Review Fireship by Joan Vinge

The scene at the end of the film Ghost in the Shell depicts the main character integrating herself with the global network.  Her personality subsumed, the assumption is that the meeting of the ‘minds’ results in a dilution, an absorption, the individual personality effectively vanishing into the uber-mind of the net. Joan D. Vinge, in her 1979 novella Fireship, takes the idea of combining personalities in a different direction: schizophrenia.

Michael Yarrow is an ordinary man living on Earth, that is, until agreeing to have a jack installed in his lower spine and AI attached that interfaces with his mind.  The AI named ETHANAC 500, the decision results in three personalities: Yarrow, the AI, and a combination of the two, a personality which calls itself Ethan Ring.  Dominance of one over the others dynamic, the man wanders through life in a semi-spastic state as each personality pushes and pulls at control.  Able to maintain the appearance of sanity, Ring commits a crime to escape his situation and lands on Mars to elude the law.  Staying at the luxury casino Khorram Kabir, his singularity is all too quickly discovered.  Threatened with being revealed to the police, Ring is blackmailed into helping a mysterious organization dig into the casinos’ inner workings, particularly its secretive owner.  Putting his personalities to the test, what results is a suspense-filled story that threatens to tear Ring into his three different selves. 

Review of The Chief Designer by Andy Duncan

In the US, the Soviet space program is given short shrift.  Few Americans know the Soviets were in fact the first to put a human into orbit and return him safely to Earth, most aware only of the gleaming smiles and “One small step…” phraseology of Buzz Aldrin and Neal Armstrong.  In writing his 2001 novella The Chief Designer, Andy Duncan aimed to correct this oversight.  Thankfully, it was not his only goal.

Opening with his imprisonment in a Soviet labor camp and ending several decades after the success of the MIR project, The Chief Designer is an abridged and semi-fictionalized biography of Sergei Korolev.  Mastermind of the Soviet space program throughout the Cold War, Duncan artfully moves through the significant moments in the man’s life one window at a time.  From his indirect saving of cosmonauts to his interaction with Kruschev, Brezhnev, and other Soviet prime ministers, his calm demeanor to the influence he had on later generations of engineers, Duncan captures the spirit of the man in a neatly told ‘story’.

Review of Blue Champagne by John Varley

(Please note this review is for the novella Blue Champagne, not the 1986 collection.) 

John Varley’s most endearing quality as a writer is perhaps his humanism.  The author’s stories always keeping an eye to the manner in which various elements, most often technological or biological enhancements, affect people and society, his 1981 Blue Champagne is a great example.  The novella examines disabilities, sexuality, celebrity- and voyeurism, and the manner in which technical advances could affect them all.

Blue Champagne is set in a giant swimming pool in space.  A low-g aquapark for the rich, amongst its inhabitants are a Baywatch-esque crew of lifeguards preying on the famous and beautiful who vacation there.  Drugs and tech galore in the playground of luxury, another favorite activity is the video taping of life—many of the pool’s visitor’s in fact reality tv stars.  One of the main characters is QM.  A golden boy in the pool, he is a lifeguard constantly on the lookout for fast love.  And he finds it in Megan Galloway, a paraplegic with a sidekick.  The sidekick one of the important parts of the story, it is essentially a torso wrap which stimulates the body electrically.  Bach still lacking feeling below the waist, she is nevertheless perfectly mobile.  Also caught up in video taping and analyzing life with a computer, she and QM traverse the paths of love—her computer perhaps capable of capturing that exact magical moment it first blossoms.

Review of Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

I acquired Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake based on strong desire.  Prior to purchasing the 1979 novel, I had spent a long weekend hiking in the sun.  Arriving home and picking up Ben Bova’s The Best of Analog thinking to read a few pages before falling asleep, all too quickly I was caught up in McIntyre’s novelette “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand”.  And when I did read the last word—after midnight, it was with frustration.  The story of Snake so effectively balancing empathy and plot, I wanted desperately to know what happened after the healing in the village.  Where did her journey take her?  Did she ever return from wandering the radiation scarred land?  And ultimately, was she able to replace the one item an ignorant couple had all too easily deprived her of?  Despite its fairy tale elements and big-button morals, Dreamsnake (1978) extends the story to novel length and answers these questions in quality fashion.  

“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” forms the opening chapters of Dreamsnake.  Attending to a boy with a tumor lodged in his stomach, it tells of a night in the life of a healer named Snake.  The tools of her trade non-standard to say the least, the three snakes she keeps in a basket each perform a role in the curative process.  The boy frightened—but not nearly as much as his parents, he submits himself to Snake’s peculiar requests, and endures the pain she asks of him in preparation for the cure.  Preparing this cure an esoteric process, the sacrifices made test everyone involved—perhaps Snake the most.  But when catastrophe strikes while effecting the prepared drug, Snake is left to pick up the pieces and wonder what her future holds.

Review of Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Despite being on multiple bestseller lists, despite winning the Pulitzer prize, and despite being a writer of “literary training, generation, and pretensions”, Michael Chabon is a genre proponent.  (Read the afterword to his 2008 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union for more info.)  Literary fiction aficionados lauding Chabon’s talent—for talent it is, The New York Times Magazine, one of the bastions of American literature which lets speculative fiction play on its margins, contracted the author to write a serialized genre story.  Published over the course of five months, and collected in a single volume in 2007, Gentlemen of the Road is the result.

In the time honored tradition of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric and Moonglum, and all other fantasy adventure pairs, Chabon adds Zelikman and Amram to the mix.  The former a scarecrow-thin physician of Frankish descent who wields a blood-letting lance as a sword and the latter a strong-as-an-ox African who carries a Viking axe into battle, the pair get themselves into one scrum after another as they cheat, cure, assist, and fight their way across the lands of Kazaria (what is today the Caucus region) in one adventure after another.

Review of The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

There may be no greater writer of speculative fiction shorts than Ray Bradbury, and The Illustrated Man is one of his most celebrated collections.  Tied loosely around a framing device more dependent on Something Wicked This Way Comes than anything inherent to the collection, the stories plumb the depth of the human heart and emerge bittersweet.

The collection opens with the narrator traveling the Wisconsin countryside by foot.  His fire a beacon in the night, a man who’s just been kicked out of the circus comes to join him.  Covered in tattoos, the man asks for the narrator’s hospitality before settling into the story of how he came to be unemployed.  A deal with a witch gone wrong, the tattoos he asked for are not what he received: most people who see the metamorphing images end up dead shortly thereafter.  The circumstances dictate his terms of employment are most often of the short variety.  Curling up beside the fire, the man eventually goes to sleep, leaving the narrator to watch the illustrations come to life on his tattooed flesh.

Review of Stone by Adam Roberts

It’s been several days since finishing Adam Robert’s 2002 Stone, and I’m still unsure what to think of the novel.  On one hand, it could be a semi-jumble featuring a few strong ideas wedged inexpertly into a single story.  On the other, it could be something more profound: the strong ideas may prove to be something more in combination, the linkages yet to be made in my brain.  Regardless, the fact I’m still mulling it over means there is something to the book.

Stone is the story Ae, a convicted murderer living in a jailstar.  An epistolary novel, Ae writes journal entries to a stone while living in a prison inside a sun.  ‘Executed’ in the first few pages, he is rendered a mere mortal when all nanotech is removed from his body.  In the universe at large, Ae has the unique distinction of being the only criminal.  Nanotech evolving humanity into a utopian state, Police do not even exist.  People travel from one exotic world to the next, living a dream without fear of disease, ageing, death, and even crime.  It is thus that a special prison has been built to isolate Ae from the rest of society.  Watched over by two jailers, a strange voice comes into Ae’s head one day offering him a deal: if he is helped to escape, will he agree to kill all 60 billion people on a planet to be named later?  Agreeing to the conditions, his jailbreak is made and the story begins.

Review of Coyote by Allen Steele

Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were once the ‘big three’ of science fiction.  Vanguard of the Silver Age, their stories were amongst the most widely read science fiction of the time, and remain popular to this day.  Influential in obvious and unobvious ways, their optimistic vision of technology and mankind in space have carried on.  Written wholly in the spirit of these three men, Allen Steele’s Coyote series is an acknowledged confirmation of the tradition that tells its own tale of planetary adventure.   

The first books in the series is called simply Coyote (2002).  Published (interestingly) in Asimov’s over the course of a year, the book is broken into novella/novelette sized chunks.  Each moving linearly into the next, the stories describe the people of the USS Alabama on their trip from Earth to 47 Ursae Majoris, a moon dubbed Coyote revolving around one of its large planets, and the beginning of their settlement.  Coyote full of tricks, the story is part drama, adventure, and colonization effort, buoyed by Steele’s clean, practiced prose.

Review of Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart

Amongst myself and those I have met in my life in the West, little to none ever received any Asian history lessons.  China a country which is only recently gaining attention, it is largely due to commercial and political interests that knowledge has begun to expand.  Remaining lost to most Westerners is the rich history and culture which have brought China to the place it is today.  Vying with with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures for the earliest recorded word, its literature is also amongst the oldest in the world.  Included in this is a wealth of storytelling—including works of fantasy.  This is not to say the West has been ignorant of the Middle Kingdom, only that such knowledge is passed on by a limited group.  Scholarly research and esoteria the norm in which knowledge of China is propagated, the fictional side has received little treatment.  But that is not what makes Barry Hughart’s 1984 novel Bridge of Birds so remarkable.

Fully integrating Chinese legend into ‘reality’, the sub-title of the novel spells it out: A Novel of an Ancient China that Never Was.  Hughart one of those few who took the time to seek out knowledge on his own, the book exudes both the joy of storytelling, knowledge of the Middle Kingdom, and the desire to say: ‘Hey, look at this treasure trove of fictional delight just waiting on the other side of the Pacific!’.  Never overt, Hughart assimilates street corner myths, novels from the Chinese canon, Chinese culture, as well as bits of Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist philosophy into his first novel, Bridge of Birds.  Having lived in China for four years, I can attest to the veracity of the spirit and wisdom of the land placed on the page.  Part mystery, part adventure, part ‘historical’ fantasy, and all intelligent fun, Bridge of Birds is one of the most unique works of fantasy ever written—in the West.

And, we're back online...

And... Speculiction is back. Argentina and Chile were great, but, like always, I wish we had more time to explore.  One life is not enough to see this world!!

I will go through our photos this week and choose some to post here.  Stay tuned.  (They are beautiful countries.)