Reviews

  • Virtual Destruction, Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1996, 327 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-00308-7

    There are times where I really wish for honesty in advertising. Or at least in cover blurbs. Even though Virtual Destruction isn’t as bad as some horrendously misleading cover copy I’ve seen, it still angers me to see bad labelling like this-

    but perhaps the only problem is in my own mind. You see, no one will contest the affirmation that Virtual Destruction is Science-Fiction. To wit:

    At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists (ie: computer nerds) are putting the last touches on a revolutionary technology: Virtual Reality. But as the date of an important demonstration approaches, the project leader is found in the VR room, dead. Is it a murder, or not? And who did it?

    Much like the likeable Walter Jon Williams thriller Days of Atonement, Virtual Destruction uses a near-future locale as background to a “murder mystery”. But whereas Days of Atonement had a resolution that hinged specifically on science-fiction, Virtual Destruction mostly uses VR as a prop… the real guts of the novel are elsewhere.

    There are other problems too. While Days of Atonement was a solid thriller that stood on its own from beginning to end, I got the impression that Virtual Destruction was nothing more than the start of the “Craig Kreident, High-Tech FBI Agent” series. While Kreident is an enormously pleasant protagonist, he’s not as well developed as his Days of Atonement counterpart. This is probably intentional, since series hero can’t have all the stuffing knocked out of them in volume one, hmm?

    I will be forthright in saying that I do not enjoy reading about retarded (or even “dim”) characters, of which there are two in Virtual Destruction and whose plight is milked for maximum pathos. But that’s just me.

    In the end, Virtual Destruction might be better suited to another category: “Best Sellers”. Like it or not, I interpret Virtual Destruction as an attempt from Anderson and Beason to write accessible, wide-span yarns like Crichton, Cussler and the like.

    It’s a successful attempt, mostly. As said before, the character of Agent Kreident is sufficiently sympathetic to engage the reader. The prose style is fast and readable. The SF trappings are meticulously described, and there’s an impression of authenticity from the novel.

    The resolution, for reasons that will remain a spoiler, is a letdown on several fronts. Some plot threads are dropped without adequate resolution. I liked the fact that one potential flaw was turned into a virtue by one plot resolution. On the other hand, a certain scene intended to be powerful came up as flat because… get this… virtual means not real!

    The biggest flaw of this novel is that it’s surprisingly fluffy. Light, escapist, bestselling entertainment. That’s not a bad thing per se… if you’ve got the right expectations.

    Still, it’s better than the usual Crichton.

    [Jan’98: There is indeed going to be a “Craig Kreident” series of Techno-Thrillers. I intend to read’em as soon as they come out at my local library.]

  • Otherness, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1994, 357 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-29528-4

    David Brin is one of my favourite writers, ever. His fiction is full of technological optimism, cautious but determined environmentalist, good old Campellian human chauvinism and rockin’ action. More than anything else, Brin reminds me of early Niven stories, where the galactic void was the limit, characters dared to go beyond it and ideas flowed freely. He may not write the most polished prose ever, but Brin never loses sight of the reason readers buy his books: To be entertained. For that reason alone, a single of Brin’s short stories is worth more to me than truckloads of stuffy self-conscious literary dreck. (Okay, so I’m hyperbolating again. Shoot me.)

    The River of Time, his first short story collection, was probably the best single-author short story collection I’ve ever read, the only other contender being Greg Egan’s Axiomatic. So, it’s really unexcusable that I waited so much time to read Otherness, more than three years after it came out on the market.

    The bad news is that it’s less overwhelmingly impressive as The River of Time. The good news is that it’s still a Brin anthology; fun and fascination available for all.

    This isn’t your usual “bag’o’stories” collection: The book is divided in five thematic sections, from “Transitions” to “Otherness”. Included in the mix are story notes (unusually placed in the middle of the section) and short essays mostly concerned about the theme of “Otherness”.

    What is that Otherness thing Brin seems to be so enthusiastic about? Well, it’s a bit like this: Only in the Western world today, do we have an obsession at proving that we are wrong: Youth questions authority, historian question traditional interpretation of history, children are expected to be better (ie: not do what their parents did wrong), people often using the expression “But I might be wrong”, outright glorification of other cultures, etc… This is socially unprecedented, and a good thing, says Brin in a much better way than I can. The essay in which this principle is first explained is hilarious and profoundly fascinating. Recommended reading.

    The rest of the book is mostly entertaining. The only dull section is “Cosmos”, where literary tricks take the initiative, and the story suffers. “What continues, what fails…” has a fantastic premise but an overlong execution that still didn’t grab me, even the second time around.

    A seemingly disproportionate amount of stories deal with motherhood (At least four of them), an unusual theme for a male author. A typically Campbellian “human-uber-alles” story, “The Warm Space” is also the weakest of the volume. I particularly enjoyed “Those Eyes” (a story) and “What to say to an UFO” (an essay) for the coldly rationalistic perspective of the UFO hysteria. “Detritus Affected” was very interesting up to the ending, which is absent.

    Overall, a pleasant but not really spectacular anthology. The cover illustration by Donato is lovely, and the whole anthology can be read in a short amount of time. Not to be missed by any Brin fan.

  • Infectress, Tom Cool

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1997, 370 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-87763-1

    Briefly: I like techno-thrillers and I love Hard SF, so it’s not a surprise if I’ve found Infectress to be such a pleasant read. Fast-paced action, adequate characters, a strong grasp of the SF devices and clever little touches makes this one of the best first novels I’ve read lately.

    Baen books has a tradition of publishing novels more concerned about plasma guns than deep philosophical insights. I happen to like good action/adventure SF, so I’m always curious about the latest Baen offerings. Whatever high literary standards SF aspires to, there’s not denying that the genre’s true genesis comes from the pulse-pounding pulp-ish plots. Infectress probably won’t convert anyone already sold out to the “fine literature” crowd, but is solid entertainment for those who crave a few explosions in their fiction. Thriller fans will feel right at home with this smart tale of terrorism, secret agents and high-tech police work.

    Infectress focuses on the character of Arabella, more commonly known as “Infectress”, a high-tech terrorist with a long history of bloody violence. On the other side of the plot, Scott McMichaels: Brilliant AI designer, he’s just created META: “the world’s true artificial intelligence.” When Infectress needs a lot of help for a little bio-toy of hers, you can be darn sure the three (four?) main characters are going to meet somewhere.

    The problem with techno-thrillers has always been that they’re SF books done wrong: The technology is seen as so unsettling than in most cases, it’s forgotten/destroyed/censored by the end of the book. So it’s a bit of relief to see Infectress as an SF book that finally does a techno-thriller right: The action is there along with the technical details, the plot-driven story, the competent Heinleinian characters and the pro-military attitude.

    This last characteristic is natural, since author Tom Cool is, says the tantalizing blurb, “a serving U.S. naval officer.” It’s refreshing to see a novel where the government and military forces both know their stuff, and aren’t there for yet another X-Files-type coverup.

    The back-cover blurb goes on to say that Cool is “patently the most gifted naval officer to write science fiction since Robert A. Heinlein”. While this may be very true from a strict tautological viewpoint, (How many naval officers write SF?) there are at least grounds for comparison: Cool acknowledges Heinlein (even citing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, P.82) and has a no-nonsense, practical style that echoes of the Early Heinlein. This book was pure candy to me; once started, it was difficult to stop reading. This is one book that I regret borrowing at my library… I’d rather keep it in my collection…. right besides the books of that other Tom C….

    [January 1998: Bought it. Still fun to browse through.]

    To be sure, this isn’t a perfect book. Some parts don’t quite mesh with the others (a philosophical discussion between two AI fragments is interesting, but a bit out-of-place.) and some plot points are predictable to the veteran espionage/thriller enthusiast. The villains were slightly over-the-top, but that’s part of the fun. I’m still not sure about Stephen Hickman’s cover illustration: It’s pretty, but…?

    [January 1998: The cover ended up 4th in my “Best Cover Poll’97”…]

    Despite all its good intentions, Infectress doesn’t have the extra “oomph” to propel it from simple action thriller to award-winning material. But the fact that it’s that close that’s heartening: The only thing more impressive than Infectress is its author. Tom Cool shows that he’s computer-literate, aware of the SF genre rules and able to write the kind of uncomplicated prose that a wide range of readers appreciate. It remains to be seen whether his next efforts will be as successful, but I’ll be reading whatever he wishes to write next with rapt attention. To quote the back cover blurb again: Commander Cool, we salute you!

  • The Fortunate Fall, Raphael Carter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1996, 288 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86034-X

    The adventure of discovery! The thrill of the new! The excitement of excellence! The perils of plunking down a sizable chunk of real money for a hardcover!

    Who would want to go bungee-jumping when such thrills are so readily available to the average reader? Why go white-river rafting when a trip to the local bookstore can provide such exciting minutes of agonizing decisions?

    Just in case you’re wondering, I’m talking about the rewards of reading first novels. This is where the local library comes in handy: At the worst, you’ll waste only time, not time AND money.

    Which brings us to the subject of this review, a perfectly acceptable offering by Minneapolis, Minnesota resident Raphael Carter: The Fortunate Fall (In case you’re wondering who Carter is, you’re not alone, and not about to be satiated by the author’s blurb, which was reproduced here in its informative integrality.)

    In a publishing world where every first novel is “the best book I’ve read in my life” or “the best look at postmodernist whatever since…”, It’s refreshing to find a first work that lives up to most of the quotes on the cover: There was no “better first novel published in 1996,” so Emma Bull won’t have to “eat [her] hard drive.”

    The elements of the plot aren’t exactly new: Human cameras have been around for a while in SF (most famously in Gibson’s Count Zero) and avid readers of recent works in the genre will have a certain kick comparing this book to Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire. (both taking place mostly in a complexly fractalized near-future Europe and sporting female protagonists named Maya)

    But Carter manages to do some impressive things with the concept: One camera must work with a Screener, which filters most of the unwanted peripheral sensations. The novel begins as Maya Andreyeva has to switch Screeners, only to end up with a female partner (an unusual occurrence.) Soon, Maya is dealing with a political coverup, an incarceration, long-distance love with her Screener and the biggest scoop of her life.

    But never mind the plot. As with many new authors, it’s the details that are fascinating. Maya’s “objective” reality doesn’t exist any more. She is so wired that she can choose to see images, experience sensations… Perhaps the best passage in the novel is early on, when she tries to convince her rental automobile that the alcohol she’s taking is for medicinal purposes. (nanobots refuelling, actually) The car doesn’t see it the same way, and soon tries to stop, since drinking and driving are incompatible. The situation is resolved by the almost-literal appearance of Maya’s Screener and an instance of creating reprogramming.

    It may sound boring, but Carter recounts it far better than I have. Surprisingly, his style is distinctive without being overwhelming. The prose is mostly uncluttered but assured, wry, confident… cool. If only for this quality, Carter has managed to get a “To Watch” rating on my mental Author Scoreboard. Unlike many new authors, Carter doesn’t have the impulse to show us how smart he is at the expense of good storytelling.

    Yet, Carter’s work is smart. He mixes sociological insights with musings about the nature of love, life and everything… It’s an interesting mélange. The books succeeds more than it falters, and one couldn’t ask more.

    I was a bit disappointed by the conclusion, where we go back to the time-honoured tradition of having the villain talk about his evil plan in front of billion of people (but this is excusable, since Maya is a camera, duh!) The finale is… interesting.

    The book is full of “good bits”; the already-mentioned car argument, Maya’s interrogations by two “policemen”… but the background details are also interesting without being flashy: North America is a backward (“I could always emigrate [there] and spend my live seeing nothing more technologically advanced than a pitchfork”) continent, but Africa has brilliantly combined ancient traditions with high-technology.

    The medium length of the book and the easygoing prose makes the readers breeze through the novel. I do get the feeling that this is one book I won’t avoid re-reading in a few years.

    This is Good Stuff. Just when our bookstore’s shelves are covered with TV tie-ins and derivative trash, it’s refreshing to see original material like this. Kudos to The Fortunate Fall, its readers, Tor Books and Raphael Carter.

    Besides, paperback books are way cheaper than bungee-jumping. And you can read The Fortunate Fall in the bathroom, instead of going to the bathroom before your unfortunate fall—

    okay, so you got the point.

  • Dragon’s Egg, Robert L. Forward

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 1984, 309 pages, C$2.75 mmpb, ISBN 0-345028349-X

    (Or: Too much of a good thing. WAY too much of a good thing…)

    I adore Hard SF.

    You see, SF for me stands for Science-Fiction, not the recent wishy-washy labels “Speculative Fiction”, “Sociological Fantasy”, “San Francisco” or even (the pain!) the all-inclusive “Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror and all kind of stuff we just call SF because we really don’t have the IQ to know better.”

    (It’s all a plot, I tell you: People without the technical qualification came in, found that they couldn’t compete with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke on their own terms and resolved to change the rules of the game so they wouldn’t get beaten up so badly. Tie this with the decline of the American Empire and receive 5,000 bonus points.)

    Generally, the harder the SF, the better I like it. It’s no accident that my favourite books last year were Red Mars, The Ascent of Wonder and Tau Zero, all heavily-hard SF. Pushed at the extremes, I’ll grab a science non-fiction book rather more quickly than a non-science fiction book.

    (This is the point that I choose to remark that not everyone is mentally equipped to follow science non-fiction books… heh-heh-heh.)

    I remember reading a Robert L Forward novel (Timemaster) a few years ago, and being embarrassed at the characterisation, which is quite a feat for someone who’s proud of being style-deaf. On a whim, I picked up Dragon’s Egg, resolved to find out if Forward was really as bad as I remembered.

    He is. In the words of David Pringle’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of SF: “ill-written novels” Forward is a terrific idea generator, but can’t dramatize them for beans. In the tradition of the worst B movies, some of the dialogue is so bad, it’s hilarious. Here’s an instance, chosen at random: [Page 32 of the paperback edition]

    “The pulses could be high frequency bursts that are higher than the nominal design frequency for the low frequency radio antennas,” he said. “Can you calculate the antenna pattern for a higher frequency?”

    And this is one of the better ones. I am not making this up.

    Yet, it would be too easy to blast this novel on poor drama, laughable dialogue and cardboard characters. These three literary qualities are not why this novel was published. And allowances must be made, for Dragon’s Egg was Forward’s first novel.

    What is impressive about this book is the rigorous scientific extrapolation underlying the story: A race of sentient beings evolve on the crust of a neutron star, where gravities and magnetic fields are enormously more powerful than on earth. These beings, called Cheelas, live about ten thousand times more rapidly than humans. During one human hour, 5 cheela generations pass…

    As it happens, one human scientific mission is there just at the good time and place to give a little help to the cheela. In twenty-four hours, they go from roman-type empire to FTL flight…

    Most of the book is very, very boring. This is one of those few novels where the alien passages feel more natural than the human scenes. (See my gripes about dialogue: I can believe in aliens talking that way, but humans??? Nah….) But the scientific stuff is fascinating, and the last few pages are gripping; pure hard-SF candy for the mind.

    It won’t surprise anyone that there’s a technical appendix at the end. Also not surprising is the usefulness of such an appendix. In a hurry, just read it and skim the remainder of the novel.

    This surely isn’t a book for everyone. I had a few problems following the most abstract concepts, and I can’t expect everyone to slug through two hundred pages of polysyllabic words for a few pages of sensawunder and a technical appendix.

    But if you’re able to handle it, go ahead…

  • Bestsellers Guaranteed, Joe R. Lansdale

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1993, 207 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-05502-8

    Stephen King makes me laugh.

    And I do mean this literally: I have a very high resistance to horror nowadays, and tend to laugh like a madman at supposedly “scary” movies. Part of the problem is a self-avowed tendency to make fun of everything video ala MST3K. But in the case of horror, the source material doesn’t help either: the transparency of the typical horror plot is the epitome of cookie-cutting: An evil concept, a troubled protagonist, a kill-the-sinners mentality. This is essentially King’s weakness: One can easily peer into the intentions of his fiction without going too deeply in the structure.

    Apologies if I’m getting too academic, but the bottom line is simply that Stephen King doesn’t scare me, as much of the horror floating around these days.

    This being said, I picked up Bestsellers Guaranteed for the wrong reasons: It was cheap, it had a wacky cover (librarian-type dragon lying on a pile of books) and the back-cover blurb was even wackier (Sample: “BOB THE DINOSAUR GOES TO DISNEYLAND: An inflatable toy dinosaur takes a dream vacation… that’s full of hot air.”)

    If you don’t mind, I’ll take this occasion to present my “all-time most misrepresentative cover” award to Ace, for putting humorous jacket copy on a dark horror collection.

    For this book is almost all-horror. Not the evil-thing-eats-them-all-up kind of horror, but the true, evil, dark stuff that will make you squirm and wince even though you can’t stop reading. I wasn’t creeped out by straight razors before, but now…

    People gets eaten up a lot here, but they also get beheaded, chomped, sliced, quartered, stuffed, bludgeoned… Scary stuff, less predictable than King, and written in style, too! Despite -or maybe because- the subject matter, this book was read very, very quickly.

    This is pure, undiluted good stuff. I was horrified, terrorized and grossed-out (for you who remember Stephen King’s degrees of horror). Joe Lansdale is an author with edges, a lot of them.

    A last word of advice for just about everyone: Read the book during a day with plenty of sunlight, okay?

  • Glory Season, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1993, 772 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-56767-5

    Some critics say that the difference between literature and the remainder of the “fiction” section is that literature is dedicated to a thoughtful exploration of the human mind. This, they tell us, is why SF will never be anything more than a glorified escapist genre for people who can’t handle the real world.

    The appropriate response to these idiots is to pity them, for they are well and truly living in a world of their own.

    Any half-decent SF fan already knows the answer to that accusation. But how to tell them that SF is uniquely positioned to examine the real issues that concern the human heart? What tool but SF lets authors examine the relationship between the flesh and the mind? (cyberpunk) The human and his times? (time travel) Man and his environment? (ecological/space stories) The person and the sex? (Gender explorations)

    The last category is, to put it bluntly, a pack of troubles. Gender exploration is usually slanted toward feminist fiction (since that’s the underdog) and outright propaganda. Some of it is good (The Maerland Chronicles/In the Mother’s Land, Elisabeth Vonarburg), some of it is stuffy and boring (The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin) and some of it is plainly, embarrassingly bad (Ammonite, Nicola Griffith).

    Another addition to the pack is David Brin’s Glory Season.

    Now, understand that I like David Brin. His viewpoint is one of boundless technological optimism, which happens to be my favourite philosophy too. Almost everything he writes is thoughtful, inventive, entertaining and utterly readable. Glory Season is a mixed bag, but still upholds most of Brin’s usual qualities.

    Glory Season weighs in at nearly 800 pages, and stars Maia, a young woman living on Stratos, a planet long divorced from the human confederation. Stratos’ society is mostly composed of females: Males are the disadvantaged sex. Two “kinds” of females exist on this planet: clones and the more Earth-familiar vars. (At this point, things get a bit complicated and Brin explains them better than myself anyway.)

    At the beginning of the book, Maia leaves her home to make her fortune in the world. With her is Leie, her twin-sister. Not quite a var but not really a clone, Maia thinks she can make her fortune on Stratos… And the adventure begins. Maia’s story is intercut with “didactic interludes”, excepts of diaries and works about Stratos’ history. Like the “Ancillary Documentation” in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gap series, these bits are tasty, interesting, and don’t really detract from the flow of the story.

    And lest anyone be confused, this is a story. Brin never loses sight of the reason people buy his books: Entertainment. Maia will be participant in gunfights, revolutions, betrayals and the usual gamut of adventure fiction situations. To be fair, this is perhaps the weakest aspect of Glory Season: The fast-paced adventures of Maia are sometimes a bit too fast-paced to sustain interest. A quieter, shorter novel could have been better.

    Fortunately, Maia’s an interesting protagonist and her coming-of-age is as fascinating as the society surrounding her. The ending is a bit abrupt, but still wrap most things up. It’s evident that Brin has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues presented in this novel. Fans won’t be disappointed.

    Neither conclusive nor embarrassing, Glory Season is a blend of adventure and extrapolation that’s perhaps not dense enough. Nevertheless, still a solid novel from David Brin.

  • The Talisman, Stephen King & Peter Straub

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1984, 768 pages, C$8.75 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-10533-4

    People often ask me why I read so much Science-Fiction. Frankly, that’s a very good question that I haven’t got around answering yet. Oh, sure, there are the usual excuses: I grew up with it, I watched Star Trek for as long as I remember, I’ve always been interested in space, science and stuff, etc… Nevertheless, the best answer may still be that, frankly, what else would I want to read?

    Other genres are boring or limited in numbers: Techno-Thrillers are fun but few, romance isn’t my cup of tea, mysteries are (usually) mind-fluff, general literature meaningless AND boring, horror usually cliched and fantasy-

    I don’t usually read much Fantasy, and The Talisman reminds me why.

    Begin by ignoring the names on the cover. Sure, Stephen King and Peter Straub are two terrific horror writers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that The Talisman is horror.

    It smells like fantasy, looks like fantasy and reads like fantasy. To wit:

    A young boy, wise beyond his years, discovers that he can access a parallel world. His mother’s analogue in this world is a queen, and he must cross America to retrieve a talisman that will heal both versions of his mother. Opposing him are a powerful dark prince and his real-world analogue, a lawyer.

    If that’s not the essential Fantasy Plot, what is?

    Surely, there are enough dark critters and evil persons to transform this in a dark fantasy, but it’s still the usual plot taking place.

    Like most novels by King -even though I suspect Straub might have written most of the book- this book is pleasantly readable… if such a word can be applied to dark fantasy. Characters are well-presented, the adventures of the hero are told reasonably well.

    There are a few deviations from the standard plot, mostly dealing with the dual-universe nature of the story, but the thrust of the novel remains the same as countless fantasy trilogies before it. And I can’t help but be ambivalent about a novel that is explicitly aware of hard-SF, yet grossly contradicts its own rules. Oh, and the finale is interminable.

    I’ve heard people say this is the best book they’re ever read. On the other hand, some people have called this the worst Stephen King book, ever. As usual, the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. In short: Average.

  • The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction, Ed. David Pringle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Carlton Books, 1995, 309 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 1-85868-188-X

    I recently detailed in these virtual pages my acquisition of The Science-Fiction Encyclopedia and The Visual Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction. To refresh some readers’ memories, my impression was unarguably positive. After all, how can you argue against 1,300 pages in one case and a page-full of photographic credits in the other?

    Well, call me jaded, but the 304 pages and page-full of illustration credits of David Pringle’s The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction (subtitled The Definitive Illustrated Guide) aren’t quite as impressive…

    The basic problem is how to present the subject, especially when it’s as diverse as SF. Do you go for the connoisseur, the fan or the general public? Talk about books nobody read any more or go for the quicker, stupider movies? To that, add the challenge of presenting visuals properly: By theme, date, subject, illustrator?

    The choices made by the staff of TUEoSF are clear: They’re going for the general public and more accurately, the British general public. The cover illustration features the scantily-clad robot from METROPOLIS. The back cover has Jane Fonda as a suitably curvaceous Barbarella, Akira, Arnold S. as The Terminator and the ship from “2001”. That should give you an idea of the book’s media-oriented content.

    For better and for worse, SF is now a genre most readily identified with television and movies. A large part of the encyclopedia reflects this. Of the eight sections, one 60-page segment is about movies, another 50 pages discuss TV and radio series. Other notable sections deal with Themes (40 pages), “creators” (writers and directors, 70 pages) and “Heroes and Villains” (45 pages) The last section is especially puzzling, since it’s not very useful as reference and pretty much unreadable to anyone not familiar with the books and movies discussed.

    The British emphasis has its moments: The dry humour that permeates the book (a contribution of David Langford, perhaps?) is often disrespectful, irreverent and -yes- amusing, provided you’re in the appropriate mood. Unfortunately, it also means that UK authors get more than their fair share of representation: Two-shot Brit wonders are discussed while more prolific North-American authors are ignored. (Some nice photos, though)

    Also notable for fan-boys like me are the positive comments about Babylon-5. (Even discussing the suspicious similarity with DS9, but underlining the fact that B5 was pitched to Paramount first…)

    The commentary is excellent, even if the categories are suspicious. Interestingly, more than a few relevant comments about TV-SF later appeared in an article written for the very scholarly magazine “Science-Fiction Studies” by none other than Brain Stableford… who’s a collaborator to this book. (Amazing coincidence, don’t you think?)

    But for your money, keep an eye on the Clute books. They’re more complete, much more informative and contain about as much illustrations that this book.

  • Courtship Rite, Donald Kingsbury

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1982, 409 pages, C$4.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-46089-7

    If you should be so lucky as to meet Donald Kingsbury in person, you will be impressed. With his 6-foot+ frame, unkempt white hair and long-winded interventions, he’ll towers above you physically and intellectually. He’s the perfect picture of a British intellectual. He’d make a perfect mad scientist. Instead, he turned to Science-Fiction.

    My first Kingsbury fiction was the excellent “To Bring in the Steel” in the Hard-SF anthology The Ascent of Wonder. A good hard-SF tale, it also delved unusually deep into the psyche of its characters. “A mix of Herbert and Heinlein,” I thought at the time.

    With Courtship Rite, the comparison with Herbert seems more and more adequate:  it’s a planetary romance of the best, most intricate sort… just as Dune was.

    On the planet of Geta, several centuries in the future, a human civilisation has evolved after quite a few centuries of isolation from Earth. Geta is a desert: arid, harsh, barren. Most of the plants are poisonous. The human society has adapted in consequence: Cannibalism is the only source of meat, marriages involve multiple partners, people “decorate” themselves with scars and complex rituals dictate courtship, death, love… This isn’t a “nice” society, nor an easy book to digest. The technological level is barely above medieval despite the advanced genetic knowledge and some scenes are simply brutal.

    The story itself is ho-hum: Boys love girl, but chief orders them to marry barbarian princess. Boys stage Ritual of Death to see if she’s worthy and the story goes on from there. What follows is war, pain, death, a more-or-less happy ending, several levels of intersecting intrigue and a fascinating social exploration. The book is immensely detailed, yet effortlessly so: Kingsbury obviously knows Geta like he lived there.

    For Courtship Rite is the social equivalent of Hard-SF tales. Geta’s society is meticulously described by affection and -yes- admiration. I was impressed by the originality and completeness of the vision. In many ways, this book is a trip on another planet.

    The characters are exceptionally well-drawn. This is a superior planetary romance, on both sense of the term: A smart SF Harlequin book… (albeit an unusually sadistic one) Kingsbury had put a lot of care in his characters and it shows. Whatever the story is, you care for them. What’s more, I got the unusual feeling that the latter part of the book was moved along by the characters; excellent. Each of the book’s 66 chapters is headed by an original epigram -another touch of Dune– and some of them are true gems.

    It’s a magnificent tapestry, a very dense, well-written book. I recommend spending a little more time on this book. I didn’t and frankly, I now regret it. A re-reading in a few year will be much more satisfying. It has the depth of Dune, if maybe not the strong narrative drive: The story is uneven and takes more than a while to rev up to speed. Add to that a few technological inconsistencies (the genetic vs mechanical knowledge) and the overall effect is diminished, but still impressive.

    Still, it’s a very good read. It’s no wonder it was nominated for the 1982 Hugos. If you can find it in used libraries, don’t hesitate to pick it up. This isn’t for everyone, would make a rotten miniseries, will certainly shock most SF readers in places (even the most jaded) but is worth of attention by mature SF readers.

  • Ammonite, Nicola Griffith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 1992, 349 pages, C$4.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-37891-1

    Re-reading the above reviews, I am filled with dread: Not only aren’t they very good, but they’re also insufferably nice. I hate nice. Sooner or later, someone is going to send me a nasty e-mail asking whether or not Kim Stanley Robinson paid me for the heaps of praise lavished on his Mars trilogy.

    So, in an effort to scale back the balance a bit, I have selected the worst SF book I have read this year. And this book is gonna get it. Be sure of one thing; I am not going to get any check from Nicola Griffith in the foreseeable future.

    Because, you see, Ammonite is a bad novel. There are many degrees of badness, as well as several factors that sour my opinions of a particular book and Ammonite is a particularly remarkable intersection of a bunch of these anti-qualities.

    I’ll be honest: I’m less than partial to explicitly feminist novels. I’ve explained several of the reasons elsewhere, but my main point is that fighting excesses with excesses are not a good way to win. Castrating all males is as much a power fantasy as tying up all females. (Personally, —I have a sister—there’s no doubt in my mind that women are as much out equal in terms of aggressiveness and inherent potential for violence… watch out when social conditioning will crumble.)

    And Ammonite is an explicitly feminist novel. In spades.

    On a certain planet, all men die and most women get temporarily sick from a native virus. Centuries pass, and anthropologist Marghe Taishan (that’s our heroine) arrives on the abandoned planet to test a new vaccine. What she discovers is a pastoral, all-female society (or rather, societies: War’s still going on between the clans.) Ah, but if all males dies upon exposure at the virus, how are the women reproducing? Will Marghe be able to stop the conflict between the opposing forces? Will she find love, meaning and happiness on this planet?

    Now here comes my biggest objection to the book. Any careful SF fan could be able to guess where the story’s going based on the previous paragraph: The women are able to reproduce themselves with the transformations brought by the virus. Marghe will go native, meet girl and fall in love, but not before going through some terrible experiences of her own. Odds are that she will go through the single most defining experience for a woman on the planet, which is becoming pregnant “all by herself” (with a little help from her friend.) Of course, we can expect her to solve the Big Political Conflict by the end of the book and Live Happily Ever After.

    The fun of SF, in most cases, is to see the author destroy our preconceived assumptions while going through the novel. And it would be even better for said author to do it entertainingly: I want action, or intelligence. If you’re about to write a 350-pages book, be sure to sustain it with enough plot, storyline twists and surprises to make me feel I’ve paid an adequate sum for the g’darn book!

    Sadly, this doesn’t happen here. The expected twists never come: Marghe goes native, is rejected by natives, goes through some terrible experiences, falls in love, never gets sympathetic but does get pregnant, solve the conflict and Lives Happily Ever after. Points are deducted for goofy science, interminable length and glorification of new-agish crap.

    To put it simply: There are no surprises in this book. By the time the Big Political Conflict is solved, we just don’t care anymore. I would have liked the book better if Marghe would have either just hung herself or loosened the man-killing virus upon the galaxy. But this doesn’t happen.

    It might be a wise time to include a personal interlude here: In the first three months of 1996, I took an English course at my very own UofO, entitled “Utopian and Science-Fiction.” The course, taught by a teacher by the unlikely name of P h y l l i s P. P e r r a k i s, stank, bored and confused. But that’s another essay: “How academia doesn’t get SF, or at least not around here.”

    At one point in the course, a female student from nearby Carleton University came into our class to ask if anyone was interested in participating in a survey for some kind of thesis on feminist SF. One of the two books: Ammonite. One fellow classmate (female) wanted to participate: “Anything for a free book” she said.

    I warned her. I told her it wasn’t worth it. I pleaded for abstinence and restraint. I used a great many deal of **asterisks** to convince her not to waste her time on the book. But she didn’t listen…

    Guess what? A week later, same place, same time: Fellow (female) classmate comes to me and says: “You’re right. It’s an incredibly boring book.” Ha! Vindication! Seems that her problem with the book was the same than mine: No surprises, incredible ennui…

    Ammonite, to restate, is a failure as a novel. Even then, it almost succeeds as a science-fiction story. The first chapters are interesting, but as soon as we get an idea of where the novel’s going, it loses all interest. Marghe’s trek across the planet is nothing compared to the odyssey the reader has to endure through the novel’s 349 pages. By the time everything settles down, we just don’t care anymore.

    More on new-ageish crap: The society described by Griffith in Ammonite is barely feudal. Isolated clans, fighting for dominance until Marghe makes them all cooperate. Rejection of technology (which only serves males or male-indoctrinated females) is much more than strongly implied. The goofy pseudo-explanation for the virus’ effect smacks more of undigested psychic healing exploita than actual biology. Techies, or just rational people, will have to go elsewhere to get decent entertainment.

    As a feminist tract, it’s not very good either. It did win the Lambda award for best gay/lesbian/bisexual novel of the year, but this award means exactly what it does… Not that all “feminist” novels are bad, or anti-technology: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s In the Mother’s Land/The Maerlande Chronicles is a good example of female-dominated, interesting, non-anti-tech novel.

    In summary: Burn, baby, burn!

  • A Million Open Doors, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1992, 315 pages, C$25.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-85210-X

    Much like the Music Industry’s been feverishly looking for bands “like the Beatles”, SF has been looking for “Heinlein’s Successor” ever since the Grandmaster declined/became boring/died in 1988. Various successor have been appointed (including most notably Spider Robinson; not a bad choice) but none has risen to take the crown.

    The latest heir to the throne is John Barnes, a science-fiction writer whose books have been steadily growing in maturity and intensity. From an inauspicious beginning (The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, 1988) Barnes has produced a few fine novels (most notably Orbital Resonance and A Million Open Doors) before hitting the big-time in 1994 with his excellent disaster epic Mother of Storms, followed in 1995 by the ultraviolent Kaleidoscope Century (His latest projects are the fantasy One for the Morning Glory and a series of men’s adventure books self-admittedly written for a quick buck.)

    Why the comparisons with Heinlein? Ask the four authors whose blurb on the back cover of A Million Open Doors compare Barnes to the Big Guy. Ask David Pringle, whose Ultimate Encyclopedia of SF says “If Robert Heinlein had been raised amid suburbs and malls and the socio-political chaos of the past three decades, he might have grown up to be John Barnes.”

    Yet, the comparison is unfair: Barnes’ forte is sociological extrapolation and -lately,- fiction that isn’t afraid to pull its punches, may it be in violent or sexual content. Quite a few Usenet readers have expressed a few doubts about the author himself after reading the ultra-violent-porn subplot in Mother of Storms. Others are reputedly abandonning Barnes after the sometimes graphic Kaleidoscope Century.

    Well, never mind that. With A Million Open Doors, we take a trip back to a kinder, gentler John Barnes. This is a tale of two planets: harsh Caledony, where a religious government casts a humorless, rigid shadow over their inhabitants and Nou Occitan, a planet “where duels are fought with equal passion over insults and artistic views alike.” The narrator of the tale is Girault, a “young” man living the extravagant life of the traditional Nou Occitans. He spends his days drinking with his friends, fighting duels, insulting strangers and writing poetry for his “girlfriend.” When said girlfriend “betrays him in the worst way possible”, Girault finds himself running away from her, off on Caledony.

    Yep, this is a novel of Culture Shock: Imagine a 16th-century French aristocrat trying to convert modern-day Iran to his way of life and you’ll have a good idea of this novel’s thrust. But as Girault changes Caledonia, Caledonia changes him too… Like so many good Heinlein novels, this is also a very good coming-of-age story.

    I was surprised and delighted by A Million Open Doors. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s very amusing. This novel has that extra… oh… “joie-de-vivre” that leaves you smiling even days after reading this book. Better yet, this is an intelligent bright novel. Barnes’ insight in what make societies tick is impressive. At the same time, the story stays very personal: A strong cast of characters complement narrator Girault’s passage in adulthood, ten years belated. This isn’t as much a “Growing Up” novel as a “Will you grow up, already!” story.

    This is a much more even novel than the latter Mother of Storms. It’s more focused and less dark. Less brilliant, perhaps (Mother of Storms is an incredibly smart novel, even for SF) but with a larger potential audience. (This isn’t to say A Million Open Doors is fluffy from start to finish: There’s a few darker passages, especially their solution to death…)

    The cover art, as usual from artist John Harris (of Ender’s Game cover fame) is hopelessly out of touch from what’s in the novel.

    Had I mentioned that the prose style is compulsively readable? Thought so.

    It’s difficult to say which kind of novel I prefer from Barnes: The light, uplifting work like A Million Open Doors, the massive volume like Mother of Storms or the dark distopia of Kaleidoscope Century… In the end, the versatility of John Barnes might be his greatest talent yet.

    I’ll keep reading.

    [January 1997 addenda: Just to prove that I have a talent for being wrong, I claimed in a Usenet message that A Million Open Doors should please everyone. (Referring to the recent ultraviolent content in Mother of Storms and Kaleidoscope Century). A day or two passed, with a reply to my message saying that there was quite a bit of disgusting S&M sex, not-quite-jolly swordplay and rape in the book… which is absolutely correct.

    To defend myself, I’ll point out that the S&M and swordplay bits are in the first hundred pages, the rape is in background and the whole impression of the book is far less violent than the others. Growing up, for Girault and his friends, implies leaving behind the S&M and the swordplay. A curious thing, selective memory is…

    Still, I can be an idiot to most people, most of the time, see? 🙂 ]

  • Heavy Weather, Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1994, 310 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-09393-2.

    To make a weak joke right at the start of the review: Audiences worldwide stormed theaters in June 1996 to see the thunderous tornado flick “Twister.” I was there. It was fun. This movie showed me things I hadn’t seen before and was enjoyable despite the bland plot. In that respect, “Twister” stands among the most fun of 1996’s releases.

    However, an oft-repeated comment on the net was “read Heavy Weather instead.” Curious, I resolved to check, even if the decision wasn’t that hard to make: Sterling is one of SF’s best authors. His fiction has acquired impressive weight in recent years: Schismatrix is one of the best, disturbing, most impressive and complex novel to come out of the Eighties. Only the presence of Ender’s Game on the 1985 Hugo ballot prevented—

    —but this isn’t a review of Schismatrix (other that to say “Rush to your stores, the omnibus Schismatrix Plus is there!”) He’s not immensely prolific (about one book every two years) but what he writes is good, imaginative, fairly readable and original.

    Sterling isn’t an easy writer to categorize. He has been one of the main drives behind cyberpunk fiction, but unlike a few writers of this genre he hasn’t really stayed in the genre. Is Heavy Weather cyberpunk? There are no easy answers.

    For one thing, cyberpunk doesn’t automatically associate with tornadoes in my mind. Yet, tornadoes make up a rather large part of Heavy Weather’s plot: In an ecologically unstable future America, a bunch of young people, including genius mathematician Dr. Jerry Mulcahey, chase twisters for fun and profit. Mostly fun. Among this bunch of tornado hackers lives Jane Unger, rich heiress. As the book starts, Jane uses fancy technology to make her brother Alex escape from a Mexican clinic, bringing him into the “Storm Troupe” (Please do not groan when you realize that means the members of the group call themselves “Storm Troupers…” Okay.) Alex is not very good company: He’s physically sick, rebellious, unstable. Resentment abounds in the Troupe. Will he be able to contribute to the group? And what’s that about a permanent F-6 supertwister?

    Sterling mixes a lot of high-tech goodies into his novel: Truly cross-country vehicles, VR delta-planes, Library-of-Congress-on-a-disk, “Shadow Government” outlaws, the destruction of a major town, DNA remedies… Fascinating stuff from start to finish.

    The feel of Heavy Weather might be considered as straight cyberpunk: The intensely gritty atmosphere is far removed from squeaky-clean typical SF labs: The techno-toys are not treated with reverence, but as ordinary tools, prone to failure or uselessness. We suffer with the characters as they don’t bathe, wear decent clothes or have a decent sex life. The evolution of Sterling’s cyberpunk themes is interesting, and should provide ample material to future Eng. Lit. majors

    Yet, this is more than straight cyberpuke. We even get to like a few characters: The evolution of Alex is especially heartening, as is his consequent acceptance in the Troupe and his relationship with his sister. Most of all, there’s one very good upbeat finale, something that caught me a bit unprepared given the tone of the rest of the book. Characters are okay, readability excellent, ideas original. Recommended.

    As far as windy-disaster-type SF novels go, this is almost up to par to John Barnes’ superlative Mother of Storms. And it does beat “Twister” hands down for intelligence. There’s even a cow-bit!

    [Page 258 of the hardcover edition]

    Jane felt a chill existential horror as [their car] remained airborne, remained flying, and things began to drift gently and visibly past them. Things? Yes, all kinds of things. Road signs. Bushes. Big crooked pieces of tree. Half-naked chickens. A cow. The cow was alive, that was the strangest thing. The cow was alive and unharmed, and it was a flying cow. She was watching a flying cow. A Holstein. A big, plump, well-looked-after barnyard Holstein, with a smart collar around its neck. The cow looked like it was trying to swim. The cow would thrash its great clumsy legs in the chilly air and then it would stop for a second, and look puzzled.

    I’ve said elsewhere that the difference between visual and written SF is that the latter does deal with consequences. Here’s the proof, from the book’s two subsequent paragraphs:

    And then the cow hit a tree and the cow was smashed and dead, and was instantly far behind them.

    And then [their car] hit another, different tree. And the air bag deployed, and it punched her really hard, right in the face.

    Enough said. Now, go read the book!

  • Arc Light, Eric L. Harry

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1994, 551 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-88048-9

    Though Science Fiction remains my favourite literary genre, there’s a special shelf in my personal library for techno-thrillers, a genre more closely associated with SF that most people assume. If Fantasy is the new-age-ish sister of SF, Techno-thriller is the weird cousin always playing around with guns and borrowing stuff with no intention of ever bringing it back.

    Naturally, there’s a whole range of techno-thrillers. At the lowest end, there’s the standard nice-but-unrewarding “Big Weapons, Terrorists, Explosions” plots, but it takes more than a few acronyms, nuclear weapons and middle-eastern villains to make a techno-thrillers. Moving out of Sturgeon’s 90%, we get authors like Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, Harold Coyle and Larry Bond, who write impeccable, believable 500-pages novels that read more like romanced histories of future wars than simple potboilers.

    Or, should I say, used to write such novels. Clancy has moved on to other things: His three latest novels have been disappointing for a number of reasons, spin-off products are diluting the “Tom Clancy” trademark and his latest fiction has been steadily skewing toward the political rather than the military end of the techno-thriller spectrum. Harold Coyle’s two latest novels have been about the Civil War. Bond and Brown’s latest offerings are markedly duller than their predecessors.

    Now here’s Eric L. Harry, with an invigorating novel of nuclear war between post-Cold War USA and Russia.

    Arc Light begins with nuclear war. Barely a hundred pages in the novel, the deed is done: a limited nuclear strike has devastated both countries. While no major civilian centers are hit, the military capacity of each country is vitally wounded: one of the book’s subplots follows the ordeal of two servicemen stuck in a nuclear launch silo underneath a blast area. The two governments react differently: Russia toughs it out while the USA impeach their president. (Well… He did contribute somewhat to the war by telling the Chinese that Russia was about to attack them…)

    The book goes on from there, topping even a big premise with ever-quirkier plot twists. President Livingstone is judged by the senate, servicemen are called back into service, the USA invades Russia… It all leads to a good techno/military/political thriller. The blurb states that this is the most electrifying debut since Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October and while this hyperbole should be taken with a bucketful of salt, there is at least ground for comparison.

    I was especially impressed by the human side of Harry’s novel, which oscillates between maudlin tearjerkers and scenes that just feel right. While the some scenes in the Melissa Chandler subplot are a bit too emotionally cheap, there’s terrific material in the scenes following the soldiers going to war. The variety of the viewpoints is also impressive: Harry doesn’t shy away from covering the action from different perspectives, from strictly military action to top-level political intrigue and espionage hijinks. The characterisation is good enough for the genre: it may not be particularly impressive, but at least it’s there. It helps that even the Russians antagonists are represented with some degree of nuance.

    On the flip side, not all subplots are equally interesting and the conclusion is a bit disappointing, in no small part due to the way the author painted himself in a particular corner. A similar situation was handled somewhat better in Joe Weber’s Defcon One.

    But overall, I was impressed and I think that most thriller fans will react in the same way. With his debut novel, Harry has already become an author to watch. His second book (Society of the Mind) is in stores now, and it seems to be pushing the techno-thriller genre in another direction, tackling issues about Artificial Intelligence. This type of material coming for a non-Science Fiction writer is always interesting to contemplate: you can be sure that I’ll take a look.

  • The Legacy of Heorot, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1987, 383 pages, C$17.95 hc, ISBN 0-671-64094-1

    Science-Fiction has a love/hate affair with the visual. The lurid covers of SF pulp magazines in the thirties traditionally represented bodacious babes threatened by evil bug-eyed monsters. While these covers probably attracted the most appropriate public for these magazines, it also had the effect of driving away anyone not in this age group. Fortunately, or so it seems, the illustrations have gotten better since these garish times. (Fortunately, bodacious babes still make appearances from time to time, but this time around, they’re the one threatening the bug-eyed monsters.)

    Then there is the long and sorry case of SF on television. From “Buck Rogers” to “Babylon-5” there HAS been a certain evolution. But SF-TV would be nothing without the overwhelming influence of its big brother, SF-Cinema.

    And therein lies the problem. For, to be quite blunt, most of SF-Cinema is unmitigated crap, produced by illiterate idiots for idiotic illiterates. In the past few months, I have heard two SF authors give up on SF-Cinema. (Robert J. Sawyer, in an interview with Sci-Fi Weekly (http://www.scifiweekly.com/) and Walter Jon Williams, in a Worldcon chat transcript, around the same http) And they’re right! Rare is the good, competent, intelligent SF film that pleases both the eye and the brain. (The most famous example, Star Wars is pleasant for the eyes, comforting in its simplistic story, very competent in sheer movie-making savvy but frustrating for lack of depth.)

    Exceptions exist, but by far the most successful SF movies of recent years have been action/SF hybrids, building upon the SF concepts to provide great visuals: “Terminator II”, “Jurassic Park”…

    …and “Aliens”, which brings us tortuously to the subject of this review. You see, “Aliens” is one of my favorite movies. Fabulously produced for a pitiful budget of something like 16 million US$, it has set a standard for SF/action flicks that has rarely been excelled since. Its suspense is extreme, the dialogue delightful (Quote heaven!), Sigourney Weaver’s performance exceptional… pile up the adjectives, man, I’m running out of them!

    The theme of “Aliens” is known: Bunch’o’marines pitted against ultimate enemy of man. They duke it out.

    Surprise, the theme of The Legacy of Heorot is known: Bunch’o’colonists pitted against ultimate enemy of man. They duke it out.

    “Aliens”: 1986. The Legacy of Heorot: 1987.

    TLoH might or might not be directly inspired by “Aliens”, but it doesn’t really matter. For the book is utterly enjoyable, even for fans of the movie. The action takes place on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti: Avalon is a planet ideal for colonization. No terraforming required. “Samlons” in the rivers, wildlife abound, the planet seems to contain no big surprises, even a few months after the foundation of the colony.

    “Seems” is the key word here. For there is something on Avalon that’s ready to attack… That “something” is a “Grendel”… a bear-sized frog able to out-race medal-winning sprinters and eat them up when they catch their tasty human prize. Nasty, nasty critters. As the uncredited “Washington Times” blurb states, ‘makes “Aliens” look like a Disney nature film.’

    As it might be expected, the colonists (led by the usual military expert so beloved of Pournelle and Niven) find a way to beat up the Grendel, then his half-dozen compadres in the immediate area. But-

    at this point, we’re at mid-book. What is happening, here? In two words, ecological collapse. You see, the Grendels were part of a natural ecosystem designed to keep a certain segment of the wildlife in check…

    And there lies the difference between “Aliens” and TLoH. One deals with the consequences of genocide. (Well, call it as you like. And no, I haven’t forgotten than the creatures in “Aliens” weren’t part of the natural ecosystem… Unless you’re one sadistic eco-designer.)

    There are the other differences too. The characters in TLoH are sympathetic and more fully realized than their counterparts in “Aliens”. While still not great stuff, (we get the misunderstood and under-appreciated military man Who Cried Wolf, the nerdy guy Who Gets His, the incompetent politician Who Dismissed Military Guy and the usual assortment of competent females) they still felt closer to reality than the marine squad in the movie.

    And the style… Niven fans know what to expect. Completely readable from page One to page 383. I was easily caught up in the action and the minutiae of a brand-new colony. Even though I suspect that Barnes did most of the writing, with the N&P duo providing substantial creative input, it’s a very good read. Even if the finale is somewhat confusing, this is the kind of book they talk about when they’re saying “page-turner”.

    As SF, it’s fairly light in concepts. The real strength of the book, like “Aliens”, is in suspense, entertainment and action. That will probably make it unsuitable for the literary crowd, but fine for most of us.

    I liked it, can I say anything more? It doesn’t aspire to greatness, but it’s a fine, fine, fine read for summer afternoons…

    I’m sorry if the preceding review praises TLoH at the detriment of “Aliens”. Fact is, I would probably choose the movie over the book… if you absolutely have to choose: These two works represent quite well, I feel, the potential strength of SF in both medium, given similar subjects.

    And now for the harder question: Why don’t they make more SF movies as satisfying as “Aliens”? Answer next week, kiddos… Don’t forget, marks will be deducted for excessive spelling mistakes, general stupidity and gratuitous use of the three-letter string “ID4”…