Mini-Review Part One

Legends, edited by Robert Silverberg (TOR Fantasy, $27.95)

Heartfire, by Orson Scott Card (TOR Books, $24.95)

Legends never die, but they can fade with time. The mythic power of the legendary worlds glimpsed anew in Legends is likely to earn them a lasting place in the memories of those who thrill to heroic quests, magical adventures and the eternal battle between good and evil.

Edited by Robert Silverberg with helpful maps and illustrations, the robust 715-page anthology offers much more than 11 new short novels by today's masters of fantasy. As Silverberg argues in his perceptive introduction, fantasy is the oldest branch of imaginative literature, dating from the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh (2,500 B.C.) to as far back as Ice Age Europe when ``fur-clad shamans'' recited tales of ``gods and demons, of talismans and spells, of dragons and werewolves, of wondrous lands beyond the horizon.'' By skillfully fitting many wondrous lands into one volume, Legends makes a convincing case that the genre has been revitalized by today's best writers.

Silverberg defines the focus of fantasy as the ``world beyond that of mundane reality,'' and humanity's struggle to assert dominance over that world. Certainly, the anthology's authors have dominated their field by creating an ambitious series of linked epic novels and stories: Anne McCaffrey (Pern), Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), Orson Scott Card (Tales of Alvin Maker), Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time), Tad Williams (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn), Terry Pratchett (Discworld), George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire), Terry Goodkind (The Sword of Truth), Raymond Feist (The Riftwar Saga), Silverberg (Majipoor), and the protean Stephen King (The Dark Tower).

Each writer contributes a new 40- to 80-page novel in their imagined universe. Each tale is introduced with an insightful overview of that world and a summary of previous books. Some tales bridge gaps in the major plot lines; a few take place well before or after those events. The result couldn't be more accessible to the uninitiatedor more engrossing for fans.

The fantasies are varied in tone, from the sense of loss and ominious foreboding in Debt of Bones, Goodkind's tale of a wizard and Mother Confessor's efforts to avert a terrible war, to the satirical reversals and exploding stereotypes in The Sea and Little Fishes, Pratchett's latest Granny Weatherwax fable about an alleged wicked witch.

King builds upon his four Robert-Browning-inspired novels about Roland, last of the gunslingers, in The Little Sisters of Eluria. Set during the first book (The Gunslinger), when Roland is pursuing a black-robed magician, this dark and deft tale focuses on the heroic loner's attempt to escape from ghoulish succubi. King's fans will shudder and be satisfied, although this is more a creepy, bug-infested Western than a typical modern horror story.

Even the seemingly minor works brim with beguiling details. Although the wonder of McCaffrey's telepathic dragons is disappointingly absent from Runner of Pern, the intimate struggles and cozy textures of daily human life provides a taste of McCaffrey's wide, warm appeal. Dragons of a less cuddly sort uneasily share Le Guin's island world of Earthsea with humans, some of whom learn the skills of practicing magic.

Like Le Guin's acclaimed early-1970s Earthsea trilogy and 1992 sequel, Dragonfly ranks as a classic in its exploration of the power of language to define the self. In this beautifully written tale of metamorphosis, a young girl discovers her ``true name'' and undergoes an initiation into adulthood.

Another gem is Card's The Grinning Man, another rollicking tall tale about Alvin Maker's journey through an alternate-history colonial America. Davy Crockett and a chiseling miller receive their just deserts in this whimsical yarn.

Time will tell which of the above authors' sagas will join the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson's collections as enduring fables. Ursula Le Guin and Stephen King can't be counted out, but I'm placing my bets on Orson Scott Card's visionary Tales of Alvin Maker.

Orson Scott Card burst upon the science-fiction scene in the 1980s with two successive Hugo award winners of spectacular scope and uncommon wisdom: Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Yet his late- 1980s fantasy trilogy (Seventh Son, Red Prophet, and Prentice Alvin), about a boy with a "knack," easily tops his first-rate science fiction.

Readers begged Card for years for more stories about Alvin Maker, a journeyman blacksmith in a colonial America where folk magic actually works and the American Revolution never happened. With Alvin Journeyman (1996) and the recently released Heartfire, Card's classic trilogy expands from one man's coming of age to the slow maturation of American civilization itself.

Card, who grew up in Utah, often undergirds his fiction (notably, his five Homecoming novels) with a subtle Mormon metaphysics. Both a humanism and a devout spirituality pervade the Alvin Maker tales, in which some people have the knack of seeing the "heartfire" with in souls, but others deny them.

Like its absorbing predecessors, Heartfire blends history and allegory, fictional and historical charactersincluding the naturalist Audubon, the French novelist Balzac, and statesman John Adamsto dramatize poignantly all of the issues that have divided America, from slavery, racism, and rampant statism to the mistreatment of Indians and the persecution of witches. Heartfire, which can be enjoyed on its own but is best read in sequence, achieves a Biblical intensity with its Cain-and-Abel subplot of Alvin's envious younger brother, its voodoo-enhanced revolt of angry black slaves, and Alvin's ongoing vision of building a shining city out west.

By the fifth novel's hopeful conclusion, Card has set the stage for a new American revolution. Just as J.R.R. Tolkien's landmark trilogy The Lord of the Rings resonated with archetypal British myths, Card's wise and witty Tales resonate with the deepest American themes and highest American ideals of "liberty and justice for all."

Reviewed by Michael Grossberg

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (TOR, $27.95)

Six years ago, Vernor Vinge won the Hugo award for his novel A Fire upon the Deep. A Deepness in the Sky, his first novel since then, is a prequel to A Fire upon the Deep. Many such further works in a series are disappointmentseven perfectly good novels can be disappointing against a sufficiently high standard. But A Deepness in the Sky was not a disappointment; its story is compelling and its ideas are radical and ingenious.

To start with, it displays high technical competence as fiction. The page count and the cast of characters are large, as with many recent books; but in this book, all the major characters, both human and alien, remain sharply distinct and individual. The story is divided into three parts; impressively, nearly all of the third part is a sustained climax, one whose tension remains high for chapter after chapter. Many surprises emerge during this final part, but all of them were properly foreshadowed earlier in the novel; often the crucial events took place in plain sight of the reader.

This is the hardest of hard science fiction. It contains pointers to the space operatic marvels of A Fire upon the Deep, but it is set in the inner parts of the Milky Way Galaxy, where few of those marvels are possible; Vinge's characters occasionally refer to the Failed Dreams of Old Earth's dawn ages, from antigravity to true artificial intelligence. The human societies in this setting have extremely good distributed computer networks, slower-than-light interstellar travel, terraforming, and life extension and have been spreading out through the galaxy for several thousand years. And, tragically, the many human-inhabited planets repeatedly fall from high civilization into barbarism, through crude statism or subtle computational failures. A central government able to prevent this from happening is one of the Failed Dreams, for centralization itself is one of the things that destroy high civilizations.

What preserves civilization is something quite different: a interstellar trading fleet, the Qeng Ho. As its name suggests, this is based on the interurban mercantile networks of the overseas Chinese and other Asian communities; people of white European ancestry are a minority in Vinge's future. The Qeng Ho are an entire society devoted to trade and to maintaining reputation; their worst condemnation is to say that someone does not care about return business. An important part of this story is the collision of the Qeng Ho with a planetary society with very different values, the Emergents.

What brings the two together is the first human contact with an alien civilization at the threshold of high technology, living in a thoroughly exotic solar system whose sun shuts down regularly. Vinge dedicates this novel to Poul Anderson, and it invites comparison with Anderson, but perhaps even more with Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. In fact, on reading it I was struck by how human Vinge's Spiders seemed and how much this reminded me of Clement's Mesklinites, only to discover that Vinge had very carefully accounted for that humanization within the events of the novel itself, an impressively clever idea. 

The two human societies competing to establish relations with the Spiders are equally cleverly portrayedand this is where the story becomes radical. For in the first place, Vinge is contrasting two ethical traditions, one for which trade is inherently a virtue and one for which it is a vice, a crime, or even a sin. And in the second place, he is contrasting two business management styles: the decentralized trade networks of the Qeng Ho and the corporate hierarchy of the Emergents. It can't have been accidental that one of the key posts among the Emergents is titled Director of Human Resources, and that it gives that familiar label profoundly sinister overtones. Like Michael Flynn's In the Country of the Blind, but like too few other libertarian science fiction novels, A Deepness in the Sky points at the subtle authoritarianism that came into American business practices with the adoption of the Prussian general staff model for corporate management, the efficiency engineering of Taylor and the Gilbreths, and the creation of the profession of business administration.

But beyond this, the Qeng Ho offer an alternative vision of a culture founded on business and trade, one conveyed in ingenious jokes, such as the Qeng Ho starship Invisible Hand being taken over by the Emergent head of security, who can't imagine why the Qeng Ho would adopt a name that so perfectly defines his function. This culture is envisioned as one that can carry on trade over time spans longer than the life spans of many human societies, and that finds it good business to enrich every other culture it deals withas, in the real world, market economies have been doing since the Stone Age. Vinge contrives to fit the entire story of the Qeng Ho civilization into this account of one of its crises.

In short, this is a libertarian science fiction novel that succeeds equally brilliantly as a libertarian work, as a work of science fiction, and as a novel. It was better than I hoped for for the past six years. If another book equally deserving of next year's Prometheus Award is published this year, it will have been a year of marvels for us all.

Reviewed by William H. Stoddard

Starfarers, by Poul Anderson (TOR Books, $25.95)

Imagine embarking on an interstellar voyage with the sad knowledge that while you're gone, generations will have died. Imagine leaving with high hopes of alien contact, only to confront the discouraging failure of other star- faring civilizations to flourish. Imagine the final indignity of returning to an Earth that has become an equally alien world, indifferent to the fruits of your quest.

That's the bittersweet premise of Starfarers, Poul Anderson's disquieting blend of brooding romanticism and sobering realism. Anderson is not as renowned as Robert Heinlein or Arthur Clarke, but he ranks high in the pantheon of science fiction's golden-age writers. For almost half a century, he has written compelling novels and stories, rich with adventure, character, appreciation of nature, and love of life. Anderson shares Heinlein's storytelling flair and love of liberty and Clarke's sense of poetic beauty, but his fiction is distinctive for its wintry Scandinavian moods.

Unlike some science fiction writers, who hit their stride early, Anderson just keeps getting better. In Starfarers, as in some of his best previous books (The Boat of a Million Years, Tau Zero), Anderson tells a wistful tale of episodic discovery and future evolution while raising disturbing questions about the long-term prospects for scientific progress, individual freedom, and interstellar exploration.

When astronomers discover evidence of a starfaring civilization 60,000 light years away, ten scientists volunteer to journey there on the starship Envoy. No convenient faster-than-light drive, a la Star Trek or Star Wars, for Anderson: The round trip will take 12,000 years, but only a few years pass on Envoy because of the time-dilation effects near the speed of light. Envoy's multicultural crew bonds into an uneasy extended family, but the tensions and shifting liaisons of a long voyage take their toll, threatening the mission.

Back on Earth and neighboring colonies, despotisms rise, science stagnates, and humanity splinters into genetically altered races. Those few who continue to travel between nearby stars knit into the Kith, a subgroup treated with increasing condescension and prejudice by planet-bound aristocracies.

Suffused with a sense of homesickness and the preciousness of life amid a vast cosmos, Starfarers reflects an older man's awareness of the remorseless march of time. Anderson recognizes that we are all time travelers by the end of our life journeys.

Longtime Anderson fans may miss the bright optimism and wit of his Trader to the Stars series or the recent Fleet of Stars trilogy, but the patient will be well-rewarded with solid science fiction that avoids easy answers and ``warp-drive'' fantasies.

So far-flung are this novel's scattered triumphs and defeats that characterization is not as rich as one expects from Anderson. Many alien and human characters appear too briefly to make much impression, while the starship crew is drawn just deeply enough to support the terrific story. Ironically, the increasingly alien characters reinforce Anderson's theme. By the novel's cautiously optimistic end, readers will join the surviving crew members as strangers in a very strange land.

Reviewed by Michael Grossberg

Revolutionary Language by David Calderwood (White Knight Publishing)

I first approached this novel with a skepticism reserved for works unblessed by an editor's intervention, fearing that yet another author's courage and vanity had exceeded his talent and commonsense. My earliest delight was the discovery that Revolutionary Language is well written. The author sets a brisk initial pace and manages to sustain a level of conflict and action more commonly found in an adventure thriller than in a "book of ideas."

Like all libertarians, I would prefer to live in a libertarian society. Yet we seem so mired in statism that I frequently despair: "How shall we get there from here?" Revolutionary Language illuminates one possible path toward that destination. I finished RL with renewed hope. Revolutionary Language is set in the near future, near enough to "right now" and real enough in premise that some programmer, somewhere, could be implementing the technology even as I write. Best of all, if it is not happening already, some reader of this book may be moved to make it happen!

A freelance programmer, Andy, has been working on a contract to produce customized encryption software for a private firm. Unknown to Andy, the firm intends to use his work to promote an extralegal endeavor. The Feds, unfortunately, are already involved in an attempt to make a case against the firm and they bust Andy, hoping to coerce him into writing a "back door" into his encryption software.

Eventually, Andy does some hard time, loses his girlfriend to the federal agent who caused his imprisonment, becomes embittered and disillusioned, and is released on probation with a clause forbidding him to work with computers.

Reduced to working as a janitor at a university, Andy falls in with a circle of mostly libertarian professors and begins to refine his naive individualism into a fully conscious appreciation of the dangers of the State. He then conceives of a suite of programs that, working in concert, would allow many to take all or most of their work "off the record." The Feds hear of this and begin a covert attempt to locate the author of the software and prevent its release.

Actually, I've mentioned only one of the many interweaving plots in this complex and entertaining work. Without slowing the pace, it manages to bind a considerable amount of libertarian philosophy into the heart of the various conflicts that drive the novel. I can easily pass this book to a nonlibertarian friend confident that, having read it, they will better understand why we think the way we do.

Revolutionary Language is a splendid libertarian read.

Reviewed by Gary F. York

Project Avalon by B. Alexander Howerton (Space Available Press)

Project Avalon, an apparent first novel by Alexander Howerton, is rife with talk about the future and how to fix the present. The key is space colonization. The narrative of the novel packages the central action around a retrospective look from the year 2101 at the founding of a lunar colony one hundred years previous. Young Gary LaFey (and the reader) is about to learn a history lesson about how his great-great-grandfather helped found the Avalon colony on the moon and how the Earth destroyed itself.

Art LaFey, Gary's ancestor one hundred years ago, is a copy editor at a Seattle alternative newspaper, with dreams of setting the world aflame with his nationally syndicated editorials. He is passionate about space exploration and the space program. Humans must get away from putting all their eggs in one basket. When a shuttle explodes during its launch, the cautious bureaucrats shut down the space program, claiming too many human lives are endangered doing something we know little about. Art is enraged and begins to look for ways to get more involved, to do something about his beliefs. He falls in with some young college environmentalists; they attack technology, while he hopes they will see his views that space colonization will help the environment.

Through his actions in the environmentalist group LaFey befriends a rich industrialist, Merle Lindstrom, who is impressed with LaFey's vision and honesty. Linstrom pulls LaFey into an inner circle of working on the Avalon Project. This project seeks to collect the best of humanity in preparation for the colonization of space and in hopes of starting over again. Unfortunately, a few people in the circle have other plans.

Which group will triumph, and what will happen with Earth relations if a group of colonists set up an independent base on the moon?

Project Avalon is a well-intended novel. Art LaFey is an ardent idealist, and he rarely stops pushing his ideas to anyone he comes across. Herein lie the novel's problems, for even though it is a slim book by today's standards, the plot often fall into didactic gravity wells. Howerton gives us insight into how plans for colonization might form and be driven, and we know from the narrative structure that the colonists succeeded, since it is told from the moon one hundred years after the shuttle explosion that sent LaFey into his activism frenzy.

Howerton certainly has the right motivations and intentions, but as a novel Project Avalon stumbles on plot points and prose style. As a guide on how to get into space and why, it's a good read.

Reviewed by Anders Monsen

Sliders: The Classic Episodes by Brad Linaweaver (TV Books, 1998, $14.95)

Back in 1996 when Sliders debuted on Fox, it seemed like a great science fiction concept, ideal for a TV series. It poses the idea of a group of people using new technology which enables them to travel to parallel worlds where slight differences in the outcomes of events change history--either radically or slightly. The technology breaks down, and they lose the tether to their original world. They must then travel constantly to other worlds until they stumble back to their own reality, each episode able to show new worlds, new alternate timelines.

In the worlds they visit JFK might not have died, or Hitler might have succeeded in taking over the world, or the communist revolution might have triumphed, or on a simpler level, your father and mother might never have met, or you might have died young, or you might meet yourself. Allohistory, as alternative history is often called, is now a common theme in science fiction stories. Sliders seemed poised to become just what the field needed, a non-Trek successful TV series able to show that science fiction really dealt with ideas.

Brad Linaweaver is certainly one of the best qualified persons to write this episode guide for Sliders. After all, he wrote Sliders: The Novel, which recounted the two-hour premiere of the show in written form. Linaweaver visited the set, spoke with the show's creator and prime mover, Tracy Torme, and interviewed the main cast. He lives in Hollywood and has worked in several aspects of show business. His knowledge of the show and the business around it shines through the entire guide.

Sliders: The Classic Episodes consists of detailed synopses of the first two and a half seasons, with brief descriptions of the second half of the third season, the last season on Fox. Linaweaver interviews the four main cast members, Sabrina Lloyd, Jerry O'Connell, Cleavant Derricks, and John Rhys-Davies. Two of these were replaced late in the third season, and I agree with Linaweaver that their departures were the show's loss. Rhys-Davies is a powerful actor, in voice and demeanor, and he instantly improves any scene of any movie or TV show in which he is part. Sabrina Lloyd has an elfin charm and the kind of strong female presence Hollywood seems to instinctively hate. I was not surprised to read that she started in theater, where the "scripts" are better.

In addition, there are interviews with Peter Spellos, one of the guest actors, as well as with Tracy Torme and co-creator Robert Weiss. All the interviews were conducted before Lloyd and Rhys-Davies left, and before the show started to suffer and slide downhill. Sliders was cancelled by Fox after the third season, although the Sci-Fi Channel picked it and resumed production, under new management so to speak. There's a certain buoyant innocence in the interviews, where Lloyd talkes about being "on for the duration," and Torme talks happily about his numerous battles with executives constantly urging changes, from the significant to the trivial.

Sliders: The Classic Episodes works on several levels. It is an excellent research guide, listing the writers, directors, and composers for each episode (this isn't Babylon 5 where one person wrote over 80% of the five year series; instead twenty-four writers tackle forty-six episodes, with several repeats but also many one-time writers), as well as supporting cast members. The synopsis of each episode is clear and informative. And opinionated. Linaweaver pulls no punches, reaming at least two of the stories as incoherent, and wistfully pointing out how other episodes could have been much better. Linaweaver slips in humor as often as he can, and in ways only he can; the informal style makes even the shorter plot summaries quite readable.

The best episode guides are the ones where Linaweaver slips in commentary and analysis. He makes the reader, even one who may not have seen specific episodes, visualize how the plots unfold. In others he runs down the plot in snappy sentences. Such narrow descriptions tend to lose the reader because names and plot development zooms along rapidly.

Since many shows have both an A story and a B story, juxtaposing these plots too quickly tends to confuse things. Linaweaver takes pains to make the episode guide entertaining, as well as to show the evolution of the show and the characters. Although he covers only three seasons, we see the growth of Sliders as it struggles with its inital limitations; the first two seasons were set in San Franscisco, and it moved to Los Angeles in the third, leaving room for many Hollywood inside jokes in the interviews. People who live in LA know how to laugh at themselves and especially Tinseltown.

Even if you're not a Sliders fan, this guide is useful and informative as a book about science fiction and the television industry. Too mnay good shows suffer quick deaths (the original Star Trek lasted three seasons), and the creator rarely has full control. If you're a Sliders fan you'll want to buy this book, especially for the interviews, but also for the memories, which Linaweaver, a true fan of the visual media, captures on almost every page.

Reviewed by Anders Monsen

Legacies, by F. Paul Wilson (Forge, 1998, $24.95)

Fifteen years ago in his novel The Tomb F. Paul Wilson gave the world Repairman Jack, perhaps one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction. The years in between witnessed a handful of Repairman Jack stories in various anthologies. F. Paul Wilson's latest novel, Legacies, serves up a main course of Repairman Jack, and satisfies the reader in almost every aspect. In fact, in this reviewer's eyes, it may well be his best novel since Black Wind.

Alicia Clayton, a young doctor running a Center for Children with AIDS, is fighting her legacies. Her father, whom she long since has shut out of her mind and life, inexplicably leaves Alicia his house when he dies in a plane crash. She wants nothing to do with the house, but is less than eager to sell it to her despised half-brother Thomas, who seeks to buy it at any price, despite a noticeable lack of income. To make matters worse, Alicia is up against a vicious gun for hire and former US soldier, Sam Baker, and his money man, Kemel Muhallal, a somewhat out-of-place Saudi Arabian working for a shadowy private group willing to do anything to protect its interests. We learn the motives behind the actions of almost all the characters in tantalizingly slow snippets; still the key to the novel is not the motives, but the characters, and Wilson writes his priorities admirably.

Observing all these events, like a lurker on an Internet newsgroup, is Yoshio, the enigmatic Japanese agent of the Kaze Group, a behind-the-scenes business conglomerate (featured more prominently in Wilson's other 1998 novel, his sf collaboration with Matthew Costello, Masque). And then there is Ronald Clayton, Alicia's scientist father, the man whose legacies draw these threads together, the dead hand holding the puppet strings.

No other person feels as tightly pulled by these strings as Alicia, who fled her home at age eighteen and moved as far away as possible, severed all ties with her family, and is driven to near desperate acts to rid herself of her past, such as hiring Repairman Jack. She had reluctantly taken on Jack's services to retrieve a roomfull of Christmas presents for the children at the shelter. That makes Jack just the sort of person who might actually accomplish the impossible, and it's all slightly outside the law, which suits her needs.

Wilson is superbly adept at sustaining characters, delving into their motivations so that the reader almost understands them, yet not giving it all away. Legacies builds suspense artfully on many levels, and although the roots of the hatred Alicia feels for her father may be transparent to some readers, the main mystery is far from easy. Add to the fun the game of figuring out what new trick Jack will pull from his inventive mind to exact justice for his clients or to stay alive when threatened by thugs and you've got a novel that's a joy to read. I'm particularly happy that Jack is not a sappy humanitarian hero who quails at hurting a fellow being, even someone who tries to hurt him. He is the kind of person who will lay his life on the line for loved ones, yet will not lift a finger to help anyone who has hurt those same loved one.

At the same time, he is not an unemotional robot. Wilson crosses genres with ease, and there are strong scientific backdrops instead of monsters of prophecy as in The Tomb. While Repairman Jack is the bright nova in this book, the other characters are equally well-rounded, even Sam Baker skating along the thin edge of amoral insanity. Is it coincidence, one wonders, that the most psychotic killers are those trained by the government as soldiers? As J. Neil Schulman writers, there is a difference between justified and unjustified violence. The government does not teach this difference; soldiers hear only that you kill when you are told. Repairman Jack's sense of ethics, however, gives him the ability to distinguish such reasons.

In our statist society, the fictional character of Repairman Jack is the ultimate libertarian wet dream. Jack is the Man with No Name, the avenging angel for hire. The various jobs Jacks performs alongside the main task he is given by Alicia illuminate Jack's ethics, as well as his humanity and intelligence. He is a tough guy with a sense of poetic justice, as revealed not only here, in Legacies, but also in the short stories, "A Day in the Life" (Stalkers), "Home Repairs" (Cold Blood), and "The Long Way Home" (Dark at Heart). Some of these are collected in Wilsons latest anthology, The Barrens and Others. In Legacies F. Paul Wilson sums up everything we've come to expect from Repairman Jack, and I highly recommend this novel.

Reviewed by Anders Monsen