Richard Chwedyk sold his first story in 1990, won a Nebula in 2002, and has been active in the field for the past twenty-nine years.
DELIVERING THE GOODS
Those of us reading this magazine, and other magazines like it, are well aware that when we talk about science fiction, we’re not all talking about just one kind of thing. If someone mentions “cereal,” not all of us visualize a box of generic bran flakes sitting on a grocery store shelf (remember grocery stores?). Some of us are going to think of something like the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs from Calvin and Hobbes. And why not? There’s cereal and then there is “cereal.” The latter may not be good for you, but it does make you feel good (in moderation, of course).
Many kinds of science fiction may deliver the goods, but there’s many kinds of goods that can be delivered, all under the same rubric, all in the same sort of package.
Let’s see what goods have been delivered to us this time.
Hella
by David Gerrold
DAW
June 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7564-1657-7
I was going to say a whole bunch of stuff about David Gerrold and how he is now one of Grand Masters of the field, and how I remember when he was a punk kid who managed to write one of the most famous Star Trek TOS episodes (“The Trouble with Tribbles”) of all time, and that I’d been a fan of his prose at least since The Man Who Folded Himself, and how a number of his fans are pissed that he’s writing this new novel when he should be finishing his “The War Against the Chtorr” series, and then throw in something about how if I had read his book about SF and fantasy writing, Worlds of Wonder, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to write my own article about writing science fiction because he’d said everything I wanted to say already. [Stops to take breath.] But you know all that, so I won’t even mention The Martian Child (though I just did).
What I will say is that Hella is a novel I have been waiting for, though I didn’t know I was waiting for it. I’ve been reading many stories and novels about humans heading out to settle other planets, survive hostile environments and discover things about the nature of humanity and/or the universe, and none of them have been as engaging and compelling as this novel.
There’s plenty of great world building here. Hella is planet where everything is big—way big. And there’s plenty that the humans have to learn to adjust to, including their own sexual identities, and plenty of other strange and wondrous interminglings of the everyday with the barely conceivable.
Plus, as an added bonus, HARLIE makes a significant and welcome appearance.
But what really makes this novel work in a way that leaves my other readings far behind is the voice of the storyteller and central protagonist, Kyle Martin.
Now, in a sense, this is his story: a child grows to an adult in a strange and in some ways hostile world. His story is a reflection of the “bigger” story of the human settlement on new worlds (new to us, at least). We never lose sight of either aspect of the novel’s narrative territory. Kyle’s a good storyteller because he’s a good listener, and a good observer. Kyle has a lot to tell us about himself, but also about Hella, his friends, family, acquaintances—and he never gets lost in delineating the details of one to the exclusion of the other. He is straightforward, direct, and respectful of us—his audience. As readers, we find it easy to trust him because he trusts us.
There’s this general feeling in the Hella Colony that we’ll never conquer the planet if we hide behind the fences of Summerland Station. So we have to go out ourselves, smell the air and taste the world. We have to feel the dirt between our fingers. If we are ever going to make this planet ours, we have to give up our fear of it and get into a genuinely courageous relationship. That’s what Captain Skyler says.
The influence of Robert A. Heinlein is strongly and unapologetically felt here, but the delivery is pure Gerrold.
I remember hearing author Karen Joy Fowler say once, “When I find the voice of the story, it all comes together.”
Hella comes together splendidly. When the voice of the storyteller meets the ear of the reader in the right way, the teller, audience, and story all become one.
And does so here.
Fleet Elements
by Walter Jon Williams
Harper Voyager
December 2020
ISBN: 978-0-0624-6706-5
I’m not sure if this is a continuation of Williams’s “Dread Empire’s Fall” series or a new series that picks up where the other left off. Either way, we’re back in the Praxis universe, and there’s loads of action and intrigue, centering on an amiable (to us, if not always to each other) pair of characters, Gareth Martinez and Caroline Sula. The aliens who worked so hard to establish the Praxis Empire and do away with humanity are now, themselves, extinct. Praxis, however is far from extinct, though it is equally far from being orderly. It’s fractured and torn in civil war.
Galactic empires come and go. We’ve had so many of them. All you have to do is scan the shelves of the local library or bookstore. Even when they are so splendidly rendered as what Williams has accomplished here (and elsewhere; he’s been at this for a while now). And even when he convincingly encapsulates the debates over the nature of empires, good or bad, in some fascinating dialogues provided by an extensive cast of characters.
What we care about, and what keeps us going, page after page, is our engagement with Martinez and Sula. Their relationship is as rocky and perilous as all the nifty battles and fleets of lethal warships—and some nifty science thrown into the bargain (remember that for all the lords and ladies and feudal strategies stressed in the usual cover copy, “interstellar adventure,” a.k.a. “space opera,” at its heart, is science fiction) just for fun. At the heart of many a good novel are the people, no matter the species, whose journey these pages record. It’s their story, even when we’re enchanted into images of action and energy rendered with the precision of an engineer’s schematic:
The bomber rose to his feet, satchel in hand, and began to make a clumsy run around the Sun Ray toward the officers’ hostel. At best, Sula knew, the bomb would blow out the door of the hostel and let the attackers enter to begin a massacre. At worst it would take off the whole front of the building. So Sula did her best to track the bomber in her sights and kept pulling the trigger until a light shone on the back of her pistol to tell her the magazine was empty. Return fire smacked into the wall of her building, twitched the curtain above her head. She dropped the magazine out of her pistol, slapped in her spare, and saw the light wink out. But she’d lost sight of the runner, and then she heard the thrashing sound of one of the rifles on full automatic, and the open window frame dissolved into flying metal splinters while bullets hammered the wall and plaster and dust filled the air.
Galactic empires come and go. I may not care much about pistols or automatics or crazed bombers. But a paragraph like that leaves one so breathlessly present in the immediate scene, it’s worth all the empires and their lords and ladies in a shelf’s worth of other space operas.
Nucleation
by Kimberly Unger
Tachyon Publications
November 2020
ISBN: 978-1-6169-6338-5
Some years ago, when the notion of remote-controlled space exploration started to seem like a more plausible means for “getting out there,” a number of science fiction fans and space enthusiasts winced a little. Robotic probes controlled from the home planet just didn’t feel the same, or didn’t mean as much. “We” wouldn’t be out there, just our hardware.
And science fiction writers wrestled with the question of where could we find the drama in some person or persons sitting at a base on earth, controlling vehicles and probes, but going home at the end of their shift, maybe stopping on the way to pick up tacos for the family. It didn’t feel like boldly going where no one has gone before. It felt like boldly going nowhere.
Rest assured, Kimberly Unger has found a way to make piloting space vehicles via virtual reality interesting, compelling, with the requisite “stakes” high enough to maintain our interest. Besides, the VR piloting is just a first step. Unger has done a good job of fashioning a world where such an approach to space exploration feels solid under our feet.
What seals the deal is our hero, Helen Vectorovich. She is not an intensely complex character, but she is a determined character, searching for the truth behind two significant failures for which she has been held responsible. She keeps the novel on course where it can easily drift off into overly lengthy explanations of how pilots and operators inside these strange podlike things can control remote ships via “quantum entanglements.” No, I don’t know how quantum entanglements work either, but Unger gives us sufficient detail (but not much more) to convince us that they do work as something more than the SF equivalent of “abracadabra.”
The ending is “open” enough to indicate that this is the start of a series. It is also a first novel. What it may lack in polish it makes up for in promise.
Ballistic
by Marko Kloos
47North
May 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9005-6
Marko Kloos was not a name with which I was familiar, nor his publisher, 47North (a division of Amazon Publishing, which I didn’t even know existed until I received this book). It was worth taking a look.
Kloos is a writer with more than requisite skill in depicting complex situations and processes. More important, he has a feel for human concerns and conveys them with real thought and emotional depth.
Military SF is not usually my go-to reading, but I know that some of the most solid prose writing in the field can be found in its, if you’ll excuse the expression, ranks. Ballistic is engaging and engrossing. For a second novel in a series, it has a solid (but not completely captivating) opening unless perhaps you’ve already read the first book. Nevertheless, I stayed with it, and was rewarded for doing so.
In many space operas and military SF series, there are rival powers, high stakes, alliances and rebellions and races against time. What often gets lost is the grunt’s-eye-view of persons doing tough jobs, getting things done without regard to the fate of the galaxy or whatever else’s fate has to be fought over. The human drama, no matter the species, is what usually sells me.
Aden Jansen, the hero here, is an interesting and affable enough person, but where Kloos really sells me is in his supporting cast. Our point of view shifts ably through a number of characters. One who particularly caught my attention is Idina, a thirty-seven-year-old infantry sergeant who is starting to feel her prime may be getting past her. But soldiering is the only life she has known. Her current assignment underscores her ambivalence.
. . .Eleventh Street wasn’t very crowded, but there were still plenty of people around, and Idina didn’t like the idea of having to fire her weapon. Even with the aim assist of her suit, rounds could miss their target, or overpenetrate it and strike someone who didn’t need to get shot. Out in the field as an infantry trooper, she’d rarely had to think about things like collateral damage or restrain her firepower for fear of hitting the wrong target. The AI in her armor wouldn’t let her fire on a friendly accidentally, and all the people on her side had their own armor, which would deflect stray sounds and ricochets.
And that’s why soldiers don’t make good police officers, she thought . . .
Far off as the world of Gretia and the other worlds of Kloos’s novel may be, they have a familiar resonance. And what impresses readers most (I hope) about this novel (and those to come, I hope as well) is not the author’s command of weaponry, interstellar technologies and various other paraphernalia, but his deep appreciation of human frailty and insecurity.
It’s what we look for in all good novelists no matter what sub-category we fit their work into, and it’s what we find here in no small measure.
Alien Secrets
by Ian Douglas
Harper Voyager
June 2020
ISBN: 978-0-0628-2538-4
Perhaps it’s because I’m still thinking about Colin Dickey’s The Unidentified, which I reviewed last month, that I was drawn into this novel, which is the first in a series (“Solar Warden,” the name of the series, runs bigger on the cover than the title of the novel). Dickey’s book examines our fascination with things like cryptids (the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot) and UFOs and how belief in such things can mutate into conspiracy theories of ever-growing proportions. We have an innate need to find explanations for things that have no explanations. Applied in one way, we’re engaging in delusion. Applied in another, we’re making fiction.
Douglas has come up with a clever alternate history beginning with post World War II UFO sightings marking certain alliances between humans and aliens, continuing with the ever-popular former Nazi scientists working for “our side” or “their side,” secret government agencies, historical figures making significant cameos, aurian from outer space, and a Navy SEAL lieutenant who will, of course, get to the bottom of things on our behalf.
The novel is a little heavy on establishing its backstory and world building, and our protagonist, Mark Hunter, is still a ways from becoming distinct from all the other “capable man” heroes of such series. But in the end I found the novel great fun. And thoughtful fun as well, which bodes well for the rest of the series.
“A STORY IS A BALLET”
Benchmarks Continued: F&SF “Books” Columns 1975–1982
by Algis Budrys
Ansible Editions
2012
ISBN:978-1-300-34659-3 (trade paperback)
978-1-913451-00-4 (e-book)
Benchmarks Revisited: F&SF “Books” Columns 1983–1986
by Algis Budrys
Ansible Editions
2013
ISBN: 978-1-291-43604-4 (trade paperback)
978-1-913451-01-1 (e-book)
Benchmarks Concluded: F&SF “Books” Columns 1987–1993
by Algis Budrys
Ansible Editions
2013
ISBN: 978-1-291-45527-4 (trade paperback)
978-1-913451-02-8(e-book)
Beyond the Outposts: Essays on SF and Fantasy 1955–1996
by Algis Budrys
Ansible Editions
2020
ISBN: 978-0-244-56705-7 (trade paperback)
978-1-913451-67-7 (e-book)
These books may seem a strange choice in my quest to familiarize you with classic—or at least “non-recent”—SF and fantasy, but I think these volumes are appropriate on a number of levels.
Why read books of collected book reviews? Because, in these days, with Goodreads and similar platforms, we have all become book reviewers.
And in this mad pursuit, Algis Budrys was perhaps the most intelligent, insightful and, above all, entertaining practitioner our field has had, and may ever have.
During most of the 1980s and early 1990s, I bought my copies of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from the newsstand or bookstore and read them on the commute home from my newspaper job. The first thing I would turn to was Budrys’s “Books” column. I knew that not only would he inform me of books and authors I should keep an eye out for, but very likely reading the column would be my one encounter with a great mind for the whole month.
For Budrys, very often, reviewing a book was the starting off point for a meditation on our field, on literature or art in general, or our place (such as it may be) in the universe. His writing never sought to be overtly familiar or conversational, but he similarly did not indulge in academic esoterica. He wrote his reviews as he wrote his best fiction (and his fiction remains some of the best this field has produced): with wit, economy, and heart.
The best way to appreciate these books is not to go through them systematically, volume to volume, page to page, but to flip around randomly, light upon a promising topic, then jump to another. In the midst of an essay, “Beyond Rayguns and Godzilla,” on what distinguishes science fiction from other literary works, you might come upon a passage like this:
All fiction is about social interaction, even if the protagonist is totally alone, because he never is. He is always with the reader. The drama lies in the interaction between the protagonist and the reader as they explore their world, and it is relevant to the reader to the extent that he feels distinct kinships and antipathies toward the character’s various actions. But speculative fiction is drama made more relevant by social extrapolation.
He was always perceptive. He could be profound. He could also be wickedly hilarious. Elsewhere, he writes a plea to his editor, here labeled “Boss,” about a best-selling novel he was given to review:
. . .You have finally assigned me a book I cannot finish. Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Supremacy . . .waddles when it walks, has feathers all over it, and constantly makes weird noises. I would bet it was bred by artificial insemination. It is a turkey.
And anywhere between his insight and his witty dissections, he found time to be sublime:
Language is a tool, all right. But you cannot extract beauty from a packing case even though it’s stamped “Magic Lantern.” A story is not a packing case even when it has blurbs on it. A story is a ballet.
David Langford and his friends at Ansible Editions should be applauded for making so much of Budrys’s nonfiction and critical writing available to us again.
Now if only someone, or a group of someones, would do the same for his fiction.
Copyright © 2020 by Richard Chwedyk.