Book Review

  • Mining the Sky, John S. Lewis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Addison-Wesley, 1996, 274 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-201-47959-1

    In her early-nineties pop-song “Sleepless Satellite”, singer Tasmin Archer wondered “Did we go to the moon too soon?” When hit records begins to ponder the fate of the space program, it’s a sign that things have really gone to waste.

    And, looking at 1999’s NASA, we can only wonder how we’ve gone from the moon to a few overpriced, timid expeditions in low Earth orbit. By any means, we now should have landed humans on Mars, established a base on the Moon and seeded our skies with space stations. Instead, we go nuts over a teleguided rover on the surface of Mars. Whatever.

    Maybe we did go to the moon too soon, argues John S. Lewis in Mining the Sky: That the whole initiative was a purely political battle against the Soviets and nothing more. There’s certainly historical validity to the argument. The challenge then become to find a worthwhile reason to go back into space. As Lewis announces early on, “if we are to return on the moon, it will be because there is some visible relationship between that endeavor and [our] future material well-being.” [P.ix] Mining the Sky is a book-length treatise on the practical advantages of space exploitation.

    It begins close to home, and eventually moves to the stars. We see how we could harvest oxygen from the moon, power from the sun, minerals from asteroids and fusion fuel from Neptune. We see why we should move into space as soon as possible, from stopping civilization-killing meteors to restoring ecological balance to Earth.

    Lewis is no newcomer to the space business. He advances dollars as readily as chemical reactions. While this often becomes obtrusive, it brings an extra layer of credibility to the book, making it unusually convincing.

    Among the great moments of Mining the Sky is the monetary evaluation of an ordinary asteroid: NEA 3554 Amun, the smallest known M asteroid is “only” two kilometers in diameter and weights thirty billion tons. “Assuming a typical iron meteorite composition, the iron and nickel in Amun have a market value of about $8,000 billion.” [P.182] Including the other metallic elements expected in this type of asteroid, Amun’s tag price climbs up to 20,000 billion dollars. Not bad for an object likely to smash into Earth sooner or later.

    Another great moment comes when Lewis tries to represent how much iron is accessible in the asteroid belt: A> 825 quintillion tons, B> four hundred million years of present-day consumption, C> Covering Earth’s entire surface in 800 meters of iron, D> Seven billion dollars’ worth of iron for everyone alive on Earth today. That’s only considering iron and excluding the other metals. And the fact that there are even more Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit!

    Given Lewis’ intent to write a more-rigorous-than-usual vulgarization book, it’s reasonable to warn any prospective reader that Mining the Sky is more of a serious argumentation than an easily accessible “fun” book. The style can get very dry in spots, though Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm more than does enough to pull us in.

    True, Mining the Sky is a great work of unbounded optimism. But ask any space enthusiast, and they’ll tell you -like Lewis does-, that Space Exploration is not for gloomaniacs. It’s a lot like putting money aside now to ensure a comfortable life later. It’s the logical way to go. It’s the ultimate adventure. It’s where no man has gone before. And in any case, it’s better to go to the moon too soon than get there too late.

  • Aftermath, Charles Sheffield

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1998, 452 pages, C$19.95 tpb, ISBN 0-553-37893-7

    The great thing about modern civilization is that every few days, we find new ways to bring it down. Take an electromagnetic pulse, for instance. In theory, it’s an energy reaction that simply produces an massive influx of electrons. The consequences, however, are devastating on modern machinery: They overload electronic circuits -frying them permanently- and wipe out magnetic storage formats. This well-known phenomenon -which can be caused by nuclear explosions, among other things- is slowly becoming the sword of Damocles that’s hanging over our modern electromagnetic civilization.

    EMP wouldn’t have been a problem a hundred years ago. Even as late at 1975, the consequences wouldn’t have been as dramatic. But nowadays, a large part of our financial, communication and media networks increasingly rely on complex electronic devices easily damaged by electromagnetic pulses. It’s going to get worse. Aftermath is a novel that takes place after a freak astronomic event has created a massive electromagnetic pulse that completely devastates Earth’s electronics…

    Three cancer victims begin a hunt for a scientist who can continue their longevity treatments. The president of the USA is besieged by personal and national issues. Astronauts from the first Mars mission arrive near Earth to find that nobody can come and get them. Yet another fanatic religious group arises..

    If you suspect a disaster novel, then you’re right: Though Aftermath is definitely SF, it takes place is a future far closer to ours than Sheffield’s other novels. The time is 2026, and in spite of a few fancy new gadgets, there really isn’t much there to tantalize the SF fan. It actually looks closer to 2010 than anything else. Like many disaster novels, Aftermath also sacrifices ideas for lengthy plotting, which is where Sheffield begins to lose control over his book.

    I’m of the opinion that sex is absent of most hard-SF writer’s work because they end up looking silly if they try it, (which isn’t to say that sex in non-hard-SF works isn’t pretty silly either!) and Aftermath pretty much proves my point. Nearly each characters discourses at length about his sexual (in) capacities, from homosexual congressmen to pedophiliac scientists to impotent heads of state. I believe I speak for a sizeable proportion of the North-American population when I say that the less said about the president’s sex life, the better.

    All of this ties into a bigger complaint, which is that Aftermath hasn’t got a recognizably normal character in its dramatis personae. No one to identify with, no bird’s eye view of the action and disaster. I’m all for originality in characters, but when overdone it reads a lot like your average daytime soap opera.

    Fortunately, Aftermath has a bit more meat than the usual melodrama, and it’s one of its virtues that it steadily becomes more interesting as it advances. Be prepared for a rather average start. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes obvious that the novel’s plot lines won’t be tied up by the end of the book, and so Aftermath ends on a note strongly suggestive of at least one sequel. It would have been decent for Bantam to at least acknowledge this on the dust jacket…

    This lack of closure, coupled with the humdrum nature of most of the novel and the sometime-ridiculous sex-driven character dynamics make Aftermath a less-than-commendable choice. Sheffield has done much better in the past, and we can only hope that he’ll come back to form soon.

  • The Transparent Society, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Perseus Books, 1998 (1999 reprint), 377 pages, C$22.00 tpb, ISBN 0-7382-0144-8

    Imagine two cities in which cameras are installed in every public area. The only difference is who controls the camera: City Number One has cameras accessible only by the police force. City Number Two has cameras easily accessible by everyone. City Number Two even has cameras installed inside the Police stations! Which city would you rather live in?

    This, in a nutshell, is the main argument of David Brin’s The Transparent Society: modern information technology cannot be stopped and our only choice is to learn to live with them openly. This lucid and thought-provoking work explores the new possibilities and dangers of the information age and comes out with a set of opinions at odds with everyone else, yet curiously reasonable.

    David Brin is no stranger to odd ideas. An astrophysicist by formation and science-fiction writer by trade, Brin’s novels include new concepts and fancy extrapolations by the truckload. With this book, he polishes off a few pet notions, integrates new material, backs it up with some research and enlivens everything with a prose forged in the merciless arena of escapist entertainment. The result is very, very good.

    To be fair, The Transparent Society is not only a book about privacy versus accountability, but also a fascinating techno-social study of neo-western civilization. Fans of Brin’s previous writings will recognize an attempt to consolidate and strengthen his earlier themes. The concept of “social T-cells” alone is a meme that should spread far and wide.

    One of Brin’s biggest strengths is that, even while exhorting a quiet revolution, he just sounds so darn reasonable. Unlike what one might expect from a hard-SF writer, Brin is no elitist: it is obvious that he loves today’s society and the people that compose it. That puts him at least a notch above the many cleverer-than-thou techno-social writers.

    For this reason, not everyone will agree with Brin’s “contrarian” approach. On public discussion forums, he and The Transparent Society have attracted a fair amount of negative comment. Some of this is undoubtedly due to Brin’s skepticism regarding the so-called “cypherpunk” (or “crypto-anarchist”) movement, who claim that strong encryption will liberate the people and bring down all evil governments. Brin offers several compelling reasons why this simply won’t happen, earning the enmity of these online groups.

    The notion of transparency as championed by Brin is not the easiest choice to make. It’s far easier to make mistakes and have your way behind closed doors than in public. On the other hand, our civilization is more or less already based on transparency: Think of the medias, the check and balances in our government, our free market economy, our scientific method based on rigorous peer review… The very idea of truth-as-transparent is even ingrained in our language, as demonstrated by some wonderful common expressions: shady deals, dark side, murky affairs, obscure intent…

    On more practical matters, the book itself is well-produced, though the numerous “hidden” footnotes bring so much to the text that they should have been integrated as on-page side notes rather than put at the end of the book. The index, however, is very complete and useful.

    Brin’s overall thesis is quite convincing. The Transparent Society should be required reading for most policy-makers and forward-thinking individuals. We should consider ourselves lucky to see such a readable counterpoint to the usual shrill privacy alarms that seem to be issued daily. Brin’s ultimate message is worth thinking about; with increasingly decentralized power put in the hands of wholly average persons, privacy will become obsolete, even dangerous in the future. We cannot possibly hope to live in an information age without being transparent to some degree or another.

    [July 1999: It should be noted that, fittingly enough, The Transparent Society was my first purchase ever by on-line commerce. A suitable book for a system built on a sane balance of openness (Internet) and security (encrypted transactions).]

  • Star Trek: The Next Generation #50: Dyson Sphere, Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 235 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-54173-0

    Star Trek has never been known as being particularly rigorous in its scientific accuracy. Hard-SF has never been praised for its overwhelming attention to characters. So what happens when two of today’s hottest hard-SF writers team up to write a Star Trek novel? Dashing all hopes of a Trek novel with the usually well-defined TNG characters dealing with accurate science, the result ends up combining the flaws of both sub-genres.

    Faithful readers of these reviews, if any, undoubtedly noticed my general admiration for the novels of both Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, both of whom have written exciting novels of hard-Science-Fiction that traded characters development for clever ideas and plotting. Together, they have written The Killing Star, a pretty good modern novel of alien invasion that combined ideas and themes proper to both writers.

    I found myself in the unusual position of anxiously waiting for a Trek novel when I learned that they were busy at work on a follow-up to TNG’s episode Relics. That episode, as long-time Trek fans remember well, signaled not only the return of Trek’s original engineer Montgomery Scott, but also marked the introduction of a solid SF device in the Trek universe: A Dyson Sphere.

    A Dyson Sphere is, basically, a ball built around a star so that all of the star’s energy is used. It’s unimaginably big, easily providing the usable surface of billions of Earths. This is the first problem with Dyson Sphere: It’s simply too big to mean anything to the characters. Though not exactly a new problem (Niven’s Ringworld also suffered from “too much to see here” syndrome), it’s especially grating when the novel has to be over in two hundred pages.

    Compounding this problem is the mis-match between setting and characters. There is nothing left for Beverly Crusher, for instance, to do but be awed and fascinated by the sphere. None of the characters can do anything about the setting. (Apart from Picard, that is, and his only emotion is a desire to explore.) Pellegrino and Zebrowski bring back the silicon-based Horta from previous Star Trek episodes, but can’t given them anything interesting to do.

    The second problem is that Dyson Sphere is a story where the characters spend their time reacting to things instead of acting upon them. Basically, they discover a neutron star that will soon strike the Dyson Sphere, destroying it utterly. Fine. (What a coincidence!) But once that’s established, what’s left to do for the crew of the Enterprise? Explore until impact? That’s pretty much all there is. No suspense, even in the few action scenes. The deficient writing doesn’t help; the action is described in a minimal fashion that simply doesn’t evoke the required awe.

    As if this wasn’t enough, the authors are curiously inconclusive about their hypotheses. Was the Dyson Sphere built by Borgs? Possibility raised, but left unexplored. Is the neutron star a weapon of war? Possibility raised but left unexplored. What the heck happened at the end? Possibility raised… Very frustrating. Not to mention the deus ex machina.

    Ironically, the book improves after the novel ends; 37 of Dyson Sphere‘s 235 pages are dedicated to multi-pages author bios and two lengthy afterwords. The afterwords have nothing to do with the book, but they’re fascinating in their own right, discussing antimatter rockets and other advanced physics.

    It pains me considerably to decommend Dyson Sphere: I really expected something better from these two authors. Great for them if the royalties earn them enough money to make them happy (Dyson Sphere was in the USA-Today Top-50 bestseller list!), but as for me, I’d suggest reading the afterwords at the bookstore and wait until the author’s next books. (Or pick up a copy of Pellegrino’s Dust, a much better work at roughly the same price…)

  • Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard, Russell Miller

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Key Porter, 1987, 390 pages, C$24.95 hc, ISBN 1-550-12027-7

    First things first: I will not shy away from admitting that I loathe Scientology.

    Most of this anger is a natural byproduct of my general abomination for sects. Organized -read “established”- religions at least have a veneer of respectability and relatively down-to-earth beliefs. (Despite my avowed atheism, I once got an A+ on a college-level essay that argued that the catholic church had a beneficial impact on the colonization of Canada. This has scant relation to Bare-Faced Messiah, but I can’t pass this opportunity to mention it.) Sects, on the other hand, combine financial swindling with seemingly voluntary lobotomy. How else to explain paying obscene amount of money to find the state of mind one can get from a good long walk in the woods with a pretty girl?

    Scientology, however, holds a special place in my pantheon of Bad Ideas. As an early Internaut, I still seethe at their callous legal shenanigans which finally forced the shutdown of the anonymous remailer anon.penet.fi. As a Science-Fiction fan, I carry the collective burden of a genre that hosted L. Ron Hubbard before he decided that the way to make money was to organize a religion. The so-called “top-secret” documents of Scientology, recently revealed by a band of courageous ex-scientologists, read like bottom-level sci-fi garbage. Scientology has no clothes; if it appears so blindingly obvious to me and multiple other wise persons, why isn’t it obvious to everyone?

    Bare-Faced Messiah is not really about Scientology. It’s a biography of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. By casting the forefather in the true light of his accomplishments, Russell Miller reveals the tissue of lies and forgery that is at the heart of Scientology.

    L. Ron Hubbard didn’t compromise a life of honest work and accomplishments by starting the scam called Scientology. This biography makes it clear that Hubbard was a self-aggrandizer, a fabulist and an unbalanced boy well before he used his easy talent for fiction to write for SF magazines. Numerous incidents where Hubbard keeps promoting himself as “The Youngest Eagle Scout Ever” -when no records could prove or disprove this affirmation- is particularly instructive.

    From this boy without a clear sense of himself would emerge a teen constantly inflating his modest accomplishment in tales worthy of men’s adventure magazines. Which inevitably happens, as Hubbard finds himself drawn in a profession where lies are honorable. But Hubbard is a compulsive buyer and before long, he tries to evade his debts in the military service. His war is not heroic, but his war tales are, as he manages to transform a battle with a known magnetic anomaly into a country-saving duel with a Japanese submarine.

    After the war, Hubbard divides his time between magazine pieces and trying to swindle a medical pension from the Navy. He eventually writes a piece called “Dianetics”, from which he’ll establish a religion. Though this first scam ends badly -Hubbard is a compulsive spender-, it lays the foundations for Scientology.

    From there, the remainder of the tale is distressingly familiar: a man with too much power, too much money and too little wisdom. As Scientology grew, Hubbard diminished. His death in 1986 puts a merciful end to a life taken over by paranoia.

    I will quickly gloss over Hubbard’s bigamy, his criminal records, the ludicrous tale of his private navy and other assorted antics; they’re more valid reasons to look for Bare-Faced Messiah. This wonderfully well-researched book lays bare the moral foundations of a fascinating character. For Hubbard might be the twentieth century’s most successful con artist, his true life is even more fascinating than his imagined life.

    Anxious to read the book? Worried that your local library’s copy was destroyed by your friendly neighborhood scientologist? You’re in luck: Check out the online, uncensored version of Bare-Faced Messiah at http://www.jritson.demon.co.uk/bfm/bfmconte.htm

    The Internet just might get the last laugh over Scientology…

  • Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1999, 918 pages, C$39.50 hc, ISBN 0-380-97346-4

    Wow. Where to begin?

    By the physical object itself. Cryptonomicon is a big book. At 918 pages, it’s a pitch-black hardcover that will occupy fully 4.5 centimeters of your shelf. That is, if you decide to plunk down the 40 Canadian Dollars that will grant you the privilege of carrying this pound brick.

    Judging from my local bookstore, however, even the monetary argument will deter few. (I grabbed the last of six copies, three days after its arrival in the store) Only the “Neal Stephenson” is required to attract fans. After a much-remarked SF debut titled Snow Crash (which has since become a cult classic), Stephenson won the Hugo with The Diamond Age and co-wrote two superb contemporary thrillers with his uncle under the pen name Stephen Bury (Interface and The Cobweb).

    Cryptonomicon is far closer to the meticulously-detailed, intricately plotted Bury novels than either of Stephenson’s own SF novels. For one thing, more than half the book takes place during World War Two (echoing Bury’s description of another conflict, the Gulf War, in The Cobweb) and the other half takes place in the present.

    Techo-geeks should be relieved to note, however, that Cryptonomicon is no “mere” WW2 or present-day thriller. Cryptonomicon begs to be fitted in a new genre, “Wired-Fiction”. Stephenson has written for the magazine several (including one of the best article the magazine ever published, “Mother Earth, motherboard”) and his latest novel reads a lot like the ideal novel for Wired-heads. This is a good thing, mind you.

    Judge for yourself: The present-day plot concerns Randy Waterhouse, an Internet expert who finds himself in business to construct a data haven in Southeast Asia. The WW2 plot revolves around Randy’s grandfather, a brilliant mathematician who spends the war breaking Axis codes. Cryptology, technology, hacking, computers, business and a myriad of other subjects are frenetically explored and brought together in Cryptonomicon, at the greatest pleasure of all the techno-geeks in the audience.

    The charm of Cryptonomicon lies largely in its unrepentant didacticism. This is techno-docu-fiction at its most extreme, including graphs, equations and pages-long digressions on arcane subjects (Few reviewers have resisted the impulsion to note the four-page exposé on how to eat Captain Crunch cereal, and I will not be an exception.)

    In the hands of a lesser writer, Cryptonomicon might have been an interminable bore. But fans already know Stephenson’s quirky prose style, and the result provokes emotions oscillating between intense fascination and audible hilarity. This is an amazingly well-written novel.

    This book is filled with so many good scenes that it’s hard to know which ones to highlight. At least keep two of them in mind: The most hilarious is certainly the wonderfully-funny business plan. The most impressive is Randy’s character-defining hacking apex. Thinking of it, Randy’s expedition account (“The Weird turn Pro”) is also mesmerizing…

    It’s not a perfect novel by any mean; the ending -while stronger than Stephenson’s other solo novels- is still annoyingly incomplete. At least one character is still mysteriously unexplained —what’s this about several other volumes in the series? And, for a 918-pages novel, it’s curiously lacking in plot. My own techno-nerd sensibilities kept wanting to go back to the present-day thread, but I’d be hard-pressed to find anything in the novel worth editing out.

    No matter: Much like Interface and Snow Crash were stupendous books, Cryptonomicon easily ranks as a must-read novel of 1999 for technically-oriented readers. It’s big, it’s impressive, it’s exhilarating and, in all seriousness, you get a full forty Canadian dollars’ worth of entertainment.

  • Life Signs: The Biology of Star Trek, Susan Jenkins M.D. & Robert Jenkins, M.D.

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 1998, 189 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 0-06-019154-6

    All things considered, it is pretty ironic that the movies and dramatic television series most closely associated with science are, in fact, those which will make the most errors. For each CONTACT which takes care is trying to be as accurate as possible, there’s a LOST IN SPACE to throw all of physics outside the windows in a hurry. STAR TREK, for all its qualities, has never stuck too closely to accepted rules of science. Instances of TREK scientific ludicrousness (“Invert the beam’s polarity!”, “Spock has no more brain!”, “We’re devolving!”) are too well-recorded to argue.

    Despite everything, Trek occasionally gets it right, or -more significantly- allows for an imaginative springboard to today’s knowledge. Renowned physicist Lawrence M. Krauss has made a name -not to mention a mint- for himself with The Physics of Star Trek and its sequel (Beyond Star Trek) and we could only expect other similar books.

    These books have arrived, en masse, in book-stores: The Science of the X-Files, The Metaphysics of Star Trek, The Science of Star Wars… Not to be left out, The Physics of Star Trek‘s publisher Harper Collins now comes forward with Life Signs: The Biology of Star Trek.

    Fortunately, this book is written by competent personnel: Unlike the doubtful The Science of the X-Files, written by even-more doubtful fantasy writer Jeanne Cavelos, Life Signs is the product of a collaboration between husband-and-wife Robert Jenkins, M.D., geneticist and Susan Jenkins, M.D., psychiatrist. Impressive credits; are they any good at vulgarization?

    All Science of… books are (should be) exercises in scientific popularization rather than simple collections of random nitpicks. Ideally, they should use the SF series/movies as excuses to present more substantial content. Here, The Jenkinses use Star Trek as a reason to explore current research on exobiology, genetics, longevity, cloning, mating rituals, evolution, life in space and other biological considerations.

    A large part of the success of books life Life Signs resides on the way the authors are able to sustain the readers’ attention while still communicating meaningful information. Fortunately, the Jenkinses are able to vulgarize the material in an entertaining and fascinating way… not to mention staying respectful of the show. “How alien can you get?” is a serviceable example of how to structure a broad topic (xenobiology) in an accessible fashion. It helps that the book is often wryly funny.

    In many ways, this book was more informative for your reviewer than was The Physics of Star Trek, mostly due to a weaker knowledge of biology to begin with. This being said, the books have a few significant shortcomings which make it a doubtful buy. First and foremost, at 189 pages, the hardcover edition is certainly not worth thirty-two Canadian dollars! While a desire to keep a complex subject at a manageable length is understandable, Life Signs doesn’t offer a very good return on investment. The cruel lack of an index is a potentially fatal flaw in a scientific reference book. Some of the gimmicks are annoying; for a book on biology, Life Signs often errs in “series summary” territory (see pages 87-92) There is a thing as being too cute.

    On the other hand, if you can manage to acquire Life Signs at reduced rates or in paperback, it makes both a great gift and a fun introduction/refresher to the complex subject of biology. Though their familiarity with specific characters and episodes suggest that the Jenkinses are fans, they’re not blind fans and their rational perspective on Treknology is harsh but fair. (The last chapter is about “Where no one will ever go”, and brings some much-needed sanity to a few of Trek’s most ludicrous assertions.)

    Light-hearted but substantial, Life Signs not only answers long-standing questions, but suggests new unanswered questions… such as why the heck is Picard still bald in an era of advanced medicine?

    Is that a set-up for a sequel? Make it so!

  • Moonfall, Jack McDevitt

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Prism, 1998 (1999 reprint), 544 pages, C$8.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-105112-8

    Science-Fiction is often considered, justifiably or not, an escapist literature. One could make a good case that the ultimate escapist stories are end-of-the-world tales, and SF has made a tradition out of such drama. Whether we’re due to be destroyed by aliens, asteroids, black holes, plagues or nuclear war, we can vicariously enjoy other people’s plight while our lives are comfortably uneventful. Jack McDevitt finely upholds this SF distinction with Moonfall.

    The novel takes place in April 2024. While Americans are rushing to fill their tax papers and casting their ballots for the presidential primaries, scientists across the globe are preparing for a spectacular solar eclipse. During the eclipse, an amateur astronomer discovers a comet. Slight problem: the comet is going to impact the moon with such force that it’ll shatter it.

    Unfortunately, humans now have a presence on the Moon, and only hours after the vice-president inaugurates Moonbase, all six hundred residents must escape. As if losing the Moon isn’t enough, some scientists then announce that the impact will send multiple fragments crashing down on Earth, some as big as the one which destroyed the dinosaurs…

    You could do a checklist of expected elements in a disaster novel and Moonfall would have most of them. A large cast of characters. Disaster vignettes. Nick-of-time escapes. Media commentary. Politicians of all stripes. Stupid bystanders. If nothing else, McDevitt has done his homework in order to fulfill readers’ expectations.

    So far so good, but McDevitt’s novel has two significant weaknesses that diminishes its overall effect. The first is almost inherent in disaster novels; the second one is more serious.

    All disaster novels are based, of course, on the disaster. As such, a disaster happens only once, or -if it is averted- not at all. The rest is either apprehension or consequence. Catastrophe novel continually toe the line between impatient readers and let-down readers. Moonfall mitigates the problem with two crises, but spends far too much of its time in overdone suspense.

    The second problem is that McDevitt, by and large, misses the opportunity to create a gallery of compelling characters. Disaster novel characters are usually divided in heroic and anecdotal groups. Moonfall‘s core is fine, with a likeable vice-president and his entourage, but the other recurring characters are not given the chance to shine and distinguish themselves, with the result that they’re often indistinguishable from the one-shot characters seen only in a vignette and then gone forever. Not only would Moonfall have been a substantially shorter novel without these diversions, but the focus of the work would have been strengthened on the vice-president plot, which is really the central axis of the novel.

    Still, don’t get the impression that Moonfall isn’t a particularly enjoyable perfect piece of summer reading. “Not exciting enough” is a broad enough criticism that it can apply to some jaded readers and not to others simply in search of a good read. Richly detailed, carefully researched, Moonfall does so many things right than it’s ungrateful to be pickier than what it deserves.

  • All-American Alien Boy, Allen Steele

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1996, 267 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-00460-1

    Several reviewers, yours included- have often commented of the different approach used by Allen Steele’s brand of science-fiction. Though he has shown his ability to write hard-SF like the best of them, he approaches his subject from a bottom-up perspective. He writes about the common man in exceptional situations, the worker who implements the grandiose plans for tomorrow. Orbital Decay starred criminals, dull-witted construction workers, insane officers and failed SF writers. The Jericho Iteration‘s protagonist was, like Steele, a St-Louis investigative journalist.

    With this background, the unusual focus of the stories collected in All-American Alien Boy all makes sense. His first collection (Rude Astronauts) was heavily concerned about the usual space exploration SF subject matter. (Though not, as Steele writes in his introduction to his second collection, “set mainly in outer space” [P.xiii]) All American Alien Boy is different, concentrating on near-future SF and historical alternate histories. Few stories are set in more than twenty years. The title refers to the adaptability required to cope with today’s pace of change; we are all a bit more alien than ever before.

    As a big supporter of author introductions to stories in collection, I was pleased to note that Steele wrote substantial introductions to his stories, detailing sources of inspiration and occasionally getting on soapboxes. Most introductions are interesting, some less so and others (like the last half of his introduction to the collection) simply pedantic. Still, it’s appreciated.

    As for the stories themselves, they’re vintage Steele: A clear and elegant style with occasional structural experimentation. Fortunately, there’s more variety than in Rude Astronaut. Like most novelists who started out as journalists, Steele’s prose goes straight to the story without useless detours. It’s no surprise if the two weakest stories of the collection (“See Rock City” and “A letter from St.Louis”, though the latter is from the perspective of a journalist… in 1900) are written with more elaborate style. It’s the more classical stories that shine.

    “Jonathan Livingstone Seaslug” owes a lot to Arthur C. Clarke, as Steele mentions in his introduction, and the result is a tale worthy of the master himself… though the conclusion is obvious early on.

    I thought that despite a fascinating premise, “Lost in the Shopping Mall” could have been stronger. No matter; it’s good enough as it is.

    “Whinin’ Boy Blues” is the sort of SF story that I like to read, with high-tech gadgets, unusual situations, an action-oriented plot and a happy finale. Just ignore the strange title.

    “Doblin’s Lecture” is sociological SF, with a touch of psychological horror. Thought-provoking and with an effect that’s ultimately contrary to what we may expect, a characteristic also shared with “The Good Rat”.

    Finally, I hope this review is just and equitable, because “Hunting Wabbitt” is a great revenge fantasy, from an author to a bad critic.

    No interplanetary spaceships, no aliens. A few giant robots, VR addiction, sea monsters and a crashed SSTO, but that’s as wild as we get. Still, a good author doesn’t have to rely on gadgets and All American Alien Boy is a pretty good collection. You could do worse than take a look at it.

  • Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, Jeff Greenwald

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking, 1998, 273 pages, C$33.99 hc, ISBN 0-670-87399-3

    I used to be a fanatic Star Trek fan. Raised on “Star Trek” reruns and fascinated by “The Next Generation” as a teen, my interest in the show ended at around the same time than I discovered the Internet and -maybe less strangely- as I discovered the really good (written) SF stuff. Since then, I have followed the series with only the sketchiest attention, as the newer series like DS9 and Voyager have failed to grab my attention.

    As a result, I know Star Trek but can’t really attach any deep non-nostalgic emotion to it. You will not catch me learning Klingon, dressing up in a purple skin-tight uniform or even reading *.startrek.* newsgroups. Though I did pay good money for three of the last four Trek movies and a few used Trek novels by good SF authors, (plus one Canadian dollar for a used copy of the English/Klingon dictionary, just for kicks) that’s pretty much the extent of my financial investment in the Trek Franchise. It’s a TV show, not a way of life.

    Not everyone sees it that way. All around the globe, fans are watching the show religiously and integrating its philosophy in their lives. Jeff Greenwald is, for lack of a better term, what we could call an intelligent fan of the series. “Not a rabid fan” he warns us “never one to squeeze my guts into a spandex uniform, but a fan nonetheless.” [P.3] Future Perfect is an attempt to find out why people are so fascinated with this long-running series.

    Future Perfect has a three-part entwined structure. The first is what you would expect from a standard examination of “Star Trek”: interviews with the actors, description of such oddities as the Klingon Language Institute, portraits of JPL engineers fascinated with the show, etc…

    The second is unusual for a book self-described as “not prepared, approved, licensed or endorsed by any entity involved in creating or producing the Star Trek television series or films.”: Greenwald managed to be granted access to several crucial steps in the creation of Star Trek: First Contact, which opened in theatres in 1996 to both popular and critical acclaim. From last-minute script revisions to opening night, Greenwald is there, like a fly on the wall.

    The third part of Future Perfect is the one that earns the book its subtitle. Greenwald goes around the globe to find out why exactly Star Trek is such a world-wide phenomenon. From Klingon marriages in Germany to a delightful interview with the Dalai Lama, we truly get, for what is possibly the first time, an image of Star Trek across the planet.

    Greenwald doesn’t always succeed in his self-imposed task, but always remains interesting. His interview with Kurt Vonnegut has few relevance to Star Trek, but remains thought-provoking. If some of his stops on his world-wide Star Trek tour are disappointing in term of Trek, he never misses the chance to make us visit wonderful places. (viz; “The Wired Raj”)

    Future Perfect hasn’t managed to make me fall in love with “Star Trek” all over again, but it has certainly restored my respect in the series, and I can only be grateful to Greenwald for that. (I even took the time, midway through the book, to watch a Voyager episode. Though the story -“11:59”- wasn’t exactly good by most standards, it did mesh perfectly with Greenwald’s theories about Star Trek.) One might quibble with the limitations, the methods or the individuals that make up Star Trek (I came away from the book with even less respect for Brannon Braga, which is quite an accomplishment), but it’s essential to realize that for all its fault, the ideals of “Star Trek” are the same that drives more serious science-fiction. If more people can be inspired by those, great.

    Jeff Greenwald has written a book that is simultaneously about, and well beyond “Star Trek”. His writing style is almost worth the price of the book in itself. No boring interviews, but wonderfully crunchy encounters (drinking vodka with Kate Mulgrew, being gruffly treated by Patrick Steward, cruising chicks with Brannon Braga…) with the all-too-human beings that took millions among the stars. No ordinary Trek book, but a darn good, non-fiction account of human determination. Not bad for a TV show!

  • Macrolife, George Zebrowski

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1979, 284 pages, C$3.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-55483-6

    One of the unique aspects of Science-Fiction as a genre is that is some instance, it’s possible for a novel to be completely interesting while also being completely rotten. George Zebrowski’s Macrolife is a good example of this.

    In many ways, this is an incompetent novel. For most of the books, you can’t discern the characters, and it doesn’t help that most are members of a same anglo-saxon family, so you’re stuck with boring names like Jack, Richard, John, James… Everyone talks the same way and act identically so that it’s a waste of time to figure out the characterization.

    The novel is divided in three parts, and I’ll be the first to admit that the third one should have been a two-page epilogue, not a thirty-five page chapter. The pacing is also sadly deficient in the middle section, with our protagonist going down on a primitive planet to… er… do some stuff I couldn’t get interested in. Whoever Macrolife‘s editor was, s/he could have spend some more time on its structure. The prose is okay, though Zebrowski didn’t bother with dialogue.

    Which leaves us with the first section and segments of the second part. Fortunately, the novel improves sharply in the fist section. “Sunspace: 2021” resemble Clarke’s work in many ways, with its portrait of a future human society just beginning to step into space. The near-magical “bulerite” element isn’t very convincing, but it does sets up a few interesting situations. More significantly, this section revolves around an event that doesn’t require a lot of effort to be gripping; the end of Earth always requires some attention..

    The beginning and ending of the second sections also have some interest, mostly in the description of how humanity is able to evolve beyond Earth and even thrive elsewhere. Though I’m not really familiar with the whole of Zebrowski’s work, this really fits well with the end of his 1998 novel Brute Orbits and elements of The Killing Star, his 1995 collaboration with Charles Pellegrino.

    The true value of Macrolife, as is the norm for a hard-SF novel, are the ideas that it showcases. Though it would be useless to pretend that the notion of space colonization is as surprising today as it was in 1979, Zebrowski makes an interesting argument and his “Macrolife” (ie; human settlements as cells of a super-organism) terminology is thought-provoking. Though the novel is twenty years old, it hasn’t perceptibly aged and compares in theme with the latest hard-SF. (It’s fun to see Greg Egan’s Diaspora as an update to Macrolife. Or maybe not.) In any case, this is a novel of considerable ambition. As the blurb says, “From the end on the world to the end of the universe”!

    One can’t say that Macrolife has much of a reputation today. (Though its worth noting that the Library Journal selected it as one of the “100 best SF novels”) It’s unfortunate, given that it seems as significant -in SF terms- as its contemporaries like Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds and Clarke’s The Fountain of Paradise. In fact, I’m surprised that “Macrolife” as a term hasn’t received much more attention (an Altavista search reveals only 35 mentions) in this age of enlightened environmentalism and impending private colonization of space.

    You can easily dismiss Macrolife on literary merits; no argument about that. You can scoff at the weak characters and chances are that they’d agree. You can even ditch most of the last two-third with nary a qualm. But you can’t really argue that the novel isn’t worth a look. Such is the strength of SF, which can get away with escaping most of the criteria of good fiction and still end up with a worthwhile result.

  • Starlight 2, Ed. Patrick Nielsen Hayden

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1998, 318 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86184-2

    In his introduction to Starlight 2, editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden reopens a well-stirred can of worms by noting, unapologetically, that his anthology series includes both Science-Fiction and Fantasy. The SF-vs-Fantasy debate has torn apart many otherwise-solid relationships, destroyed entire families and plunged not a few countries into internal strife. Well, maybe not, but in the fannish community, there are few more acrimonious subjects.

    Hayden, -noted contributor to rec.arts.sf.written, in addition of being one of the best editors in the SF business- forces the debate in his introduction to Starlight 2, when he writes such combative statements as “[both genres] share the same readers” (not sure) and “much of SF is fantasy with hardware” (much of bad SF, usually) as well as his counterpoint to David Hartwell’s “all-‘true SF’” credo for his “Best SF” anthology.

    Past this rather doubtful three pages, Starlight 2 is a collection of thirteen Science-Fiction and Fantasy stories. There’s something for everyone, and that’s the biggest failing of the anthology.

    I’ll be honest and admit that I skimmed over the stories by Suzanna Clarke, Carter Scholz, Ellen Kushner, Esther M. Friesner, Angelica Gorodischer (as translated by Ursula K. LeGuin): Life’s too short to waste on that icky fantasy stuff, especially when it gets boring on page two and the last few pages offer no big surprises.

    The anthology starts off with a bang with Robert Charles Wilson’s Divided by Infinity. Smooth introduction, great paradigm change(s), terrifying conclusion, great premise. If only the other stories would have been like that…

    M. Shayne Bell’s “Lock Down” offers the promise of a much better story that what is actually delivered. No big conflict, no development… just… almost a vignette. Disappointing. With luck, Bell will develop his premise into something more substantial. Maybe a novel?

    Raphael Carter is almost invariably a constant joy to read, and “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” is no exception. Despite a relatively meaningless premise, the story is presented, quite originally, in the style of a scientific research paper. Fun stuff.

    Martha Soukup’s The House of Expectations veers close to comedic territory at times, but finally ends up as one of the best -and most poignant- stories of the volume. Classically structured and clearly written, it’s a pleasure to read.

    Many people will be surprised by David Langford’s A Game of Consequences. Not because it’s not up to Langford’s usual high standards of writing, but because it deals with rather more serious themes than the British author’s usual brand of comedy. One of the best of the volume.

    “Access Fantasy”, by Jonathan Lethem, conforms to expectations of difficult reading (one story, one paragraph), cardboard future, ironic humor and inconclusive conclusion that we’ve come to expect from Lethem. Surprisingly, it’s also a lot of fun. Who would have thought?

    Geoffrey Landis is best known for hard-SF, but Snow looks a lot like pure realism. The sympathetic protagonist, however, is miles removed from the usual clichés or squeaky-clean hard-SF protagonists. A very good short-short story, with a twist.

    Finally, we come to Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, which always seems poised of the verge of something much bigger and much better, but ends up rather weakly, with the sense that an opportunity was missed. I still think it’s a pretty good linguistic SF story, but a lot of the extra stuff should have been cut.

    SF or Fantasy, magic or reality, Starlight 2 offers a collect of sophisticated speculative fiction. Though I didn’t find it as uniformly marvelous as some other critics (too much fantasy, not enough oomph in the conclusions), it’s good reading as long as you know which story to pick and read. “True-SF” fans, however, should be best served by the Hartwell anthologies.

  • Trunk Music, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 1997, 383 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-316-15244-7

    The biggest problem with crime fiction nowadays is that a lot of it tends to be written as part of a series. You know the setup: One author will create a really good protagonist, and then re-use him in multiple books. Never mind the unlikeliness of someone going though all of these adventure; it seems to be the norm.

    Publishers will undoubtedly tell you that this is a great way to sell more books. If a reader likes one book, then s/he’ll be more likely to try the next book in the series. For the authors, it arguably allows them to concentrate on the all-important plot and proceed with an already-established protagonist in a familiar environment.

    Unfortunately, there is a darker side to this practice. The most significant is that this assumed background gets more inclusive as the number of books piles up. Readers jumping into a series in mid-stream can be bewildered. It becomes a major challenge for an author to find ways to integrate this background in their newest novel to allow them to pick up new readers. (The limitations imposed by the existing background are of no relevance to this review and will thoughtfully be ignored here.)

    Trunk Music is the fifth book in Michael Connelly’s series about an LAPD detective with the unlikely name of Hieronymus (“Harry”) Bosch. Novice readers need not worry about jumping in mid-stream, however: Bosch begins the novel by opening his first case since coming back from disciplinary leave. As Harry gets back into the Homicide-solving business, we readers are offered the opportunity to meet with his new colleagues and reflect with the protagonist about how his job has changed. Nice.

    Furthermore, Harry’s first case isn’t your boring run-of-the-mill murder: The victim is discovered stuffed into the back trunk of his car, a white Rolls-Royce. His name: Tony Aliso. His profession: Movie producer. Of course, things are about to get far more complex. The wife reacts strangely. The Organized Crime unit reacts strangely. Internal Affairs reacts strangely. We’re in for a suitably twisty maze of a plot.

    Almost every interesting element of crime fiction is present in Trunk Music: California, Murder, Las Vegas, Double Agents, Theft, Escapes, Hollywood, Mafia, Romance, Blackmail, Los Angeles, Internal Affairs, Racism, Prostitution, Cars, Old Flames, Gambling, Corruption, Interrogations, Movies, FBI… the list goes on. The result is a complex novel that uncharacteristically remains understandable throughout.

    Even more convincing is the accumulation of procedural detail. It’s crucial for most crime fiction to convince the reader of their plausibility and Trunk Music is undoubtedly a novel of the nineties, with its post-Rodney King LAPD, attention to Employment Equity issues and usage of modern communication and audiovisual equipment.

    Connelly’s writing style has a lot to do with the novel’s success. His characters are well-introduced and suitably handled. Nobody’s perfect, and even the hero is motivated by goals that aren’t always admirable; watch as his initial handling of the case is more a case of personal advancement than reasonable procedure. The dialogue is spot-on and there are more than a few chuckles to be enjoyed from Harry Bosch. Great Scenes also pepper this novel, raising it from the ranks of the merely good novels to the status of a little great yarn.

    Despite being a fifth-of-a-series, Trunk Music starts out in a way that’s easy to immerse newer readers. Then the plot, the characters and the details take over and the result is nothing short of a superb police procedural. Publishers will undoubtedly be pleased to note that gee, if Trunk Music was that good, it might be worthwhile to read Connelly’s next book…

  • Shadows of Steel, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 1996, 367 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-399-14139-1

    Another book, another enemy, another war.

    It must not be an easy job to be a techno-thriller writer. The standard formula -to which one must adhere in order to keep readers- requires at least one non-negotiable variable: An implacable enemy who threaten America’s interests. In the eighties, such an enemy was easy to find: Every country behind the Iron Curtain was an acceptable foe and most novels featured Evil Soviets.

    Of course, things weren’t as simple after the Berlin Wall came down. Writers have been forced to use drug dealers, American Terrorists, India, Russian extremists and other more-or-less convincing enemies.

    Iran, however, has always been a good enemy (Clancy’s Executive Orders, Coyle’s Sword Point, etc…) and in Shadows of Steel, we go back to the tried-and-true Iranians, whose usual anti-American stance and aspirations toward becoming a regional power makes up for at least a willingness to fight.

    On the other hand, these are the enlightened nineties, and only a few of Iran’s craziest military officers wish war with the United States. No matter; before long we’re bombing them again. What else do you need to know about a Dale Brown novel?

    If it’s any good? Tough question. Shadows of Steel is a competent technothriller, but invites comparison with other works that will inevitably make it seem less enjoyable than it actually is.

    The biggest problem with Shadows of Steel is that it’s part of Dale Brown’s long-running “Patrick McLanahan” series. It brings together characters from many novels, including Skymaster‘s Jon Masters, Day of the Cheetah‘s Wendy McLanahan and Storming Heaven‘s Kevin Martindale. In internal chronology, it takes place after Brown’s second novel Day of the Cheetah. And there lies the difficulty. Brown’s 1989 novel wasn’t very realistic, featuring several fictional high-tech devices in a future seven years removed and postulating a dastardly plot by the Soviets to steal one of America’s newest fighters. On the other hand, it’s still one of Brown’s most exciting novels: Plausibility was more than compensated by slam-bang action and the result was one heck of a good read.

    You can guess the rest: Shadows of Steel is so much more down-to-earth (fewer high-tech, more jargon, more actual procedures) that compared to Day of the Cheetah, it’s downright boring. Not entirely boring, mind you: Brown is incapable of delivering anything else than a good read. But the difference between the two novels is shocking, almost as if a soft-spoken attorney reminded you of his past as a Black Panther.

    Either Brown wants to be exciting, or he has to match his series’ coherence with real-world markers. There is increasingly less middle ground. Unlike Tom Clancy, whose “Jack Ryan” novels are now ludicrously diverged from reality, Brown is trying to take his wilder earlier novels and tighten them up even more closely with current events. It doesn’t work. Time for new singletons.

    Two other major annoyances: Along with the previous Storming Heaven, Shadows of Steel also feels like a series of good-to-great scenes linked together by a thin thread of plot. More ominously, Shadows of Steel concludes on a note that more than feels like if the whole novel was a setup for Brown’s next book (Fatal Terrain).

    Is Shadows of Steel still worth a read? As usual, the answer -despite the relative lack of excitement in the plotting- is still that military aviation fans will find here one of the most polished novels dealing with their favorite subject. Non-fans need not enlist.

  • Mars Underground, William K. Hartmann

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1997, 428 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-58039-7

    The most unfortunate consequence of Science-Fiction’s fascination for Mars during the nineties is the production of the planet’s definitive future history. From now on, every novel about the Red Planet have to contend with the towering shadow of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which more or less said everything that needed to be said seriously about Mars until we eventually get there: Lesser Mars novels like Jack Williamson’ Beach Head are eaten for lunch by Robinson’s Mars.

    It seemed to me that the only serious way to avoid comparison to Robinson’s story was to go gonzo and write far-out novels like Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, so different from Robinson’s history that it couldn’t be compared. So, I didn’t really expect anything like Mars Underground to succeed, given the way it almost retreads the first half of Red Mars. And yet…

    Mars, 2032. We will follow four persons: Dr. Alwyn Stafford is the closest thing to a Martian: He’s been on the planet for almost twenty years and continues his research in Martian life-forms. Carter Jahns (shades of Burrough’s “John Carter”?) is one of the engineers responsible for planning human expansion on Mars. His friend Philippe Brach is the French artist-in-residence on Mars. And, disrupting the cards by her arrival from Earth is Annie Pohaku, news journalist.

    One day, Stafford disappears while on a solitary exploration trip. The whole Martian contingent is mobilized to find him, including Jahns. The clues they find are puzzling, suggesting deliberate intent to confuse the situation rather than accidental disappearance. But why, and how, would Stafford disappears? The story gets even more complex when Annie gets much closer to Philippe and then to Carter… serial seduction, or ways to ensure she doesn’t miss a potential scoop?

    For a newcomer to science-fiction, William K. Hartmann has impressive credentials: Multi-degree scientist involved with projects such as Mariner 9 and the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, Hugo-nominated author/co-author of eleven science books, be brings both knowledge and technique to Mars Underground, with fascinating results.

    The biggest surprise, I suspect, is that despite Mars Underground‘s clear membership to hard-SF, it is written with an elegance uncommon to the subgenre and an attention to characters that is far removed from the quick sketches we’re almost used to read. Uncommonly, this novel centers almost as much on a love triangle than on the promise of a good old-fashioned scientific mystery.

    As far as enigmas go, this is a good one. Stafford’s disappearance has a few quirky aspects that can’t be easily explained by Jahns, who presses on further and further until he discovers an explanation, then another, then a conspiracy… The intrepid Annie is with him at each step of the way, but whose side is she really on, besides herself? Hartmann keeps the reader guessing throughout the novel, only letting the answers appear near the end. Even though the conclusion isn’t as strong as it could have been, it’s spectacular enough to be interesting.

    Ironically, it’s the reverse that’s true of the novel: While Mars Underground is very strong in terms of characters, plotting and overall writing, it’s not as spectacular as it could have been. Hartmann stays as close as possible to the realm of the possible -his Mars is uncannily *real*- and while the result is commendable, it’s not as awe-inspiring as one might have expected. This is not really a failure as it is a slight disappointment, and even then not very much. Mars Underground is a better-than-average Hard-SF novel that’s surprisingly human and should gather a readership beyond the usual school of Science-Fiction realism. It needs no comparison to Robinson’s Mars to be appreciated.