Review of Man Plus by Frederik Pohl

Modernism’s hopes for mankind found expression in numerous ways, many of which fell directly into the wheelhouse of science fiction.  Asmimov, Heinlein, Clarke and others made a living presenting visions of a better life on Venus, robots to perform human labor, and spaceships to other planets—lebensraum abound.  But the cyborg has always been a fence-sitter.  Venus a jungle paradise, robots the perfect servant, and gleaming spaceships between the stars—these three shine at a much brighter intensity than the augmentation of humans with mechanical parts.  Mankind wary of such personal intrusion, literature about cyborgs has always been more equivocal in tone.  From Budry’s Who? to Dick’s “The Electric Ant”, the genre has seen a cautious approach to the combination of machine and body.  Adding a layer of subtle—and all the more biting for it—political satire, Frederik Pohl’s 1976 Man Plus is another strong example of the ambivalence.

Man Plus is set in a future wherein the world is in the grip of socialism.  Only North America remains capitalist, and statistics and trends indicate war is ever closer to deciding for how much longer.  Believing human habitation of Mars is the only way to avoid conflict, US President Fitz-James Deshatine sets up a secret American program to modify a man physically for open-air life on the red planet in preparation for American colonization.  Deshatine’s strong Texan demeanor driving the program as fast as it can go, Roger Torraway is quickly called into duty: to sacrifice himself for the common good.  Stripped of nearly everything that makes him corporeally human, he emerges a cyborg man.  Much to the emotional pain of his wife and friends, his bat-like eyes, plastic intestines, wings for dealing with balance in Martian gravity, reptilian skin to withstand cold, muscles replaced with a substance that requires no nourishment, and lungs a set of pumps to deal with the pressure differential make him more machine than man, only portions of his brain left untouched.  As the statistics continue to indicate war is ever closer, Torraway’s trip to Mars looms more important—but for whom?

Review of Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett

As NASA’s Curiosity rover trundles about the surface of Mars today, another page turns on the glories of pulp science fiction.  Leigh Brackett’s vision of a land populated with humans and aliens, ancient cities and creatures, long-buried secrets and mysterious deserts fades a shade closer to pale as one desolate desert image after another is beamed back to Earth.  But there was a day when her works shone with the hope and possibility of life on the planets beyond Earth. Gollancz bringing together the best of these stories in one collection, Fantasy Masterwork’s Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories is the imaginatively nostalgic look back to a time when the solar system held more possibilities.

The collection contains five novelettes, five novellas, one short story, and one novel.  Though organized chronologically by publishing date, little actually links the stories.  A few are set on Venus and a handful feature the character Eric John Stark, but the majority are the plights and travails, adventures and journeys of various men and women across the ancient Martian landscape.  All manner of the vividly fantastic and anachronistically technical emerging in their tales, the collection is by default science fantasy, but certainly the motifs and mindset of pulp fantasy fill the book’s cup.

Review of The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs genre milestone A Princess of Mars ended with the hero appropriately back on Earth where he’d begun his tale.  One plot line was left unresolved, but had the book not sold as well as it did, the reader could have walked away satisfied the circle was completed.  But with Dejah Thoris trapped in the First Born’s Temple of the Sun, a Martian year to go before she is to see the light of day again, the ending of The Gods of Mars is anything but complete.  With the red carpet laid out for a third installment, The Warlord of Mars follows upon The Gods of Mars, but, brings the tale of John Carter to a close, no loose ends.

And indeed, with Dejah Thoris trapped, it is up to her beloved John Carter to rescue her (for the millionth time) from the jaws of death.  Trailing a Thern and First Born into an underground cavern in the opening chapter, he learns of a secret entrance into the Temple of the Sun.  But worse yet, he learns the pair plot to kill Dejah Thoris before her allotted year is up.  Spurned to action with the ever-faithful Woola at his side, John Carter embarks on yet another rescue attempt (rolls eyes).  An extended chase that takes Carter to the North Pole, every color of man on Barsoom—red, black, white, yellow, and green—is eventually drawn into the plight.  Battles on ice, secret entrances, double-bluffs, new alliances, enemies turned friends—all of Barsoom intersects for the massive conclusion of the John Carter epic.

Review of The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the most over-the-top novels ever written.  Inspired by pulp and in turn inspiring pulp to this day, its heroic absurdity—ahem, sentimentality possesses a verve for storytelling that plumbs the depths of exaggerated and imaginative fiction like few other period works of such length. And once the train starts rolling, it’s tough to stop it.  The Gods of Mars (1914), sequel to A Princess of Mars, sets the dial to twelve for John Carter’s wild return to Barsoom.

Transported back to Earth amidst an oxygen crisis at the end of A Princess of Mars, John Carter never learned whether the woman he loved, Dejah Thoris, or the son they were waiting to hatch (hatch!!!) suffocated or not.  Praying to the sky above his New York home one night that he might return to know their fate, at the outset of The Gods of Mars John Carter once again finds his corporeal-self transported away from Earth.  Arriving in an unfamiliar land, he’s unsure whether he’s on Barsoom or not. Strange plant men assaulting him in an exotic landscape that is nothing like his memories of the red planet, it isn’t until he meets up with his old friend Tars Tarkas that the truth slowly unfolds: he has arrived in Dor, the land of the dead.  All manner of exotic adventure unraveling, Carter must fight through peril and danger to escape a land no Barsoomiam has ever escaped from to learn what has befallen his beloved Dejah Thoris and son in the ten years since he last set foot on Mars.

Review of Moving Mars by Greg Bear

It is myth; it is legend; it is part of the fabric of the culture.  Every schoolboy and girl in the US knows the story of the Pilgrims, how they were oppressed in their native land and came to a new world to practice their beliefs in freedom. Ahh, America.  Among the first Europeans to settle in the West, this historical event is commonly viewed as a seminal moment in US history.  As a result, similar stories have come to be prized by the culture: good ol’ American fighting spirit and can-do will win the way when one desires to live a certain way or practice a particular political ideal.  Taking the myth/legend to the next planet outward in the solar system, in 1994 Greg Bear penned Moving Mars.  Nominated for every major American science fiction award (and winning once), it’s fair to say the cultural mindset continues to reinforce itself.

Moving Mars is the story of Casseia Majumdar, university student and daughter of one of Mars' oldest families.  Called Binding Multiples, blood relations are not necessarily the common denominator to the big communities.  The BMs’ mixing corporate and genealogical ideals into ‘bloodlines’, their clannish presence is as far as Mars’ governance has evolved since humanity first settled the planet.  Growing up ‘red rabbit’, Casseia lives in the tunnels of Mars along with five million others, getting a university education, and living as normal a life as Martian underground conditions allow for.  In comparison to Earth, this is rather limited.  Technology is available but always a few upgrades behind, and in limited supply.  And while people are free to mix as they please, Martian society remains more provincial in its customs and traditions.  Following on a love affair after university, Casseia is selected by her BM for an amazing honor: to accompany a relative to Earth for political negotiations.  What she sees and experiences there forever changing her worldview, little does she know it is her knowledge Mars will be drastically changed by in the future.

Review of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I am agog.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 A Princess of Mars is a book I’d never read, that is, until turning the last page today—and I am agog.  Like a genre rosetta stone, I now understand the root of America’s pulp science fiction and fantasy tradition.  Purple prose, heroes of a larger-than-life variety, a plot that continually expands its extent of incredulity, science fiction cum fantasy cum science fantasy—all the pulpy pieces are in place in one big, mythically maudlin male fantasy of the finest, squishiest cheese.  And the blazing sexism, disguised racism, undoubted ethnocentrism—everything WASP-ish, I’m just agog…

A Princess of Mars is the story of John Carter, a man who comes to be the greatest hero Mars has even known.  An officer in the Confederacy, after the Civil War he goes west seeking a fortune in gold in Arizona.  Finding a rich vein, he and a colleague head to civilization to get the equipment and laborers they will need to mine it.  But a tragedy occurs, and Carter is forced to defend himself.  Finding a cave to hide out, strange forces take over, and before he knows it, he lies naked in the middle of the Martian wilderness.

Review of "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson

Mars has been a subject of science fiction since before the genre became a fixture:  Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Philip K. Dick’s The Martian Time-slip, Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Princess of Mars series, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars, C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy, Ben Bova's Mars, and many others have in one way or another imagined what life might be like on our neighboring globe.  Representing more than a decade of research and reading on the subject, Kim Stanley Robinson's 1994 Red Mars is an elaborate work that just may set the bar Mars colonization novels.

As is to be expected, Red Mars begins with the planet as a wasteland and moves toward colonization—a very human version, at that.  The main characters are introduced on the nine-month space flight from Earth, inter-group tensions set, and then turned loose on the cold, arid desert. The book divided into eight sections, a main character is the focus of each, making the novel a surprisingly character-centered work despite the large amount of technical and scientific information included and developed.  John Boone is an experienced astronaut—the first to land on Mars, in fact—and is the expedition’s leader.  Frank Howard is the second in command and secretly harbors feelings of jealousy regarding not only John’s position of power, but also his charisma and people skills.  Nadia is a tough female engineer, doing her best with the tools at her disposal to build the infrastructure and facilities they need to live.  Hiroko is an intelligent but unique-minded biologist with ideas of her own (to say the least) regarding how society should function socially.  Not the only rebel, Arkady is an architect and planner with ideas even more radical regarding the structure and interaction of people, science, and government on the planet.  Through these and a handful of other main characters Robinson weaves his highly scientific yet intriguingly human tale.

Review of "Martian Time-slip" by Philip K. Dick

His output hit or miss, it’s easy to be skeptical cracking open a book by Philip K. Dick.  The psychotic craziness of Dick’s personal life so often leaking into his writing, on more than one occasion his works feature plots and themes derailed by a chaos seemingly external to the text. In the rare moments Dick was able to focus his drug and paranoia fueled energies into a synergistic story, the sci-fi world benefited. Martian Time-slip, just falling shy of The Man in the High Castle or A Scanner Darkly, is one of these occasions.

The setting Mars thousands of years in the future, the red planet is experiencing its second wave of civilization.  The Bleekmen (Dick’s less than subtle name for Africans) are being pushed to the wastelands while those of European descent terraform the planet in capitalist fashion.  The main character is Jack Bohlen, a recovering schizophrenic electronics repairman (sound Dickian??) whose day to day life can only be described as quotidian.  Spiritually and morally grey, his dull love affairs do not prevent him from sympathizing with the Bleekmen, the group treated poorly by Union bosses like Arnie Kott.  The moderately sized cast revealed slowly, readers are eventually introduced to Bohlen’s bored wife, his uncle Leo the land speculator, Otto the salesman, and Steiner the suicidal importer whose autistic, perhaps schizophrenic son may hold the key to Kott’s plays for power as Mars develops one parcel of land at a time.

Unlike such novels as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said that feature plots wandering digressively, Dick maintains focus throughout Martian Time-slip.  Though seeming to tread close to no-plot land on a couple of occasions, he never crosses the border.  The conclusion fully cohesive and satisfying, 1964 must have been a good year for Dick.  Making this statement all the more complimentary is the successful manner in which he experiments with the center of the book’s narrative.  Shifting viewpoints like building blocks (imagine an asterisk), the resulting narrative structure may look like an M.C. Escher creation, but is fully supportive of the story—a profitable gamble that pays dividends at the conclusion.  

Minor themes of Martian Time-slip include the treatment of disabled children, suicide, schizophrenia, and artificial intelligence (a la Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)—all under the umbrella concept of colonial dystopia on Mars.  The main theme of the novel, however, is materialism (in the commercial sense) versus traditional ways of life, particularly Africans and their perennial philosophy.  Like our world, encounters between the development-minded colonists and the nomadic hunter-gatherer Bleekmen prove awkward and one-sided.  Though not in-depth, Dick weaves voodoo magic, time warps, and wisdom of the ancients into the novel’s satisfying conclusion, drawing in the ethnic concerns of his, and unfortunately still, our time.

In the end, Martian Time-slip is in the upper echelon of Dick novels.  The story well-conceived and presented, only typical Dickian complaints remain, e.g. poor prose, wacky anachronisms, etc.  These, however, can be overlooked given the strength of the thought provoking storytelling.  While stylistically perhaps most similar to Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, thematic content is, however, of a different mold.  Ethnic values and capitalist conceits often taking backseat roles in other Dick novels, they come to the forefront in Martian Time-slip.  The result is story featuring a dystopian Mars with many other elements Dick fans will enjoy, paranoid schizophrenia, sentient androids, and for good measure, a little voodoo… 

Review of "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson

(This review has also been posted at www.fantasyliterature.com.)

A sturdy home in the burbs seems the best metaphor describing Robert Charles Wilson’s 2005 Spin.  The novel does everything correctly.  It builds mystery in a curiosity evoking fashion.  The characters have all the right traits to color a story.  The prose moves the plot steadily forward, at times even gaining artistic heights.  And lastly, sci-fi elements support the evolving premise of the book as well as any fan of Heinlein, Wells, or Asimov could hope.  That being said, it is the mapped nature of the novel which undermines its overall quality, and ultimately leaves what is a solid domicile for some, lacking character for others.    

The fundamental concept underpinning Spin is that the earth is one day suddenly encapsulated in a time bubble by an unknown group dubbed the Hypotheticals.  While a minute remains minute and a second a second on earth, time in the universe beyond moves exponentially faster.  Wilson plays the idea in two directions for society.  The first are those who react positively to the notion only 50 years remain before the sun fizzles out.  They seek to profit from the knowledge available to experimentation having  millennia as a timeframe.  The second part of society, however, is in despair of the looming fate, effectively giving up on moral codes and civilized behavior. This dichotomy and the ground between are portrayed by the three protagonists: the twins Jason and Diane, and the main character Tyler, respectively.  Style smooth and literary, Wilson chronicles forty years of the lives of the three as they deal with the knowledge the sun will burn out in their lifetime.    

With the impending apocalypse at times less than convincing, character reaction is not the only divisive aspect of the novel.  Story content can likewise be split along two lines, scientific speculation and the relationship among the three main characters.  Thus, while astronomy and biology nerds delight on one hand, the eyes of romantics sparkle on the other.  Wilson fails to intertwine these two aspects, however.  Despite that the obvious intent was to impress upon readers the effect of catastrophic world events, it is rare that any of the characters are emotionally affected by the crime sprees, depression, and general chaos.  They live their “normal” lives carrying out their adolescent love drama, the chaos pushed to the background for the character development scenes.  In trying to drive home the human aspects of the desperation of the scenario, one would expect stronger ties between the two.  Pohl’s Gateway, for example, does a much better job of portraying a human at end, not to mention McCarthy’s masterpiece The Road.  As a result, Spin could have been split into two books: one in the hard sci-fi genre, the other in romance.  As so much sci-fi contains wooden characterization, however, Wilson shouldn’t be denounced too heavily for introducing plausible characters to a genre story, and in the end it is just the disconnection between the two which undermines the overall intent.

Another problem arising from the textbook nature of the novel is how contrived many of the scenes feel.  One can almost see the points in Wilson’s outline being ticked off one by one as the pages turn.  Main character is questioned by insignificant third-party to reveal inner personal secrets to reader. Check.  Main character “accidentally” runs into old flame and is forced to update life.  Check.  Scientist appears stage left for info dump on state of world after major event.  Check.  Create implausible distraction so that two characters can be alone.  Check.  And so on.  Suffice to say, some writers do a better job of disguising movements in timeframes and dispersal of necessary story info.

But there remain several positive points to the novel.  Wilson incorporates a large amount of research into the book.  Medicine, terraforming, rocketry, astronomy, the potential for life on Mars, planet seeding, etc. all fall under discussion, and at times, actively propel the plot.  For the hard science fans out there, this will certainly appeal.  As was mentioned, the strong prose coupled with the escalating feeling of suspense, though starting to peter toward the climax, nonetheless does an effective job of making the reader want to turn the page.  Hints and clues constantly left dangling, Wilson knows how to keep readers wanting to know the “real truth”.

Those who choose to pick up Spin will be left oscillating rather than spinning.  The two sided coin that is the novel – combination speculative science vs. love story – will enthrall or put off.  But in the end, the quality prose, interesting premise, and fully developed storyline will be enough for most readers to at least say it’s a sturdy effort by a competent writer and that their time hasn’t been wasted.  The house in the burbs, despite a few undesirables, has been good to them.