“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …”
One of my fondest and most vivid read“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …”
One of my fondest and most vivid reading memories is my first reading of Tom Clancy’s THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, arguably English literature’s first techno-thriller. I recall holding my breath, eyes wide and eyebrows raised, and swallowing deeply as defecting Soviet submarine Captain Marko Ramius played a deadly silent game of hide and seek in the mountainous undersea terrain of the Reykjanes Ridge off the coast of Iceland. EAGLE STATION riffs on the same themes by moving that international chess match into the air, into space, and onto the surface of the moon, as a Sino-Soviet alliance wages covert (and officially undeclared but very, very hot) warfare (with extreme prejudice) against the USA over control of the lunar surface and the mining of the moon’s helium-3 resources.
There is no shortage of brilliantly exploited, fast-paced themes here to thrill even the most hard-core technology, political, and military junkies – hard-nosed international diplomacy; deployment of the recently created US Space Force; hard-core military tit for tat that treads ever closer to the boundary of a declared world war; high speed aerial battles; advances in weaponry that would make your head spin; and, of course, government decision making under the stress of all of these conditions.
EAGLE STATION is a snap to recommend to fellow readers and the latest nominee for my Top Ten of 2024 reading list.
On a side note as we rapidly approach the fateful November day on which the US will decide whether its future will include democracy and the rule of law, I shuddered when I tried to imagine a certain Donald J Trump in place of EAGLE STATION’s president, John Dalton Farrell. The possible results for the world as I pictured Trump making decisions in the same scenarios were simply terrifying. Food for thought … !
“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concern“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concerned, realistic, evocative, ominous, thought-provoking … MR ADAM is all of the above and a good deal more besides.
Consider a hypothetical world in which a nuclear accident sterilizes every man on the planet except Mr Adam, a rather unassuming, mildly introverted man with a definite case of low self-esteem, who happened to be working deep in a mine shielded by vast quantities of lead deposits at the time of the accident. Pat Frank’s brilliant (but hopefully not prescient) tale tells the disconcerting story of a shocked world’s reactions to the situation from a variety of possible perspectives – young vs old; male vs female; government or military vs citizens; nation vs nation; and, of course, Mr Adams vs the rest of the world who see artificial insemination (with him as the sole source of semen) as the only possibility for the continuation of the human race (as if that is necessarily a good thing, LOL!).
Easy, easy, easy to recommend to other readers and a definite incentive to explore Pat Frank’s more widely known classic, ALAS, BABYLON.
“People … it appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”
A heat wave in northern New England, a fearsome storm, a fog, and then an all-encom“People … it appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”
A heat wave in northern New England, a fearsome storm, a fog, and then an all-encompassing mist traps a motley collection of shoppers in a grocery store. The mist is pure evil and what it brings to life with it will raise the hackles on a reader’s neck.
THE MIST is a fast-paced, gruesome, gothic, imaginative, creep-fest that showcases Stephen King’s flair for creating a cast of characters with a myriad of reactions to what is pure over-the-top Hollywood horror. But it’s great entertainment and, goodness knows, it’s easy to recommend to lovers of the horror genre.
“ … there is no god except those that we create ourselves.”
In the 21st century, the United Republic of America was a theocratic, authoritarian reg“ … there is no god except those that we create ourselves.”
In the 21st century, the United Republic of America was a theocratic, authoritarian regime under the thumb of a far right, conservative group aptly monikered the New Christian Right. Coyote is a new colony created in the 24th century by the cryogenically maintained survivors of a hijacked starship the URSS Alabama who chose to flee the URA and their repressive, xenophobic policies. (Sound familiar? I’m willing to bet that Allen Steele knew exactly what he was doing, who he was parodying and who he was warning when he created that scenario at the start of the Coyote series).
GALAXY BLUES, is a sublime space opera set in Steele’s futuristic Coyote universe that clearly pays homage to both Star Wars and Star Trek tropes. It is the story of Jules Truffaut, a disconcerted and disgruntled dissident, ejected from the Union Astronautica space fleet, who believes that he no longer has a viable home and life on earth. It’s “Coyote, here I come” but his only path to interstellar emigration is as a stowaway on a starship. The game is on and GALAXY BLUES is a definite winner for fans of the sci-fi genre.
If you tell me that Allen Steele didn’t have a mental image of Jabba the Hutt lurking in the corners of his thinking when he created the “chaaz’braan” character, I’ll call you a liar. How’s this for a literary reprise of Star War’s memorable gangster slug:
What came through the door was something that looked like a bloated and incredibly ancient bullfrog. Swaddled in heavy robes of crimson and gold whose train dragged behind him, he lurched forward on thick, bipedal legs, his shoulders bowed by the weight of years. Rubbery jowls fell from either side of a broad, thick-lipped mouth and sparse white hair hung limp from a flat, slightly ridged skull. Two deep-set eyes – one half-closed and slightly askew – gazed straight ahead in what appeared to be an expression of senile boredom.”
There’s no shortage of legit science for readers who fancy themselves to be geeks or nerds informed in matters astronomical (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan):
“Coming into view from behind the limb of the planet was something that, at first glance, resembled an enormous eye. Red-rimmed, as if irritated by something caught in the cloudy white mass of its pupil, it wept a vast tear that seemed to fall away into space. Altogether, it resembled the baleful glare of an angry god … a Cyclops among the stars. Although still several million miles away, nonetheless it was awesome, and utterly terrifying. The black hole at its nucleus was invisible to us, surrounded by the ionized gas that made up its ergosphere … the ring of dust and debris that swirled at sublight velocities around its outer event horizon.”
“Existing as a computer program, or a pattern in a transporter buffer, for five centuries. I can’t even imagine …”
Call it vintage next generation“Existing as a computer program, or a pattern in a transporter buffer, for five centuries. I can’t even imagine …”
Call it vintage next generation TNG Star Trek space opera, if you will.
Deanna Troi has tied the knot of connubial bliss with Riker who has been promoted to Admiral and posted to earth. Picard, still married to his position as captain of the Enterprise, has also married Beverly Crusher. Worf, promoted to Commander, has assumed the position of Picard’s First Officer, “Number One” in Picard parlance. Geordi Laforge remains in charge of Engineering while Data and Lal are in parts unknown.
AVAILABLE LIGHT is, first, the story of the discovery and prosecution of Section 31, a deep cover black organization that has been exposed after two centuries of behind the curtains computer control of earth, humanity, and Starfleet Command. Jean-Luc Picard, among other high level Starfleet Officers, has been implicated in the forced removal and assassination of a Federation President, ostensibly to prevent a possible renewal of war and violence with the Klingon empire. While Starfleet’s Attorney General ponders the path to that prosecution, Picard is passing through a distant, unexplored area of space called the Odyssean Pass. The second story in AVAILABLE LIGHT is a superb “first encounter” tale that unwinds when the Enterprise crosses paths with what appears to be an abandoned derelict ship and a second ship that, like the Ferengi and their Rules of Acquisition, has only profit on its mind as it lays claim to the empty, drifting ship as salvage.
The Section 31 threat is a timely, cautionary tale on the dangers of AI and unwarranted government oversight and surveillance:
“… nearly every Federation citizen for the past two centuries has been under continuous active surveillance, their every action and communication monitored by an advanced artificial intelligence that culls through this collected information, onstensibly searching for patterns or indication of threats. Section 31 agents then acted on that information, to include murdering anyone deemed a danger to Federation or Starfleet interests … without any form of due process or accountability …”
An interesting hypothetical villain, to be sure, that seems to take its origins from Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon and his notions of psychohistory in the FOUNDATION series:
“For over two hundred years, a computer program has been analyzing patterns and activity, making predictive calculations and acting on probabilities to shape the course of our history. We’ve all just been told that the freedom and security we enjoy has been engineered by a piece of software.”
Rather strips the gilding off the lily, I’d say! And speaking of homage to literary forebears, how about this random quotation from a Star Trek officer while riffing on Spock’s interminable reliance on cold logic that seems to make a completely obvious nod in the direction of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes:
“It would be illogical to theorize as to the builders’ motives while possessing incomplete information.”
AVAILABLE LIGHT closes with a small piece of homespun philosophy that seems worth bearing in mind as we live our lives, 21st century or 24th century!
“… our reason for being is to make a difference, rather than simply marking the passage of time.”
Despite its continuing (and completely annoying) perpetuation of the nonsensical idea that emissions from phasers can be seen as they leap from weapon to target and provide that target with time to duck and roll:
“Chen had just enough presence of mind to duck as the yellow green energy beam surged from the shadows. It passed over her head as she dropped to one knee, while instinct made her draw her phaser and snap a quick shot at the beam’s point of origin.”
AVAILABLE LIGHT is a worthy and compelling addition to the Star Trek canon and the vast library of human-alien first contact stories. In fact, I would hazard a guess that classic sci-fi editor John Campbell would rate Dayton Ward’s creation of the Osijemal species and their search for a new planet after the destruction of their home world as one of the more unique and interesting alien species in the sci-fi repertoire.
“Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel … she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped “Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel … she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped for a few more fish.”
In MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, Canadian author Waubgeshig Rice explored what happens in a post-apocalyptic world where the bridge to civilization, as fragile and as tenuous as it was when it existed, collapses utterly – complete power failure, total communications blackout, no internet, no telephone, no television, no delivery of any goods or commodities, no fuel.
Ten years later, life in a small aboriginal community fully isolated from the outside world, from the white world, a life renewing their dwindling Anishinaabe traditions, has encountered the fatal roadblock of dwindling resources. Their lake is overfished and the land-based animal resources have fled the neighborhood of their community. Migration to a new home has become a vital necessity and the elders of the community have decided it is time to send a scouting party to their traditional home area of the northern shores of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. They need to discover whether life in their former home is viable.
As one might expect in any such novel, the reader is met with a complete spectrum of actions and reactions – heroism, cowardice, bravery, courage, violence, fear, hope, despair, doubt, greed, generosity, leadership, withdrawal and, of course, more than a few deaths under a myriad of related circumstances. Sadly, author Rice also tells a story in which a post-apocalyptic world has failed to learn from its past errors, its past hatred, and most definitely has not evolved into a post-racial world. Racism and xenophobia remains an endemic component of white, western society.
MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES is a worthy sequel and although it does not have quite the strength and compelling urgency of its predecessor MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, it is an easy novel to recommend to those who enjoy themes of post-apocalypse and dystopia. Learning some of the components of aboriginal Anishinaabe culture and their relationship to the world around us is a definite bonus.
A trip with Mr Peabody in the sci-fi wayback machine to a story that did NOT age well!
“Meet David Falkayn, sharpest young trader in the PolesotechnicA trip with Mr Peabody in the sci-fi wayback machine to a story that did NOT age well!
“Meet David Falkayn, sharpest young trader in the Polesotechnic League and susceptible only to the lithe curves of unwary space girls.” An apprentice interplanetary trader looking to advance his career, the heft of his purse, and the number of notches on the belt recording his sexual conquests. THE TROUBLE TWISTERS languished unread on my bookshelf for the better part of fifty years and … sigh … I really should have left it there to slowly disintegrate to powder.
THE TROUBLE TWISTERS is self-contradictory. It’s a collection of informative and interesting side-bar style essays on science, interstellar travel, astronomy, physics, and math together with rather modern outlooks on the nonsense known as organized religion. But those essays are couched in a story that is misogynistic to a ridiculous degree and focused on distinctly macho male attitudes towards sex. Sadly its protagonist earthlings also exhibit a profoundly capitalist, self-entitled distinctly Wild West American cultural attitude towards extraterrestrials and planets other than earth (for purposes of thematic analysis, these aliens would be considered as “indigenous” or “colonials”).
On those destructive, colonial attitudes, for example:
“… they’d have to increase their numbers, and enlarge their industrial base, and get control of every man-useful planet in this neighbourhood. But eventually; for power, and glory, and upset of the hated merchants, and advancement of a Way of Life – war … The time to squelch them was now. A good healthy licking would discredit the landholders …”
On the (hopefully long outdated) puerile attitudes toward women and sex:
“Three in a ship, I think, is enough … You, the Master merchant, trained in culture comparisons and swogglehorning. A planetologist and a xenobiologist. They should be nonhumans. Different talents, you see, also not so much nerve-scratching when cooped together. Nicer to have a lovingly girl along, I know, but when you get back again, ha, ha! – you make up good. Or even before. You got just invited to my next little orgy, boy, if you take the job.”
And on religion:
“Only a moron or a tourist would generalize about an entire planet from a single culture. But you could usually figure that the most advanced people on a world had at least one of the more sophisticated theologies. And Katandara’s was astoundingly crude … ever since primordial Fire and Ice happened to get together and condense into the universe, … there were vaguely personified demons, powers, call them what you will; and they were forever trying to restore chaos. Their modus operandi was to cause disasters. They could only be held at bay through magic … and magicians weren’t uniformly good, either. You never knew if somebody hadn’t been corrupted and was lending his abilities to the service of Destruction.” (sure sounds like the clergy and administration of modern day religions to me!!)
There are lots and lots of great golden age sci-fi novels out there that can be read like timeless classics. Go find one and give THE TROUBLE TWISTERS a pass!
For a popular science nerd and a reader of sci-fi with a lit“Good night, Rocky.” “Good night, Grace.” “Good night, Mrs Calabash, wherever you are!”
For a popular science nerd and a reader of sci-fi with a little more than a passing knowledge of university level physics and math, PROJECT HAIL MARY is a gift that keeps on giving, manna from heaven, or a smashed piñata that will allow you to sit cross-legged below it as it rains down a blizzard of gifts from above. I’ll acknowledge that my reaction may be more ebullient than others but, having closed the last page with a sigh of satisfaction and a small sniff that it was over, I’m thrilled to have just been privileged to read one of my personal Top 10 Favourites for 2023 and, arguably, one of my Lifetime best!!
Jumping off from the reality of the existential threat of global warming, Weir takes the opposite tack and posits the coming of the mother of all killer ice ages. Science has detected Astrophage – a primordial life form capable of literally feeding on the heat of the sun and causing its output to decline precipitously to a point at which life would be unsustainable on earth. The solution – if one exists at all – requires an interstellar multi-year voyage to Tau Ceti, a nearby sun in the galaxy. Nearby, hah! Yeah, right! Even having solved the problem of rocket propulsion and fuel capable of accelerating a ship to near light speeds, the voyage would take over four “ship” years and nearly thirteen “earth” years after accounting for relativistic time dilation.
The back cover marketing blurb characterizes PROJECT HAIL MARY as a tale of discovery, speculation, and surivival to rival THE MARTIAN. Well, that’s for sure. A list of the topics that Weir’s blockbuster follow-up to THE MARTIAN touches on would be nearly as lengthy as the novel itself – relativistic time dilation, of course; stellar evolution and star classes; suspended animation; exobiology; extraterrestrial first contact and communication; linguistics; artificial gravity; the psychology of space travel; EVAs; panspermia and evolution; orbital mechanics; and much, much, MUCH more!
Because I thought ARTEMIS was such a ridiculous letdown after THE MARTIAN, I waited a long, long two years before I had the courage to crack open PROJECT HAIL MARY. I needn’t have worried! It was worth the wait and a good deal more besides. Definitely recommended.
Solaris had “shown the astonishing faculty of maintaining an orbit which ought, without any shadow of a doubt, to have been unstable”.
Kelvin was a psSolaris had “shown the astonishing faculty of maintaining an orbit which ought, without any shadow of a doubt, to have been unstable”.
Kelvin was a psychologist sent to a research space station orbiting the planet Solaris with the mandate to determine whether the mission should be terminated and disbanded due to a lack of progress. What he finds instead is a crew in dire mental difficulty struggling with the apparent hallucination of figures from their own pasts. Kelvin soon finds himself in his own turn visited by his much loved wife, dead these long years past at her own hand. Is the vision real and, much more to the point, how is Solaris plumbing the mental depths of its visitors and creating these troubling visions?
Situated somewhere in a vast literary tract bounded by horror and paranormal, philosophy, psychology, and sci-fi, SOLARIS is an extended essay musing on impenetrably esoteric themes including Gaia; planets as global lifeforms and planetary sentience; intelligence and motivation; the nature of memory; and the almost infinite possibilities for the nature of extraterrestrial life and intelligence. If John Campbell was pleased at Stanley Weinbaum’s response to his dictum, "write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man" when Weinbaum crafted the ostrich Tweel in THE MARTIAN ODYSSEY or the outrageously bizarre intelligent plant Oscar in THE LOTUS EATERS, then it must also be true that Stanislaw Lem simply smiled, sat back, and said, “Hold my beer”! The mind simply reels:
“It had been accepted that the [Solarian] ocean was an organic formation – a sort of gigantic entity, a fluid cell, unique and monstrous (which they called ‘prebiological’), surrounding [Solaris] with a colloidal envelope several miles thick in places – the astronomers and physicists asserted that it must be an organic structure, extraordinarily evolved. According to them, the ocean possibly exceeded terrestrial organic structures in complexity, since it was capable of exerting an active influence on the planet’s orbital path.”
Yeah … some understatement! Here was a planet capable of guiding itself in orbit in order to maintain indefinite viability around dual suns that should have gravitationally destroyed the planet in a mere twinkling of geological planetary time.
And consider this rather awesome evaluation of the shortcomings of any possible efforts at communication with extraterrestrial intelligence:
“… the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one- or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us … Gastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be, any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any non-human civilization.”
I would have added narcissistic and egocentric to that list of descriptors to mankind’s contemplation of the universe but neither Lem nor the editors consulted me!
If you like your sci-fi plots crisply detailed and clearly finished with a definite dénouement, climax and ending, then perhaps SOLARIS won’t be your cup of tea. A wide open lack of completion to the story is clearly intended to allow the reader to continue thinking and contemplating on the issues and themes that Lem placed before his readers. Recommended with the caveat that SOLARIS worked for me but it won’t work for everyone.
“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where the“I was in one of the new residential schools, …”
“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where they tried to kill the Indian in the child.”
HUNTING BY STARS, a sequel to THE MARROW THIEVES, posits a mid-21st century dystopian world, caused by the ravages of global climate warming, in which non-aboriginal white people have somehow lost the ability to dream. The scientific reasons for this devastating neurological deficit in white people and the fact that its cure rests in the bone marrow of aboriginal people are not explored. Nor are those explanations necessary for Dimaline’s story - aboriginal people are hunted down, their bone marrow is harvested, and the marrow donor is summarily killed. Aboriginal lives are meaningless and expendable in the drive to rescue whites from the plague and pandemic madness caused by the loss of dreaming. Even worse yet, with a terrifying program of indoctrination and brain-washing (in a manner much like Rick Yancey hypothesized for his extraterrestrial invasion in his young adult sci-fi novel, THE 5TH WAVE), some aboriginals, having been captured by the marauding whites, are absorbed and re-inserted into their communities as secret agents to assist with the “recruiting and harvesting” of healthy young aboriginals for their marrow.
The narrative stands, fully exposed in its naked reality, as an extended metaphor for the cultural and actual genocide of aboriginal people in Canada by the white non-native population, their government and its tools, the Roman Catholic and other Christian churches.
Highly recommended with the added hope that THE MARROW THIEVES and its sequel HUNTING BY STARS make it onto the curriculum for younger school readers. Perhaps if young readers, who are undoubtedly innocent of Canada’s past offenses, become shocked and angry, they will become adamant activists in the fight to ensure the problem is repaired and subsequently relegated to history. (Dare I say that we might hope to swell the ranks of the “woke”?) Like the first step in AA’s Twelve Step Program to recovery from alcoholism, the white community’s acknowledgement of the existence of this problem, as shameful and as embarrassing as it is (and note carefully that this is couched in the present tense), is the first necessary step to a meeting of the minds with aboriginal people, to the adoption of some of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to the elevation of aboriginal people to a recognized, important status in the future of a compassionate, tolerant, forward-thinking Canada.
“Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death ray“The truth is, once they found us, we were toast”
“Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death rays. Forget about epic battles with tanks and fighter jets and the final victory of us scrappy, unbroken, intrepid humans over the bug-eyed swarm. That’s about as far from the truth as their dying planet was from our living one.”
THE 5TH WAVE is a gripping young adult tale of courage and survival in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion that knocks the intellectual stuffing out of the likes of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a much loved classics like THE WAR OF THE WORLDS or even the best that the STAR WARS franchise has to offer. This invasion was not meant for mere planetary conquest. This was all-out total genocide of humankind that had been planned over centuries and would be carefully executed in five stages – first, EMP or electromagnetic pulse; second, artificially generated coastal tsunamis on a global scale; third, a devastating plague; fourth, the silent hunting down and execution of remaining pockets of humanity … and the fifth? Well, you’re just going to have to read the story, aren’t you?
Aside from telling a fascinating tale of survival, romance, high-tech horror and gruesome dystopia, I have no doubt that Rick Yancey was also making a profound political comment. He was leaving intellectual thinking room for the conclusion that his story was an extended metaphor for the possible destruction of the USA or even world from within by current right-wing elements, gun worship, and even evangelical Christianity. A literary, book-length version of Walt Kelly’s oft-repeated Pogo aphorism, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
Consider these rather interesting hints that might lead a reader to that interpretation:
‘ “Twigs” … street for “thugs with guns”, murderers, rapists, black marketers, kidnappers, and just your general punks who showed up midway through the 3rd wave … it wasn’t the aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.”
“Dad had a thing about guns. Never liked them. Said guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. Now he didn’t think they were dangerous so much as he thought they were ridiculously lame.”
‘ “Now I lay me down to sleep …” to me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.”
Maybe there’s a message and maybe there’s only a story. But, if you put your nose down to where the rubber hits the road, that story is pretty damned exciting. Definitely recommended.
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