars” (annotated), “The Sountrack”, selected poems (including one called “A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy”) and a final poignant piece titled “Purple Mars”, where Robinson may describe his last day of work on the Mars trilogy.

    The result is both more and less of what we expected. On one hand, it is a worthwhile companion to the Mars trilogy, presenting more of what made the trilogy so popular. On the other hand, it doesn’t present what would have been interesting to see in a companion volume: Non-fiction essays on the conception, the writing, the revision of the series. Original plans. Maps and drafts. More substantial side-stories. As such, it almost approaches the “let’s dump cut scenes in the marketplace” approach.

    But really, The Martians couldn’t be anything but a disappointment for fans of the trilogy, knowing that this is pretty much the last of what Robinson has to say about the place. As such, it’s a fitting -if uneven- tribute. Non-fans already suspect that they shouldn’t begin here, but fans should be advised that The Martians is a decent sideshow to the main event.

  • Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, Gregory Benford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bard Avon, 1999, 225 pages, C$26.00 hc, ISBN 0-380-97537-8

    We human critters have a few deficiencies, and one of them is certainly our lack of capacity for long-term planning. Try as we might, our day-to-day combat through life almost invariably relates to the next meal, the next paycheck, the next project, the next summer vacations.

    The problem is not as much with human individuals, but with the realization that no one else is making long-term planning either. Organized groups usually think too much in terms of upcoming elections, end-quarter results or continued sources of funding to be concerned about long-term perspectives. This is not exactly a bad thing (given the rate of technological and social change, most plans will crumble at long range anyway) but it can certainly become a problem in a few situations.

    Deep Time, by noted scientist and SF author Gregory Benford, takes a look at a few concerns that will require more than our usual attention span. In the process, he raises some fundamental issues about the environment, technical progress, civilization lifespan and how even long-term science is conducted by short-term humans. The book is divided in four parts:

    The first segment begins as Benford is asked to be part of a study team, mandated by the American Congress, to study ways of ensuring that nuclear waste sites will remain undisturbed for more than the 10,000 years required for their degradation to harmless levels. Putting “Dangerous stuff; keep out!” signs obviously won’t do, especially when we consider that 10,000 years is lengthier than the span of recorded human history. Benford’s team had to consider such cheery subjects as complete civilizational collapse, language drift, evolving digging technologies, relic hunters, etc… The team ended up proposing massive, eerie sculptural features, multiple-language messages with iconographic support and a host of other neat features. This is by far the most fascinating piece of the book.

    The second quarter concerns the efforts of a group of scientists to compose an “ultimate” message-to-others to be carried on the Cassini space probe. Though most of us are familiar with the gold plaque loaded on the Voyager probes, this was meant to be an updated version of this effort. Unfortunately, even though an interesting message was developed, the effort was doomed and replaced by a politically-neutral DVD containing an utterly meaningless list of names…

    [March 2009: I wrote this review in 1999 and, along the way, touched upon a conflict between Gregory Benford and Carolyn Porco described in the book’s “Vaults in Vacuum” chapter. In September 2002, Carolyn Porco wrote to me to explain that she disagreed with her characterization in Benford’s book and allowed me to post a few corrections. In March 2009, Gregory Benford wrote to me to explain that he disagreed with the corrections and suggested corrections of his own.

    You know what? Life is too short, I respect both Benford and Porco (from afar) too much, and I’m too ignorant of the matters discussed to try to abitrate. All three of us have better things to do. So I have removed both the original content and the corrections (the most curious of you know where to go to find the archives), and would rather leave you with the smartest thing I’ve learned from this decade-long episode. In the (last) words of Carolyn Porco:

    Next time, reserve judgement until you’ve met and spoken to the individuals involved.

    The book become less interesting as Benford gets on a high environmental soapbox in the last half of the book. The third part still turns around a worthwhile idea, as Benford tells of his proposition to build a “Library of Life”, a repository of DNA from most of today’s species of plants and animals threatened by extinction. Though not a startlingly original project, Benford uses this as a springboard to other related subjects (conservationism, taxonomy, scientific politics, etc…).

    But the fourth quarter grates as it veers off in a well-intentioned, but strikingly unoriginal rant about how humanity is already sending deep-time messages by environment degradation. Though Benford keeps things interesting with little-known facts, the impression left by this section is one of déjà-vu: Not exactly why one would pick up the book in the first place.

    Additionally, Benford leaves out an important part of any deep time projection: The very real possibility of increased lifespans and of political stabilization. While this isn’t a flaw by itself, this omission does get a bit suspicious after the umpteenth time Benford talk about short human lives. Wouldn’t longevity undermine his thesis? Maybe…

    Still, despite a rather heavy-handed environmentalist screed in the second half of the book, Benford keeps thing interesting, and Deep Time fulfills the goal of any decent non-fiction science vulgarization: Make us discover thing we didn’t know before. Or cared about.

  • MTV: The Making of a Revolution, Tom McGrath

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Running Press, 1996, 208 pages, C$22.95 hc, ISBN 1-56138-703-7

    If ever some future historians decide to study my life in detail, they’ll probably abandon before my twenty-fifth birthday out of terminal boredom. They’ll quickly conclude that I missed out on sex, drugs and most of rock’n’roll. It speaks volume that I’ve never seen a straight ten minute of MTV, and that was an accident. For all their much-vaunted influence, MTV and its Canadian equivalents (MuchMusic and MusiquePlus) are remarkably easy to avoid if you don’t have cable.

    And yet, even I can’t argue with the impact of MTV and video clips. From the business side of things, it has produced a discontinuity in the way popular music is marketed. There is very literally a pre-MTV and a post-MTV era as far as selling pop music is defined. Before, you produced some songs, played them on the radio and hoped for the best. Now, with the artist in everyone’s home through video clips, the image is an integral part of the process. Is it any wonder that pop-phenomenons like the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys can succeed today on unimaginative musical content? (Indeed, looking at today’s female singers, one can wonder if musical success is somehow genetically linked with attractiveness.)

    But the true measure of MTV’s success is that its influence has spread well beyond the confines of music: By linking image and song, it has also boldly redefined the audiovisual universe of popular culture. Squeezing a mini-story in four minutes require some compression, best achieved with quick cuts, fast-paced action beats and the avoidance of subtlety. Television quickly noticed that the same rules could also apply to longer lengths, as initially proven with “Miami Vice”. Cinema took longer to catch up, waiting for clip directors to helm full-length pictures, but when Hollywood noticed the phenomenon, it never looked back. Action films are now filmed like videoclips, their frenetic pacing appealing to jaded viewers. The biggest summer movie of 1998, -ARMAGEDDON, directed by former music-video director Michael Bay- was called “the first two-hours movie trailer” by top film critic Roger Ebert.

    MTV did this. MTV took popular culture by storm and single-handedly changed it beyond former recognition. That’s what Tom McGrath tells us in MTV: The Making of a Revolution. He goes beyond just a straight corporate history of the TV network and places it in context by linking it to other changes in the 1982-1993 timeframe. That’ how we end up not only with a book that decently traces MTV’s ascendancy, but also the associated fields of cable television (actually invented in the 1950s) and video clips.

    As could be expected, MTV lovingly covers the pre-history of the network and its first few moments. (The first video played by MTV was, fittingly enough, The Buggle’s “Video Killed the Radio Star”. MTV Europe began with an even more appropriate clip, Dire Strait’s “Money for Nothing”) Then it’s America’s infatuation with Michael Jackson, Madonna, video clips, and MTV… But the book covers roughly fifteen years, and that’s just enough time for more than a success story. MTV briefly faltered in the late-eighties, as it realized that it could be only “FM radio with pictures”, but had to re-invent itself as a true channel with more to offer.

    This is not a press-release book, nor is it a superficial look at a pop phenomenon. The writing is informative, witty and occasionally very funny. But McGrath has done his research, and the end result is truly a good look at MTV. Even the carefully-wild graphic layout respects the content and tries to spice up the rest. It’s a shame, for such a visual subject, that there couldn’t be more photos, and that the ones that are printed are limited to a bichrome palette.

    In a nutshell, MTV simply accomplishes what it set out to do: Give a good and thorough history of MTV as well as make it clear that the impact of the television channel was significant on more than simply popular music. I was convinced, and that’s all I need to say.

  • The Warrior’s Apprentice, Lois McMaster Bujold

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1986 (1988 reprint), 315 pages, C$2.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-65587-6

    In almost four years of steady book reviewing, I have somehow managed to avoid talking about Lois McMaster Bujold’s work. This oversight is inexplicable given that I’ve never read anything by Bujold that I haven’t liked. I’ve even had the chance to meet her in 1997, at Montreal’s Con*Cept SF convention (I unknowingly transgressed normal con-going etiquette by asking her to autograph a book while she was browsing the art show. Fortunately, she was gracious enough to sign my paperback copy of Mirror Dance with a smile.) So, allow me to use this review of The Warrior’s Apprentice as a general rave about her work.

    Lois McMaster Bujold is not exactly at the cutting edge of science-fiction. Her books contain few original ideas, her future is comfortably extrapolated according to the old-style rules (no pervasive nanotech, no real infotech impact, etc…) and -if you want to get downright nasty- many of her stories could comfortably be told in fantasy, romance or contemporary settings.

    But that is belittling Bujold’s considerable skills. What she lacks in terms of innovation, she compensate by creating some of the most realistic and sympathetic characters in the genre. Her writing is simple, yet elegant and powerful. Her plotting is meticulously paced to keep the reader racing forward. While her worldview is characteristically positive (the good guys invariably win), she doesn’t hold back on the punishment her heroes have to endure in order to triumph.

    Most of her stories are set in one single universe and feature the same set of characters. This provides her with the opportunity to build one comprehensive universe, and to move her characters across arcs that would be impossible to complete in one single novel. Contrarily to other multi-book universes, hers holds together amazingly well, and seems more logical than most.

    The Warrior’s Apprentice is, from real-world chronology, the first book to star Miles Vorkosigan, the tortured hero of most of her cycle. Published in 1986, it was her second novel, but it remains as good as her latter efforts. Ultra-intelligent Miles is introduced and brilliantly wins both his battles and the reader’s undying sympathy. After all, who else can fail his military academy exams and yet manage to build up a mercenary fleet?

    Despite a few slight flaws here and there (it needed a bit more clarity in some spots, and maybe some fleshing out of the mercenaries), it’s very hard to dislike this novel. Not only is it compulsively readable, but the characters are all-around winners. Miles Vorkosigan’s superior tactical skills could be insufferable if they weren’t balanced by some wickedly funny self-depreciating internal monologue: A typical SF superhero with an atypical lack of pretentiousness. The other characters are well-handled and also made suitably sympathetic. Bujold not only writes good stories, but also has the knack of building up to great scenes. The Warrior’s Apprentice mixes coming-of-age episodes with space battles and one final great courtroom scene in a whole that’s just satisfying.

    After that, it’s no wonder to see Bujold regularly nominated for the fan-selected Hugo awards, and to read some rabidly devoted comments by Usenet fans. She deserves all of it. Though maybe not imaginative enough to be an essential part of the SF panorama, the works of Lois McMaster Bujold are nevertheless worth some attention. And you could do worse but to try The Warrior’s Apprentice as an introduction.

  • Moonseed, Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Prism, 1998, 534 pages, C$20.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-105044-X

    Sometime, I wonder how Hollywood producers deal with it.

    No, I’m not talking about the sleeping-with-supermodels-and-rolling-in-cash part. That I can reasonably understand. But I really wonder how they have to deal with the trade-offs between story and budget. Consider disaster movie, which are all about showing expensive catastrophes on screen. If you’re on a limited budget (and even $150M is a limited budget), how can you deliver a really good disaster film when it’s literally too expensive to put it all on screen?

    This isn’t a problem in novels, because when you get down to it, prose writers have essentially an unlimited budget for visual effects. They can blow up the earth for exactly the same amount of money that have two minor character talk to each other. No publishing house is ever going to bankrupt themselves by investing in a spectacular historical war novel over a simple romantic comedy. Movie studios, on the other hand, pretty much tattooed HEAVEN’S GATE in the forehead of every script acquisition manager…

    Stephen Baxter’s Moonseed proves how much more satisfying a disaster story can be in written format. Not only is it more spectacular, but it’s also better-constructed and far more clever than its Hollywood counterparts.

    It all begins on the night when astronaut Geena Bourne and geologist Henry Meacher decide to divorce. Venus blows up and Henry is transferred to Edinburgh, where a mysterious silvery dust soon begins ravaging the countryside. Before long, the Edinburgh dust pool is growing at exponential rate, and it becomes clear that they’ve got to stop it. Evidence points at contamination from one of the Moon rocks, so NASA puts together a mission using present-day technology to go back there…

    Stephen Baxter is known for being a hard-SF writer, and Moonseed will do nothing to diminish this reputation. He plays the SF game and follows the rules, which does give a delicious particularity to the part where NASA puts together a baling-wire mission to go back to the moon. Otherwise, spectacular scenes abound, whether it’s Edinburgh being consummated by the “Moonseed” or Seattle being erased by a tidal wave. Big bucks special effects, backed by I-guess-accurate physics.

    Moonseed is less capable when it comes to human characters. Some are barely introduced and then forever forgotten (Marge Case, Jenny Calder, Cecilia Stanley, etc…), others are superfluous (Blue Ishiguro, Hamish “Bran” McCrae and the remainder of the clichéd cult subplot), while the protagonists are involved in quasi-soap-opera plot complications to keep them together. (No, but seriously, wasn’t it possible to select a worse three-person moon team?)

    But it doesn’t really matter, disaster stories and hard-SF novels being what they are. Even the lengths of the novel can be a good thing when they add such richness. Who cares about individual humans when the whole race is at risk? Moonseed is far more original than the usual catastrophe scenarios, ironically by going back to the source disaster story, the classic When Worlds Collide. The ending accelerates the pace of the novel, leading to a wide-open conclusion that truly rewards the reader.

    So, next time you’re contemplating paying almost 10$ for a disaster movie, consider Moonseed as an alternative. Easy reading, original threat, imaginative plotting, neat gadgets and cool scenes not constrained by a fixed SFX budget. What more could you ask of an end-of-the-world story?

  • False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes, Thomas Hoving

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1996, 366 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-81134-0

    For someone like me, technically trained in cold, hard matters of equations, algorithms and formal methods, the world of fine arts is as mysterious and incomprehensible as an alien mindset. You look at a picture, you like the picture or not. If you really like it and if it’s for sale, you buy it. Simple!

    Not so simple. C.P. Snow would be proud. Art is not merely something that can be simply reduced to “liking/not liking”. Especially when older artwork is concerned, it becomes a question of cultural pride, personal self-aggrandizement, financial investments… And then troubles begin. When you buy a Roman sculpture to show off, it doesn’t matter if you like it: It does matter if it’s an authentic Roman sculpture, though. Who is to say if it wasn’t hacked out three years ago by some guy deep in Arkansas with a talent for reproducing “authentic” Roman sculptures?

    False Impressions is a book about fake artwork. Well-respected “former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art” Thomas Hoving brings both erudition and wit to this fascinating subject.

    Though the book is not without flaws, it does present the subject adequately. Hoving spends some time discussing the history of fakes, noting that even in Roman times, for instance, artists routinely faked Greek artwork. Medieval times are full of fakery, up to and including the shroud of Turin. The popularization of the art world has given rise to even more audacious fakery at the beginning of the century.

    A lot of the narrative is simply Hoving’s autobiography as far as fakes are concerned. It’s a bit of a disappointment to find out that in many cases, a fake is never entirely conclusively proved as being a fake. It often happens that even the latest scientific methods are simply useless to distinguish fakes, especially if they are from roughly the same period.

    Neither is the fake necessarily of lesser quality and/or artistic merit. Hoving insists that fakes are often of better quality than the original work of art. Generous souls can even consider them pastiche, especially if they’re not meant to represent a specific oeuvre, but a “lost piece” in the same tradition.

    What is a fake, then? It all boils down to the very simple axiom that a fake is not what it’s purported to me. A Roman sculpture produced by our hypothetical Arkansas guy would be a fake if represented as being authentically roman. But it would be a work of art in its own right if represented as “American, 1999”—though probably decried as being an obvious Roman rip-off…

    Any book that can have me thinking about this kind of stuff gets points for audacity. On the other hand, False Impressions is not exactly a great book and part of the problem lies in the medium. Text-heavy books are not a good way of discussing art. Art is made to be seen, to be touched, to be felt in person. A study of fakes almost requires us to be able to compare original with fake, or at least see what we’re talking about. No such luck here: False Impressions does contain photographs, but they’re on a black-and-white insert late in the book that feels a lot like if each one was painstakingly inserted after much arguing. This would have been terrific material for a TV documentary, even a four-part miniseries. But as such, False Impressions is a tease in its text format.

    Compounding the problem is that Hoving might know his subject like few others, but his writing style often veers into irrelevant minutiae. Everything he writes isn’t exactly essential. Where was the editor?

    Still, I have to admire a book that can make me ask questions about artwork and fakery. False Impressions, despite significant flaws, is an eye opener and a mildly diverting trip into a hitherto unsuspected shady underworld. Not exactly recommended to everyone, but worth picking up if you’re really intrigued by the subject.

  • Fool’s War, Sarah Zettel

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 1998, 455 pages, C$6.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60293-0

    A few contemporary Science Fiction critics of late have bemoaned the tendency of contemporary SF to become entrenched upon itself. Rather than being stories about the effect of rational change on humanity, SF is now most about SF itself. Instead of fresh ideas, we get stories that are explicitly about SF gadgets, space adventures with robots, laser guns and aliens that refer only to other SF stories and not plausible development from today’s world.

    This description of SF-as-SF certainly applies very well to the “media” segment of written SF, those bastardized written STAR TREK episodes, or infamous STAR WARS trilogies. These are not SF-as-literature-of-ideas, but SF-as-moneymaking-machine-for-media-corporation. The work aims at nothing more ambitious than giving existing fans a story in a predefined universe where sweeping changes are forbidden by license holders.

    But one doesn’t need to go in media-SF territory to encounter SF-as-SF. The whole segment of space opera is arguably based on premises that will not be realized “in the real world”. Who can argue in favour of Faster-That-Light engines? Who believes that Galactic Empires are a viable form of government? For all we know, FTL drives will never exist and all of space-opera is fantasy.

    So say the critics. And they’re mostly right: SF has acquired a specialized audience in its long existence, and many of these readers are perfectly content with good old-fashioned stories about AIs, robots, aliens and galactic empires. Where critics err, however, is when they assume that SF-as-SF is somehow less worthy than its more realistic counterpart. Which finally brings us to Sarah Zettel’s second novel, Fool’s War.

    Judge for yourself from the plot description: “Katmer Al Shei, owner of the starship Pasadena, does not know she is carrying a living entity in her ship’s computer systems. Or that the electronic network her family helped weave holds a new race fighting for survival. Or that her ship’s professional Fool is trying to avert a battle that could destroy entire worlds.” The only missing thing is a few exclamation points.

    But however conventionally specialized her setting may be, Zettel knows how to please her public. Fool’s War is clearly written (up to a point where it’s easy to skim and gloss over crucial details), her characters are pretty well-defined and the plotting maintains an adequate level of interest.

    Her take on Artificial Intelligence is one of the elements that Zettel brings to the SF idea cauldron by writing a genre novel. In Fool’s War, AI self-consciousness is a product of sudden paranoia. Succinctly put, sentience happens as soon as a program realizes that it is susceptible to being turned off at any moment. The inevitable systemic crashes caused by newly-conscious paranoid AIs are cause of significant concern for many characters in the novel, and some barely-repressed anger from one particular character.

    Distinctive touches like these, plus genuine dialogue skill, cause renewed interest in Fool’s War. Zettel’s attention to the people side make her space opera read far more like Lois McMaster Bujold than E.E Doc Smith. While some elements are unconvincing (Her inclusion of Islamic characters is understandable, but neither touching or impressive), the novel as a while holds up pretty well.

    Though “merely” a genre novel, Fool’s War play the rules of the game very well. Experienced SF readers will find what they expect in here: A good plot, professional characterization and touches of humour mixed with a sprinkling of ideas. With just some more work, Zettel shows a lot of promise as an author worthy of attention.

  • Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, Dale Pollock

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harmony, 1983, 304 pages, C$14.95 hc, ISBN 0-517-54677-9

    Summer of 1999 was flagged, in movie circles, as being “the summer of STAR WARS” given the release of the newest chapter in the saga, STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. The movie certainly captured media attention for a while, mostly under the form of humorous human-interest stories about the hordes of rabid fans lining up days, even weeks in advance to be the first to get tickets for the movie’s premiere.

    Your reviewer has more than a soft spot for the STAR WARS films, even though this fondness never reached unreasonable levels. Growing up with the STAR WARS films, however, makes them almost critic-proof, impervious to critical judgment. (Seeing the new STAR WARS on opening day was a must, though a flexible work schedule and matinee showings simplified matters considerably.)

    In this context, it might seem a bit belated to do a review of a 1983 biography about STAR WARS creator George Lucas. But after reading the book, the new STAR WARS summer of 1999 makes it the best year yet to review Skywalking.

    Stop. Rewind. Play.

    Skywalking is a biography of George Lucas. From his childhood in California to teenage years marked by a passion for sport cars—a passion that would culminate in a spectacular car crash, and would be immortalized later in AMERICAN GRAFFITI. The narrative follow Lucas from his first few days at USCinema school, through his student films to, finally, his first full-length feature, THX-1138.

    Then Skywalking details the steps leading up to the release of the first STAR WARS film, from the agonizing screenwriting to the chaotic filming (sets destroyed by sandstorms, malfunctioning special effects, etc…) and the almost-unexpected success of the film. By that time, two-third of the books are done, and the remainder of the book seems like routine; the success of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, the production of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the making of THE RETURN OF THE JEDI…

    Unexpected details pepper this biography. A visit on the RETURN OF THE JEDI set. Descriptions of George Lucas’ student films. A summary of the first, first STAR WARS screenplay. A chapter on the friendship between George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

    This portrait of George Lucas is fairly complete. Dale Pollock takes great care in establishing, even at first, the traits that would push Lucas to build a cinematographic empire: His thriftiness, his sense of authenticity, his distrust of authority, his desire to entertain and his refusal to compromise.

    Skywalking remains relevant even seventeen years later because this is a relatively unbiased portrait of Lucas. Relatively, because Lucas granted unprecedented access to Pollock, numerous private documents and several interviews. It’s a fair bet to assume that Lucas cannot be studied in this fashion any more: Would his status as a legend of filmed SF (gack!) allow him to collaborate so willingly to a book of this type nowadays? Hmm… LucasFilm is already known for extensive history rewriting… (“EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE”)

    But the true value of Skywalking in 1999 is to be found in the last chapter, where George Lucas allows himself to talk about his future projects: Enhanced special effect, independent production facilities, forays in video games… THE PHANTOM MENACE is the culmination of these elements, and 1999 is the first year where we can see the extent of Lucas’ success. Yes, George Lucas has accomplished everything he’s set out to do. The irony, after seeing THE PHANTOM MENACE, is that he’s put himself in a position of supreme accountability for the considerable flaws of the end product.

    Skywalking won’t convince those who criticize Lucas. It’s not a chainsaw biography, it’s not a slavish portrait of a demigod. It has managed to remain relevant seventeen years. It even shines on current event, proving that nothing ever exists in a vacuum, that nothing new is without antecedents. Not bad.

  • Manhattan Transfer, John E. Stith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1993, 381 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-51952-3

    New York, New York.

    Has a city ever exerted a greater fascination from the popular media? Whether in song, literature or film, New York has invaded the popular consciousness, coming to stand for the archetype of the Big City. One can easily mention multiple movies taking place there (1997: MIMIC, MEN IN BLACK and THE PEACEMAKER. 1998: ARMAGEDDON, DEEP IMPACT and GODZILLA. 1999: EYES WIDE SHUT and THE CORRUPTOR…)

    People across the world can enumerate New York’s biggest attractions without ever having set foot on American soil: Lady Liberty, the United Nations, the Empire State Tower, the World Trade Center… Even the districts have acquired reputations of their own: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx… (For bonus points, name movies whose title is inspired by these districts)

    For a variety of reasons, New York has become a locus of multiple interpretations. Some of it is simple rural jealousy, though to be honest, in comparison to New York we’re pretty much all rurals. New York stands as the incarnation of all of our feelings toward big cities. Who hasn’t ever dreamt that New York’s problems could be solved by making it disappear?

    That’s what happens one morning in John E. Stith’s Manhattan Transfer. UFOs appear and start severing Manhattan’s links with its surrounding: laser beams cut bridges, subway tunnels, roadways, solid earth… Then a bubble is installed over the city, and the whole package is lifted up in the sky, brought inside a spaceship and installed on a vast plain where dozen of other bubble cities are also lying there…

    A team is quickly formed inside the human city to try to find out what the heck is happening. As they try to enter in communication with the other cities, they find out that the aliens are installing power, water, and waste conducts. Clearly, the aliens want to keep them around for a while… but why? Is this a zoo, an experiment or a grocery cart? (The alien’s true reason for taking Manhattan becomes far too obvious even at mid-book.)

    All of this happens in the first fifty pages of Manhattan Transfer. If only the remainder of the novel could have been that good… Like many premise-driven SF novels, this one falters after the initial setup, and goes on for maybe a hundred pages too long. The middle section is sorely in need of some tightening up. (Maybe by cutting the unnecessary “preacher” subplot?) Fortunately, the novel picks up interest again as it advances forward. If the ending undergoes too many false climaxes, it wraps up in a satisfying, if abrupt, manner.

    Adding to the fun, Manhattan Transfer is written with the can-do attitude exemplified by golden-age SF. The characters of the novel are almost invariably competent men and women, and they won’t stay kidnapped for too long! It’s one of the intellectual pleasures of the novel to see how Manhattanites end up coping with this radical lifestyle change. Though Stith is far more optimistic than it could reasonably be expected, his characters are so sympathetic that readers will forgive some easy rationalizations.

    Devotees of the hard-SF school of thought will find a lot to like in Manhattan Transfer. Even though the writing isn’t as concise and as clear as it could be, the characters are above-average for this type of story, and there’s a clear narrative drive from cover to cover. An unusual, yet well-handled premise and some cool scenes make this a worthwhile read. Better yet; consider it as an alternate version of INDEPENDENCE DAY.

  • Standard Candles, Jack McDevitt

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tachyon, 1996, 248 pages, C$20.00 hc, ISBN 0-9648320-4-6

    As a marginal Jack McDevitt fan, imagine my surprise as I browsed through the Science-Fiction Book Club’s latest catalogue and discovered a mention of the previously-unknown title Standard Candles. A trip to amazon.com later, I had found out that this was McDevitt’s first short story anthology, and that it had been published in 1996 (!) by a small publisher.

    Given that I’ve read all of McDevitt’s other books, my surprise was compounded by the complete absence of Standard Candles from his bibliography. Granted, McDevitt’s latest publisher (Harper Prism) doesn’t list other publishers’ books, but still… So I ordered Standard Candles, curious to see what McDevitt had produced in short-form SF.

    The SFBC edition of Standard Candles is a slim (248 pages) volume containing 16 stories. Given that one of them is more than fifty pages long, the remainder of the stories in this book are fairly short and can be easily read in one time.

    I have a special fondness for single-author collections because they tend to succinctly summarize everything you want to know about an author’s interests, style, strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, in this case, it brought back memories of how, if McDevitt can be great, he can also be insufferably annoying.

    For each Moonfall, Engines of God and Hercules Text, suspenseful novels against backgrounds of hard physics, archaeology and SETI alien contact, there’s A Talent for War, Ancient Shores or Eternity Road, disappointing stories that barely explain their own premises and suffer from pointless detours, unresolved events and depressing finales. And so the pattern repeats itself in Standard Candles, in 248 short pages.

    McDevitt is not a conventionally optimistic SF writer. His stories are filled with fallen civilizations, sentient stupidity, matrimonial failures and malfunctioning technology. His roots in classical studies inevitably bring us back to boom-and-bust cycles, to uncertain futures and the possibility of total systemic collapse. Even his most optimistic scenarios always include signs that, gee, idiots will always be with us.

    Ironically, historian McDevitt often writes Science-Fiction stories in the vein of physicist Gregory Benford, about scientists stuck with very ordinary problems and extraordinary discoveries (“Standard Candles”, “Cryptic”, etc…)

    It’s no mistake if this book is classified as being “Science Fiction/Literature” on its dust jacket, especially after reading “Translated from the Collossian” (aliens go around stealing classical literature) and “The Fort Moxie Branch” (about a mysterious library of lost literary gems). Is it a coincidence, however, if these are two of the book’s best stories?

    Similarly enjoyable are the two great stories related to chess. “Black to Move” is a chilling (if overlong) story of alien cunning explained in chess terms. “The Jersey Rifle”, on the other hand, is a charming, quasi-comic tale about The Best Chess Player in the World.

    There’s nothing charming about most of the book, however. A typical McDevitt conclusion resides heavily on the threat of future Very Bad Things. A welcome exception is “To Hell With the Star”, which certainly ranks up there with the best of the SF wish-fulfillment fantasies. But McDevitt is, by and large, a melancholic, pessimistic writer. Nothing wrong with that, but taken in long sustained doses, it does put a dampener on your day.

    Standard Candles is still a worthwhile anthology: McDevitt delivers more often than not, and provided one doesn’t read all the stories one after the other, the dark and depressing tone is a change of pace. More significantly, Standard Candles is a pretty spiffy summary of everything that interests the author, from classical history to hard physics. Fans will love it; non-fans are advised to wait until they’re fans.

  • The Dragon’s Eye, Joël Champetier (Translated by Jean-Louis Trudel)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 296 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86882-0

    Allow me to preface this review with an important disclaimer: I am not a disinterested reader when it comes to The Dragon’s Eye. I’ve known both author Joël Champetier and translator Jean-Louis Trudel since 1995’s “Can-Con’95” SF convention and if it would be presumptuous of me to claim them as friends, I can at least honestly call them good acquaintances.

    Similarly, I’ve been reading French-Canadian Science-Fiction for a long time, and my favorite novel remains La Taupe et le Dragon (The Dragon’s Eye), one of the few adult action/adventure idea-heavy hard-SF novel to come out of the French-Canadian scene. I’ve followed closely the process leading to the English translation of the novel and now I’m pleased to see that the American public can now read one of the best-kept secrets of French-Canadian Science-Fiction.

    The Dragon’s Eye takes place nearly two hundred and fifty years in the future. Earth has expanded into space, and the colonization of extra-solar planets has begun. Not all nations have equal means, however, and China finds itself relegated to a barely-hospitable planet in a nearby double-star system. One of the stars is the Dragon’s Eye, a small but dangerous star whose intense radiations cause widespread blindness among the colonizing population. As is conditions weren’t harsh enough, New China is saddled by enormous debts. Rebellion rumors flow freely…

    In the midst of all this arrives Réjean Tanner, an operative for an Earth intelligence agency. He quickly finds himself in enemy territory, tasked with retrieving a rogue agent… regardless if the agent is cooperative or not.

    The stage is set for an adventure solidly placed in the James Bond tradition. But Champetier has other ambitions, and the action/adventure tale that is The Dragon’s Eye never goes quite as well as planned, never quite as easily as we might like it to be. For veterans of the spy genre, this novel is a blast given the number of conventions it cheerfully overturns. In a way, this is almost the anti-James Bond novel, yet not a satiric one…

    An aspect that shines in The Dragon’s Eye is the meticulous world-building done by Champetier. The Eye’s harmful radiations force everyone to take radical steps to protect themselves against blindness and skin cancer; this obsession permeates the book’s society as deeply as one could expect from the best SF extrapolations.

    Best of all, The Dragon’s Eye is a wonderful read. Champetier is one of the few French-Canadian authors to deliberately choose an uncluttered style, and the result is a novel that’s easy to get into, very well-plotted for maximum interest, and never too lengthy. I read it in a flash, pulled by the lean narrative.

    I had initial fears that all the qualities that I remembered from La Taupe et le Dragon were due to unfair comparison with other French-Canadian works. It’s a relief to be finally able to judge the book in a fair context. Fortunately, the book holds up amazingly well: As an action/adventure SF with a unusually good sense of world-building, one could be hard-pressed to find better. Kudos to Champetier and kudos to Trudel for a pretty good translation. With a bit of luck, Tor will now publish Champetier’s other horror novels… and with even more luck, more SF from him. Though we French-Canadian will get to read it first!