Visions of Paradise #112: Wondrous Stories Visions of Paradise #112: Wondrous Stories Contents Wondrous Stories ...............................................................................................page 3 Forbidden Planets ... The High Crusade ... The Space Opera Renaissance ... Seeker ... Resplendent ... Tidbits Listomania.............................................................................................................page 16 A future history primer The In-Box ..........................................................................................................page 17 On the Lighter Side...........................................................................................page 18 _\\|//- ( 0-0 ) -------------------o00--(_)--00o----------------- E-mail: [email protected] Personal blog: http://adamosf.blogspot.com/ Sfnal blog: http://visionsofparadise.blogspot.com/ Available online at http://efanzines.com/ Copyright © January, 2007, by Gradient Press Available for trade, letter of comment or request Artwork Brad Foster ... cover Sheryl Birkhead ... p. 7 Trinlay Khadro ... p. 18 WondrousWondrous StoriesStories In his editorial for Forbidden Planets, editor Marvin Kaye mentions that this is the 27th anthology he has edited for the Science Fiction Book Club since 1970, but this is the first one I have bought for a simple reason: all the previous ones were fantasy. This book is the most recent collection of original novellas published by the SFBC. Previously I have bought and enjoyed Robert Silverberg’s Between Worlds, Mike Resnick’s Down These Dark Spaceways, and Gardner Dozois’ One Million A.D. Each of the previous volumes have featured one or two exceptional stories, with the others all ranging between good and very good. I had no reason to expect this volume would be any less interesting, nor was I disappointed. It seems inevitable that a Robert Reed novella would be one of the highlights of the book, since his masterful “Good Mountain” was the best story in One Million A.D. and his “Camouflage” was one of the highlights of Down These Dark Spaceways. Reading a Robert Reed story is virtually a guarantee you will get a creative, well-plotted story, often a memorable one as well. How he keeps turning out such a constant stream of top-notch stories is amazing to me, as is the fact that he has never received a major award for any of his stories. He has not even had as many nominees as many lesser writers, a total of 5 Hugo nominations, a single Nebula nomination, 2 John W. Campbell finalists, and a single World Fantasy nomination. He has done better with the Locus poll, making the final list 40 times, but even there he has been underrated since he has never finished higher than a 5th place finish. Reed’s “Rococo” is a Great Ship story–which is where he does some of his very best stuff, such as the amazing “Marrow” and “The Remoras”–but instead of being set exclusively on the Great Ship, this is a story about its discovery and one of the alien races which petition for space on the ship. It tells the story of a woman Aasleen and her brother Rococo who is beloved by everybody on the Great Ship, until he abruptly and mysteriously tries to land on a forbidden world and she is sent to bring him back. The plot itself is interesting, but the story’s strength is the alien world Chaos and its various races, particularly the Scypha. Reed fans will not be disappointed by this story. Jack McDevitt has also appeared in several of these SFBC volumes but, unlike Reed, he has not done his very best stuff in them. “Kaminsky at War” questions the Prime Directive of much classic SF, including the various Star Trek series. Kaminsky is an anthropologist on a space ship studying a world inhabited by particularly violent natives. The comparisons to 20th and 21st century humans are fairly obvious in the story. After observing a particularly brutal slaughter, Kaminsky can no longer accept the Protocol and sets out to do whatever he can to end the slaughter. The story is interesting reading, but it is primarily a wish fulfilment story, with a wish fulfilment ending, and is somewhat less successful than other stories in the book. Julie Czerneda has garnered popularity in recent years with several series of biologically-based sf adventures, none of which I have read. But her popularity among both readers and critics has encouraged me to read some of her stuff, so I was glad to see her story “No Place Like Home” here. It tells the story of a humanoid race who have lived in spacecraft for so many generations they have no knowledge of their legendary homeworld. So their craft travel from world to world seeking their homeworld. Rather than send boarding parties to the various planets, the ships contain a group of “walkers” who travel to the planets vicariously through a link with cloned Avatars. The story is told through the point of view of Walker Drewe who grows interested in the technology behind the creation of the Avatars, so that she and the reader learn the biology behind it simultaneously. One story I did not like at all was Alan Dean Foster’s “Midworld.” The introduction describes Midworld as so full of dangerous life-forms that no one in her or his right mind would ever venture to explore it.” So the first eight pages of the story consist of a team of 4 men who come to Midworld to seek a missing scientist on its surface first discussing the planet with an expert on the planet’s dangers. Those 8 pages consist of the 4 men ridiculing the expert while struggling to repress their laughter at his warnings about the planet’s dangers. The remaining 37 pages of the story consist of those 4 men traversing the planet as one-by-one the planet’s indigenous lifeforms kill them. That’s it. There is a not very successful at sense of wonder at the planet’s vegetation and subhuman lifeforms. I’m not sure what the purpose of this story was. Comparing Foster’s story with Nancy Kress’ “JQ211F and Holding” only illuminates the weaknesses of Foster’s story more. Kress creates a world even more inhospitable than Foster’s, one that has been recently discovered by a scientist who has proven without shadow of a doubt that that world is the source of all life in the galaxy, life which then spread via panspermia to other worlds. Another scientist on the small ship is a devout Christian who believes the world is Hell. The story combines the scientists’ search for primordial life on the world with the Christian who seeks her own unannounced agenda there. This is a typically-strong Kress story, albeit one which does not stand up to deep philosophical thought. Not surprisingly, Allan Steele’s “Walking Star” is a very traditional story about a field guide on a somewhat-hostile world–although nowhere near as hostile as Kress’ and Foster’s worlds–who is hired by a rich man to seek one of his former employees and close friend who has abandoned his job apparently under the spell of a strong native drug. Typical of 50s type stories, the missing man harbors deeper secrets than mere drugs, so the story packs an unexpected, and somewhat dire, ending. Pleasant reading although less-thought-provoking than Kress’ story. Overall, this is a slightly weaker volume than either Silverberg’s Between Worlds or Dozois’ One Million A.D. I would rate one story as superb (Reed’s “Rococo”), two better-than-average (Kress and Czerneda) and two worthwhile (McDevitt and Steele). That’s not a bad percentage. * I wanted some lighter reading for the plane flight to Orlando, so I selected Poul Anderson’s classic novel The High Crusade, which I have not read in thirty years. The opening scene could have been straight out of Star Trek (although the novel preceded the tv series by about 6 years). A spacecraft lands on a world inhabited by intelligent beings living in a feudal society. As the ship descends, thousands of natives gather around the ship. A door in the side of the ship opens, and a landing crew descends the ramp, each member holding a ray-gun in their hand. With their superior technology and firepower, the spacemen feel absolutely no threat from the natives, so much so that one of them casually shoots and kills a threatening native. Immediately the thousands of natives, who are actually members of a well-trained army, let fly a volley of thousands of arrows which immediately riddle and kill each member of the landing party. The native army quickly enter the ship through the ramp and destroy the entire crew of the ship. The planet is Earth, and the native army is led by Sir Roger de Tourneville who was bringing them into battle. Instead the ship leads them to the intergalactic empire of the Wersgorix where they prove that a highly-advanced technology is not necessarily safe against warriors of a considerably less-advanced culture, a fact which has been illustrated in countries such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq over the past half-century, all wars which occurred after The High Crusade was written. One of Anderson’s tenets here is that simpler does not necessarily mean stupid, a tenet which recent history has certainly validated. Much of the book is tongue-in-cheek, and the reader certainly needs to suspend his or her disbelief at how easily the feudal warriors succeed in many instances. But the book is never boring, and never so outrageous as to be frustrating. It was very good light reading. * When I started reading science fiction in the 1960s, I was not a big fan of “old” space opera which, much as Bob Tucker defined it, consisted of pulpish adventures with few redeeming values other than the ability to pass a few light hours reading.