Gordy Dickson's newest novel, serialized in the last three Astoundings, has already created a stir in the community. Dorsai! is the tale of Donal Graeme, youngest member of a mercenary family from a planet of mercenaries, who starts at the bottom and works his way into the most senior military post in the Earth sphere. It's definitely designed to appeal to those who like combat, military structures, and politicial intrigue.
Sadly, while I actually enjoy all of those things (after all, I've read the magnificant Caine Mutiny at least four times), I was unable to really get into this book at all. Definitely disappointing Dickson for me.
The universe is promising enough. I like stories set in a small set of worlds clustered around Earth, and Dorsai! does a good job of depicting the sixteen colony worlds within about 25 light years of Earth. There are three main camps, each reflecting the sentiment of their parent worlds: liberal Earth, restrictive Venus, middle-ground Mars. Largely autonomous, the primary export of the colony worlds is specialized humans. Some planets export technicians, others sociologists. The world of the Dorsai breeds the galaxy's best soldiers.
These worlds are in constant warfare, and they rent out the Dorsai to lead their troops. The situation is unstable–political forces are gathering to push a truly free market of people peddling, essentially contract slavery. The ambitious Prince William of Ceta plans to be the informal head of all the human worlds, pulling the strings.
The real problem with Dorsai! is its utter lack of characterization. In this big universe Dickson has painted, there are but a handful of recurring characters. It reminds me of The Count of Monte Cristo, where there are about nine people in all of Paris. None of the characters have any depth, and the story is narrated in a distant, aloof manner. We never really get inside anyone's head, and Graeme is the only viewpoint. Moreover, Graeme's military genius is never really explained. He just goes from victory to victory, continuously rising in rank. The plot is a bare skeleton; the story would probably benefit from being a series of books, if each one could hold a reader's interest, of course.
It's also a very male-heavy universe, which I find implausible for a story set four centuries in the future. All in all, if feels very shallow and brawny. I'm sure it will go down in history as a defining tale in the genre, but it's a bandwagon I'm afraid I can't be bothered to buy a ticket for.
Stay tuned next time for the rest of this month's Astounding! I hope it will be better than the Dorsai!, but I shan't hold my breath.
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Two years ago, the Soviet Union demonstrated the ability to lob an H-bomb across the globe. Overnight, it was clear that anywhere on the planet could be destroyed with just 15 minutes' notice, if that. This year, the United States will base Thor and Jupiter IRBMs in Europe within range of the Soviet Union, and the Russians will feel that same Sword of Damocles. Never mind that America's Strategic Air Command has more bombers now than ever, and one can be fairly certain that the Soviet counterpart is at a historical high, as well.
Civilization could all come crashing down at a moment's notice. It's a reality we've lived with since that first artificial sun blossomed over the desert of New Mexico, but it's never been closer, more tangible.
An atomic holocaust has been the subject of numerous novels and short stories since the late 1940's, but until this year, there had not been a grittily realistic portrayal of a nuclear exchange and the subsequent struggle for survival.
Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon was released just two months ago, and it has already caused a well-deserved stir. It is, quite simply, sublime. With its strong grasp of the technology of the nuclear war machine, its savvy of human interactions in a post-apocalyptic setting, and its unadorned yet somehow gentle depictions of the well-drawn characters, it is a one-sitting page turner.
In brief: Randy Bragg is a dilletante resident of the sleepy resort and fishing town of Fort Repose, Florida. After an abortive flirtation with politics (his defeat attributable to his soft line on segregation), he lives a rather aimless life. His brother, Mark, is a senior intelligence officer at America's missile command center in Cheyenne Mountain. The book opens on December 3, 1959, with the two world Superpowers on the brink of war. Mark warns Randy that war is imminent and sends his family (wife, two children) to live in Fort Repose.
And not a moment too soon. Within six hours of Helen, Ben Franklin, and Peyton's arrival, Florida and the rest of the nation are hit with several bombs, knocking out first communications and then electricity. Within a day, Fort Repose is reduced to a pre-Industrial oasis in a radioactive hell.
Randy quickly becomes the leader of his local group, which includes not just him and his brother's family, but his strong, liberated girlfriend, Elizabeth, her parents, Randy's black gardener and maid, the maid's husband, a young doctor, Dan Gunn, and a retired Admiral, Sam Hazzard. Together, they become the hope of Fort Repose, assuring its shaky survival over the course of the year after the attack.
Pat Frank sets the stage with care and a nail-biting sense of inexorability; the bombs don't fall until page 91, after we have become intimately familiar with most of the book's protagonists. The hurdles that the residents of Fort Repose must overcome are plausible. The solutions are reasonable. The ending is bittersweet, but tinged with a little hope, and perhaps the best that could be expected.
What impresses me the most about this book is its progressive character. There are several strong woman characters (Helen; Elizabeth; Peyton; Randy's ex-girlfriend, Rita; the town telegrapher, Florence; the town librarian, Alice; Missouri, the maid), and the book is a strong indictment of racial prejudice, along with the legal practices stemming therefrom. It is a book about the triumph of human spirit, as exemplified by all of the species' members.
Is that a strong-enough recommendation? Run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstand and get yourself a copy.
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Every so often, I find a piece of fiction so compelling that I hate to give away too much about it for fear of spoiling the experience. Going through my stack of Galaxy novels, the ones I picked up cheaply not too long ago, I came upon The City in the Sea, by Wilson Tucker, published eight years ago in 1951. I had not heard of him before, but a quick polling of my friends determined that not only is he a BNF ("Big Name Fan"), but he is also quite an accomplished science fiction author. Interestingly, he coined the term "space opera."
Sometimes one can judge a book by its cover. In fact, the scene depicted is right from the novel. In short, several thousands of years from now, after an atomic holocaust destroys civilization, and global warming floods the continents, a resurgent matriarchy in England (having reached a Roman level of technology) establishes a colony on the American eastern seaboard. Finding only lackluster specimens of native humanity there, they are surprised when a clearly superior fellow (male, no less) strides purposefully into the colony from beyond the Appalachians. He is mute but compelling, and the colony's Captain accompanies him back across the mountains, along with a company of woman soldiers, in search of the man's settlement.
The ensuing story is told entirely from female viewpoints (alternating between three: the efficient Captain Zee, her wry and charming doctor, Barra, and, briefly, the Captain's adjutant, Donnie). It is suffused with a sense of wonder, the kind you get in a good Pellucidar story, and it is satisfying from beginning to end. City also has that good, timeless quality that will keep it a classic in decades to come.
So read it already! I'm sure you can find a copy somewhere. If you like it, drop me a line. Fair readers, be advised that vital plot elements may be discussed in the correspondence below.
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Sorry for the long delay, folks! It's not for lack of things to talk about, that's for sure.
As you know, I am an avid fan of Galaxy (formerly Galaxy Science Fiction–retitled, perhaps, for those embarrassed to be science fiction buffs). I recently discovered that Galaxy, in addition to publishing a monthly (now bi-monthly) digest, also puts out complete novels in digest format. These are not serials, mind you, but full-length novels.
This month was a little light in the digest department, there only being Astounding and Fantasy & Science Fiction to review, so I went down to a second-hand store and got me a truckload of old Galaxy novels. I, sensibly, began with the earliest one I was able to get my hands on, The Alien, by Raymond F. Jones, published in 1951.
Raymond Jones has been around since the early 40's, and you proably recognize his name from having penned This Island Earth, which was turned into a fairly popular movie. I confess that I don't recall having read anything of his before The Alien, and I don't know if this title has made me hungry for more, though this is not meant to be a disparagement.
This is a surprisingly uninspiring cover for a book that is quite bombastic once you get inside. Written in true Space Opera style, it is a sweeping tale covering millenia and the galaxy, pitting scientist heroes against religious fanatics.
So far so good…
Actually, the set-up is excellent. A few hundred years in the future, automation has given humanity overmuch leisure time. With little to do but argue politics and philosophy, the average lifespan of a government is measured in months, and the people are hungry for a strong leader on whom to latch.
Del Underwood is an archaeologist with no taste for modern Earth. His self-imposed exile takes him to the asteroid belt, where mysterious artifacts of a long-dead race are scattered. Apparently, Jones subscribed to the now outmoded idea that the asteroids are the remains of a planet that once exploded (it turns out that there is not nearly enough mass in the asteroids to make a proper planet, and the orbits don't line up properly to have had a common origin).
The first third of the book is about how Underwood and his team figure out how to gain entry to a seemingly impenetrable vault. I love stories like this–essentially first contact through artifacts.
Once inside the vault, the story gets a bit hackneyed. The team finds the organic remains of a galactic warlord along with instructions on how to revive him. Though Underwood quickly gets cold feet about the affair, the people of Earth, desperate for novelty and a leader, insist on the overlord's resurrection.
After a short gestation, Demarzule is born and immediately takes up the reins of power. This is Underwood's cue to leave Earth in a scout ship with a small crew (including the one female character, the talented surgeon, Illia) in search of the weapon that had been used to destroy Demarzule's planet (now the asteroid belt).
The most likely spot where the weapon might be found is the home planet of the Dragborans, the race that had defeated Demarzule's people. Unfortunately for Underwood, the mighty Terran fleet, now serving Demarzule with fanatic zeal, gets there first and loots the planet of all valuables before putting a torch to its ancient (abandoned) cities. Underwood's team sneaks to the Dragboran planet's moon, where some Dragborans still live, though in an apparently primitive state (how Demarzule's Terrans missed that, I couldn't say.)
Appearances are deceiving, however, as the remnant Dragborans (who look just like people, as does Demarzule), have secret psionic powers that make them quite formidable indeed.
The third part of the book, detailing Underwood's return to Earth to take on Demarzule, aided by the Dragboran power, is pure, overwritten, scientific romance. Which is not to say it's bad. In fact, it was fast and enjoyable reading. The climax is suitably… climactic.
On a side note, I appreciated the "softness" of the science fiction. There is little to date the novel (other than the style, of course), and so it will age reasonably well, I imagine.
So if you spot a copy at your local book shop, or if the thing gets reprinted, and if you like this sort of story, you will not likely regret picking up The Alien.
Next time, some rather scary non-fiction. If you follow the papers, you know the bombshell (literally) that the Air Force dropped on the press last Friday. But I'll save that for the 26th…
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As you know, I am well-acquainted with Mr. Murray Leinster, science fiction writer extraordinaire. His newest novel, The Pirates of Ersatz has just finished its serial run in this month's Astounding, and the nice fellow has given me permission to distribute it freely amongst my readers.
I suppose that depends. As I said a couple of months ago, it's set in the same universe as the Med Series, but with a completely different protagonist.
In brief, young Bron Hoddan is an engineer from a family of pirates. Where Hoddan's from, it's almost respectable, even. But Hoddan wants to make his mark in the clean world and so heads to squeaky-clean Walden… where he runs afoul of the law for trying to improve on paradise with an upgraded power generator.
Fleeing for his life to the crude medieval planet Darth, he then runs afoul of the local aristocracy for… well.. just about everything. Yet, so resourceful is Hoddan that he manages not only to survive but to thrive, getting the best of the petty nobles and winning the admiration of the plucky heroine, Lady Fani.
That's only the first half. How Hoddan turns a ragtag fleet of colony ships into a phoney piracy concern and manages to steal from the rich and somehow make everyone richer, is rollicking adventure.
Now, I don't think this is the best Leinster I've ever read. He likes to write short sentences. His sentences have few words. They can be repetitive. He abuses this trait a little overmuch to my liking. The story is also a bit disjointed (dare I say "episodic"?), particularly in the Darth section.
That said, there is also much to like. I happen to really like the decentralized Med Series universe with its range of interesting, unique planets. The story also makes it quite clear that a strong heroine is far more compelling than a trophy, and it is always clear who is in the driver's seat in the Fani/Hoddan courtship.
Most interestingly, in the course of his travels, Hoddan invents an independent landing device small enough for installation on starships. This is huge as, until this book, ships could only land on planets that had erected mammoth landing grids that projected magnetic tractor beams to guide vessels to the ground. I wonder if we'll see the fall-out of this invention in later stories.
So try it. The price is right, and it will definitely get you from point A to Z with a smile on your face. 3.5 stars out of 5.
See you on the 14th!
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And here we are with Part Two of our journey through Isaac Asimov's latest opus, the anthology Nine Tomorrows! One of my readers made the observation recently that if Asimov has a flavor, it's "light vanilla." It's not outstanding, but neither is it objectionable.
I think that's an astute observation (though I really like vanilla, so perhaps it's not fair to that poor, maligned spice). In any event, I've now finished this collection of Asimov's most recent work and shall resume my full report.
The Gentle Vultures came out in the December 1957 issue of Super-Science Stories, one of the few magazines that came out in the second boom of digests stating 1956. Devoted largely to "monster stories" now, it seems to be hanging in there, surprisingly. In Vultures, Hurrian representatives of a galactic federation have been monitoring our planet for the past 15 years, waiting for the inevitable nuclear apocalypse. I say inevitable because in the universe of Vultures, no race, with the exception of the vegetarian and thus non-competitive Hurrians, has managed to harness atomic energy without using it to destroy or nearly destroy itself.
You can argue with the premise or the basic assumptions if you like. I wouldn't, since the point of the story is that humanity sort of turns these assumptions on their head. So now you've got these Hurrians impatiently waiting and wondering whether or not they should, you know, give things a little push…
Skewing the data to fit a premise, indeed!
All the Troubles of the World also came out in Super-Science. Imagine the crime-stopping precogs of Dick's Minority Report are actually a big computer. Now imagine that this computer is sick of predicting crimes (and sicknesses and other species malaises). Now imagine that this is an amazing, groundbreaking story.
Two out of three ain't bad.
Spell my name with an 'S' came out in Star Science Fiction (I've never head of them either). This one came so close to being good as a satire of confirmation bias leading to self-fulfilling prophecy, but the end is a typical and uninspired gotcha. I do enjoy when Asimov writes close to home, culturally, however. He's a lanzmann after all.
I may get flak for this next one. The Last Question is one of Isaac's favorite stories, and my wife liked it a lot when it came out in a 1956 Science Fiction Quarterly. It is a trillion-year history of humanity, the computer that people built, and the universe. The story ends with the universe's heat-death and rebirth. While I admire the scope, the ending doesn't make a lot of sense for several reasons, which I won't detail here for fear of spoiling it, but about which I'd be happy to discuss over coffee and/or beer.
And now for something quite different. I read The Ugly Little Boy when it came out as Lastborn in Galaxy last year. This one may be the best thing Asimov has ever written, and it's a fine swansong to leave on if he's going to wear his non-fiction hat full time. The ugly boy is actually a Neanderthal child plucked from the Pleistocene and held (for sound scientific reasons) as a prisoner in a lab. His only friend is the protagonist, a woman doctor, who essentially adopts him. It's a lovely, touching story whose only fault is that it is too short. Isaac, I didn't know you had it in ye.
So there you have it. Asimov completists should pick up this representative sample of what may someday be known as his "Late Fiction Era." Who knows–maybe if he goes back to fiction in twenty years or so, he'll have learned how to end a story properly.
3.5 out of 5 stars.
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For twenty years, Isaac Asimov (spelled with an "s") has been a name synonymous with science fiction. Quite recently, Asimov has been making a name for himself as a science fact writer a la Willy Ley. It's a natural transition, I think, so long as you can swing it. Thus far, I've preferred Asimov's defunct column in Astounding to the one he does for Fantasy & Science Fiction, but that doesn't mean the latter one is at all bad.
But today, I'm going to focus on Asimov the science fiction writer. I've a confession to make: I recognize that Asimov is one of the field's major icons, but I've always found his work, well… workmanlike. Unlike Dick or Sturgeon or Sheckley, there's not much flavor to his stuff, and the writing and concepts are still rooted in the Golden Age of Campbell. I have a suspicion that his stuff will date poorly.
Why do I pick this particular moment to faintly praise my colleague in age, ethnicity and interests? Nine Tomorrows, an anthology of recent Asimov fiction was just published, and I thought you'd like to know what I think. I'll cover the first half today.
Being an avid digest reader, several of the stories were already familiar to me. To wit, I read the lead novella Profession in Astounding back in June of '57. In the story, it's the far future. Humanity has spread across the stars, and the demand for specialized knowledge is so acute that people now have a college degree imprinted in their brains at age 18. Yes, it's another "everyone does the job they are best suited for, and the one who can't be programmed ends up running the game." I liked it better the second time around, but it is hard for me to swallow that there can be sufficient innovation at the hands of so very few innovators. I am not surprised to hear (through the grapevine) that this was a Galaxy reject before Campbell took it.
The Feeling of Power came out in IF about a year ago, and it covers similar ground. In a world where all mathematical computations are done by computer, manual/mental arithmetic is seen not only as wasteful but impossible! It'd be good satire if Asimov meant it as such, but I don't think it is. Interestingly, Asimov posits that computers will have a minimum effective size and, as such, missile guidance will always be limited to a subhuman level of accuracy and responsiveness. In Power, it is concluded that the best use of the rediscovered human computation ability would be to employ humans as pilots for spacecraft and missiles.
It is such a strange point for the author to assert as even he concedes in other stories that computer logic components, if not computers as a whole, are trending toward the smaller. From mechanical switches to vacuum tubes to transistors. I don't know what's next, but I suspect it's not far off. Oh well.
If you like Asimov's scientifically inspired mysteries, you might enjoy The Dying Night. It's a straight whodunnit with the key to the puzzle being the environment in which the murderer has lived. Not bad. Apparently, it came out in one of the F&SF issues I missed before I started reading them regularly (July 1956).
Finally, for today, is I'm in Marsport without Hilda, which came out in Venture in the November 1957 issue (after Robert Silverberg made me stop reading it with his vile tale, Eve and the Twenty-three Adams–it's right up there with Queen Bee). It has the potential to be painful, but it degenerates (evolves?) into another decent whodunnit with a slightly dirty, somewhat silly solution.
I note and applaud that Asimov makes a conscious effort to include an international cast of characters in his stories. If only he'd recognize that women are people too…
So, thus far, a solid 3, maybe 3.5 stars out of 5. Not at all bad, but not the work I'd ascribe to a master, either.
See you on the 28th!
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So here I am on a DC-7C turbo-prop headed for the emerald isle of Kaua'i. A full week of lying out on the beach with nothing but my family, my typewriter, and a large backlog of books and magazines. I had intended to write, today, about the rest of the February 1959 Fantasy and Science Fiction. Unfortunately, due to a S.N.A.F.U. in bag-packing, that magazine was unavailable to me for the flight out.
But every cloud has a silver lining. As it turned out, I had packed a random A.E. Van Vogt novel called The Mixed Men. It was published some seven years ago, and the original stories from which it was compiled were published during the War. I finished the short novel in just a few hours, and, as the flight takes nearly half a day, I found myself with time to write this article and flash it to my editor. On time for the evening edition, no less!
The book is very very good.
I read a lot of science fiction, and precious few authors write advanced technology and settings in a way that is not destined to become dated in short order. There is an art to boldly plotting the future while keeping the descriptions of the advanced components of technology non-specific. Van Vogt, of course, is well-regarded for a reason. A spiritual descendant of Doc Smith, his space opera is both sweeping and plausible.
In The Mixed Men, it is some tens of thousands of years in the future, and humanity has colonized the entire Milky Way galaxy. The Imperial Battleship Star Cluster has been dispatched to the Greater Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy of ours) on a ten-year mapping mission. The vessel is enormous, fully a mile long and crewed by 30,000 men and women.
Significantly and refreshingly, its skipper is a woman, the viewpoint character Lady Gloria Laurr. More refreshingly, she is brilliant and capable (gasp!)
The story: at the tail-end of the Star Cluster's assignment, the ship finds incontrovertible evidence of a human presence spanning the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Complicating the matter is the revelation that the Magellanic peoples are actually mutant refugees (and their non-mutant allies) from Earth. The mutants possess superhuman intelligence and strength, but at the cost of their creativity. The “robots,” as they were pejoratively labelled, were reviled by “normal” humanity and became the victims of a genocidal war prosecuted against them some 15,000 years prior. They were forced to flee our galaxy to the Magellanic Cloud, where they have now lived for millennia on 50 hidden worlds.
With the discovery of this renegade branch of humanity, Lady Gloria orders the ship to undertake a new mission: the incorporation of the 50 worlds into the Terran Empire—by force, if necessary. Her aim is not subjugation for its own sake. The Imperial policy is one of freedom and democracy for all, but no independent states are allowed to exist for fear that an external force might pose a threat to the Empire.
Lady Gloria's decision predictably leads to an all-out conflict with the Magellanic state, which also has a protagonist in the person of Peter Maitland. Ostensibly an astrogator on a Magellanic warship, Maitland is actually the hereditary leader of the “Mixed Men,” offspring of the mutants and non-mutants. These Mixed Men have double-brains conferring to them the brilliance and toughness of the mutants as well as the creativity of normal humans. Moreover, Mixed Men have the ability to exert psychic domination upon others making them quite formidable indeed.
Just as the mutants were mistrusted and shunned by Earth, so are the Mixed Men discriminated against by the Magellanic Government. Thus, the Mixed Men are forced to constitute a hidden state within the 50 worlds.
Confused yet? And that's just the set-up! Yet the story flows quite naturally and with a strong personal connection. There are wheels within wheels, machination after machination, and best of all, intelligent decisions made all around from beginning to end. If I have any quibble at all, it is that the second half flags slightly after the brilliance of the first half; Van Vogt was not quite able to completely caulk over the seams of the three stories that make up the book. I also felt a little uneasy at the mind-control exerted not just by Maitland, but by Lady Gloria (the latter using machinery where Maitland needs only his mind). But only a little: Van Vogt sensitively restrains himself from portraying mind-rape, for which I am grateful.
In short, The Mixed Men is science fiction that is at once of the widest and narrowest scope. Whole galaxies are involved, yet the players are few and well-drawn. I heartily recommend it. Interestingly, going back over my old Astoundings, I see P. Schuyler Miller didn't like it much, and he felt the protagonist “wasn't very convincing.” I wonder which protagonist he's talking about. I liked 'em both. I know, too, that Van Vogt has been attacked for reworking his short stories into “fix-up” novels, but I think it worked pretty well with this one.
Stay tuned day-after-tomorrow for another article and photos from Nawiliwili Bay!
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According to the Federation of Atomic Scientists, we have been teetering at the brink of nuclear destruction since the Soviets detonated their first H-Bomb. Now that both East and West have demonstrated the ability to launch, without warning and without possibility of resistance, H-bomb-carrying missiles from one hemisphere to the other, I will not be surprised if the FAS ticks the clock one minute closer to midnight.
It is thus no surprise that post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre coming into full flower. On the Beach, a pessimistic look at the aftermath set in Australia, came out in 1957, and it was a strong seller.
One of last year's crop was Horace Coon's 43,000 Years After, which tells the tale of an alien archaeological expedition to Earth 43,000 years after humanity has exterminated itself and all vertebrate land life by nuclear hellfire. Coon is not, by trade, a science fiction author. He writes social how-to books and satirical social commentary. It's actually a good background for someone writing a book of this type.
The best satire holds a mirror to its subject to point up its absurdities. Coon does this in 43,000 by letting humanity's writings and edifices, most made for public consumption rather than posterity, be our race's only method of communicating with the archaeologists, humanity having rendered itself otherwise quite mute.
And what did we leave behind? Most of our cities have been smashed, and the remains have not aged well over 43 millennia. It is clear to the future observers that we did have large transportation networks, that we did have knowledge of the H-bomb, and that such weapons were employed universally (though the aliens are somehow able to deduce which had been fired by the West and which by the East). Some statues survive, and the aliens are aided by a limited sense of telepathy that enables to them to puzzle out mysteries that might otherwise be unsolvable (the last is a hand-wave, but scientific rigor is not the point of the book).
The real breakthrough comes when the expedition finds a time capsule buried in 1938 in conjunction with the World Expo. The capsule provides a wealth of written and physical detail, particularly the Almanac and Sears Roebuck Catalogs. The expedition also finds scattered records on stone and surviving microfilm, but they (conveniently) end in the 1950s, ten years before the determined date of the holocaust.
The findings of the archaeologists are conveyed through the personal musings of each of the three expedition directors: dogmatic and dictatorial Zolgus, thoughtful and scientific Yundi, philosophical and emotional Xia. Each is heavily influenced by his/her prejudices. Zolgus, for instance, cannot help but denigrate humanity for its failings: employing agriculture, failing to fix the planet's axis, not embracing a world dictatorship, eschewing renewable energy sources. Zolgus acknowledges briefly that his own race had its savage time, but he refuses to pardon Earth's growing pains, describing us universally as "stupid." Unfair? Perhaps, but an attitude that the richer nations of Earth frequently adopt toward the more "backward" nations of the world. Or by the rich toward the poor (i.e. "I got mine; why ain't you got yours yet?")
Yundi is more respectful, but relying solely on empirical data, he has the most trouble understanding humanity's self-destructive urges. Xia is willing to be charitable. She unabashedly falls in love with the Earth and its erstwhile inhabitants. She recognizes and forgives our self-destructive urges, only lamenting that they came to such an unhappy fruition.
We do not learn much about the aliens except that which can be gleaned from their own reflections–they must be roughly humanoid, but they have no teeth and six digits on each appendage. They do not crowd all of their sensory organs into their head. They have a Communist-style dictatorship and vast technologies and access to energy. They do not self-perpetuate or have families, but rather artificially grow their young so as to completely liberate both sexes. Coming to Earth reinforces the wisdom of these practices for Zolgus, but creates doubts regarding them in the other two, especially Xia.
Ultimately, the questions the expedition asks are "why did humanity kill itself, and was it inevitable?" In answering these questions, Coon tells the readers (through his characters) how to possibly avert the potential tragedy. Coon also creates a secondary cautionary tale in the form of Zolgus, depicting in a negative light the phenomenon of technological dehumanization.
Of course, such a book runs the risk of being a colossal bore of philosophical posturing. In fact, the book is rather short (just 143 pages), and quite well written. The characters, while probably not alien enough, are engaging, and each have their own well-developed tone. As a story, the plot could have been served better with more focus on the archaeological sleuthing; the archaeologists come to their conclusions a bit too quickly. But, again, that's not really the point.
So give the book a read. You may or may not come away with any profound shifts in your thinking, but you won't have wasted the few hours it takes to complete the novel.
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Are we alone in the universe? That's a question that has been asked with greater frequency and intensity recently, corresponding with Humanity's first faltering steps into outer space. Are we about to enter an interstellar community?
If you ask me, the answer is “no.” The time scales involved are just too immense. Allow me to explain. Let's be optimistic and assume that most stars have solar systems like ours around them. Let's be more optimistic (starry-eyed?) and assume that a good portion of these solar systems possess Earth-like planets that can support life. There are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy—perhaps as many as 300 billion. Surely, around some of these stars, intelligent life must have evolved.
I don't dispute any of the above, actually. I think life is a fair inevitability given the right original conditions, and once you have a creature that is multi-cellular, eats other creatures, and is mobile, you have a creature that would benefit from some kind of brain. Once the brain gets started, it seems likely that it would continue to grow in the creature's descendants as intelligence is generally a useful trait.
Here's the problem: Homo Sapiens, if we are being charitable, has been a species for about a million years. We have been a civilized society (again, charitably) for 6,000 years. Industrialization began 200 years ago, and space travel is exactly one year old. At this rate, we'll have a window of a few hundred or maybe even a thousand years during which we will be spacefaring and recognizably human, whereupon we will “graduate” to whatever the next step is. Or we'll blow up the Earth when the Federation of Atomic Scientists' clock strikes Midnight.
That few thousand years compared to the entire history of the universe is a razor thin slice. It's the width of a penny atop the Empire State Building. Sure, there are probably intelligent aliens out there, but odds are extremely high that they are either behind us, and therefore limited to their planet, or beyond us, and therefore uninterested. Humanoid aliens with technological levels similar to ours make decent fiction, but they might as well be fantasy, not science fiction.
If we ever do meet an alien civilization, it is bound to be unrecognizably alien and bewilderingly beyond our comprehension technologically. Not many authors have tackled the subject, but some stories do exist. Clarke's Childhood's End is perhaps the archetypical example. Much of that book is devoted just to the effects this contact would have on humanity: the humbling, the shaming, the frustration, and the technological/sociological benefit.
Another example, and the catalyst for this article, is William Tenn's Firewater. This story actually came out six years ago in Astounding (where I missed it), but it was recently reprinted in a Tenn anthology called Time in Advance. Tenn is a good writer; I have come to look forward to his stuff, and the anthology is worth picking up.
In Childhood's End, the aliens at least had the decency to talk to us. In Tenn's story, they appear simply as jiggling dots in ethereal brown or umber bottles floating above our cities. They hang in the sky, watching us, intentions unknown. If we attack them, with rocks or missiles, it has no effect. Worse, it sometimes invites retaliation—the destruction of the weapon and/or the weapon's user.
Yet, there are some people who can communicate with them. These are the Primes—people who have lost their sanity trying to conform to the aliens' thought patterns. In doing so, they have acquired the ability to do tremendous psionic feats, but they are also quite mad. The Primes live on reservations camped out next to a congregation of aliens in Arizona.
The Primes have figured out a number of technological and sociological advances, though they do not apply them. It is a kind of game to them. Moreover, because dealing with the Primes can be so dangerous, due to their instability and contagious insanity, dealing with them is highly illegal.
One person, Algernon Hebster, is willing to take that risk. A highly successful businessman, he has perfected the art of trading with the Primes, exchanging various artistic gimcracks for new technologies: washless dishes, better televisions, finer clothing, etc. But his situation is becoming increasingly untenable. The United Humanity government is hot on his trail with an investigation into his illegal activities and the atavistic Humanity First movement is plotting a revolution with Hebster as Enemy No. 1.
I particularly liked Hebster's (admittedly over-simple) analogy for the situation. He likens Earth's contact with a vastly more-technologically advanced civilization to the (devastating) meeting of the American Indians and the Europeans. The native Americans generally responded in one of two ways: they either resisted the Europeans, futilely (as Humanity First wishes to do in the story), or they were subjugated, accepting the European firewater and becoming worn-out shadows of themselves.
There was a third kind of Indian, however (in Hebster's analogy). This one didn't fight the Europeans nor had any interest in firewater. What was exciting to this Indian was the bottle in which the firewater came. This artifact represented a product of a technology far beyond what was possible for the natives, and it was something that could be traded for, if one were canny enough to develop goods that the Europeans wanted. Hebster notes that after a wretched period of adjustment, the American Indian cultures adapted to the new situation and managed even to profit from it. Perhaps humanity as a whole could do the same, if a good that the aliens wanted could be found and developed.
How Hebster deals with this crisis and ultimately is the lynchpin to establishing real contact with the aliens, makes for an excellent 50 pages of reading. It is an ambitious story, and one of the few attempts to posit a truly alien species and the likely effects the meeting with such a race would have on humanity.
Find it. Read it. Let me know what you think.
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