BOOK REVIEW: TURTLEDOVE, THE VALLEY-WESTSIDE WAR

Harry Turtledove, The Valley-Westside War, Tor, $24.95, 285 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-1487-1). Publication Date: July 2008.

Harry Turtledove's Crosstime-Traffic novels are based on an old science-fiction notion, exploited endlessly by Keith Laumer, among others. The basic idea is that alternate or parallel worlds branch from ours when critical decisions or events can go more than one way. Thus the American colonies did/did not win the Revolution, the North did/did not win the Civil War, Hitler did/did not make a successful career as a painter, and so on. By itself that's the secret of alternate-history fiction. Add in a way to travel between the alternate worlds, and you have the stuff of science fiction.

In the Crosstime-Traffic novels, our world is the home line, the only one with the secret of how to travel between alternates. That secret has allowed us to solve many problems, for it allows access to multiple Earths full of oil and other necessary resources. It also gives historians a way to bring the power of the scientific method to bear on their field. They can't do experiments, but they can study the alternates to learn what happens when one small thing is changed. Sometimes they study a very different alternate and struggle to learn what small thing was changed.

In The Valley-Westside War, that's why Liz Mendoza is in Los Angeles, college on hold for a bit while she helps her historian parents figure out why in this Earth a nuclear war nearly destroyed everything in 1967. 130 years later, the place is still a wreck, with technology just about up to making matchlock guns and the telegraph. Fortunately the UCLA library still stands, and that's where Liz spends her time, scanning old Newsweeks and such in search of clues.

Unfortunately, the kingdom of the San Fernando Valley attacks and conquers LA's Westside. Worse yet, a Valley soldier about Liz's age spots her and takes an unwelcome interest. Worser yet, Dan's a pretty sharp fellow, and he soon realizes Liz isn't quite ordinary. And when a secret agent for the old Westside regime appeals for shelter, everything quickly goes crossways.

And that's the story. The Mendozas manage to wriggle out of trouble of course. But though Liz thinks Dan is an unwashed barbarian, she also recognizes his intelligence. She didn't want him following her around, and in the end she's quite happy that she will never see him again.

Or will she? Every time an author lets a character say such a thing, you just know he's planning a sequel. Fans will be happy, for the series is popular. And even though the basic idea is pretty musty, Turtledove handles it well.

BOOK REVIEW: KAGE BAKER, THE HOUSE OF THE STAG

Kage Baker, The House of the Stag, Tor, $24.95, 350 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-1745-2). Publication date: September 2008.


Kage Baker is rightly renowned for her tales of The Company (aka Dr. Zeus), which used immortal cyborg troops to rescue the treasures of the past before their destruction by fire, flood, eruption, and war (etc.) for the delectation and enrichment of the future. The troops were plotting several different rebellions against their masters, who had shown a distressing tendency to put unwanted servants in cold storage or even subject them to endless, agonizing (and ultimately fruitless) efforts to destroy them, and the year 2355, when all the Company's records of the future fall silent, was fast approaching. There was plenty of material there for a saga, and she used it well, ending with The Sons of Heaven, which I reviewed in Analog in November 2007.

The House of the Stag (a return to the world of The Anvil of the World) says that her earlier success was no fluke. The mode is fantasy, not SF, but the skill on display is as great as ever. The tale begins in the forests where the Yendri live. Green-skinned, peaceful, given to dancing on the green before choosing mates for the bowers, they have no idea what to do when the Riders appear, seizing them as slaves, cutting the trees to make farms, and dwelling in rude piles of stone. Some escape into hiding, and among them are Ran and Teliva and their babes, Ranwyr and the half-demon foundling Gard. But hiding only lasts so long, and even the mysterious Star, who sings songs of healing and power and preaches compassion, cannot protect the Yendri forever. Since the mountains that surround their home are impassable, they are doomed. Or are they? Gard grows up and begins a one-man guerilla war that ends with his banishment from his people.

But his story has only begun. He fails to climb the mountain ice-wall to freedom and winds up enslaved inside the mountain, where in times long gone a group of powerful mages were trapped. He shows strength and talent of several kinds and is eventually trained as a mage himself. His trainers think to use him as a sacrifice to gain their own freedom, but he is more powerful than anyone suspects. Soon he is free and on the way to becoming a dreaded Dark Lord, head of an army of demon brigands, and master of a mountain fortress all his own.

Meanwhile, back among the Yendri, the Star has aged and passed. A Child foretold has appeared to grow to beauty, strengthen the ideals of peace and healing and compassion, and lead the Yendri to a new land, not far from where Gard is brigandizing. To stop Gard's attacks on Yendri villages, the Child goes to him. Soon, much to everyone's vast surprise, they are married and she is bearing him a son. More surprising yet, it soon becomes apparent that he is her captive, not she his.

Alas, politics and the past refuse to leave them in peace. There is work yet to do before they can relax.

BOOK REVIEW: SCALZI, ZOE'S TALE

John Scalzi, Zoe's Tale, Tor, $24.95, 335 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-1698-1). Publication date: August 2008.



When I reviewed John Scalzi's The Last Colony in the October 2007 Analog, I found it a nice conclusion to the Old Man's War series. The original premise was a nice inversion of traditional modes of warfare and a lovely echo of a line I first heard in the sixties, when critics of the Viet Nam war would say that it was so typical, old men sending young men off to fight the old men's war, and wouldn't wars be a lot simpler and shorter and even less likely if we could send the old pharts off to fight their own battles.

Maybe, but it wasn't very likely, then or now. So Scalzi imagined a future when humanity goes to space and discovers we're not the first. There are plenty of folks already out there, they're constantly fighting over colony worlds, and not one of them appreciates a new kid on the block. Hence the Colonial Defense Force, a need for troops, and at least a perceived need to keep the folks back home in the dark about how dicey things really are. So the CDF makes Earth an offer: Once Earthlings pass age 75, they qualify to join the Colonial Defense Force and be given a nice new super-strong young body with which to stave off the hordes of ravening aliens who threaten the colonies. The first novel started with John Perry and his wife Kathy. Alas, Kathy died too soon, but those who volunteered and died before their transformation got their DNA used to produce even superer soldiers for The Ghost Brigades. In due time, John became a hero and met Jane, who looked just like Kathy, presumably because she was Kathy's "ghost." Together they went off in pursuit of a traitor scientist, Charles Boutin, who was trying to help the aliens defeat humanity, in part by tinkering up an electronic gadget that would give the definitely sentient Obin true consciousness. John and Jane wound up adopting Boutin's daughter Zoe, who came with two bodyguards from the eternally grateful Obin.

Last Colony opened to show John and Jane on the colony world of Huckleberry, where he was an ombudsman with a Solomonic gift for conflict resolution. Then the CDF's General Rybicki showed up to announce that they have a new assignment, managing a new colony called Roanoke being set up in defiance of an alien ban on new colonies. In other words, they were being planted right in the middle of a big red bull's-eye, all so the CDF could try to weaken the alien Conclave that forbade new colonies. Not that Rybicki was very forthcoming with this. The CDF was big on the mushroom theory of governance (keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em horse manure), so all John and Jane knew at first was that Roanoke was supposed to be the very first colony settled from the colony worlds instead of Earth, and it was up to them--somehow!--to keep Roanoke from being pounded into dust. Where the earlier novels were pretty pure space opera, this one was all politics, of course, with much of it sounding fairly familiar. Zoe and the Obin turned out to be very helpful, and the CDF wound up with plenty of egg on its face as well as having to face some major changes in the way it did business, rooted largely in what John did to the mushroom farm.

Scalzi now let's us know that readers didn't want the series to end. They wanted more. Specifically, they wanted more about Zoe, as well as about Roanoke's natives. To boot, he felt that he'd glossed over some important events. So he wrote Zoe's Tale, from Zoe's teenaged female point of view (a tough trick for a guy!). The overall flow of events is familiar, but though the book starts at the same time as Last Colony, with Rybicki's arrival, Zoe just isn't privy to what is going on. Her life is that of a kid, an intelligent kid, and a kid who just happens to be something like a goddess to the Obin, but still just a kid. She's busy growing up, becoming and learning who she is, as opposed to what she is. In due time, she solves the mystery that has obsessed the Obin for ages (why did the Consu give them intelligence but not consciousness?) and gains help from the Consu for herself and Roanoke, all largely because of who she is.

And that's the moral of the tale: Who you are is much more important than what you are. It doesn't sound very profound when said so flatly, but think of how many people get killed because someone sees the what (ethnic identity, religion, gang membership, political affiliation, etc.) as more important than the who. Needless to say, galactic civilization--the CDF and all the aliens out there--have a lot to learn from Zoe, for the conflicts that embroil them have much more to do with what than who.

We could learn something too, and if enough young people read this book, it could have a salutary effect on the next generation.

Oh, but I'm a dreamer!

BOOK REVIEW: BUCKNER, WATERMIND

M. M. Buckner, Watermind, Tor, $24.95, 301 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-2024-7). Publication date: November 2008.


One of the old science fiction and fantasy tropes is the Thing from the Swamp. The Thing can be a primordial monster with a craving to devour shrieking maidens, a space alien just as hungry, or a spontaneous emergence from swamp muck mutated by a radioactive or chemical spill (and of course this one's hungry too). In Watermind, M. M. Buckner adds one more genesis: In the throw-away society that is modern America, millions of tons of electronic gadgetry gets tossed. That's a lot of chips, some of which are pretty tiny (think of RFID chips). In the near future we can expect to see even tinier chips in the mix as nanotech gets rolling. That's a lot of might-be computing power, certainly enough to suppose that as the rivers roll the rubbish downstream into the Mississippi, eddies might collect a critical mass of circuitry into a single spot such as Devil's Swamp, where CJ Reilly, a brilliant young lady who has fled MIT under the whip of her late father's scorn, and her sort-of boyfriend, Max Pottevents, a zydeco musician, are contract laborers cleaning up a chemical spill.

After what I just said about Swamp Things, you just have to be expecting a great big GOTCHA at this point. But no. They stumble on a patch of water that is frozen solid despite the muggy local climate. It does weird things, and CJ--being brilliant--starts hypothesizing madly. Before long a corporate honcho is involved, some of those hypotheses are looking good, and efforts are under way to sample, capture, and destroy the Swamp Thing.

Except it's pretty good at wriggling out of traps. A couple of people die as it defends itself. It destroys wharfs and barges. And before long it's grown much larger, demonstrated an astonishing ability to adapt, and headed down the river toward New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The corporate honcho is growing desperate (he dreads the prospects of lawsuits galore and inevitable bankruptcy), while CJ, with Max's help, is trying to teach the Thing music and communicate with it.

Yup. It's alive and perhaps even sentient. It's not some evil, ravening monster, for it can transmute initial lessons in 4/4 time into a 3/4 waltz. It's a waltzing Swamp Thing! And there we are, trying to destroy it as it wriggles and flees. A few older exercises in the trope have accused humans of being the bad guys, but never quite so blatantly. Justice might require that our destructive efforts somehow backfire on us, but no. Buckner says we're pretty effective when we set out to destroy things. On the other hand, the Thing is very mutable. The ending, depending on whose side you take, is either terrifying or hopeful.

There are some basic technical problems with the book, however. The idea that a sentient neural net could emerge from waterborne electronic garbage is awfully far-fetched, but let that go. More of a problem is Buckner's sense of the biology in which the net is embedded and which it coopts. For one thing, bacteria do not have cell nuclei. In fact, the lack of nuclei is one of their major defining features. And it would have been so easy to edit out any mention of bacterial nuclei--well, I'm reviewing this from an Advance Reading Copy, and some changes will be made before hardbounds hit the stores. Maybe the nuclei will vanish, leaving behind a story which, if unlikely, is still a lot of fun.