The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

The term “space opera,” as David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer explain in the introduction to their new anthology, The Space Opera Renaissance, has a long, tangled history. It was originally used as an insult, to describe the bad space pot boilers published in the lesser magazines, not the space stories that were liked by many people, such as those by E.E. Smith or Jack Williamson (works that most of us today would point two as the early classics of space opera). During the 1960, the writers of the new wave both used the term a bit more widely as they tried to put an end to that type of SF. But the form survived. Space adventure – and really, space opera is a type of space adventure – remained popular, and in fact is often the core of the genre. Moreover, as the 1980s and 1990s progressed, space opera expanded and it became an area where literary ambitious writers such as Iain Banks would write. As Hartwell and Cramer say in the introduction, “What is centrally important is that this permits a writer to embark on a science fiction project that is ambitious in both commercial and literary forms.”

The Space Opera Renaissance explores the history of space opera as we now define it. It includes stories from the 1930s (under the heading “Redefined Writers”; that is, the stories weren’t necessarily considered space opera at the time, but are now looked upon that way) though the space opera of today. It’s over 900 pages long and contains 32 stories, several of them quite long. A few may push your personal definition of space opera, but all help lay out the boundaries of the sub-genre. Most of the major writers of space opera are included; those that aren’t are because their space opera efforts have been novels, not shorter works (Vernor Vinge is a good example here).

The first group of stories, “Redefined Writers,” are by Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Leigh Brackett, and Clive Jackson (the latter’s story is an amusing send-up of space adventure stories). Hamilton’s “The Star Stealers” is the only story in the collection that I thought was sub-par. It’s a rather stilted story about aliens who are approaching our galaxy to steal our sun and how the human race fights them off. It does help to define the genre, and Hamilton was an important early writer, but it’s not that good of a story. Williamson’s “The Prince of Space,” while also very dated, is much more readable. It’s not one of Williamson’s best, but it’s an enjoyable story.

Brackett’s “Enchantress of Venus” is the real gem of the early group. It’s a type of story that I usually didn’t consider space opera. It’s a planetary adventure story, along the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars stories. But this type of story does fit some definitions of “space opera.” As the editors note, the categories of “space opera” and “science fantasy” have sometimes in their history been distinct, at other times merged. But, whoever you look at it, this is a great example of this type of story. Brackett is a good writer; her Erik John Stark stories, of which this is one, are colorful adventures set in a solar system where Venus is a world of swamps, Mars one of deserts, and so forth. They combine romantic adventure (“romantic” in this case in the broad sense of the word, not the narrower sense it’s often used in today) with fantastic settings. One way to picture these stories is they are what Burroughs might have produced if he could write much better than he did. This story, set beneath a gaseous ocean of Venus where an ancient race rules, is one I hadn’t read before. It’s great fun, and, like so many stories in the book, makes me want to go out and read or re-read other works by the authors.

The section “Draftees,” though it’s actually labeled “Draftees (1960s),” contains three stories from the 1950s and 1960s, by authors that are now pointed to as some of the early starting points of the space opera revival. All three are very good. Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon” is typical Smith, colorful, well written, and very strange. Humans travel between the stars, but they have found that something lives in subspace, something they picture as “dragons,” that can destroy ships that venture away from the light of stars (which keeps the dragons away). Humans can’t fight the dragons alone, so they partner telepathically with cats, who have much faster reflexes, and who see the subspace creatures as “rats.”

Samuel Delany befuddled a number of the new wave proponents. In many ways, he was doing exactly what they were advocating. He was literarily ambitious, he used new and fresh techniques, his prose was multilayered. But he used these techniques to produce several space opera, which they disliked. In fact, Delany, more than perhaps anyone else, helped launch the literary space opera in the 1960s. His novel Nova is perhaps the famous example of this, but his short novel “Empire Star,” included in this collection, is another fine choice. What can be more central to space opera than a young man with a mission to travel across the galaxy to help free a race of slaves. It has a number of interesting twists and turns, and from a plot perspective is classic space opera. But it’s narrative style is new, incorporating several modernist (or, really, post-modernist) techniques along the way to address the readers. It’s also structured into a nice package, where Delany cleverly ties up the various loose ends by story’s end. It remains a great read, and is most reminiscent of Alfred Bester’s great novels.

From here we move into the beginnings of the real modern renaissance of space opera, with such writes as David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and of course Iain Banks. Brin’s story is set in his Uplift universe, and it can be compared to Stephen Baxter’s “The Great Game” later in the volume to illuminate some of the key differences between much of American space opera and much British space opera: this is especially telling because Brin and Baxter are far less overtly political than many of their counterparts such as David Webber, Ian Banks, or Ken MacLeod. Both Brin and Baxter set their stories in a future universe where there are massive problems and wars (in fact, it would be far more comfortable to live in Banks’s Culture than in Brin’s Uplift universe). But, Brin has a very upbeat view of humanity. The whole premise of the Uplift universe is that humans uplifted dolphins and chimps and made them partners in their expansion into the universe – unlike very other major culture in the galaxy that uplifts races, then makes them subservient clients for many centuries thereafter. In “Temptation,” the situation looks bleak for the dolphins (and for the human/dolphin/chimp civilization in general, since they are at war), but the underlying feeling is that the dolphins are by and large basically decent and will do the right thing (and, in the larger universe, that the humans are by and large decent and will do the right thing, having outgrown a number of their problems). Baxter’s story, by contrast, is set in his Xelee universe. There is a short-term optimism, in that humanity has overcome major scientific and technical challenges, has overcome several alien subjugation, and in the end continues to move out into the universe, becoming one of the two major civilizations in the galaxy. But here, humans are jealous of the Xelee, who are technologically superior yet ignore the humans. Humanity views the Xelee as a force they must someday overcome. In “The Great Game,” the humans position themselves to go to war against the Xeelee. The story ends at the start of the war, but those who have read the rest of Baxter’s future history know the final result: humanity unknowingly distracts the Xeelee enough that they are unable to save the universe. Thus, mankind’s envy and desire to rule eventually brings about the end of the universe for life as we know it.

Dan Simmons isn’t optimistic in the same way that Brin is (in fact, Simmons can often be quite dark), but “Orphans of the Helix” presents us with a group of future humans who act with basic dignity and morality in the midst of what can best be described as a classic space opera situation. A space ship carrying a large group of humans in hibernation drops out of supralight speed when the AIs controlling the ship pick up a distress beacon. They find a civilization built on a star-girdling tree that’s being savages by a berserker-like machine that, comet-like, returns at long intervals and wreaks havoc on the civilization. It comes from around a nearby giant star (this is a double-star system), and the assumption is that it must be a left-over war machine, since that star has no inhabitable planets. The starship could destroy it, but they face an issue: what if that machine is still serving a purpose and their choice would actually result in genocide. So they commit to investigation before destruction. Although Simmons has received a lot of attention for his novels, he is also a great short story writer, and this is a very good one.

The characters of Peter Hamilton’s “Escape Route” likewise encounter an alien artifact: in this case, the remains of a large space ship. The human ship that encounters it is supposedly on a prospecting mission, though in actually those who hired it are terrorists secretly looking for uranium to create a dirty bomb. The lead terrorist is at first unwilling to explore the ship, though his second comes to realize that what they find in that ship will change everything and that the economic chaos that will follow won’t be a good time to be an independent society that gained it’s independence by terrorism. Hamilton, like Simmons, is most known for his novels – in Hamilton’s case, for very, very long novels – but his short fiction is some of his best work. This is a good example of it.

Donald Kingsbury’s “The Survivor” is set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe, during the Man/Kzin wars. It’s lead character is a cowardly kzin (cowardly by kzin standards, in any case), who eventually becomes the trainer of the alien slaves that the kzin had originally overthrown to become a space going power. These aliens – The Jotoki, who have five separate brains that form a group consciousness of sorts-- are a marvelous alien construct. The lead character – who the Jotoki call “Mellow Yellow” – is far more humane to them than the typical kzin, even becoming friendly with them. Kingsbury uses this to draw the reader in, to have the reader sympathize with and even begin to like “Mellow Yellow.” This increases the impact of the final part of the story, making it even more unsetting, as “Mellow Yellow” is given control over a group of captured humans, who experiments with, trying to make them more docile. This is a remarkable examination of the psychology of two alien species – one, the kzin, who we think we can understand because they are “big cats” but whom we ultimately don’t. It’s also proof that there are times when someone can write a great story set in someone else’s universe.

Gregory Benford’s “A Worm in the Well” is a fine hard SF story, but it’s one that I’m not sure of why it’s here. It’s a hard SF problem solving story, in which a young woman has to retrieve a worm hole from the sun to pay off her debts. It focuses on how she solves the problem. In the introduction to the story, Hartwell and Cramer talk about it “knowingly playing with the adventure traditions of space piracy,” but I don’t see that. But it was a good story, so can’t really complain much about its inclusion.

The final section of the book, “Next Wave,” covers the most recent space opera. In their introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s “Spirey and the Queen,” Hartwell and Cramer say, “It has some of the space-war sizzle and true weirdness that we see as a primary appeal of late-model space opera.” Weirdness – in many cases, a post-singularity sort of weirdness, in other cases (such as in Stephen Baxter’s stories), a mixture of the truly alien and cutting-edge physics (a good recent quantum physics book can be as weird as much of the strangest space opera) – is a big part of much, though not all, modern space opera. This weirdness isn’t new – it can be found in the works of Alfred Bester, Cordwainer Smith, and Bruce Sterling (Sterling’s Schismatrix were important developments along the road to modern space opera, and I’m surprised the current volume didn’t include one.)

Reynold’s “Spirey and the Queen” is certainly strange. It involves a war in a system where planets have not yet formed. The war is fought mostly by artificial constructs called “wasps,” and what humans there are have been genetically modified (some have tails like fish instead of legs, for example). The weapons of war include not only massive kinetic and energy weapons, but cyber weapons that can affect the enemy’s psyche. The story involves one ship’s attempt to capture and destroy a ship of traitors, and what they uncover to be the truth. It’s fast past and full of page after page of fascinating alieness. Reynolds has produced several of the best space opera novels of the new century, but he has also produced a number of good short stories, including this one.

Charlie Stross’s space operas have mostly been of novel length – Iron Sunrise and Singularity Sky. “Bear Trap” appears to fit into the universe of those novels (I say “seems” because there seem to be some ideas in common – the Festival, for example, but I’d have to go back to the two novels to see if truly ties in, or if these are ideas that Stross later re-used in different ways. In some ways, this story reminds me of some of the Accelerando stories: there is the same breathtaking future shock one experiences in those, the same way in which the worlds of humans and data are thoroughly intertwined. The story itself – beyond the background details – is entertaining enough, but rather minor. This is a story to read for the details. It’s a lot of fun, though not up to Stross’s later work.

This is a great collection, and a worthy successor to The Hard Science Fiction Renaissance. Highly recommended.

[Reviewer’s confession: This volume is over 900 pages long and contains 32 stories. It’s also very heavy, so my usual way of reading it is to read a story or two or three (depending upon length), then read a (literally) lighter book, then come back to this one. At this point, I actually still have about another five stories to read (I’ve been skipping about a bit) and have been writing this review as I go along. But, since we have company tomorrow night, followed by a convention (Confluence, our local convention), followed by more houseguests for much of the next week or so (with only a few days in between), I wanted to post this to my blog. If the final few stories deserve special comment or cause me to revise my views, I’ll update the review. I’ll probably also post the review on Amazon when I’ve read the last few stories.]

Doctor Who: 2006 season

Last year, when I watched the newly revived Doctor Who, starring Christopher Eccleston, I was quite impressed. It was easily the best Doctor Who ever done, preserving what was good from the old series – imagination as well as the basic humanism of the Doctor – with good acting and production values and more mature writing. It delved into issues that the older series ignored and it’s best was quite good indeed. Three episodes (four really; one’s a two-parter) are on this year’s Hugo ballot. I was therefore a bit upset when I heard that Eccleston was leaving after only one year. Nobody, I thought, could live up to him.

I’m happy to say that I was wrong. David Tennant is the best Doctor ever. He plays the character wit and energy, and provides a depth that even Eccleston didn’t reach. (Apparently, this is a role he has always wanted.) I’ve watched the first half of the new season (on DVDs purchased from Amazon UK; the third DVD is on the way), and I am quite impressed. In fact, the last two episodes I watched – School Reunion and The Girl in the Fireplace – are two of the very best episodes ever and will certainly be on my Hugo ballot next year.

In School Reunion, the Doctor find a UK school in which something strange is going on. By chance, the strange occurrences area also being investigated by an old companion of his, Sarah Jane Smith (who was my favorite companion from the older series). In the midst of all the action and adventure, the episode looks at what it’s like for the companions – who get to see the universe for a short while, but then are left behind. It opens Rose’s eyes to what will certainly happen to her at some point. But it also begins a look at the Doctor, who in the end is a lonely immortal (or near immortal, at least), doomed to go on as all those who cares for age and die.

This theme continues in The Girl in the Fireplace. The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey find a deserted space ship. Doors from the spaceship lead to the Palace of Versailles in the 1700s. The Doctor goes through one, emerges from a fireplace, and saves a young girl from a clock-work construct from the spaceship. It turns out that she is the girl who will grow up to be Madame De Pompadour, the mistress of the king. The Doctor returns, only to find that much time has passed. He returns several times, to interact with her at various times in her life, and she figures out who he is, again seeing the essential loneliness that lies beneath his frenetic exterior. It is a very moving episode – emotional and effecting, something that you normally don’t associate with Doctor Who.

I really hope that the new series can maintain this level of quality. I look forward to seeing more of David Tennant’s Doctor.

Superman Returns, Superman, Superman II

After going to see Superman Returns, I decided to watch the two older films that it was nominally a sequel to, to see if Superman was as good as I remembered it being and if Superman II was any better than I remembered it (it wasn’t). So this review will touch on all three of the major Superman films. (We’ll forget about the third and fourth Christopher Reeve films; they are best forgotten.) I’ll also note that some of the best Superman adaptations have not been live-action films, but rather the best episodes of Superman: The Animated Series. Someday, I’ll try to review that series, which, along with Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League (and Justice League Unlimited) are among the best superhero adaptations you’ll find anywhere.

But, let’s start with the new film: Superman Returns. It’s a good film. It’s not up to the quality of the first Superman, but it has many things going for it (and a few nagging problems). Superman, after having been away for five years (he’s visiting the remains of Krypton) returns. Lex Luthor, who has been in prison – presumably for murder and attempted mass murder (see Superman) has been released on parole since the chief witness against him, Superman, can’t be found. And Luthor has his usual (at least of the movie version of Luthor) crack-pot scheme – this time to create a new continent using Kryptonian technology, even if it means destroying the American East Coast. It all makes for a pretty good superhero adventure film. The plot is usually interesting (if you ignore a few nagging problems; see below), the acting overall good, and the effects by and large quite good. Brandon Routh and Kevin Spacey are good as Superman and Luthor, though not as good as Reeve and Hackman (a common theme with this movie: good but not as good as the 1978 film). And Brian Singer (director of the first two X-Men films and creator of the TV series House) also does a good job.

The film does have a few problems. Superman is away for five years. So is Clark Kent. Kent returns. So does Superman. Yet nobody makes the obvious connection. Later in the film, Superman if hospitalized for days after saving the world. Kent presumably is missing for that whole time, but again nobody makes the connection.

One point that bothered me when I watched the film but was cleared up later involved Lois Lane. She has a kid, one that she assumes is the child of her live-in boyfriend. It’s Luthor who first asks if the kid could be Superman’s. Later he demonstrates some super powers in a crisis. So how could Lois not know that she and Superman could have conceived a child? The answer is in Superman II. He and Lois do make love in one sequence. Then, at film’s end, when Lois can’t deal with being around Clark every day, knowing what she has to give up, he erases her memory. (See below: one of my many complaints against Superman II is the way it kept adding superpowers to Superman’s abilities.)

The music is mixed. It reuses a lot of John Williams’ music from the original, including the marvelous Superman theme. But the original music, written by John Ottman (who I hadn’t even heard of before checking the credits for this film) is uninspired.

A lot has been made of the lack of chemistry between Superman and Lois Lane in this film. That didn’t bother me as much as it bothered some. I agree that Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth aren’t the couple that Chris Reeve and Margo Kidder were, but the film is trying to present them as having a muddled relationship at this point.

Overall, though, it is a film worth seeing and enjoying. We plan to re-see it this weekend, at the IMAX theatre in the Pittsburgh area.

Superman (1978) is a marvel, a film that still retains most of its original magic. Yes, the Krypton sequence could have been trimmed just a bit (and it’s slightly longer in the extended edition, which is the best version of the film) and I really could do without Lois Lane’s childish “Can You Read My Mind” poem (a good moment to hit the rest room or go for a snack), but overall this is a great film. The Smallville sequence is touching and well done, setting up the essential character. And after Superman reaches Metropolis, especially the string with the great action sequence that starts with his saving Lois who has fallen from a damaged helicopter, is tremendous. Gene Hackman is great as Lex Luthor, managing to be both a menacing criminal genius and to provide comic relief at the same time. His plot to explode a nuclear weapon in the San Andreas fault, sending California into the ocean so that the desert property he’s buying up becomes worth millions, is both wonderfully absurd and just the sort of thing for this type of movie. (One of the great movie moments: there are actually two missiles, since Lex’s dumb assistant, played by Ned Beatty, mis-programmed the first one. Superman, to demonstrate how callous Luthor is, says “I bet you don’t even know where the other missle is going.” Lex: “I know exactly where it’s gong. Hackensack. New Jersey.” Miss Tesmacher (Lex’s girlfriend): “But Lex. My mother lives in Hackensack.” Luthor looks at his watch, then shakes his head.)

It’s all great fun, from the marvelous comic book opening to the closing shot of Superman in space. And, since Superman II was mostly shot at the same time as the first film, we all had great hopes for it. But …

Superman was directed by Richard Donner, who had a great sense of the characters, understood how to blend humor into the movie but at the same time keep it dramatic, and overall did a good job. But the producers (Alexander and Ilya Salkind) didn’t like him. So they fired him after the first film and brought in Richard Lester, who didn’t understand the characters, threw out and reshot scenes, didn’t pay attention to continuity, and overall turned what should have been a good film into a so-so one.

At the very beginning of Superman, we see three Kryptonian criminals being sentenced to the phantom zone (in the movie, that amounts to imprisonment in a giant crystal). That was the set-up for the second film, where the three criminals escape and come to earth, where Superman must defeat them. A good set-up, but it goes wrong in Lester’s incapable hands.

First off, Lester seems to ignore logic, even the internal logic of the film. Superman, after revealing his identify to Lois, takes her to the fortress of solitude. There, he goes through a treatment that makes him mortal, a treatment that, the image of his mother assures him and us, cannot be reverses. Clark and Lois return from the fortress, only to discover that the super villains have essentially taken over the world. Clark turns around and heads for the arctic, and a bit later returns as Superman. So, how did he reverse the irreversible treatment? How knows. It all happens off stage.

When Superman finally encounters the villains, we have a scene in which they shoot force beams from their fingers at one another. Where did this power come from? Again, who knows. Lester presumably didn’t care.

Gene Hackman is again good as Luthor, though this time the role is much smaller. But, Lester apparently didn’t like some of the dialog and reshot it after Hackman was on to other projects. There are a few long shots of Luthor where the voice is clearly someone doing a Gene Hackman imitation.

The music can be summed up the same way I summed up the music for Superman Returns: the Williams music the re-use is great. The original music isn’t at al memorable. The effects likewise alternate between good and painfully bad.

The film isn’t all bad. There are a few good scenes, such as Superman tricking Luthor and the villains, such that they wind up losing their powers. (Though since Superman got his back, maybe they can too.) The whole thing alternates between fun, minor entertainment, and dumb, annoying sequences. I’m still amazed by the handful of critics who thought this film was better than the first one.

I hope there are more Superman films. But I also hope that, if there is a sequel to Superman Returns, that Brian Singer directs it.

The Engine of Recall by Karl Schroeder

There has been a lot of talk over the last decade or so of the amount of great SF coming out of the UK. But there’s also been a steady stream of very good SF and fantasy coming from Canada (particularly, it seems, the Toronto area), from writers such as Robert Charles Wilson, Robert Sawyer, Cory Doctorow, and Charles De Lint. Karl Schroeder is yet another important writer from the Toronto area. He’s written several good novels. The Engine of Recall is his first collection of short fiction.

It’s a shame that more Hugo voters – including me – don’t follow the Canadian SF magazines and anthologies. Several stories in The Engine of Recall, had they been published in Asimov’s, say, would likely have been Hugo nominees. Schroeder is a fine writer, producing good SF – mostly falling into the “hard SF” category – that ranges from near-future stories involving nuclear terrorism to far future encounters with aliens or alien environments.

“Halo,” set in the same universe as his novel Permanence, is set in a universe where people have settled around the brown dwarf stars that are numerous and closer together than the normal stars we see in our sky. The story involves a terrorist threat. Elise Contrell, who controls remote mining mechanism, picks up a signal from an incoming ship, warning her that her world must mine space around it, else their entire population will be destroyed. A fanatical sect, intent on cleaning the local worlds of all but their own kind, has taken over the ship. The message is sent by one of the few they kept alive – a young male singer who is forced to provide entertainment, but who has found a way to sneak outside the ship to broadcast a message. While the overall story arc addresses the response to the threat, much if it focuses on the growing relationship between Elise and the young singer: a relationship that is doomed since the only way to save the settlement is to destroy the ship. Schroeder does a good job in setting up this relationship and tying it to the story of the planet’s activities in trying to save itself.

“The Pools of Air” is reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement. Clement once said that he didn’t see the need to use intra- or inter-species conflict in his stories, that the universe was hostile enough and provided enough opportunity for drama. “The Pools of Air” is set in the clouds of Jupiter. Three people are there to film a documentary when their ship is damaged. The story involves their attempt to survive and the obstacles – both physical and psychological – they must overcome. Schroeder does a good job painting the harsh beauties of Jupiter, and creates a story with both tension and character in this locale.

“The Dragon of Pripyat” is set in the area near the ruined Chernobyl reactor. Gennady Malianov must figure out how extortionists are releasing radiation. It’s a good story, one that’s particularly memorable for it’s eerie, harsh setting. Gennady returns in “Alexander’s Road,” this time to track down two stolen Soviet H-bombs and some missing uranium. The story is exciting and the potential terror weapon created from the uranium is truly horrific.

Several of the stories examine what it means to download a copy of one’s brain pattern – consciousness, perhaps – into a computer. “Making Ghosts” addresses it directly. A dying woman copies her brain pattern into computer memory. The result seems conscious, but is it really her? And even if it is perfect copy, what does this mean to the person who is dying, who is still, after all, going to die. “The Engine or Recall” also address the concept, but this time it’s only part of a larger story about an attempt to salvage an alien artifact. In this case most downloads are partials, spun off for specific purposes, which can then return to reintegrate their memories into the person who spun them off. But, even a “full copy” is only a copy of the person’s current state. Schroeder questions how such a construct, lacking the true memory and experience of the original, can truly be the original. Schroeder, in these two stories, does a nice job of raising questions about what has become an SF trope of immortality via downloading.

Other stories involve a reasonably alien (e.g., not just a human that looks alien) alien (“Solitaire”) and life on Titan and mega-engineering in Saturn orbit (“The Cold Convergence”). All of the stories are at least good, and several, as I mentioned earlier, should have been Hugo nominees. This is a good first collection, and I look forward to more from Schroeder.

The Skinner by Neal Asher

Take elements of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld, add a bit of Jack Vance (especially the “Demon Princes” series), add yet more that is reminiscent of Iain Banks, and you have a glimpse of at least some of the flavor of Neal Asher’s The Skinner. This is not to imply that Asher is a cheap imitation. While he is not to the level of Banks, he is a solid writer in his own right, who takes some elements of what has come before him, added a number of original elements of his own, tied them all together in a multi-stranded plot, and people it with some memorable – both positive and negative – characters.

The story takes place in the far future. Most of the human worlds are part of the Polity (which stays enough in the novel’s background that you don’t get a real good feel for what it is, though I gather that you do in Asher’s other works). There are several other intelligent species in the universe, including one other earth-born species: hornets, it seems, are a hive mind. There are also AIs and robots (sometimes called drones, reminiscent of Banks).

Seven hundred years before the time of the novel, humanity had fought against the Prador. The Prador are vicious killers, even killing their own young in competition. The Prador had the technology to turn humans into literally mindless puppets, destroying their brains and controlling their bodies. A small group of renegade humans, let by Spatter Jay Hoop, had led an operation to sell humans to the Prador, killing about ten million in the process. Sable Keech, who died at the time of the war but was reanimated, has the mission to track down and kill the remaining renegades. He has tracked the last two to the planet Spatterjay, where Hoop had originally run his slaving operation.

Spatterjay is like Harrison’s Deathworld, but with a twist. It’s a deadly world, whose fauna preys on one another and on anything else that lets down its guard constantly. But there is a strange side effect. One particularly nasty group of predators are the leeches. The leaches bit off junks of flesh, but those prey that survive are infected with a virus. The virus gives the body regenerative capabilities (thus, the leaches get more food), and over time the infected become both very strong, very hard to hurt, and nearly immortal. This is why Hoop and one of his companions are alive (in some fashion) so many centuries later.

Arriving at the same time as Keech – and traveling with him for part of the time –are Erin Tazer, who has returned to visit the Old Captains (the oldest, strongest survivors of the leech virus) and figure out if she really wants to be immortal, and Janer, who is a human in the pay of the hornet hive mind (which, it turns out, wants to establish a base on Spatterjay). But they are pursued by Rebecca Frisk, Hoop’s lover and the other survivor of the renegades, who with a group of mercenaries, plans to kill Keech. And an Prador elder, who wants to kill all the Old Captains, who are the last living witnesses to what happened in the Prador war.

This is all the start to a plot that features some interesting twists and turns. There is a lot of real strangeness here and a lot of invention, but Asher does a good job of pulling it off. The strange background and the plot mesh well together, neither distracting from the other, both important parts of how the book makes its impact.

The are a few scenes that are somewhat disturbing. Frisk is a homicidal maniac, who delights in torturing her victims to death. Hoop was worse in his heyday, though what remains of him by the time of this book, while a disturbing, nasty monster, is not as unsettling as Frisk. (This, in a way, is also reminiscent of Banks, since many Banks books contain at least a scene or two that is rather nasty and often gross. Consider the execution cell in Consider Phlebas, for example, which seemed like something dreamt up by a nasty-minded 12-year old.) But if Asher steps over the line in creating this discomfort, he does do it to help set up the story, nor does he do it often enough to detract from the story. (Banks doesn’t either. He’s one of my favorite writers, even if there are occasional scenes in his books that bother me long after reading the book.)

Overall, Asher isn’t up to the level of Banks (few are). But he’s yet another good example of the resurgence of space opera. The Skinner is a good space adventure, but one filled with detail and texture. I enjoyed it and hope to try another of his novels soon.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

It’s probably good for other writers that want to win Hugos that Vernor Vinge doesn’t write more quickly. In the last 15years, he’s written thee major novels. The first two won Hugos. The latest -- Rainbows End – is, so far this year, my choice as the year’s best. Vinge is one of our best writers of hard SF – one of our best writers of SF of any type – as well as one of our best at looking at the real implications of the technological and social changes we see going on around us. And he is a skilled writer, one who has developed his skills over the years and gotten even better.

Vinge’s previous two novels – A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky – were remarkable space operas, combining new and interesting concepts with good writing, adept plotting, and believable and interesting characters. Rainbows End is a different sort of book. It’s set on earth in the 2030s. It’s a world that’s a believable extrapolation of today’s world, full of both near magical technology and incredible risk. Technology has enable everyone to stay connected, has enabled people to accomplish great things. At the same time, it’s put weapons of mass destruction capability in the hands of even large criminal gangs, and terrorism has to be guarded against by a combination of super cyber sleuths and strike teams that are ready to go into action at any moment. The overall plot arch of Rainbows End is set up around this, but most of the book doesn’t actually center on that. Instead, Vinge concentrates on the actions of a number of characters, keeping the espionage threat as a driving force in the background.

The books starts as a European analyst, in sorting through data, finds a slight indication that a lab in San Diego is developing mind-control technology (or, as Vinge calls it, YGBM – You Gotta Believe Me – technology). Three higher ups in Indo European intelligence decide they must secretly look into this, without tipping off the Americans, since the American government could be involved. (Unlikely, since the three great superpowers – America, China, and the Indo-European Union – have been cooperating to keep threats under control.) But, there is a twist here: one of the three – the head of the Indian branch -- is actually the one running the experiment. He plans to use the YGBM technology himself (to save the world from itself, of course). So, while his two colleagues are trying to figure out what’s really going on, he plans to mislead them. But they need someone to help pull things together in America, so they hire a free agent, someone who projects his image (this is a time when people don’t always meet in person; the always-wired populace can easily meet virtually) as a rabbit and who acts a lot like Bugs Bunny.

This is all in the first 20 pages or so. But from there, the book shifts focus to the Gu family. Robert Gu, the world’s greatest poet and world-class son of a bitch years ago, is returning home to his family in San Diego, cured of Alzheimer’s. His son Robert Jr. is a marine who leads one of the strike teams that responds to possible world killer events. His daughter-in-law Alice is one of the world’s great analysts, able to look at masses of data and perform threat analysis. And his granddaughter Miri is a brilliant pre-teen, immersed in the high-tech culture around her but wanting to help her grandfather, despite himself, return to the world.

Much of what follows, though driven from behind by the Indo-European espionage case and by the mysterious Rabbit, focuses on the characters of Robert and Miri and on those around them. Robert returns to high school, to Fairmont High, where adults like Robert returning to the world and kids who can’t cut the usual high-school programs and are thus in the “vo-tech” track are taught. Bit by bit, Robert learns the world around him, becomes more in tune with technology, and at the same time becomes more human and less of a bastard. It’s a brilliant performance by Vinge as he manages to create a handful of intriguing and well drawn characters and put them in a such a fascinating world. He balances several plot threads quite nicely, bringing them all together at the end in a satisfying way.

One of the great accomplishment of the novel is the way Vinge manages to show us technology that’s near singularity level, to make it believable, and to put it in a world where his characters interact with it in believable ways. He shows us this technology and makes it an integral part of all that’s going on but he emphasizes the characters. The technology doesn’t dominate the novel; the characters do. We walk away from this book remembering the characters and what they did and how they interacted with the technology. We remember the technological magic, but in the context of the characters, not the other way around. In the end, this both gives it a more human feel and makes it more believable. If characters we believe in and care about view all this as just part of what is normal, we are more likely to do so.

Throughout, Vinge emphasizes the importance of collaboration and of being able to actually analyze and correlate the massive amounts of data that even now are available to us. Robert starts at Fairmont as his old self – contemptuous of those around him who he feels are less talented than he is. But in large part it’s his collaboration with Juan, a boy who can’t really write, but who helps Robert to understand technology while Robert helps him to compose with words, that makes Robert more human, more of a character who we can like.

The book is also an optimistic look at the future. Yes, there are threats everywhere. Criminal gangs can get nukes. (Saturday night specials aren’t handguns any more.) And bad things have happened. But the major powers have learned to cooperate;, to keep things in check. Moreover, the world is filled with wonderful things, ranging from technology that allows people to create their own views of the world (being able to walk through a park and see, if you want, icons over things to give you more information about them is something I’d love) to medical technology that can cure many diseases. But I think where Vinge is his most optimistic is in is view of the young people in this world. Miri is not only brilliant; she’s a very good kid. And Juan, for somebody who is in the vo-tech track, is also brilliant and a nice, helpful kid. Even the pranksters are a twins who reminded me of the Weasley twins in Harry Potter. (To compliment this, even the vo-tech schools have good teachers.) I hope that things do turn out as well.

This is a great book. Mark Olson, in his review of it, called it Vinge’s best novel yet. I’m not quite sure I’d go that far. I have to confess I’m a sucker for good space opera, and his previous two books were superb space opera, and had wider scope than the current book, so if I had to pick just one book to point to as his best, I’d lean toward one of those. On the other hand, Rainbows End is a virtuoso performance, tightly written, and full of great ideas and great characters. I recommend it highly, and as I said earlier it’s at the front of my list (far in front) of best books of the year so far.

The Last Siege, The Final Truth (Clone Wars volume 8)

Warning: Star Wars geekery follows. If you aren’t interested in Star Wars details, move along. Nothing to see here. This is not the review you were looking for.

Of all the of various written Star Wars tie-ins, the best are probably the series of Clone Wars comics produced by Dark Horse. They’re being released in graphic novel form. Volume 8 – The Last Siege, The Final Truth – is the latest volume. The series as a whole consists of a number of different shorter threads as well as a few longer threads. Several of the earlier volumes, for example, followed the Jedis’ encounters with Asajj Ventress, a key follower of Dooku through part of the Clone Wars. The other major thread follows Quinlan Vos, a Jedi whose master, Tholme (who sort of acts as spy master for the Jedi) has sent him undercover, to penetrate Dooku’s organization and possibly uncover the identity of the second Sith.

What makes this sequence – and the whole 8^th volume focuses on it – so good is the character of Vos. Vos struggles with the dark side and for much of the sequence it’s not clear whether he’s going to give into the Dark Side and join Dooku. He’s a dark brooding character, full of anger. This anger, like Anakin’s, is early on aimed at ending the war. Like Anakin, he is faced with choices where he can do awful things that may (or at least it seems to him) lead to better things. This ambiguity lends a lot of tension to the story and deepens the character of Vos.

The story itself involves an attempt by the Separatists to create their own clone army, this one created from a race of assassins. They are doing this deep beneath the planet Saleucami. A Jedi-led clone army lays a siege on the planet, while strike teams try to sneak in and disable force shields and the planetary defense system. Vos, leading the strike teams, has in own motivation. The Dark Jedi Sora Bulq, who Vos is convinced is the second Sith, is there supervising the creation of the clone/assassin army. Vos wants to sneak in and kill him: he thinks this will end the war and justify all he’s had to do until this point.

In the end, Vos faces the same decision that Anakin had to face. In this case, though, there are other Jedi near, including his former Padwan, who talk to him and assure him as he is about to go over the edge (something Anakin did not have, since the only two Jedi who could have had such an affect on him were fighting on the outer rim), which pulls him back. He returns to the light, though of course somewhat disillusioned since, of course, Sora Bulq is not the second Sith.

A good graphic novel. There’s one more in the series, due out later this year, and I’m looking forward to it.