Review of Taflak Lysandra by L. Neil Smith

Ohh, bargain bin, you lottery of surprise and displeasure, how you hold our fate in your hands.  Delight or disappointment just a penny or two away, your risk elevates the shock of surprise and softens the fall of displeasure.  The latter significant, with L. Neil Smith’s 1988 Taflak Lysandra, a bargain book I found for less than a dollar, a softening was needed.  Core sci-fi which makes the simplest of demands on the reader, it is perhaps best appreciated by the YA audience or the juvenile libertarian—if at all.

Taflak Lysandra is the story of one young lady, Lysandra, and her underleaf (yes, under leaf) adventure among the alien Taflak.  Like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon, Lysandra, her coyote father (father’s brain, coyote’s body), an eccentric professor, and a yeti (not what you think) embark on a journey through the leafy core of a planet in their subfolia ship to explore regions unknown.  Adventure, of course, ensues.  Aliens and cabals, fights and battles, and, naturally, the ever-present Sea of Leaves and its mysterious depths.

Review of Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

While there remain differences, I have come to think of Kim Stanley Robinson as the contemporary Arthur C. Clarke.  More diverse in the inclusion of science, writing lengthier novels, and more obviously Californian than British, Robinson nevertheless approaches the problems of humanity with the same optimism, lenience towards Eastern religions, practically and realistically conceived science fiction concepts, and underlying belief science can bring society to a higher plane of existence.  In short, they are very similar in spirit, and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), the third and final book capping Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, is glaring proof.

The conclusion of Fifty Degrees Below, the second book in the series, saw Frank Vanderwaal caught up in a fracas with a black ops intelligence team that had apparently been involved in a plot to alter presidential voting.  The election going off smoothly despite their intentions, Senator Phil Chase was elected and has chosen Diane, Frank’s boss at the National Science Foundation, to head his science group, in turn bringing Frank even closer to the executive level of science in government.  Chase the most open minded politician ever to sit the White House, a whole world of possibility reveals itself to Frank and Diane, who immediately set about investigating big-scale schemes that might mitigate ongoing climate change issues.  Their massive salt operation having changed the jet stream in Fifty Degrees Below, they now look at ways to get the polar ice caps back into good condition and the ocean levels lower such that the radical changes in weather patterns can be brought back within normal ranges and frequencies.  And the need is pressing.  From the depths of a freezing winter, record setting temperatures are predicted for D.C. in the summer.

The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels – ed. by Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois Mammoth Book of Science Fiction series, sometimes falling under different guises, is perhaps the most staid of the ‘best of’ anthologies.  Thirty-one anthologies published as of 2014, each containing in excess of thirty stories, a significant backlog of superlative material has accumulated since 1984.  Thinking to create an all-star cast of stories from that backlog, in 2005 Dozois edited The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction.  With no room for the novellas, a companion volume The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels (aka The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels) was published in 2007, and is the subject of this review.

And the anthology is something resembling the best of the best.  Most of the authors well known (and those that are not are deserving of more attention), the anthology does capture some of the most interesting stories of the past few decades.  Without the pressure of only a year to make a selection, rather decades, the degree to which each story has held a place in Dozois’ mind, and by extension the field’s, allows for cherrypicking.  While I would have compiled a different list than Dozois, I cannot deny that each of the stories picked (save one) are at least worthy of being in such a volume, and represent the field well.  If there is any downside to the anthology, it would be that longtime readers of science fiction in novella form will probably already have read many, if not most of the stories.  But enough gibble gabble, here is the brief breakdown of each.  (FYI—all of the stories, at one time or another, have been reviewed independently on this blog. Therefore it’s possible to click on the link within each synopsis to get more in-depth information.)

Review of The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

The humanitarian atrocities of certain regions in Africa are well-documented.  Warlords piling on top of warlords, all fighting for self-perceived causes or just a moment of megolomaniacal glory, much of the continent’s 20 and 21st century history, with the introduction of western weapons, is bound up in bloodshed of the most appalling, cyclical, anti-humanist variety.  For every beautiful, smiling face a person sees in a tourist brochure or UNICEF ad, there is a child soldier lying dead in a ditch. Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2012 YA novel The Drowned Cities, follow up to the successful Ship Breaker, captures precisely such a violent time in an American future history.  A grim, harrowing account, a teenage girl fights to save a friend who once saved her in a land turned upside down by internecine war and feigned patriotism.

The novel is the story of Mahlia, a half Chinese, half American girl left behind in the drowned cities (a post-flood, tropical version of the Chesapeake Bay area) after the death of her mother and father’s return to China to escape the partisan violence which followed upon America’s fragmentation in the aftermath of environmental disaster.  Caught by a passing warlord, Mahlia’s hand is chopped off.  With her head planned next, a boy named Mouse steps in at the last moment to save her.  The pair escaping the warlord, they eventually find themselves living with and assisting a doctor in a remote jungle village called Banyantown.  Only partially out of the warzone, however, distant guns can be heard throughout the day and soldiers occasionally tramp through.  But when a highly-prized escapee finds himself in their backyard one day, it’s only a matter of time before a whole army comes looking to collect.  Matters drawing to a head in Banyantown as the soldiers carouse and trample what semblance of civilized life remains to the village, Mouse and Mahlia’s have their worlds spun further out of control.

Review of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Growing up poor, no matter America or in Africa, is a difficult task.  Human nature being what it is, a variety of perspectives can be taken of the wealth gap.  The affluent side might be something mysterious and forever unattainable, it can be motivation to work hard and one day find yourself amongst the rich and likewise a lifestyle entirely undesirable, it can be something that becomes owed—like feelings of victim hood, it can be the nexus for crime and other means of obtaining fast wealth, it can be the source of depression and frustration, and it can be accepted as normal; life just goes on, best to be happy with what you have instead of don’t have.  An interesting examination of the haves and have nots, Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2011 YA novel Ship Breaker takes a look at the world through the eyes of a poor teenage boy.  Existing at one of the lowest rungs of society, it’s through a whirlwind adventure that the ultimate value of his life is made apparent.

Ship Breaker is set in a post-oil world warmed drastically by the greenhouse effect.  The polar ice caps have melted and raised sea waters hundreds of feet, inundating the continents.  Humanity pushed back but not defeated, the effect is nevertheless significant.  Whole cities drowned, conglomerates of the destitute have emerged wherever food can be found and valuable materials scavenged.  It is on the coastline of what was once Louisiana that young Nailer is found.  Rooting through abandoned tanker ships, he locates steel, copper, and other metals to earn his quota for the day.  Choking dust and mold filling every breath and the danger of being in tiny, enclosed environments haunting every step, his working conditions are abysmal.  But nothing is as bad as his return home.  Richard Lopez, Nailer’s father, is a drunken drug addict who beats his son for the most trivial of transgressions.  But one day, when a major storm breaks over the beach, their lives change forever.

Review of Gradisil by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts’ debut novel Salt was a story that balanced the meat and potatoes of conceptual science fiction with a political examination of the crossroads between anarchy and authoritarianism.  Later, his eleventh novel (excluding the parodies) New Model Army was the pertinent contrast of a purely democratic militia against a traditional army (an organization that historically has been, and is currently, totalitarianist).  Fitting nicely in the middle of these two is Roberts’ sixth novel Gradisil (2007).  An intriguing exploration of libertarianism, Roberts unpacks the political ideology with his trademark attention to society and the individual, telling the saga of one family’s rise into the highest ‘uplands’ of Earth possible and the turmoil that results.

Gradisil is at heart the story of three generations of one family—an atypical family, but a realistic one for it.  The novel opens with teenage Klara as she helps her father set up home in high orbit around Earth.  Wanting to escape the political trouble brewing between the European Union and the US, the pair are among the first people to fly into the upper atmosphere carrying a large metal tube and filling it with needed supplies: oxygen tanks, communications gear, food, sleeping hammocks, and the like—a truly Spartan freedom, but true freedom, nonetheless.  A tragedy interrupting their zero-g set up, Klara is left to pick up the pieces of life as war breaks out below.  Giving birth to a daughter, Gradisil, the narrative shifts ahead in time to when the Uplands, as the orbiting domiciles are called, have come to represent a political objective to the American government. The homes numbering in the thousands, most of which populated by rich dissidents, the President and his cabinet want to establish American governance and tax the burgeoning populace.  With violence between the land and sky threatening, Gradisil attempts to unite the Uplanders in defense of their “motherland”.  After experiencing catastrophes of her own, it is up Gradisil’s timid son Hope to resolve the political issues that have built around the Uplands, Earth’s most wide open frontier.

Review of Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson is, and mayhaps always will be, the speculative fiction writer who most integrates myth and legend into fantasy and science fiction.  The former relatively easy given myth and legend are typically already half fantasy, the latter is the more difficult given one of the aims of science fiction is believable futuristic extrapolation.  Failing spectacularly with The High Crusade (a novel that sees Medieval knights take a space ship to another planet to fight blue-skinned aliens), his 1970 Tau Zero is a more subtle mix.  While lacking in fully humanized characters, it nevertheless captures the ideal of a mythological journey in hard sf form.

Tau Zero is the story of a group of fifty astronauts on a mission to a distant star system.  The journey planned to take five years subjective time, thirty-three years actual time, the group know they are leaving their loved ones behind for good; the Earth they will return to in sixty-six years will be in differing circumstances.  Their ship, the Leonora Christine, the most sophisticated, technologically advanced space craft ever assembled by humanity, is capable of accelerating the vessel to near light speed with its massive Brussard ramjet.  Blast off going off without a hitch, when the ship flies through a nebula, however, a wrench is thrown in the works.  The gas pedal essentially stuck to the floor, the astronauts must find a way to remove the figurative wrench as they inch closer to light speed and further from the reality they are most familiar with.

Review of Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin

The 1990s are a somewhat intriguing period in the career of Ursula Le Guin.  Publishing only one at the outset (Tehanu in 1990), the decade would end without another novel hitting the shelves.  She was far from idle, however.  Publishing almost fifty short stories and a handful of collections, Le Guin remained hard at work through her seventh decade.  (She is currently in her ninth and still writing.)  With Tehanu as the opening salvo, the vanguard of her efforts in this time was to revise and consolidate her worldview regarding gender, family, society, and sexuality, amongst other common themes.  Putting all these ideas in one pot is her collection Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). 

Four Ways to Forgiveness contains “Betrayals,” “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” and “A Woman's Liberation”—all novellas published separately between 1994 and 1995.  Three told from the perspective of women and one a man, all four involve the neighboring planets of Yeowe and Werel, and are set in Le Guin’s ongoing Hainish series—marginally, as with all the other related stories.  Bound together by a handful of strong threads, slavery, rural life, culture, social revolution, race, gender, and the meaning of sexuality form the ideological foundation upon which the four stories are built.

Review of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

It is both the blessing and curse of the age of information to have laid bare many of life’s little secrets.  We may stop and admire the beauty of a rainbow, but we ruminate less on any mystical significance it might have knowing the scientific principles behind prisms.  The Earth is not flat, and indeed we are a speck of cosmic dust in the larger scheme of things.  Science has turned over the stone of knowledge such that we can see all the little insects of bald fact crawling beneath.  Fewer and fewer are the little mysteries that give life an edge of the perplexing and peculiar—that entities beyond humanity’s knowledge are still at play in the world.  Enter Hope Mirrlees’ 1926 masterpiece Lud-in-the-Mist.  Anything but fairy apologetics (ha!), it sets a little drop of something ethereal dancing on the fingertip of life—including its shadow.

Lud-in-the-Mist is the story of the town of Lud and its jolly, troubled mayor, Nathanial Chanticleer.  Though Lud is situated at the confluence of two rivers, the Dawl, which flows from wholesome English lands, and the Dapple, which flows from Faerie in the West, the people have evolved to the point all talk of fairies and elves is like unto heresy.  Even the slightest mention of anything ethereal is probable cause for scandal.  It’s thus when Mayor Chanticleer’s son admits in public that he ate of fairy fruit, the town goes into uproar.  But when a troupe of young girls at the local primer evince the same, a plague is proclaimed, and it is up to the Mayor to get a handle on the situation.  Fluffy white clouds and thunderheads descending on Lud, the sleepy little English village is never the same.

Review of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is considered by Brian Aldiss to have been the first science fiction novel.  The story of a doctor who assembles a man from human parts and incites in him the spark of life, the resulting story examines the relationship of the the creator and created in fully human terms.  Inherent to the examination is the usage of biology to unnatural ends: human creating human in a laboratory.   Motivated by the uses of natural science in his time, H.G. Wells took this one premise of Shelley’s novel and expanded it into a novel of his own: 1896’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.  Extending into an examination of mankind’s primordial instincts, the resulting story is as intellectually stimulating as it is grippingly macabre, and is a worthy descendant of Frankenstein.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is the story of the doubly unlucky Edward Prendick.  Shipwrecked, the boat which rescues him proves equally, if not more dangerous.  Its decks a filthy squalor and loaded with cages of screeching animals, the drunk captain lumbers about, insulting the crew.  When Prendick dares to talk back, he is stranded again, cast off with the rest of the passengers and animals at a lone tropical island.  Things on the island somehow even stranger than the boat, humans of odd proportions come and go, and the mysterious man who oversees the island, Dr. Moreau, seems even more bizarre.  A major scare during an afternoon’s walk in the jungle sending Prendick running as fast as he can back to the main buildings, his whole world is about to be turned upside down by revelations of the grotesque menagerie of Dr. Moreau.