Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Washington Post via Dow Jones
Publication Date: Sunday September 28, 1997
Book World; Page X08
Copyright 1997, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
By Janice M. Eisen
Greg Bear
THE TRICKIEST setting for a science fiction book is the near future. It is not that we expect authors to make accurate predictions but, barring a cataclysm, we should see the seeds of that future in today's world.
One author unafraid to tackle the near future is Greg Bear. Slant (Tor, $24.95) is a sequel to the challenging and disturbing Queen of Angels. It is set in the mid-2050s, and several characters recur, including police detective Mary Choy, psychotherapist Martin Burke, and Jill the AI.
In Bear's future, nanotechnology (technology on a microscopic level, using programmable machines the size of a bacterium or virus -- the hard sf writer's equivalent of magic) and truly effective therapy have revolutionized the treatment of mental illness. Society is a caste system, with the ordinary neurotic "untherapied" at the bottom and the well-balanced "therapied" making up the working and middle classes, while "high normals," who need no therapy, form a natural aristocracy.
Although a sequel, Slant should be understandable by those who have not read Queen of Angels; it is more accessibly written, with less slang, fewer tricks of punctuation, a more straightforward plot, and much more sex and violence. Bear's detailed vision of a possible future is believable, if not altogether agreeable.
However, as a sequel, Slant is a disappointment. There is little new invention, while Queen of Angels was endlessly inventive. More important, while Queen of Angels concerned the great themes of the nature of consciousness and the self, Slant has no such powerful theme, instead yielding only metaphysical speculations:
"Every species has its own neural boundaries, gathering information and fixing
it as knowledge. And knowledge is anatomy, the continuing body of the species .
. . And how is a hive, viewed as a whole, basically different from you and me,
or any other animal, but most especially social animals? The social order is a
kind of super-mind, nested within the species super-mind."
The plot is a standard thriller, down to the evil organization that recruits in sinister fashion (and how does the recruit, an everyman character named Jonathan Bristow, fail to notice the signs screaming "Run away!"). It concerns a plot to rob the Omphalos, an enormous building that supposedly contains the frozen remains of the wealthy dead, and a mysterious death that, naturally, turns out to be connected. Bear moves the plot along smoothly through its tangles, though at one point he resorts to false suspense, when a character is given an important revelation that is denied to the reader. Ironically, the observant reader has already figured out what is going on by that time.
The most likable and intriguing character is a fading sexual performer, Alice Grale. The others are less memorable. Mary Choy and Martin Burke are largely passive, while Chloe Bristow, a stay-at-home mom due to pressure from her husband and in-laws, sulks too much; she needs a swift kick and a copy of The Feminine Mystique. Surprisingly, Bear's villains are stereotyped, grasping men who think they deserve to rule the world:
"It doesn't happen to the best of us. The best of us cope. The best of us have
better chemistry, stronger neurons, a better molecular balance, just an
all-around better constitution . . . we're made of finer alloy. The others . . .
they fail because they're flawed."
Despite its own flaws, Slant remains worth reading. Well written and often exciting, it just doesn't measure up to the expectations raised by Queen of Angels.
C.J. Cherryh
C.J. CHERRYH's new Alliance/ Union book, Finity's End (Warner, $22), is set much farther in the future, in the 24th century, but a future much more old-fashioned than Bear's. Nanotechnology? Never heard of it. Even computers are barely a presence, though Cherryh has layered virtual-reality games on top of her long-running future history.
Cherryh works in the grand old sf tradition of space opera, ships jumping from star to star, from space station to space station. Though her world is far too similar to our own to be an altogether believable 24th century, it is convincing in its details. We can feel the rivets, we can smell the sweat:
"Then force started to build, not downward, but sideways, and the mattresses
tilted sideways, so that he had a changing view of the inside bottom of the bunk
beside him. His arms weighed three times normal, his whole body flattened and he
could only see the bottom of Jeremy's bunk, both rotated on the same axis, both
swung perpendicular to the acceleration that just kept on increasing . . . There
wasn't that much racket. Or vibration. Or anything. He shivered from fear and
ran out of energy to shiver."
This book is a direct sequel to the Hugo-winning Downbelow Station, published in 1981, and Cherryh, as is her wont, throws us in medias res. This is confusing enough for those already familiar with her future history; those who aren't will likely give up by chapter two. A reread of Downbelow Station might be in order.
Finity's End is a merchant ship which has seen much service as a battleship, in the Company War and later in hunting the pirate remnant of the Fleet. Nearly 20 years after the war, returning to trade, it also returns to Pell Station to retrieve Fletcher Neihart, the orphan son of a crewmember stranded on Pell during the war. Unfortunately, 17-year-old Fletcher, who has never known anything but Pell, has no desire to join Finity's crew; he wants to stay behind and continue working with the native aliens.But, caught in politics and family loyalties, off he must go, while Finity engages in a complex series of negotiations among stations and merchanters.
The heart of the novel is Fletcher's coming-of-age story. While Fletcher can be annoyingly dysfunctional, he is believable, as are the interactions between himself and his few adolescent crewmates. The fish-out-of-water situation is familiar, but Cherryh presents enough surprises to hold the reader. Stationers and spacers have different ways of thinking, and we come to understand this along with Fletcher. Cherryh's vision of merchanter family dynamics, like her economics, is complex and ultimately convincing.
The problem is the other plot, the negotiations. The book has next to no action, except for some silliness at the climax, but lots of unresolved suspense. The political machinations are difficult to understand, and while we come to care about what happens to Fletcher, it's tough to care about the new trade agreement.
Followers of Cherryh's future history will want to catch up with Finity's End, but are warned that it has neither the depth of Cyteen nor the action of Rimrunners. Others are advised to start with Downbelow Station instead.
Allen Steele
ALLEN STEELE's A King of Infinite Space (HarperPrism, $23) returns us to the near future. Like Bear, Steele uses near-miraculous nanotechnology; like Cherryh, he sets a coming-of-age story in a complex future history. Unlike either of their works, this novel is utterly ruined by its ending.
We meet Alec Tucker in 1995, a 25-year-old rich kid living in St. Louis. Alec is a slacker, as are his equally rich friends, all leading aimless existences funded by their parents. A drug-related car crash changes that. When Alec next wakes, it is 2099; he has been revived in a body cloned from his cryogenically preserved head, said preservation having been funded by his neglectful but guilt-ridden father.
Alec's gradual return to his full senses is particularly well done: "It isn't until I've closed the door behind me that I realize for the first time -- like many other obvious things that I've overlooked these past many days, weeks, even months -- there was no way I can lock it, either from outside or within . . . This isn't a room, but a cell. This isn't a door, but bars on a cage. A cage that can't be locked, but a cage nevertheless . . . Now I'm perceiving things as they really are. My head is full ofquestions; they writhe around each other like a nest of snakes, their heads and tails invisible beneath their knotted mass."
Unfortunately for Alec, he and the other "deadheads" are possessions of the mysterious Mister Chicago, who has revived them to use as slaves to maintain his asteroid-based palace. The situation becomes intolerable, and finally Alec plans to escape to seek his lost love Erin, who he hopes was frozen and revived as well.
Alec's adventures, in the best Hollywood tradition, move along with almost enough zip to keep us from noticing how unlikely they are. But the reader runs smack up against the ending, when Alec finds out that Everything He Knows Is Wrong. The revelation of the truth makes all that came before so pointless that the author might as well have written " . . . and then he woke up."
At the end, the other characters berate Alec for having been horribly selfish and immature, although he seems no more juvenile and self-centered than any other Gen-Xer with no need to support himself. To deserve all this, he should have been a lot more obnoxious than the likable, if shallow, young man we have watched mature.
Steele is an engaging writer, his vision of the future feels solid and detailed, and much of the book is enjoyable. The ending of A King of Infinite Space, though, makes it ultimately a failure.
J.R. Dunn
IT'S a familiar ethical poser: If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler before he committed his crimes, would you? Should you? The question is confronted literally in J. R. Dunn's novel Days of Cain (Avon, $23; paperback, $13), in which an operative charged with protecting history's integrity must stop renegades who are trying to prevent the Holocaust.
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05:22 EDT September 28, 1997
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