Cascoly Books: Cascoly Science Fiction Reviews

Star Trek novels are an information virus. They are not the best of Science Fiction, but they are addictive, engrossing, and refuse to die. Just like James T. Kirk. He will not die gracefully, in a crowd, alone, at the hands of an old enemy, by falling off a mountain, into an energy vortex or of old age. He is protected as all deities are, by the determination of the devoted that he will exist. Of course, it helps that William Shatner has decided that his story shall continue unto the Next Generation. Not that I mind.

Let's see. Kirk was last seen about to die heroically after knocking out Picard and having him beamed off yet another place where somebody had to stay behind to throw the switch before it blows up. That was in The Return, the sequel to Generations, where they brought Kirk back from his last near death experience. Hopefully they are getting tired of killing him off, because it's getting a tad predicable.

In Avenger, we replay Kirk's last moments ala Tom Mix after the commercial (see history of Saturday morning TV) and find that he was beamed out of danger and into the lost memory of his near death (what again?) at the hands of Kodos the Executioner (see early history of Star Trek, the original series).

Meanwhile, Picard and the Enterprise E (see history of ships named...oh, forget it.) is enforcing a blockade of worlds carrying a plague that threatens to tear the Federation apart and kill billions. If you ever wished for a Trek future imperfect, you need look no further.

In Generations, Kirk advises the Captain of another Enterprise to never leave the command chair, because while you are there you can make a difference. This is an unfortunate piece of non-logic of the sort that limits Trek from time to time. It's the sort of thinking that kept Shatner from allowing Kirk to go on to the Admiralty where he could help choose the mission, rather than just react to it.

Here Kirk tries on new roles, both healer and facilitator, as he tries to solve the mystery behind the origins of the plague and save the Federation and a long lost love. Again. He also needs to find out what really killed Spock's father, Sarek, and how it fits into the disaster at hand. The book is a lot of fun for fans of either series. Kirk gets to grow a bit, Spock takes it all pretty much in stride and Picard is well, Picard.

Reading joint TOS and Next Gen novels is much more fun than voting on who makes the better captain. The truth that emerges from these exercises is that they are different enough to defy comparison, but similar enough to entrust with saving the galaxy. One gets the feeling though that left alone on a planet with no way to contact Starfleet, Picard would learn to play the flute and Riker would get comfy in the big chair, while Kirk would convince the world to develop space travel just as Spock managed to locate the star system.

Dale Brown’s 10th novel in the series that started with a 14th and armored B-52 in Flight of the Old Dog returns to the original premise in Fatal Terrain. The durable casts to these stories stars Patrick McLanahan, expert in aerial warfare development and former ace B-52 pilot. Though the supporting cast has suffered attrition over the intervening books, McLanahan survives both presidential administrations and dogfights to be on the scene to fly the right piece of advanced hardware at the right time to save the nations assets. Former Air Force General Brad Elliott, booted from the Air Force after having annoyed one too many administrations pushing the development and deployment of his advanced aircraft, is along for more than the ride as the latest progeny of his Old Dog B-52, the EB-52 Megafortress takes to the field. Since the downsizing of the Air Force and the shutdown of Elliott’s HAWC weapons development center, McLanahan and design genius Jon Masters have put together a civilian counterpart named SkyMasters to explore the feasibility of heavy bombers into the next century. As usual, the test of their concepts takes place on the battlefield with more than contracts on the line.

The players on the field are the forces of the People’s Republic of China, out to take on the newly independent Taiwan. Dale Brown takes the very real position that the United States armed forces are not up to the job of making good our assurances of support based on the carrier based strength of bomber fighters, reviving his classic argument that a heavily armed and stealthed bomber group could reach halfway around the world and "touch someone". Just as the B-52 has done for the baby boomers’ entire lifetime.

Fatal Terrain dishes up plenty of action as the conflict between China and Taiwan escalates and Elliott gnashes his teeth waiting for approval from Washington to take the fight to the Chinese. Seems like that’s been the complaint of more than one American General in years past.

Dale Brown’s fiction is laden with cockpit chatter and descriptions of high tech hardware that you either love or hate. Personally, I love it. Science Fiction shies away from gadgetry today in order to broaden its market, or because it’s really being written by writers with little scientific acumen themselves, but this high tech military stuff gives no apologies for its arms catalog diatribe. Of course, to a very large degree it talks about hardware on or almost on the shelf, but if you read a lot of popular SF Battletech, David Drake’s Redliners (see our review this issue) for instance, it’s not much more farfetched.

I look forward to this collection every summer. Gardner annually restores my faith in Science Fiction as a mind altering genre with his consistently superb collection. Short stories are often the best of Science Fiction, and Gardner’s collection is the best of the best. Not to mention the indispensable year in review commentary Gardner includes as to preface the edition. As editor of Asimov's SF magazine, Gardner is about as much of an insider as you could hope to get your intel from.

Often when a perfectly good author sits down with a perfectly good idea and puts together a novel as long as the publisher wants, a lot of bad things go wrong. The chapters don’t quite track. The ending comes out of nowhere. The author gets lost in world building, and can’t stick to one world at a time. The horse dies and still the beating continues. But when that same author gets an idea for a short story...Zing.

When short stories are as good as the ones in this collection, they are concept driven gems. Meet the idea, meet the characters, watch them dance together and hang on for that little twist at the end. You can feel the little zing and see the author smiling in self satisfaction. When it’s good, you smile along. I never had much interest in mind expanding drugs, just give me more stories like the ones in the YBSF. You can even read collections like this and have a normal life too. I mean, you read a story, do some life, read another story. Nobody’s the wiser.

Nancy Kress spins an alien perspective yarn in "The Flowers of Aulit Prison" that Ursula LeGuin would have to envy. As in The Dispossessed, Left Hand of Darkness and other LeGuin classics, Terrans are the outsiders come to learn, but what the locals discover about themselves and their world view is at the heart of the story. Nancy is a consummate character writer, and here displays some world building to match. Surprisingly, Ms. LeGuin is absent from the anthology for the first time in several years.

Bruce Sterling has a great story in "The Bicycle Repairman" that hit most of my zing buttons dead on. It also happens to be up for the Best Novella Hugo award. It's got bicycles, fringe folks, rightwing extremists, never-aging boomers, high tech spy gizmos and a sense of humor. All it really needed was the bicycles and sense of humor for me, but the rest just adds to the fun in a very Sterling fashion. Tor has put this story up on it's web site in case you'd like to see it before you pick up the collection. It's at: http://www.tor.com/bicycle.html. (I’m leading an SFABC Author Discussion Group about Bruce Sterling in August, at the Wayne NJ Borders, Books, and Beyond at 8:00 PM Thursday, August 14th. C'mon by and lend your support!)

There are several Retro-SF pieces, including John Kessle’s "Miracle of Ivar Avenue" which takes place in the Hollywood of the 40s when gumshoes and starlets ruled the land. A nifty time travel yarn to be sure, and one of Editor Dozois’ own picks for best of the bunch. My favorite retro pick is James P. Blaylock’s "Thirteen Phantasms". Blaylock has penned a story Rod Serling would have loved which evokes nostalgia for the early days of SF strong enough to make me almost believe that you could bridge the years just by wishing hard enough.

Forward the Foundation! The Second Foundation Trilogy begins with Asimov's friends; Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin each of whom have agreed to write a novel in the second Foundation Trilogy. The first, Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford, which came out in March, follows Robots and Empire, Asimov's last foundation work which tied his Robot stories and Foundation stories together. Central to these stories is Hari Seldon, creator of the science of psychohistory that drove the Foundations through the decline of the Galactic Empire and three of the best loved books in all of SF. In Foundation's Fear, Hari is aided by the woman he loves, despite having realized in the last book that she was a Positronic robot sent to protect him, and manipulated by the robot Daneel Olivaw, the longest lasting character in Asimov's universe. Towards what end? The fulfillment of the Zeroth law of robotics: The protection of mankind.

In the course of the book, virtual re-creations of Joan of Arc and Voltaire prepare for a public slugfest between Faith and Reason that would have been perfect on Steve Allen's PBS series Meeting of the Minds, where he provided much the same spectacle with actors. Still, I don't think Steve had to contend with rouge AIs taking it on the lam. Not so public are the efforts to thwart Hari's appointment to First Minister by the Emperor. Through it all the Empire slides into the coming darkness.

The team of authors signed for this project promise great things for the expansion of Asimov's last effort - the synthesis of his Robot and Foundation stories.

Redliners starts out in Operation Active Clock as Strike Force Company 41 descends on Maxus 377 to take out the "Spook's" main spaceport and soften it up for the oncoming Unity invasion. The Strikers are Earth's best and most combat hardened troops, the kind of men and women you can count on deep behind enemy lines with little support.

Drake knows how to write combat, and Heinlein's Starship Troopers would have had no trouble believing the action or hardware carried by the hard hitting Strikers as they move with deadly speed through their target. What separates them from the classic is the premise of the book. By the time Active Cloak and the first chapter are done, the sharpened steel of the Strikers will turn brittle with the stress of combat, each of its members carrying back the memories of one operation gone horribly wrong, one time too many. They have crossed the red line between useful tools and broken ones.

Too battle shocked to be sent back into Earth's conflict with the Alien Spooks, the remnants of the 100 man company will fare little better if released to desks and pensions. Fortunately for them, there is another man who has been pushed to his limit of endurance as well. Tired of sending soldiers to their death or watching them come back broken and with no link to the society they fight for, the Unity commander too has had more than he can take. Redliners is about the chance for redemption he offers them, and himself.

The main action in the book takes place on a savage garden of a planet where the Strikers have been rushed along with a colonization effort of draftees from a Terran community. The construction of a one way starship, as it's being loaded along with the drafting of a skyscraper's inhabitants to tame a savage world and the detachment of shell shocked troops to protect them sounds like a typical government snafu, but it's all a plan to reunite the Strikers with the society and individual humanity they lost on the battlefield in the pursuit of their deadly craft.

The planner didn't count on a world so vicious that the plants shoot back or that the Strikers would have to protect the colonists on a forced march to the right landing spot. Drake finds plenty of action for his thin red line of 'eroes.

The story follows each of the troopers as they develop connections to the colonists and grapple with their nightmares. I often remember a line from the sitcom Taxi, where Reverend Jim, dropout from life and a Vietnam draft dodger, is confronted by 'Nam veteran Tony Danza. Danza asks what he has to say to all the guys that risked their lives fighting so that guys like Jim could stay home? Jim's reply of "Thank You", sums up both the answer veterans of that war were waiting for and Drake's point in Redliners. The Strikers are heroes, dying for a cause, but it's a truth that is too often lost on the field of combat amid the killing and dying or between the warring parties of the government. If any of them live long enough to get the colonists to safety, they may just save themselves along the way.

This is recommended summer reading. Take it along when you attack the crabgrass and weeds for that well earned break. You may not feel quite so safe surrounded by your own horticultural horrors after you finish Redliners.

The first Connie Willis book I read was Lincoln's Dreams, a mix of soft SF and Civil War flashbacks. I liked Lincoln's Dreams well enough to recommend it to friends, but I lost track of Connie in the interim. I missed The Doomsday Book, though I am assured by a usually reliable source (and the Hugo it won) that it was good. A bit slow to get to a plot perhaps, but intelligent, interesting and worthwhile.

Bellwether is certainly slow to get to the plot, usually intelligent and mostly interesting, but ultimately I'm not sure how worthwhile. Connie waltzes her characters around the corridors of HiTech, the commercial research firm they work for, for the better part of the book without getting past the sometimes Douglas Adamsesque business of corporate science, dating in the 90, and an obsession with fads throughout history. The central character is a fad researcher, trying to unravel their causes.

The historical notes about various fads that appear at the beginning of each chapter vie with the story for your attention, though the story is actually a pretty good read. It's not Science Fiction, though there are scientists aplenty, and a bit of research actually seems to be getting done, though far more form filling out. Which is of course precisely the windmill Ms. Willis is tilting at. When the book actually gets down to business, in the last few pages, all doubt as to the real nature of the book vanishes. It's a romance novel. A scientific romance novel, but a romance novel nonetheless. Well, except for the last few pages...where some interesting notions pops up. My big disappointment wasn't that the important action in the book winds up circling around love, heck, I like love a lot. I was just sorry that we never find anything useful about fads. Gee, I hope this doesn't catch on.

One thing bothers me just a tad in Bellwether. The book's heroes are scientists forced to work for a corporation that has no interest in science beyond the money it can make off it. Oh Evil Corporation. The only scientist in line with the corporation's objectives is a self-serving dragon lady out to profile grant winners and remake herself in whatever image is au courant.

Ok, time out. I'm sorry that pure science doesn't get a better shake, but does it occur to anyone that taking money from HiTech while refusing to contribute to its goals is less than pure in itself? Yes, it is. Go ahead, shoot me. I just don't buy the Gilbert and Sullivan premise that organizations are inherently misdirected. Dilbert may be a folk hero, but is he contributing anything or is he just taking shots at the system?

In Trekdom, David Gerrold is best known as the author of "The Trouble with Tribbles". Thirteen years after the series ended its run he was one of the original authors to bring it back in the original Bantam Star Trek novels. In Star Trek: The Galactic Whirlpool, we get the best of Classic Trek, the full array of cast and situations, but with the savvy move of Kirk to slightly left of center stage. Lt. Reilly takes the spotlight, and using him shows the value of a younger, less finished character. Gerrold had over a decade to think about the show before writing the book, and some retooling is evident. Kirk has settled for being the second or third on the scene when a landing party goes down, and when he decides to dash off to examine a spatial anomaly not on his orders, he is careful to fabricate a plausible legal position that would cover the situation.

Young Lt. Reilly (you probably remember his rendition of "I'll take you home again Kathleen" from the show) beams down to an artificial world zooming through the void at a third the speed of light and with no apparent way of stopping. He winds up doing all the things normally reserved for James T. Kirk, but he does them with un-Kirk like self doubt that makes the character more interesting. Maybe there should have been consideration of a series based on his character, or maybe it's just his Gaelic charm.

The story revolves around convincing the inhabitants of a colony vessel that they are really on a giant spaceship in time for the craft to avert certain destruction. Certain death is played by a pair of whirling black holes three years distant in the worldlet's path, and the opposition to salvation is provided by a religiously fanatical Captain who refuses to believe in anything outside the vessel. Been there. Done that. Well, yeah, but David does it so well that despite my intention to read a few chapters while making coffee, I blitzed through the whole book in one sitting. At 222 pages that's not the feat it might be, but the bottom line is that the book remains engaging throughout. If you want proof that the space time warps exist outside Science Fiction, pick this up for a trip into Trek's past.

Cascoly Books - Cascoly Science Fiction Reviews

More Science Fiction