Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

Jumper, by Steven Gould, is among my favorite SF books. It’s a simple story based on a simple premise: a teenager discovers that he has the power to teleport. The book is both a bildungsroman and a revenge story, as he uses his power to strike back at his enemies (thanks to the one outrageous coincidence permitted to every story, he has some nasty enemies). He reacts plausibly to his power, the characters around him react plausibly, the government gets involved. The book doesn’t hit any false notes, and it’s not too long.

Gould’s second book, Wildside, was also good, though not as good. It was also based on a single simple premise, in this case a doorway to another world, an Earth without humans.

His subsequent books were by-and-large completely forgettable, alas. He did write a sequel to Jumper, Reflex, which was OK. It lost a lot of the charm by introducing another fantastic element, an evil conspiracy which was not really spelled out and led to an ending to the book which I found quite implausible.

Jumper is now being turned into a movie, being released this weekend. It’s always fun but scary to see a favorite book turned into a movie. Unfortunately, based on the previews I’ve seen, this one is going to be a lot more scary than fun. In the movie Davy is not the only person who can teleport. There are fight scenes between teleporters. There seems some to be some kind of organization which works against teleporters. This might all be good fun, if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is in the book, and that it ruins the basic idea which made the book good. The book as written would be filmable; it has good characters and plenty of action and conflict both between and within characters. I guess it just wouldn’t be a spectacular special effects event movie, though.

Who knows? Maybe the movie will be good after all. And presumably Gould will get a small pile of money out of it, not to mention more book sales.

I like David Weber novels, even though they are terrible, in the same way that I like action movies. You more or less know what is going to happen, and you can tell the good guys from the bad guys in the first page or scene, and the dialogue is vastly different from anything any person might ever actually say, but the enjoyment comes in watching it all come together, with the occasional unexpected plot twist thrown in for fun.

I just read “Off Armageddon Reef.” It has some reasonable SF tropes, all three types of Weber characters—noble, misguided, and perfidious—good battle scenes, fast action, stilted dialogue, almost no sex (though there is a somewhat odd repressed hetero/homosexual (hey, it’s SF) relationship which Weber may or may not have intended). What’s not to like?

What’s not to like is that on a brand new world, created with what amounts to a de novo society without technology or memory of Earth (several plot points there), he has created a society of kings and nobles, with titles of nobility, etc., which is essentially identical to the society in his Honor Harrington novels, and is closely based on the English nobility. The Harrington novels are basically the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars set in space, so copying the English nobility was perfectly fine. But in this book he’s done it all over again, with no excuse at all. He doesn’t even try to explain why the de novo society might have developed this way.

Niven and Pournelle did the same thing in “The Mote in God’s Eye,” but they at least took a page to explain why, and at least their characters knew Earth history. Weber’s characters don’t, and he doesn’t explain.

Obviously Weber’s books require considerable suspension of disbelief at the best of times, but for this book I couldn’t quite manage it.

I’ve always liked the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell, who is best known for short stories like “Allamagoosa” and “And Then There Were None.” I happened across an old novel of his in a used book store, The Mindwarpers. It was OK, not great, but really struck me afterward was the cover.

The novel is a near-future story set in the Cold War (thus making it today some sort of past near-future story–we need a name for those). All the characters are ordinary human beings. The only advanced technology in the story is a sort of brainwashing device–not mind control, just the insertion of some false memories. It’s barely a science fiction story at all; it would work just as well as a Robert Ludlum novel.

Now look at the cover, which can of course be found on the web. It’s some sort of space ship flying past a planet. It’s obvious that whoever painted the cover, and whoever decided to put that painting on this novel, never even read it.

I don’t expect all that much from a science fiction publisher, but surely it’s not going overboard to expect them to actually read the book.

I recently reread Greg Bear’s SF novel The Forge of God, after coming across it in a book. It’s a novel about the destruction of the Earth. I may be too pessimistic, but I find it to be one of the most convincing explanations of the Fermi paradox.

Assuming our civilization doesn’t collapse, it’s going to become very easy for us to send machines across the whole galaxy in a time which is small compared to the lifetime of the universe. It’s going to be so easy that it will inevitably be done by some person, somewhere. The chances that we are the only intelligent life in the galaxy seem to be me to be, literally, astronomically low. So: where are the machines created by other intelligent life?

Bear’s book gives one answer, essentially an update of Saberhagen’s Berserkers: there are machines out there which destroy worlds. The book describes the Earth as a lamb calling out into a dark night, unaware of the wolves closing in. I hope that’s not the universe we live in, but I can’t think of a likelier explanation. I can think of many other possible explanations, I just can’t think of a likelier one.

This is not, of course, refuted by the ongoing failure of SETI. It’s clear that we will soon stop broadcasting radio ourselves. After a hundred years it won’t make any sense to even set up a beacon. So it seems to me that SETI is based on a false premise conditioned by our current technology. It’s still worth spending some time on, of course, just in case.

In the meantime, I hope that our civilization stays out of the Malthusian trap long enough to find out where everybody else is, or whether we truly are alone.

I’ve recently been reading Ellen Kushner’s novels. They are novels of manners set in a fantasy world. This can be tricky, as one of the attributes of a novel of manners is that all the characters attempt to adhere to a set of social conventions which is never stated or even discussed. Doing this in a fantasy setting requires some careful work to set the framework without having the characters actually describe it.

Jack Vance is a master of the science fiction novel of manners, although he normally resorts to something of a cheat: he has an outsider enter the society, which gives him a plausible hook for explaining the rules. For example, in “Marune: Alastor 993″ his protagonist is a native who has suffered amnesia, and in the short story “The Moon Moth” it is an ambassador from another planet. I think his stories without an outsider, such as “The Last Castle” (which is not so much a novel of manners anyhow) are somewhat less successful.

Kushner has no outsiders, but her novels work because she picks a more familiar milieu, and does a nice job of showing us what is different through plausible actions of the characters rather than through pure exposition. Since I like both novels of manners and fantasy novels, it’s nice to see the combination well done.

It also makes me wonder whether it is possible to write a contemporary novel of manners. After all, although Jane Austen’s novels are historical today, when she wrote them they were contemporary. It seems that that sort of novel today results in much broader comedy–something like “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” in which the realism is lost in favor of laughs. Not altogether a bad thing, of course, but also not quite the same thing.