[While you're reading this article, why not tune in to KGJ, Radio Galactic Journey, playing all the current hits: pop, rock, soul, folk, jazz, country — it's the utmost…]
by Gideon Marcus
It was only a few years ago that Drs. Watson and Crick discovered DNA, that magical double-helix of protein molecules that are the blueprints for our genetics. Now we know that our biology is coded, like so many punch cards, and that's why people are people, puppies are puppies, amebae are amebae. An embryo with human DNA cannot grow up to be a horse. A bear-coded blastula won't transform in utero into a giraffe.
There is a coding that runs almost as deeply as that in our chromosomes. It derives from the society in which we are raised and the circumstances under which we grew. Thus, a Dixiecrat is not wont to clamor for Civil Rights, and no one in my family is likely to abandon shul for Mass.
Science fiction authors have their own genetic code. While writers can be more flexible than politicians or religionists, they nevertheless tend to remain of a type, composing in a style forged early in their career by the prevailing trends and markets at the time.
As evidence of this, I submit to you two short novels by a pair of authors whose output couldn't be more different despite appearing bound together within the pages of the recent Ace Double, #F-177.
The Star Wasps, by Robert Moore Williams
The world of the 21st Century is a tidy, orderly place. Free will is an illusion. People live for their jobs and medicate for their moods. Commerce and society hum along smoothly under the control of one Erasmus Glock, a shadowy figure whose hold on the strings of power is absolute.
There is a fly in the ointment, however — John Derek is a man who would set society free. With his base on the Moon, a cadre of die-hard loyalists, and his little glass spheres that instill a yearning for freedom, he is poised to lead a revolution.
Unfortunately, the ointment also has a wasp in the form of an invasion of interstellar killers called "the viral." Incorporeal blue creatures, invisible to most humans, have been inadvertently teleported to our planet by the well-meaning scientist, Dr. Cotter. These shimmering aurorae bring death to anyone they touch, and their numbers grow by the day. This plague threatens both the stultifying profiteering of Glock and the freedom-fighting agenda of Derek. Glock and Derek must work together, along with Cotter and Derek's new recruit, Jennie Fargo, to defeat the alien foe.
Robert Moore Williams was first published in the pre-Campbell days of Analog. He has since written more than a hundred stories for a variety of magazines, but his DNA was baked in the Golden Age of science fiction. The future world of The Star Wasps is an archaic, mechanistic one. Society simplistically hinges on the activities of a half-dozen people. There is a Resilient Woman Character whose primary role is to be the Love Interest. After the intriguing set-up, Wasps degenerates into a figurative car chase, with people running around and pulling levers until the enemy is defeated.
Also, Williams writes like he's still getting a penny a word, writing in a redundant manner that only gets worse as the story drags. Gems like:
As Jennie watched, with terror tightening the band around the bottom of her heart, the circle changed and became a ball of tiny dancing blue lights.
Under other circumstances, she would have thought the lights and the changing form and the color were beautiful.
Now she knew they were death.
Was death beautiful? Not to her. She wanted life.
The Coelacanth fish, thought to be long-extinct until a specimen was hauled out of the Indian Ocean in 1938, is what's known as "a living fossil." The Star Wasps is a similar relic from a time long passed. I'd throw it back. Two stars.
Warlord of Kor, by Terry Carr
The flip-side of F-177 is an entirely different matter. Terry Carr is a new writer, as well as a Big Name in the fan community. He is one of a new wave of authors steeped in the more nuanced works of the Digest Era of science fiction that began in 1949.
Kor is set on a dusty world at the edge of Terran settlement, the site of humanity's first encounter with living sentient aliens. The Hirlaji are a dying race of telepathic saurians, their once burgeoning culture reduced to a mere handful of aged specimens due to an unknown catalytic event thousands of years prior.
Lee Rynason is the archaeologist tasked to discover the mystery of this societal sea change. Why did the shift happen so abruptly? Why is Horng, possessor of the Hirlaji's race memory, so reluctant to divulge this secret?
Rynason's efforts are hampered by the ambitions of his superior, Rice Manning. Manning has designs on the governorship of the planet and is willing to scapegoat the Hirlaji as a threat to do so — especially when it appears that the aged reptiles might somehow be related to The Outsiders, a long-vanished alien civilization that left its traces throughout the galaxy.
Sketched in thumbnail, I suppose the plot of Warlord of Kor doesn't sound much better than that of The Star Wasps. The lurid title doesn't help either (Ace loves its lurid titles). But Kor is no pulpy tale. It is the sensitive story of first contact, of discovery, of racial understanding, and of morality — of a piece with Bone's The Lani People and Piper's Little Fuzzy in illustrating the worth and importance of other, different cultures.
Plus, the characters are beautifully drawn with a spare efficiency that Williams would have done well to emulate. In 97 pages, we learn far more about Rynason and Manning, as well as the other pivotal characters — the quietly strong colony quartermaster Mara Stephens, and the cynical heretic Rene Malhomme — than we do about William's characters in 126 pages. It doesn't hurt that Kor has a very satisfying ending.
If there's any drawback to Kor, it's that Rynason and Stephens seem a little slow on the uptake. I was always a step or two ahead of them in solving the mystery, even when they had access to the same clues as the reader. That's a small quibble, though. Warlord of Kor is an excellent, quick read, and it's worth the 40 cent book price all by itself. Four stars.
Speaking of collections of old and new, this month's Galaxy is a collection of stories by veterans and novices alike. Come see how this amalgam of generations fares in the Journey's next article. Stay tuned!
[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo. Your ballot should have arrived by now…]
