Summer 2007 (34 page)

This one people refer to as “the Gargoyle cover” or “the
angry stone man cover.” It’s a safer cover, by which I mean it doesn’t really
turn anyone off. No 16 year old boy is going to shy away from it out of fear that
someone will tease him for reading it in public.

Other plusses include the fact that it’s atmospheric,
mysterious, and in keeping with the title of the book. It’s also a little more
mainstream looking, so people who don’t ordinarily go in for fantasy might be
willing to give it a try.

It also, quite by coincidence, looks more than a little
bit like me.

AK: Which science fascinates you most?

PR:
I don’t think I could pick a
favorite. I really dug chemistry in high school. And physics. But whenever I
end up getting into something new I find it really interesting. I remember when
I had to take Astronomy 101 as a GDR in college. I was pissed, of course, and I
considered it a waste of my time.

But that only lasted for about 20 minutes. As soon as I
was in the class I couldn’t help be fascinated. Pretty much everything is
interesting once you get into it.

AK: What kind of a student were you in school?

PR:
It depends. If you’re talking
about completing homework and living up to my potential, then I was probably a
bad student. But I was interested and polite, and I liked my teachers. I just
wasn’t really motivated to impress anyone.

I had mad scientist tendencies back in high school. Once
in Physics we had to create a
rube Goldberg
machine
machine. We were supposed to build a contraption using five
or six simple machines. Mine had thirty eight.

Needless to say, it was a disaster on a grand scale.
When it failed for the third time in class I flew into a rage and destroyed it.
Apparently the physics teacher still shows the videotape of that to his
incoming students.

AK: Trip “rolls sevens” — do you have a special
knack for anything?

(Besides writing, of course…)

PR:
Oh boy. The things I’m good at I
don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about in polite company.

Let me think…. Oh. I have preternatural bargaining
skills. I can sell anything to anyone.

I have also been told on several occasions by several
different people that I am the best kisser in the world.

AK: So, did you not get the memo about never starting
your story in a bar?

PR:
Oh please, that’s my most minor
offense. If you’re going to take a dig at me, make it a good one. C’mon, I know
you have it in you.

AK: What’s next for you? And will it feature a bar
and/or a redhead?

PR:
Are you making me an offer?

AK: After the kissing comment, I just might. But answer
this first: if you could be any superhero, who would you be?

PR:
Hmmm….. Emma Frost? Sexy. Super
tough. Mind control. Possibly evil….

Yeah. I think I’m going to go with Emma.

Don’t read too much into
that.

Review:
Race for the Rocket by Anne KG Murphy

His Majesty’s Dragon
–Naomi
Novik–Del Rey

Glasshouse
–Charles Stross–Ace

Rainbows End
–Vernor Vinge–Tor

Eifelheim
–Michael Flynn–Tor

Blindsight
–Peter Watts–Tor

Reviews by Anne KG Murphy

It’s July, which means if you haven’t voted for the Hugo
awards (and you plan to) you should get a move on–the deadline is July
31. Even for those of us who are not members of this year’s Worldcon (who vote
on the Hugos), the list of nominees can make an interesting, if not always completely
dependable, recommended reading list. This year’s nominees for Best Novel
include a dragonback romp by air and sea (
His Majesty’s Dragon
by Naomi
Novik), an interesting contemplation of power and psychology in a time when
people and things can be both duplicated and edited (
Glasshouse,
by
Charles Stross), an adventurous exploration of personal and (potentially)
international drama as a post-senility poet reawakens in the cyberenhanced
world of his granddaughter’s generation just in time to help save the planet
from a viral do-gooder (
Rainbows End
by Vernor Vinge), and two very
different alien contact stories: a high-minded moral, intellectual and social
alternate history exploratory called
Eifelheim
by Michael Flynn; and a
tension-filled battle between instinctive experience and cognitive analysis,
the outer and inner space psychodrama that is
Blindsight
, by Peter
Watts.

In
His Majesty’s Dragon
, readers will find
themselves sharing the frustrations and sometimes exhilarating successes of
Temeraire and Captain Will Laurence, two like-minded souls who are thrown
together when Temeraire hatches on the deck of Capt. Laurence’s ship and
accepts the harness from him, propelling the duty-bound Laurence out of His
Majesty’s Navy and into His Majesty’s Aerial Corps. Laurence bucks up under his
highly unusual career move, and finds that piloting and caring for his unique
and rapidly growing dragon is rewarding in ways he never anticipated.

Temeraire is an inquisitive and thoughtful fellow, with
the impetuousness, passion, and charming ignorance of youth. The mature and
disciplined Laurence proves a perfect counterpoint to the young creature. With
years of service to Britain under his belt, Laurence is dedicated to defending
his country, but he will find his loyalties challenged when it comes to what is
expected of himself and Temeraire.

Set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, Novik’s trilogy
(
His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War
) is
alternate history at its most creative and detailed. What if (she asks) there
be dragons? Rigged with ropes, guns and crew not unlike a naval ship, in Europe
Novik’s dragons serve in the military much as airplanes will serve later in
history (though airplanes are perhaps less likely to be boarded mid-battle).
The characters and relationships in
His Majesty’s Dragon
are believable,
the story is nicely scripted, and the sense of high-seas adventure has lead
many to compare the series favorably to the work of Patrick O’Brian.
Well-written and captivating whether describing battles in midair or political
intrigue at ground level, this is an outstanding first effort and ought to win
Novik the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer (it has already brought
her the Locus Award for best first novel).

As we have come to expect from Charles Stross,
Glasshouse
is chock full of multiple what-ifs, but the ones that are key to the plot
involve memory editing and nanotech assemblers that can manufacture nearly
anything given time, mass, and the appropriate program (or original to copy).
Such assemblers can be used as transportation gates, passing people from one
place to another as information and reassembling them at the other end of the
trip, but if those A-gates are corrupted or reprogrammed, people can be
transformed in mid-transit.
Glasshouse
proposes a few interesting
voluntary (and involuntary) mental and physical transformations people might
experience, along with implications of the misuse of such technology.

The main character, Robin, has apparently voluntarily
wiped most of his memories and is in rehabilitation, knowing little about
himself other than that he is very good at dueling and other types of violence.
An intriguing four-armed woman named Kay draws him into a role-playing
experiment that is supposedly about investigating emergent social structures in
a technologically backwards culture, but soon seems to have more sinister
motives. In the process they give up their bodies and names, to be placed in
body and gender assignments determined by the experimenters. Complexities of
mind/body identity, social psychology, conformity and rebellion against
cognitive dictatorship make this book heavier than a mere adventure. This is a
good thing, but it may not be to everyone’s taste; I found it distinctly slow
in the middle, but it picked up my interest again toward the finish.

Rainbows End
considers a similar sort of
involuntary mental editing, only in the form of a virus that could leave people
vulnerable to suggestion so strong it’s more like compulsion–every
marketing executive’s wet dream, and apparently an active experiment of some
unknown agent. There is a danger the viral technology could be made to work on
everybody–if it does, who will control it, to what end? To find out, an
international team of investigators hires an independent cybernaut whose
white-rabbit online presence only hints at the power and whimsy of his talents.
Circumstantially enmeshed in the situation is the Gu family: Robert Gu, an
elder poet who has been cured of his Alzheimer’s and given various
youth-restoring treatments, his son and daughter-in-law, who both work in
security, and his granddaughter Miri, a teenager who goes to school with a mix
of peers that includes Robert and other rejuvenants who are being retrained to
the modern world.

Situated mostly in southern California,
Rainbows End
is well-written and briskly paced. The technology it highlights is wearable VR
delivered and controlled through contact lenses, wired clothing and neural
interfaces; the primary theme is self-expression, with a secondary cautionary
theme about uploaded knowledge programs and other ways being wired might open
people to losing control of themselves. VR-enhanced reality is second nature to
the young people in the book, who construct sophisticated multimedia
compositions in school and overlay visual jokes for their peers, but Robert Gu
and other elders must come to it slowly, initially through awkward interfaces
that seem like interactive paper.

Sound like an unlikely background for international
intrigue? Vinge keeps the action moving while he embroils the reader in the
interpersonal issues between Robert and his remarkable family and friends, all
affected and enabled by various technologies they use. Vinge is up there with the
best of them in his seamless integration of imaginative technology with a
compelling story. My only regret in the technical arena was how they typeset
the person-to-person silent messaging–it was awkward and jarring; it
looked like hypertext in a way that I didn’t intuitively internalize like the
naturalistic IM systems already in use. Generally, though, the enhanced
cyberworld was well done. Particularly well drawn was a battle of competing
alternate reality creators, fighting over the future of a University Library
doomed to be digitized and shredded, Not Vinge’s best work, but an excellent
read.

Another excellent book, Michael Flynn’s
Eifelheim
also takes place on Earth, but it speculates in both the near future and in an
intriguing history. The time-split story features two communities of scholars
and a deep mystery: what has happened to the village of Eifelheim?

Pastor Dietrich is the pastor at St Catherine’s Church
in Oberhochwald, a secluded village in the Black Forest. A scientific man with
a haunted past, he once studied among such peers as William of Ochkam. His
portion of the story starts in 1348, at Matins, the Commemoration of Sixtus II
and his Companions. The countryside is electrified with a great and sudden
power, followed by a loud noise and a fire. As the villagers recover from the
fire with the help of Dietrich and his Minorite assistant Joachim, there are
rumors of watching eyes and unnatural beings abroad in the woods. Dietrich sets
out to investigate, trying in vain to assure his flock that something is not
unnatural just because you have never seen it before.

At the “Now” end of the timeline, Sharon Nagy is a
theoretical physicist trying to solve the geometries of Janatpur space. Her
domestic partner Tom Schwoerin is a cliologist–a mathematical historian.
He is working to figure out why there is no modern town in a place where the
patterns of history would logically put one. His growing theory is that
something happened there to scare people away. Some of his sources suggest
demons. Frustrated by a scarcity of information, by chance Tom recruits the
librarian Judy Cao to be his research assistant. She discovers that Eifelheim
was a gloss for Oberhochwald, and the clues start to come together.

This book does something that is all too rare; it
illustrates how scientists are influenced by the comments and other input of
the people and events around them to come to conclusions they would never would
have reached on their own. All of the scholars in this book stretch their minds
over strange ideas, especially Dietrich, who takes into his community a most
bizarre class of men. The Krenken are far from home, struggling to get back
before they run out of food that can sustain them. Technologically superior to
the men of this time, they need not fear the weapons of the local Lord’s men,
but the structure of their society may be threatened by the beliefs of the
people to whom they reluctantly turn for shelter as winter arrives. The outer
world also threatens to encroach; denunciation from the mother Church looms in
the wake of spreading rumors of demons, and there is the approaching plague
coming to further terrorize the populace. Their route home will ultimately be
explained by Sharon’s research, but for some will involve a change in their
definition of Home.