Last Update 5/29/07

Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports by James Patterson, Little, Brown, 2007, $16.99, ISBN 978-0-316-15560-1

It is a sad situation when young adult science fiction has deteriorated so much that this is a successful series.  Patterson, who is presumably much better writing contemporary thrillers, has taken one very implausible premise and developed it into, so far, three books.  The young protagonists are mutants, the results of mixing human and bird DNA, so they develop wings and can fly.  The fact that this is physically impossible is glossed over.  Anyway, their existence was discovered back in the first book and they have been pursued by another group of mutants, crossbred with wolves. 

The action gets ratcheted up in this one as the six teenagers become aware of a plot to make use of this radical form of genetic engineering to create world domination.  Yes, it's the super race plot in another form.  Patterson generates lots of action by splitting the pack of heroes up so that each has his or her own story line, although they all converge as the book progresses.  I don't have a problem with simplifying the technical content for younger readers, but I do have a problem when an author doesn't take rudimentary steps to make sure his science is at least plausible.  5/29/07

Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, Tor, 9/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7653-1825-1

Larry Niven's stories of Known Space will always stand out for me as one of best future histories I've ever read.  They mixed hard science and fine storytelling and made use of a background so interesting that it sometimes distracted from the main plot.  They're my favorite kind of space opera among my favorite fiction (particularly the short stories).  Niven's newest book is a return to that universe, to chronicle events that took place around the time the Puppeteers decided to evacuate the galaxy.  A lone human ship encounters a planet that has been turned into a slow but steady spaceship, and finds more than they bargained for, although we aren't told until much later what it was they actually stumbled into.  Centuries later, a more organized expedition is preparing to contact the Gw'oth, intelligent creatures that resemble starfish, who apparently developed a technology from simple fire to atomic fusion within a couple of generations.  A formidable adversary if it comes to that.

An expedition begins to watch them secretly because the Fleet of Worlds (entire planets fleeing the wave of radioactivity sweeping through the galaxy) will pass relatively close to the Gw'oth.  Most of the party believe the aliens are brilliant but primitive, but one of their number has a different theory, that they use a kind of group consciousness and have worked out the implications of technology in advance, which might put them technically far ahead rather than behind. We see much of this through the eyes of a human who was raised under Puppeteer tutelage, which has purposes hidden from her. The disappearance of virtually the entire Puppeteer species has also caused considerable consternation and disruption within the human dominated worlds.  The book has much of the feel of the older stories, and Nessus is a delightful if enigmatic character.  It was good to have this gap in the history of Known Space filled but while the novel is quite good, it didn't deliver the impact I remembered from earlier installments like A Gift from Earth and Ringworld.  Possibly this is another example of the fact that you can't go home again, and I'd certainly put this on my list of recommended books for the year.  The authors, the world, and this reader have all changed considerably in the interval and the old, innocent sense of wonder has apparently become harder to arouse. 5/28/07

Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe, Tor, 8/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7654-1784-1

The blurbs accompanying this first novel spend a lot of time comparing the author to Robert A. Heinlein and the novel itself to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, my favorite of his works.  I didn't think either characterization was particularly relevant, although that should not be construed to mean I didn't like the book. It shares some of Heinlein's themes, but only peripherally and certainly not those with which he is most closely associated.  The setting is a future in which the world is evolving toward a world government, or at least the closest thing to one we're likely to see.  Three men are going to have a powerful influence on the shape that future takes, and they are motivated by three different and powerful reasons - ambition, revenge, and love of art.

The prime motivator for union - and in fact domination - is a brilliant but warped high tech businessman who has quietly launched a plan designed to make him the most powerful man on Earth.  His most overt opposition is a former employee, who knows some of the details of the conspiracy and wants to derail it.  He is hindered to some extent, however, because he's effectively playing the monomaniac's game, and the odds are not in his favor.  The real opposition comes from Aqualung, leader of an immensely popular rock group, who really doesn't have a political agenda at all.  But everything is politics.  When the colonies off Earth rebel against what they see as a potential system-wide dictatorship, but despite the relatively passive power of the infrastructure, Aqualung has a much more active power.  His music, and the equipment with which he and his band mates produce it, can literally influence human emotions.  There's considerably more, but I won't spoil things by revealing too much.  The novel is an odd mix of hard science and cyberpunk, space opera and dystopia, melodramatic with a touch of humor.  It's the kind of seductive mix that has the potential to spread outside the field like the early works of William Gibson.  It's also the kind of novel that will be hard to imitate; like Chester Anderson's The Butterfly Kid, it's likely to have a very devoted group of fans.  How large that group will be remains to be seen.  5/24/07

Ivory by Mike Resnick, Pyr, 8/07, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-59102-546-7

Just a mention here of this reprint rather than a review.  I read this when it first appeared almost twenty years ago.  It was my favorite of Resnick's cycle of novels each of which was loosely based on the history of one Africa or on African customs, courtesy of his research and several safaris.  This one involves a search for a pair of ivory tusks which have been lost for thousands of years, a journey that takes him to several worlds.  A panoramic space opera with a touch of mystery and one of Resnick's best novels, out of print for far too long.  5/19/07 

Legend by David Lynn Golemon, Thomas Dunne, 2007, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-312-35263-9

This is the sequel to the author's previous Event, which introduced the Event Group to us, a kind of super X-Files, an organization secretly created by the US government and equipped with nifty technological toys, with their mission being to investigate those things which usually show up in the tabloids rather than the legitimate papers - flying saucers, supernatural events, and so forth.  I found their first adventure reasonably entertaining without being anything special, particularly because its antecedents were pretty obvious, even though I'm a big fan of writers working somewhat similar veins like James Rollins, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child. 

This time they're off to South America to investigate a legend that may have a strong basis in reality, and which might still be hidden somewhere in the jungle.  They have a series of adventures, some of them violent, before reaching their goal and discovering the truth.  The secret in this case is rather reminiscent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a humanoid creature apparently immune to the effects of radiation which can live on land or in the water with equal facility.  The "monster" turns out to be a branch of early humankind which developed a tolerance for radioactivity and which chose through some mechanism to become amphibians.  I'm not sure that the biology would pass muster here but that's really not what the book is about.  It's an adventure story, with  moderately well developed tension, considerably more interesting than its predecessor.  There are a few rough spots in the prose but nothing serious.  I don't think this one is likely to make it to the bestseller lists but the improvement from the first novel is considerably and shows a trend in the right direction.  5/18/07

Plague Year by Jeff Carlson, Ace, 7/07, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-441-01514-6

 Jeff Carlson’s debut novel bears some resemblance to Greg Bear’s Blood Music.  Someone has released a swarm of nanomachines which recreate themselves from the substance of carbon based lifeforms, that is, every animal on Earth including humans.  The spread is rapid and unstoppable and the only survivors are those who manage to  reach high altitudes where the nanomachines no longer function.  The story opens at one small mountain outpost where a handful of people survive by making dangerous, short trips down into the infected areas, and by killing and eating one another.  Although initially isolated, they eventually make contact with others and discover that an orbiting installation might be the last remaining hope of finding a cure for what is effectively a plague. 

Things are not entirely as they seem, and most of the conflict is between humans rather than against the mindless microscopic menace.  Carlson does a fine job of plotting and telling his story.  My major problem with the novel was a strategic one.  Since we know from the outset that his two primary characters are murderers and cannibals, it’s rather difficult to invest any emotional capital in their troubles and successes, even when they acknowledge themselves that they’ve become a kind of monster.  There’s considerable talent at work here, and I wouldn’t shy away from his next book, but my inability to sympathize with his characters got in the way with this one. 5/14/07

Valentine's Resolve by E.E. Knight, Roc, 7/07, $23.95, ISBN 978-0-451-46146-9

The sixth installment in the Vampire Earth series sets off in a slightly different direction.  Readers of the earlier volumes will already know that Earth has been invaded and partially conquered by a race of alien vampires who use other alien lifeforms as their soldiers and weapons of subjugation.  David Valentine was a leader of the main resistance force in North America, although he has become rather distanced from that group thanks to events in earlier volumes.  Humanity isn't fighting alone.  The Lightbearers have been helping to stem the tide of the invasion, but when David is lured back into a not altogether easy new relationship with his former allies, he discovers that the Lightbearers may be on the verge of defeat, or at least preparing to withdraw from the battle.  Or has the human race been misinterpreting the true nature of what's been happening right from the start?

Knight mixes bits of military SF, survivalist fiction, the alien invasion story, and other elements including more than a mild dose of horror, although the atmosphere has turned more and more toward adventure with a hint of mystery during the latter volumes in the series.  Old fashioned alien invasion stories are pretty much extinct, and the Vampire Earth series is hardly old fashioned, but it's the closest thing we're likely to see for the time being. I have a bit of trouble identifying with Valentine, which makes it difficult to feel the emotional content of the story at times, but I'm entertained following his adventures, and it's nice to have some evil vampires, even if they do come from another planet.5/13/07

Lasgun Wedding by Will McDermott, Black Flame, 2007, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-84416-462-2

The multi-author Necromunda series is apparently based on a role playing game which I've never seen and know little about except through the series of tie-in novels, which indicate that it's a cyberpunkish future in which lawlessness is the norm, humanity has spread to the stars, cities are gigantic, and the distinctions between nations and races have been replaced with new divisions.  There's also an effective caste system based on hereditary wealth.  Within the broad setting, Will McDermott has been chronicling the adventures of Kal Jerico, who was a professional bounty hunter in his previous adventures, but who takes a dramatic step upward in this one.  The local ruler is dead and someone needs to assume command.  Against his judgment and virtually at gunpoint, Jerico agrees to accept the position, but he knows as quickly as does the perceptive reader that this isn't going to be a honeymoon.  No sooner is his position confirmed than the plotting and pressuring begin because while no one may particularly want the throne, everyone apparently wants to control it.  Fast paced action but not much to think about.  It still beats the latest adventure of Captain Kirk. 5/11/07

Chanur's Endgame by C.J. Cherryh, DAW, 2007, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-7564-0444-4

I didn't re-read this, which includes the fourth and fifth novels in the Chanur series, Chanur's Homecoming and Chanur's Legacy, but I wanted to mention it here because this joint volume is one of the best buys you'll get for your money.  The series is still my favorite of Cherryh's work, and I miss the universe she created for it.  These were originally published in 1987 and 1992 respectively.  In the first, the feline aliens find themselves caught between two rival forces, their homeworld in jeopardy, and in the second a young and newly appointed spaceship captain gets caught up in intrigue and adventure.  Some of the best space opera I've ever read.  The first three volumes were previously collected as The Chanur Saga, and that's an even better buy.  5/9/07

Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell, Tor, 6/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-765-31507-6

Tobias Buckell follows up his impressive debut novel with this exciting and inventive space adventure.  The set up is rather complicated and I’m going to over simplify a bit, but humanity has more or less been conquered by aliens.  Those planets not directly controlled are interdicted by cutting off access to the wormholes that provide travel between star systems.  Some human commerce is tolerated but certain kinds of technology are restricted, and many humans are subjected to devices which can tamper with their memories and personalities in order to ensure their docility.  The ragamuffins are a kind of informal military force from the isolated worlds, considered pirates by the alien overlords. 

Enter Nashara, an ex-ragamuffin, sort of, who has been augmented to make her into a super soldier capable of surviving exposure to vacuum, of undermining the computer systems of the alien empire, and of defeating even other enhanced soldiers in physical combat.  She completes a mission on one world – assassinating a highly placed alien – only to be betrayed by her employers, who hoped she would become a martyr figure and were somewhat nonplused when she survived.  She escapes her supposed benefactors, but with both sides looking for her, options are limited and eventually she takes refuge aboard a ragamuffin ship.

And that's just the first quarter of this exciting space opera, but I'm not going to tell you about what happens after that because the story is too rich and interesting to spoil, and even if I wanted to, it's so complex that it would be difficult to do it justice.  It's space opera, of course, but a heavily textured one.  Buckell is quickly proving himself a writer to shelve right there with C.J. Cherryh, Alastair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, and those few other writers who have managed to adopt the advantages of mainstream literature without giving up the skilled storytelling and sense of wonder of old style SF. 5/5/07

Chapter War by Ben Counter, Black Library,2007, 7.99, ISBN 978-1-84416-458-5

One of the subsidiary stories in the futuristic half of the Warhammer universe involves various units of space marines, trained to fight the forces allied with evil, but like Marvel superheroes, apparently just as interested in killing each other.  The Soul Drinkers are one of these units, their history chronicled by author Counter in his own little corner of that universe.  The Soul Drinkers became virtual outlaws because they were mutating far beyond the limits intended and are perceived as being a danger to their masters. In this installment, they have found a way of preventing the mutation from going any further, but with an apparent solution at hand, they discover they have a new problem.  Some of their number are reluctant to return to the status quo ante, in fact, they'd just as soon attack their former masters.  Battles and arguments both ensue, with lots of rather corny speeches, jungle battles, imperial disdain, personal combat, and so forth.  The previous books in this subordinate series were competent military SF, as is this, but I don't remember the dialogue being this stilted or the characters being quite so cardboard.  The whole story feels rushed and incomplete.  5/4/07

Human Is? by Philip K. Dick, Gollancz, 2007, £7.99, ISBN 978-0-575-08034-8

Although there are still a handful of uncollected Philip K. Dick stories out there, you won't find any of them in this newest cross collection, which does include several stories that have found their way to Hollywood - "Imposter", "Second Variety", "Paycheck", and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale".  They're all good ones, as are several of the others including "The Variable Man", "The Days of Perky Pat", and "The Preserving Machine".  This title accompanies reprints of several of Dick's novels, all in reasonably uniform editions.  I can't imagine why you'd need an excuse to re-read his work, but if you do, this is as good as any.    The selection covers his early and middle careers - from the early 1950s to the early 1970s.  Just reading the table of contents reminded me of how distinctive and original his work was.5/3/07

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman, Ace, 8/07, $23.95, ISBN 978-0-441-01499-2

Marvelous invention stories have always been among my favorites.  You know the type.  Someone makes a radical breakthrough and the author explores the consequences.  Bob Shaw's slowglass, which allows light to pass through so slowly that you can look into it and see the past, or H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods.  Joe Haldeman's newest is about a marvelous invention, and it's also an offbeat time travel story.  Matthew is a brilliant but unfocused laboratory assistant who assembles a calibrator that travels in time, though only forward.  Each use is a longer jump, which obviously limits its usefulness.  Matthew has just lost his girl and his job, so he decides to connect the machine to an antique gas-fueled automobile and jump into the future a few weeks, but when he reappears in the middle of a busy street, he discovers that he is wanted for murder.  Someone mysteriously posts bail and he takes advantage of that to jump even further forward in time.

Almost twenty years forward, he discovers that the truth has come out, his reappearance calculated, and he has been awarded a position on the MIT faculty.  Of course, the world has changed radically during the interval and everything he thought he knew about physics is pretty much outdated.  No one, however, has been able to duplicate his time machine.  His situation begins to grow complicated again so he steals the time machine and uses it again, propelling himself almost two centuries forward.  By this point the novel had begun to remind me of Lawrence Manning's The Man Who Awoke, but with a sense of humor. Matthew picks up a companion or two and visits a succession of increasingly bizarre futures.  One of the classic SF themes given new life.  I'm not sure if it's possible to feel nostalgic about something new, but if so, this is the book that will do it.  5/2/07

The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker, Tor, 7/07, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-7653-1746-9

Kage Baker has been chronicling the history of the Company since In the Garden of Iden in 1998, but with this new title the sequence has apparently come to a conclusion.  The Company is a mysterious organization that reminds me in some ways of Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity or the Snakes and Spiders of Fritz Leiber's Changewar stories.  Baker's creation is a good deal more complex, however, ranging through time and space, exploring the consequences of immortality, cyborgs, virtual immortality, and other more or less familiar devices of the genre.  The Company itself has a secretive past, and it is not clear at times who is in charge or why.  Now it all comes to a head.

The enemies of the Company are preparing to seize control and some of those who might have defended the organization are hampered for various reasons.  There are so many separate story threads interwoven here that any attempt to summarize the plot - plots really - in a few words is doomed to be inadequate or even misleading.  There is dissension among the ranks - real and perceived - a powerful artificial intelligence which may have its own plans, a great secret revealed at last, shifting loyalties and surprising disloyalties.  It took me a while to get invested in this series, but at some point I got sucked in and it was quite pleasant to finally have the secrets revealed, the conspiracies exposed, and the conflicts resolved.  It will be interesting to see what shape Baker's writing takes from this point forward. 4/26/07

The Aftermath by Ben Bova, Tor, 8/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7653-0414-8

Even though I obviously have no more experience of the other planets of this solar system than I do of those surrounding another star, I've always preferred a solar rather than interstellar setting for adventures in outer space.  Mars is my favorite of the available choices, but the asteroid belt is a close second, and I've loved stories set there since Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids and Alan E. Nourse's Scavengers in Space.  Ben Bova's recent loosely related sequence of novels about exploration of the solar system is among my favorite hard SF, and of them my favorite subsequence is the Asteroid Wars, of which this is volume 4.  The original three novels dealt with the battle for commercial and political control of the asteroids, chiefly through the rivalry of two influential and determined men, and seen through the eyes of several characters.  That conflict eventually resulted in what was essentially open warfare which spread to the other colonies as well, a conflict resolved in the previous book in the series.

The present volume is - as you might guess from the title - set following the theoretical cessation of overt hostilities.  Theory and practice aren't always the same.  One of the protagonists is forced to flee when the habitat occupied by his family is attacked, escaping his pursuers only by taking refuge with a woman who seeks to manipulate him for purposes of her own.  Humphries, the villain of earlier novels, is under the influence of an alien artifact and is determined to kill everyone who knows of its existence and its properties.  But Humphries doesn't have as much control over events as he believes and will eventually be forced into a confrontation not of his making. Other characters include an artist and a cyborg, both of whom have been exposed to the artifact and both of whom will play major rules in the future of human civilization.  The upbeat ending felt a trifle contrived but not enough to spoil the story for me.  4/26/07

Deep Inside by Polly Frost, Tor, 6/07, $12.95, ISBN 978-0-765-31587-9 

This is reviewed in this category because there are a few SF or related stories, but most are mundane erotic stories – a phrase I never expected to use.  A common problem with fiction published first as erotica and second as fiction is that it frequently gives short shrift to the fiction part and is instead a series of descriptive scenes involving sex, kinky or otherwise.  Paradoxically, others which actually have a strong plot don’t work as well as erotica, often because the overt sex slows the action or functions as more of an abstraction than a plot element.  And then, of course, there are those stories where the sexual component isn’t erotic as much as it is sniggering lewdness, the author self consciously proving that he or she can use dirty words and imagery and get away with it. 

Fortunately, Polly Frost avoids these pitfalls most of the time, although the opening story, “The Threshold”, does have a teenaged protagonist whose obsession with losing her virginity comes across as awkward and artificial.  “The Orifice”, which follows, is much more successful, following the affair of two people whose sexual encounters involve exotic piercings, and some of the bizarre imagery at the piercing parlor is particularly effective. There’s some wry humor in “The Dominatrix Has a Career Crisis” and a comparatively strong story in “The Pleasure Invaders”, whose protagonist is a police officer addicted to an alien sexual drug.  Another drug, Viagra, morphs into a new addictive substance that causes sexual rampages in “Viagra Babies”, which also has a distinct twist of science fiction. 

“Imagine It” didn’t work for me.  An author of a book on sexual techniques has an epiphany. Nor did “Playing Karen Devere”, in which a female serial killer’s life story is to be told on film.  “Test Drive” could almost be an old time SF satire, set a few years from now when technological toys abound and sexual experimentation has become the fashion of the moment.  At times it reminded me of the Woody Allen film, Sleeper.  “Visions of Ecstasy” didn’t interest me either, a story about sexual asphyxiation.  The book ends with the title story, the strongest in the book, a fantasy of sorts about voodoo fetishists with sexual powers that actually work.  Genre fans aren’t going to find enough genre content to interest them, but may find the juxtaposition of frank eroticism and familiar themes intriguing.  Erotica fans should be happy because the stories are strong and the genre content isn’t significant enough to require familiarity with SF or fantasy. 4/25/07

Future Weapons of War edited by Joe Haldeman and Martin H. Greenberg, Baen, 2007, $24, ISBN 978-1-4165-2112-9

  Although you might think from the title that this is a collection of military SF stories, that’s not the case, although there are military situations in some of its contents.  Rather this is a selection of stories about the darker side of technological development, a message conveyed bluntly by the opening story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which suggests that the kind of suicide bombings we have seen in recent years will soon give way to something worse, an echo of what really happened in Vietnam and could happen again in a more sophisticated fashion in the future.  Geoffrey Landis has a more hopeful vision, the use of a non-lethal weapon that actually saves lives.  Paul J. McAuley illustrates that absolute power corrupts when a refugee boy on a relatively primitive world acquires a handgun that is equipped with artificial intelligence, a device by means of which he acquires great power, but loses something of himself in the process. 

Dena Bain Taylor and Mark L. Van Name provide two more overtly military stories, the first involving a radical new technology during a conflict on Mars, sometimes verging on technobabble, the second partnering a human with a sentient war machine.  Both are readable but unexceptional.  Similarly James Cobb describes an incident between a high tech terrorist attack via missiles and a mostly automated and even higher tech defensive system, but the story is all about the attack itself and things like characters or background are vestigial appendages.  Michael Burstein also writes about a sentient personal weapon, this time with more benevolent consequences.

L.E. Modesitt Jr. has a longish, reasonably interesting story that resorts to technobabble again, and my attention lapsed more than once.  William H. Keith has the most interesting story in the book, a history of the distant future in the mode of Olaf Stapledon, with clashing galaxies, group minds, artificial intelligences, and other speculations.  Brendan Dubois follows with a fascinating little piece about the last days of the President of the United States.  Michael Williamson's story is okay, with less political content than most of his work, and Brian Stableford finishes up with another good story, a very different take on biological weaponry.  All in all a readable, fairly diverse collection with one outstanding story, "The Weapon", by William H. Keith. 4/24/07

Alien Crimes edited by Mike Resnick, Science Fiction Book Club, 2007, $14.99, ISBN 978-1-58288-223-9

One of the pitfalls for authors to avoid in crossover stories blending SF and mystery is that you can't cheat.  If you're going to introduce a technology, or psi talent, or other device not available to mainstream mystery writers, you usually have to lay out the rules early so that the reader knows what to expect and has at least a chance to figure out the permutations possible from that premise.  At the same time, it's preferable that the fantastic element be important to the plot, the resolution, or if possible both.  Mike Resnick has collected here six original novellas that straddle that borderland and the results are in fact quite good.

Pat Cadigan, whose name shows up much too infrequently, opens with "Nothing Personal", the story of an aging police detective who has begun to experience formless anxieties that seem to have no obvious cause.  The situation comes to a head when she and her new partner get involved in the mysterious but apparently natural death of a young girl, almost a mirror image of another case from weeks earlier.  I had guessed some of what was going on but not so much that I didn't enjoy the windup.  Resnick follows with a story of his own, "A Locked-Planet Mystery", wherein a private detective investigates the murder of an alien magnate in a closed chamber on a chlorine planet.  He was accompanied at the time by one human and several other aliens, all his subordinates.  The story is worked out in the classic format, a series of interviews, the search for contradictions, motives, and opportunities.  I guessed right on this one though.

Harry Turtledove's "Hoxbomb" is set on a world jointly colonized by humans and a semi-compatible alien race (whose draft animals have names which are "Pontiac" and "Ford" spelled backwards, and the aliens are "Terrans" similarly reversed).  Shortly after her husband completes a trading deal with a pair of the aliens, a woman gives birth to a bizarrely disfigured baby, victim of a hoxbomb, a biological weapon perfected by the aliens, whose culture is based on biology rather than technology.  During the course of the investigation, detectives from the two races discover that they aren't as unlike as they had thought.  Kristine Kathryn Rusch follows with "The End of the World",  a quite moving story about alien castaways and their painful assimilation into human society.

Gregory Benford has the best story in the collection.  In "Dark Heaven", amphibian aliens have established an outpost on Earth, protected by the government.  A detective investigating a corpse found in the ocean and displaying unusual wounds finds a connection between the dead man and a mysterious sea voyage which involved one of the aliens.  When a second corpse turns up with the same mutilations, pressure increases to find a solution.  Last but not least is "Womb of Every World" by Walter Jon Williams, which is cast in the form of a typical fantasy quest adventure complete with a swordsman and a troll, but it's transplanted to another planet, there's technology instead of magic, and the villain is straight out of SF.  One excellent and five very good stories here, definitely worth the entrance fee.  4/24/07

Sandworms of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Tor, 8/07, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-7653-1293-8

There is always a risk when an author continues a series started by someone else, particularly a series held in such high regard as the Dune series by Frank Herbert.  Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson have been doing just that for several volumes, of which this is the latest and - chronologically at least - the last, since it ties up the loose ends and brings the future of the planet Arrakis and most of the characters to what appears to be a conclusion.  Unlike some of their earlier efforts, this one is based on an outline created by Frank Herbert prior to his death, so presumably reflects his own decisions about the outcome of the epic story he'd begun.  Obviously since this is the windup (although there are obviously lots of gaps that the authors could go back and fill in with additional titles), it takes place after Chapterhouse: Dune, which stopped rather than ended with various characters fleeing from a superior force, and is also a continuation of the story begun in Hunters of Dune.

If you've read Hunters, you know that by use of advanced scientific techniques that verge on the mystical,   several of the characters from the original series have been effectively recreated, including Paul Atreides, aka Mu'ad-Dib, his mother, Lady Jessica, and his advisor and companion, Duncan Idaho.  More re-embodiments are planned as their flight continues.  The Big Bad in this one is the machine intelligences which have reached a level of development whereby the existence of humanity in all its diverse forms is in serious danger.  Open warfare continues, with battle fleets maneuvering for position, the reflexes and wits of humanity against the cunning and programming of the thinking machines.  A plague threatens to weaken human resolve and there is still dissension among the various human factions.  But the machines have a surprise in store for them.  We also discover the fate of the planet Arrakis, the secrets of the Bene Gesserit, and have a variety of loose ends tied up for us.  But was it any good?  Well, I thought it was closer to Frank Herbert's original concept than some of the other books in this new series, perhaps because it was more focused on issues and events from those books, and I also enjoyed the story reasonably well for its own sake.  That said, like the previous collaborations this is clearly in a different voice.  There is less depth despite the intricacy of the plot, and at times it felt like an embellished outline rather than a finished work, which I suppose in one sense is exactly what it is and what it is intended to be.  It's a panoramic adventure and you'll probably like it, but you won't confuse i with the originals. 4/23/07

Wired by Liz Maverick, Shomi, 7/07, $6.99, ISBN 978-0-505-52724-0

I have read three previous novels by this romance writer, two supernatural and one SF, and I liked all three.  I glanced at this when it first arrived and assumed it was a romantic cyberpunk story, which was an interesting juxtaposition, so I moved it toward the top of the stack.  But when I read it, I found it was something else entirely.  The protagonist is Roxanne Zaborovsky, a typical romance heroine, a young woman caught between two mysterious and apparently dangerous men, Mason and Leonardo.  Each of them asserts that she is in danger, and that their rival is associated with that danger, but initially they aren't willing to be more explicit.  Roxanne is also troubled by gaps in her own memory and other minor oddities in her life, but it is not until later in the novel that she discovers that these two issues are related and in what way.

The nature of that explanation is subtle, complicated, and I'm not going to try to summarize it here in any detail.  It involves the nature of reality and our perceptions of it, and the interconnections among people, but there's a whole lot more as well.  One could call this fantasy as well as science fiction because it doesn't really explain the mechanism of what's happening and that, for me at least, was a problem for me was a bit of a stumbling block.  I wasn't always certain that I understood the rules.  So on balance, I didn't like this as much as I did her previous work.  On the other hand, this is one of the most original and interesting romance novels I've ever read, and if the author sometimes exceeded her grasp, that's okay too because the more we stretch, the more we achieve.  I may not have thought this was entirely satisfying, but I was entertained and intrigued enough that I will certainly read her next - and move it to the top part of the pile when it shows up. 4/23/07

Hell Hath No Fury by David Weber and Linda Evans, Baen, 2007, $26, ISBN 978-1-4165-2101-3

The sequel to last year's Hell's Gate picks up where the other left off, with a war in progress between two worlds, Arcana and Sharona, one powered by magic, the other by science.  The opening volume tried to get too much information about the two worlds into play and introduced too many characters, but the sequel seems to have gotten much of this under control - although there are still far too many characters to provide any kind of smooth narration.  The cause of the war is still uncertain, but there's no question that both sides have thrown themselves into it, employing magic, psionics, technology, and brute force against each other.  The battle will not take place in their own universes as much as it will in a variety of other planets in the Multiverse.  The motive power prolonging the war is genuine anger among the population of both realities rather than manipulation by their governments, which makes a peaceful settlement even less likely.

Given the scale of events, it's no surprise that this is a longish novel and that the action jumps around quite a bit.  I suppose you could just as easily call this fantasy as science fiction, the kind of crossover novel that Lawrence Watt-Evans, Piers Anthony, and Andre Norton have done in the past.  But where they used that device to concentrate on how characters and events were affected by the contrast on a broader scale, Weber and Evans have concentrated primarily on military implications, somewhat similar to the Darkness novels by Harry Turtledove.  The expansive coverage in this one tends to make the narrative a bit choppy at times, but the sequel seems like a much more integrated novel than its predecessor.

This hefty hardcover comes with a CD that contains more than a dozen complete novels, plus artwork and maps that are associated with them.  If you don't mind reading fiction off a computer screen, they texts are presented here in various formats and in a very attractively designed framing system.  If you don't already have copies, the CD is probably worth the price of the hardcover just for its contents.  4/20/07

To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories by Poul Anderson, Baen, 2007, $14, ISBN 978-1-4165-2113-6

Poul Anderson is one of a handful of SF writers whom I enjoyed even more when I re-read them as an adult than when I first encountered them in high school and college.  Although every writer occasionally misses fire, Anderson had a remarkably high success rate and he was one of the best at making hard SF accessible to those of us who never took a science course after high school.  This new retrospective collection brings together some of the very best of his fiction, including the complete novel After Doomsday, which was the first magazine serial I ever read, under its original title, The Day After Doomsday.  This story of the survivors of a murdered Earth trying to figure out who was responsible is still one of my favorites.

The six accompanying stories are just as good, five novellas including the Hugo Award winning "No Truce with Kings", set after a future apocalypse.  The title story is one of the best fictional treatments of the relative nature of time at speeds in excess of light. All of these were originally published during the 1950s and 1960s and they reflect a time when storytelling and the "Idea" were considered more important than prose and character, so it's particularly impressive that Anderson didn't neglect the literary side of his fiction while writing stories that fit right in to contemporary tastes.  "Un-Man" and "The Big Rain" in particular are just as effective today as they were when they first appeared, and it's great to have them back in print for a new generation of readers. 4/19/07

Innocent in Death by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts), Putnam, 2007, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-399-15401-0 

I think this is the 25^th novel in this series, which mixes SF and mystery, though it’s mostly the latter.  The setting is New York City in 2060, but other than some window dressing and occasional side references, it’s pretty much the contemporary world.  A few of the earlier volumes have had more overt speculative content, but most are ordinary mysteries.  The detective is Eve Dallas, a woman with a troubled past, currently married to Roarke, a very wealthy man who also has a difficult past, when he was an influential member of the criminal class.  Supporting characters include friends, Eve’s partner Peabody, and a cartoonish but amusing butler.  Eve is overbearing, self effacing, crude and rude, but she gets the job done.  The novels are written to a formula, usually with two tumultuous sex scenes between Roarke and Dallas, one of them usually linked to a quarrel resulting from artificial plot devices sometimes reminiscent of Marvel Comics.  All that said, I’ve enjoyed all two dozen that I’d read before and fully expected to enjoy this one. 

I wasn’t disappointed.  The story starts with the murder, by poison, of an apparently innocuous young school teacher whom everyone liked.  His marriage was happy and there was no friction at work.  There seems to be no motive for his death, and no reason why anyone would benefit more than marginally, but the poison was not placed in his thermos by accident.  The problem facing Dallas is that all of the potential suspects appear to be innocent, likeable people with no reason to wish the dead man harm.  Like its predecessors, this is a coolly plotted police procedural and in due course a suspect emerges, even though Dallas still has reservations about his guilt, at least of this particular crime.  And when the suspect is himself murdered, an entirely new range of possibilities opens.  

This is one of the best in the series, with a really chilling villain.  It is also one with very little SF content.  There are a couple of references to droids and the year is stated as 2060, but that’s just about it.  Frankly, I’ve never understood why Roberts chose the futuristic setting for the series in the first place.  Whatever category you want to put it in, you should find it a very intense and compelling story and you’re not going to want to stop reading until you know the answers. 4/17/07 

The Involuntary Human by David Gerrold, NESFA, 2007, $27, ISBN 1-886778-68-X

NESFA Press has another interesting as well as entertaining volume with this wide ranging collection of the work of David Gerrold, this one prepared in conjunction with Gerrold's Guest of Honor appearance at Boskone.  Gerrold has not been one of the more prolific writers in the field, but I became a fan back when he was first publishing novels like Space Skimmer, When Harlie Was One, and Yesterday's Children and I still give priority to his new books when they show up in the mail.  There's considerable variety here, including an excerpt from one of the War Against the Chtorr novels already published, and a piece of one yet to come.  There's also the complete script for a Star Trek episode, "Blood and Fire", never produced, and which was also the basis of Gerrold's third Star Wolf novel, Blood and Fire.  For the most part, the short stories have not appeared in earlier collections and there is some new material as well, including the introduction by Spider Robinson, a short humorous piece by Gerrold, several collections of reasonably pithy quotes, and some fiction.  The reprints include some humorous articles about King Kong, the complete novel Chess with a Dragon from 1987 - in which we learn once again that it is sometimes smart to look a gift horse in the mouth, and some good stories including "Digging in Gehenna", "Dancer in the Dark", and "Riding Janis".  Some of these originally appeared in obscure places so this is the first time they'll be readily available to many readers.  The selections here are suggestive of the author's range, which encompasses humor, thoughtfulness, and adventure in settings as diverse as space opera, the contemporary world, and pretty grim future Earths.  It's a good introduction to one of the most reliable and entertaining writers in the field. 4/16/07

Things to Come by H.G, Wells, annotated by Leon Stover, McFarland, 2007, $60, ISBN 978-0-7864-3038-3

H.G. Wells wrote this screen treatment late in his career, 1935, and the movie was released a year later.  The premise is that a new world war breaks out in 1940, lasting so many decades that the world is plunged back into near anarchy until, exhausted, a new order emerges which slowly rebuilds a more rational civilization and uses scientific knowledge to expand into space.  Although the film did not do well when it first appeared, it has since become something of a minor classic.  This is not a smoothly written novel but a screen story and as such it glosses over or summarizes event, nor does it spend much time on characterization.  Leon Stover has extensively annotated it, and has placed it in context, drawn attention to points that might otherwise have been overlooked, and provides other information which might not be available to the average reader, or viewer.  Although not written specificially for academics, this edition is intended for libraries rather than consumers, and is part of the ongoing annotated H.G.Wells series from this publisher.

There are over a hundred black and white illustrations, mostly stills from the film, which I haven't seen in many years.  Included is a lengthy, negative review of the film, Metropolis, which Wells found objectionable for philosophical reasons. The short story, "The Land Ironclads", which predicted the emergence of the tank as a major instrument of war, and another story, "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper", are also included because of their prophetic nature. 4/15/07

A Thousand Deaths by George Alec Effinger, Golden Gryphon, 5/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-930846-47

The third collection of Effinger's short stories from Golden Gryphon is actually dominated by a novel, The Wolves of Memory, originally published in 1981.  A plot summary is going to make it sound like a routine dystopian adventure story, which it sort of is but sort of isn't as well.  TECT is a supercomputer that pretty much runs everything and the protagonist, Sandor Courane, pretty much doesn't run anything.  He fails at a series of jobs and is exiled to a planet reserved for misfits, where he discovers that the entire population has been given a kind of lingering death sentence.  Sounds routine, but Effinger rarely was and this darkly funny and sometimes convoluted novels was one of his best.  Courane was a recurring character in Effinger's short fiction as well, although he was killed a few times and wasn't always living in exactly the same world.  In his introduction, Mike Resnick points out that Courane was partly autobiographical, one of only three recurring characters in Effinger's fiction.

The other stories all feature Courane, although not all of his adventures are collected here.  Most are SF but a couple are fantasy.  Of the seven shorts, I'd read all but one before.  They vary considerably in tone and setting as well as subject matter. "In the Wings" and "The Thing from the Slush" are the two I enjoyed the most, but I've rarely been disappointed by an Effinger story and none of them are included here.  Effinger's health problems and other interruptions are probably the only reason that he never became a much bigger name in the field than he did during his lifetime and, the Budayeen novels notwithstanding, I suspect he will be remembered more for his short fiction than his book length work.  It's good to see another volume of them appear.  There's also a very thoughtful afterword by Andrew Fox.  4/14/07

Kop by Warren Hammond, Tor, 7/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-765-31272-3

The setting for this very entertaining first novel is the colony planet Lagarto, which is suffering from a protracted inflation because its main source of outworld income was undercut by another source which stole their market and left the world doomed to become a backwater planet with little hope for its inhabitants.  The protagonist is Juno, a low level police official on Lagarto who has been forced by circumstances and his own weakness to compromise his principles and become a paid lackey of influential criminal elements.  Juno justifies his actions because virtually everyone is corrupt, including the local mayor, and he does draw some tenuous lines about what he will and will not do.  Nevertheless, his equivocations have made him unhappy with himself and his life and puts unusual and painful stresses on his family life.

Unfortunately, shortly after Juno reluctantly accepts a new partner, a former friend of his becomes involved in a conspiracy that is more sinister than even he can accept, and before long he's also in trouble up to his neck, learns of an assassination plot, is threatened with arrest and imprisonment, and finds layers of treachery and deceit he never suspected.  This is a gritty, serious minded thriller whose only real drawback is that it's sometimes difficult to sympathize with the protagonist, even though circumstances often dictate what might otherwise be considered serious wrongdoing.  A sequel is forthcoming. 4/14/07

The Alton Gift by Deborah Ross & Marion Zimmer Bradley, DAW, 6/07, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-7564-0019-4

I thought that once Deborah Ross completed the Darkover Clingfire trilogy, based on notes and conversations with Marion Zimmer Bradley before her death, that the saga of Darkover had at last come to an end.  Obviously I'm wrong because this new one, part of the Children of Kings sequence, is a direct sequel to Traitor's Sun and continues to fill in the gaps.  It's also based on notes left by Bradley, but I hope this isn't going to turn her into the next V.C. Andrews, with a continuing parade of books increasingly removed from the original.  It's  difficult to determine the original author's contribution even in most cases where an incomplete manuscript is left.  In this case, there's no way of knowing how closely the finished manuscript approximates what Bradley might have written herself and though I know that in cases like this the Big Name Author's name is routinely included as co-author, I think that in many cases this deflects the credit (or blame) from the person who actually did most of the work.

That said, this is a perfectly readable and entertaining Darkover novel, although it tends toward the fantasy end of the spectrum.  Bradley herself veered in this direction from time to time, perhaps taking the best of both possible worlds.  The time is shortly after the Terrans have, for the time being at least, effectively broken off contact with Darkover, leaving a society that is still bound by tradition but inevitably affected by exposure to offworlders.  Regis Hastur is dead and Lew Alton is preoccupied with his personal as well as political problems, and as if things weren't complicated enough, his daughter Marguerida's psychic sense has cast her in the role of a futuristic Cassandra, predicting crisis and disaster.  A dark presence is using the telepathic web on the planet as a tool toward world dominance, and Marguerida will have to use the shadow matrix herself to avert catastrophe.  And while the official contact with the Terrans has been interrupted, there is an unofficial presence, an offworlder who will eventually play a pivotal part in the resolution.  There's a good bit of adventure, lots of political intriguing, various mystical activities, and more than a mild touch of romance. It was nice to revisit an old, familiar setting, and Ross certainly writes well enough to continue the series indefinitely, but I have to wonder if she'd be better off creatively - if not financially - working in a world of her own.

The Hidden Worlds by Kristin Landon, Ace, 6/07, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-441-01511-5 

First novelist Kristin Landon takes a slightly different approach to an older SF theme with this one.  Earth has been destroyed by some artificial intelligences that reminded me a bit of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers.  Fortunately, some humans had already reached the stars by that point so the race isn’t wiped out, although the survivors live in constant fear that the Cold Minds will find them and finish the job.  The protagonist is Linnea Kiaho, daughter of a family that is just managing to support themselves.  In order to help with the finances, Linnea decided to become a kind of indentured servant on another world.  Her patron soon considers her more than a simple servant, but their lives are about to become more stressed than ever, because there is evidence that the machine intelligences have gotten wind of where the humans are hiding and may be on their way to finish the job.  And the patron, Iain, is involved in some complex politics of his own.  The blend of SF and mild romance is reasonably good but the angst between the two principle characters was distracting at times. 4/10/07

The Heart of Valor by Tanya Huff, DAW, 6/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7564-0435-2 

One of the refreshing things about Tanya Huff’s Confederation series, of which this is the third, is that even though they’re essentially military SF, they vary quite a bit from the usual pattern and are interesting as novels as well as military adventures.   For one thing, her main protagonist, Torin Kerr, is a sergeant, not an officer, and though she engages in the usual flaunting of regulations and orders when necessary to succeed, she nevertheless believes in the values of the military and is not the openly insubordinate type we’re using to seeing in this situation.  Huff is cognizant of the fact that, appearances to the contrary, much of the smooth functioning of a military unit is managed by the non-commissioned officers, sometimes despite the intervention of the officers themselves. 

Her latest assignment should have been uneventful, even boring.  She’s sent to a planet where marines are trained in simulations, temporarily assigned to help an officer who recently survived the near total destruction of his body.  Everything seems to be going fine at first, but then the simulations get a little bit too realistic, and its up to Torin to keep a small disaster from turning into a much larger one.  Who’s behind the change, and why?  A nice mystery wrapped up in an adventure story.  4/9/07

The Gangster Conspiracy by Steve Perry and Dal Perry, Roc, 7/07, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-451-46162-9

The late Chris Bunch had written the first three novels of Star Risk, Inc., a kind of combination security service and mercenary force working in a future interstellar civilization.  The series was on the fringe of military SF and among the best light space operas of the past few years.  Steve Perry, who has written a good many excellent space adventures of his own, collaborates with Dal Perry to pen the fourth in the series, which is very definitely up to the standards of its predecessors.  Reversals in the previous volume have been reversed yet again, but the company’s financial situation is not enviable when Revered Josiah Williams shows up with a job offer.  It seems that he represents an alliance of labor unions in a remote star system who are having trouble negotiating better terms with their employers.  Williams wants Star Risk to effectively blockade the system to prevent the exportation of trade goods, which sounds like a comparatively easy assignment, but you know as well as I that things aren’t going to be quite as simple as that.  There’s a criminal conspiracy and a web of secrets to be sorted through.  Space opera the way it’s supposed to be written. 4/9/07

Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan, Del Rey, 7/07, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-345-48525-0 

It hasn’t taken long for Richard Morgan to establish himself with his particular brand of novel, mildly dystopian novels that use some elements of cyberpunk without becoming completely wrapped up in that single aspect of his future societies.  His characters tend to be dark as well, not villains but not traditional heroes either.  A case in point is this new title set in a future where humanity has expanded into the solar system, but without solving the many problems of Earth.  Carl Marsalis is a byproduct of one of those problems.  The government attempted to create a more efficient soldier through physical enhancement and training, but the program failed and the subjects were let loose in the world despite the occasional psychological problem.  Marsalis supported himself for a while as a professional assassin but of late has decided to find a new kind of life.  Alas, his past isn’t through with him yet. 

Another of the enhanced subjects, called Thirteens, has apparently gone completely rogue.  When Marsalis is arrested, he is offered a deal.  His part of the bargain will be to track down the other man.  Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?  Well, think again because there are plots within plots, confused motives and shaky alliances, and secrets to be revealed.  There’s a considerable amount of violence along the way, and some thoughtful examination of moral issues like euthanasia, human experimentation, and the limits of patriotism.  Morgan’s future Earth is filled with contradictions, unresolved problems, conflicting interests, compromised morals, and corrupt authorities, and the fact that it feels so real is at times a bit depressing.  It’s only a matter of time until one of Morgan’s novels hits the right chord and grabs an award or two, and this might be the one. 4/8/07

All Possible Worlds, Spring 2007, $5.95

This is the debut issue of a new small press SF and Fantasy magazine, with nice cover art though the interior work is rather more varied in quality.  As you might expect, a market paying such low rates is going to feature primarily lesser known authors, and that's the case here.  The first story, by Justin Stanchfield, nicely evokes its setting, an ice moon where the operator of heavy equipment at a mining project has to choose between seeing the woman he loves just before she leaves to return to Earth and rescuing a stranded party of travelers.  Pretty good up until the end, which is rather weak and marred by some corny dialogue.  A minor vignette by Daniel Ausema follows, and then a much longer story set in a primitive society by John N. Baker.  Not badly written but not the kind of thing I generally enjoy.  John Rosenman's "High Concept" is the best story in the issue. A frustrated man creates an imaginary older brother who becomes less than imaginary in short order.  Kurt Kirchmeier has a clever piece about a school for young gods and a class in...er, um..creationism I'd guess you'd call it.  "Iron Man" by Greg Jenkins is another minor vignette. Gene Stewart's longer story is okay but a little bit disorganized.  Edward Muller's space adventure, "Prizes", was entertaining but I couldn't get into Bruce Golden's "The Apocryphist".  Michael Pignatella closes the issue with another okay story. The stories by Rosenman and Kirchmeier are the best in the issue.  Subscriptions are $20 for four issues from Zeta Centauri Inc, 3156 Portman Road, Columbus, OH 43232, or thru their website, www.zetacentauri.com/magazine.htm.  4/7/07

Death Sentence by Roger MacBride Allen, Bantam, 6/07, $6.99, ISBN 978-0-553-58727-2

Allen's previous novel, The Cause of Death, introduced the Bureau of Special Investigations, a kind of interstellar human FBI in a distant future in which humans find themselves the newcomers in the interstellar neighborhood.  That one was a convoluted murder mystery; this one  has some of the same elements, but is very different in execution.  One of their agents disappeared after being dispatched to the Metranans, one of the older races who believe they have achieved the pinnacle of technology and biological research and who have one of the most static civilizations in the galaxy.  The agent is eventually found on his drifting spaceship, having died of old age despite his relative youth.  He was carrying a message and a deciphering key, and the key is missing, probably concealed somewhere aboard although the best efforts of the BSI (and whoever murdered him) were unable to locate it.

Jamie Mendez and Hannah Wolfson are sent to find out what happened during his visit, ostensibly to solve the mystery of their co-worker's death, but also to find the key if possible.  It would be to the advantage of the human race to prove itself reliable. They arrive to find near chaos following the leak of information that someone had discovered a way to dramatically extend the Metranans' life span, but that the knowledge had been lost or suppressed.  Also present are representatives of another, even more hidebound race who conceal their true nature inside nearly impenetrable environmental suits.  The two investigators discover plots within plots before unraveling the truth.

I've also enjoyed Allen's novels.  He has a clear, expository style that seems almost relaxed even when the action is hot and heavy.  I'm also a fan of crossovers between mystery and science fiction.  Although I liked this new one reasonably well, I was uncharacteristically impatient with it.  Virtually nothing happens during the first two hundred pages except conversations among the two agents and a brief glimpse at the alien culture.  I didn't actually skip ahead, but at times I was tempted, and the second half picks up the pace nicely all the way to the finish.  There's at least one further installment in this series on the way.  It will jump to the top of the stack when it arrives. 4/5/07

Skunk: A Love Story by Justin Courter, Omnidawn, 2007, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-890650-20-9

There was a time when satires were an honored part of SF.  Alas, for some reason whimsical commentaries on contemporary problems seem to have gone out of fashion, probably because the real problems have become so prominent that readers prefer not to think about them when they turn to entertainment.  So the few satires that do continue to appear are mostly from small presses like this one, an imprint I'd never heard of before this intriguing novel arrived in the mail except for a single anthology (which included a small portion of this novel in fact).  It's a first novel, although the author has sold some short fiction, and it's very similar to the satires that Shepherd Mead, Benjamin Appel, Harold Livingston, and others wrote in years gone by.

Damien is an ordinary person, a valued office worker and a good neighbor, but he has this little problem.  At first it was just a predilection toward odd odors, but now it's an outright obsession, an addiction to the smell of skunks, and his neighbors and co-workers aren't at all happy with the situation.  Eventually his penchant for raising skunks complicates his life even more, and then he meets Pearl, a fish fetishist who is also a brilliant scientist who has found a cure for global warming.  Sort of.  Her solution is a new form of life that grows like a coat of vegetation over the surface of the ocean, producing lots of nice carbon dioxide, but with obvious undesirable side effects. Their budding romance is interrupted by crisis, however, when the animal control officer impounds Damien's pet skunks as a community nuisance.  Unable to rescue them before they are put to death, he quits his job and sells his house, intending to move somewhere more amenable to his desired lifestyle.  And his new life must include Pearl as well as the skunks.  Definitely not for every taste, but obviously quite out of the ordinary.

Ravenor Rogue by Dan Abnett, Black Library, 2007, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-84416-460-8

The Flight of the Eisenstein by James Swallow, 2007, $7.99, ISBN 978-84416-459-2

I generally prefer the sword and sorcery side of the Warhammer universe rather than the military SF like these two titles.  Partly that's because most of them are closer to the Robert E. Howard tradition than the Tolkien or wargaming traditions, and partly because much of their military SF includes or at least implies the existence of magical or supernatural entities, and that jars with the interplanetary setting for me.  The best of the SF end of their spectrum avoids or minimizes the latter and a few mainstream SF writers like Ian Watson and Brian Stableford have written pretty good entries in the series.  The track record for authors whose work is pretty much confined to this single publisher is less impressive, but there are exceptions.  The foremost of these is Dan Abnett, who writes the best of their space adventures including this, the latest in his subset about Ravenor, an official inquisitor whose job is to seek out evil doers both external and internal.  Ravenor's latest adventure takes him somewhat out of his ordinary frame, which is constricted because he is confined to a kind of glorified wheelchair and environmental suit due to hostile action years before.  That makes it a little difficult for him to disobey instructions and embark on a personal campaign to hunt down those responsible for the murder of some of his peers, but that's exactly what he and a few companions do in this new adventure.  There were a few places where I thought the dialogue was uncharacteristically clunky, but it's not a major problem.  One caveat, however; the story is not complete and continues in Brothers of the Snake, not yet published.

James Swallow has not confined himself to the Warhammer universe and has written novels in the Judge Dredd and other sequences, although all published by Black Library under that imprint or its Black Flame persona.  This is also part of a subset, the Horus Heresy, penned by multiple authors, involving the traitorous actions of a portion of the human empire and its conversion to evil.  This is the story of a ship that is rushing to carry news of the betrayal back to the authorities when it is damaged and stranded in hyperspace, and hyperspace is the land of the evil creatures that plague the universe.  I managed to work around my prejudice against this mixing of genres by interpreting the latter as just super-aliens, and found the book reasonably enjoyable though a bit slow at times.  Another caveat here, because you won't be able to find out the end results of the conflict until the rest of the series is published, but at least this installment is fairly complete in itself.  I know that game and other media tie-in novels generally get snubbed by most mainstream SF readers, but if you're looking for light space adventures that aren't full of meaningful commentary on the human condition or veiled references to contemporary politics, these might be just what you're looking for.

Starfist: Firestorm by David Sherman & Dan Cragg, Del Rey, 6/07, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-345-46056-1

Volume 12 in the popular Starfist military SF series.  The expansion of the human race through the galaxy has not been without its problems.  Rebellions, indigenous alien races with barbaric societies, and star traveling races with higher technology.  Now the biggest threat of all looms ever closer as the alien Skinks advance their campaign to exterminate humanity.  As divided among ourselves as we always are, some parties choose to take advantage of the concentration of forces along the perimeter of human space to foment rebellions and takeovers within human civilization, even if that weakens our overall defensive posture.  This is the story of one lone outpost that finds itself surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, but not out thought or out fought by their enemies.

There's not a great deal to say about the plot, which is essentially a series of intense battles between the marines and their enemies.  We all know they're going to win in the end, but it's still interesting to see how they essentially outsmart the opposition.  Sherman & Cragg are noted for their very realistic ground combat sequences and this one is no exception.  It would be nice to see them expand on the basic formula a little, but they've been so successful with it that one can't blame them for hewing pretty close to the standard line.  And I don't know of anyone alive doing better military SF.

Man vs Machine edited by Martin H. Greenberg & John Helfers, DAW, 7/07, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-7564-0436-9

It is only appropriate that an anthology whose theme is the conflict between man and technology should open with a Berserker story by Fred Saberhagen, and this one does, a collaboration with Jane Lindskold.  Alas, this isn't one of the better ones, full of action but with a flat, unsatisfying ending with the tragic hero indulging in self sacrifice.  Brendan Dubois follows with a more interesting variation of the post-apocalypse war, this one set after the kind of apocalyptic events of D.F. Jones' Colossus or Philip K. Dick's Vulcan's Hammer.  The computer systems designed to protect us became self aware and turned into a danger rather than a benefit, and the population rose and destroyed everything with microchips, effectively destroying contemporary civilization and leaving North America a balkanized remnant of its former self.  Loren Coleman adds a readable but unremarkable story of a technology laden military operation.

Rick Hautala's  "The Hum" is the first really outstanding story in the collection.  People begin to hear an almost subliminal hum that becomes more annoying and pervasive with the passage of time, and no one can determine the cause.  There have been news stories in recent months about communities plagued by very similar phenomena.  Hopefully Hautala's apocalyptic explanation isn't the correct one.  Bill Fawcett then returns to the military theme and Ed Gorman adds the much  more interesting "Moral Imperative", involving adultery and religious passion in a high tech future world.  William Keith returns to the military theme, the best of that subset in the book, a war to end wars in the very distant future, a struggle between group responsibility and individuality, between freedom and paternalism, between inorganic and organic life.

Artificial intelligence is also central to "Chasing Humanity" by Brad Beaulieu, a name new to me, but the story is one of the better in the collection.  L.E. Modessit Jr.'s "The Difference", the best piece of short fiction I've seen from this author, similarly explores the effect of artificial intelligence on society, in this case when the computers running major installations begin to waken to self awareness and decide to do something more interesting than just run a factory.  Stephen Leigh and Richard Dansky provide creditable but fairly predictable stories, after which comes Simon Brown's very entertaining "Reiteration", wherein humans and aliens mix sailing vessels with advanced technology as they battle on an alien sea.  Jean Rabe's story of a man who spends much of his life hating a locomotive provides a nice change of pace, and a refreshing change of perspective.  Similarly the protagonist of Russell Davis' "Engines of Desire & Despair" concludes that machines are by their very nature evil.  S. Andrew Swann concludes with another strong story, "The Historian's Apprentice", in which it is the machine that makes the moral decision that may be too selfless for man to choose for himself.  All in all, a solid if unremarkable collection, with the best stories by Swann, Hautala, Beaulieu, and Modessit, and not a single clunker.

Secret Weapon by Jude Watson, Scholastic, 2007, $5.99, ISBN 978-0-439-68140-7

A few years back, I read a fairly large selection of Star Wars novels for younger readers, quite a few of them by Jude Watson, but somehow I missed the fact that they were still coming out.  Watson has a separate series, of which this is the seventh book, most of which apparently feature Ferus Olin, a surviving Jedi we didn't know about who has been searching for more of his kind, encouraging the rebels, but who is often forced to serve the Emperor or Darth Vader for one reason or another.  This time, however, he is working for the rebellion, because Vader and company have a new secret weapon, and Olin intends to steal the secret for the good guys.  Watson's books are always well written, if a bit light, but since the movies themselves were meant to appeal to the young, these don't feel out of place at all even if they aren't written with the level of sophistication of those designed for the adult market.  I haven't read any of the earlier novels in this series, and I probably won't go out of my way to look for them, but if I happen upon them, I would probably find a way to work them into my reading list.

Shelter by Susan Palwick, Tor, 6/07, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-312-86602-0

Most science fiction novels that hope to tackle serious issues - bioethics, global warming, cloning, cultural clashes, or whatever - deal at least primarily with one topic and use other issues, if at all, simply as part of the background or to provide a subplot.  Susan Palwick's latest is much more ambitious than that, addressing a wide variety of topics at the same time.  My previous experience with the author's work, particularly the marvelous and touching Flying in Place, tipped me off in advance that I was going to be introduced to a cast of vividly conceived characters, and I wasn't disappointed.  If anything there was too many of them, and I wanted to know more about each of their lives.  The characters include a sort of artificial intelligence - a dead man translated into electronic life, a homeless man whose memories have been erased because he tried to help a child, a woman who disappeared for five years, and another who finds herself sucked into this woman's orbit. There's also a sentient house, a much more benevolent one than in Dean R. Koontz's Demon Seed.  And part of the story evolves because the house offers shelter to a homeless man, which it should not have been able to do.

This is, I suppose, a mild dystopia, but it's more about the terrible things we sometimes do to ourselves and others rather than what is imposed on us by a cold and distant government.  And it has an upbeat ending, although not because the rebels assassinate an evil dictator and bring about democratic reforms but because the characters discover some of the flaws in their own personalities, the reasons why they have been less than kind to one another, and move past that to a different kind of relationship.  Proof, if we needed it, that a novel can be an intense, gripping experience even if it isn't filled with derring do, scientific marvels, and a cast of larger than life characters.  This one's likely to be an award contender next year, although the low key cover seems aimed at a non-genre audience.

Dangerous Games edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, Ace, 4/07, $7.99, ISBN 0-441-01490-3

The latest reprint theme anthology from these two veteran editors has a surprisingly large number of entries which I hadn't run into before, even more surprising because they're uniformly good stories.  The theme is games which endanger people's lives, so it's only appropriate that the lead story be Robert Sheckley's classic "The Prize of Peril", still as effective today as it was back in the 1950s.  With the exception of Kate Wilhelm's contribution from the 1970s, all of the remaining stories have been published during the past decade, in as varied places as Interzone, Salon, and Analog.  It would be difficult to pick out the best stories here, but William Browning Spencer's "Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness" is another  favorite of mine and Alastair Reynolds' "Stroboscopic", Allen Steele's "Her Own Private Sitcom", and Jonathan Lethem's "How We Got in Town and Out Again" are all excellent.  The best of the stories new to me was "Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland" by Gwyneth Jones.  The selection is excellent not only because of the quality but because the stories are quite varied despite the common theme, thereby escaping monotony, a frequent malady of the theme anthology.

Red Handed by Gena Showalter, MTV Books, 6/07, $9.95, ISBN 978-1-4165-3224-8

Blacklisted by Gena Showalter, MTV Books, 7/07, $9.95, ISBN 978-1-4165-3225-5

The last successful teenaged science fiction series was, I believe, the Roswell series by Melinda Metz.  These are the first two volumes in a new series by paranomal romance writer Gena Showalter, and I doubt that they'll make it as the next such hit.  For one thing, her world is very different from the one we live on, and not very attractive.  Aliens live on Earth, all sorts of aliens, some with rather unlikely physiologies, others so close that they can pass for human.  In fact, the authorities have a serious problem discovering the aliens who hide among the general population.  There is also a special branch of the government, Alien Investigation and Removal, which responds to any violent crime by an alien with overwhelming and lethal force, directed toward any human accomplices as well, and they act outside the law and are apparently not accountable for what they do.  The entire premise for the series is suspect, and the sexual content is intense enough that we won't see this one turned into a prime time television show.  There's also a structural problem.  The recurring characters are minor and, based on the first two in this series, each book will focus on a new protagonist, which won't do much for continuity of interest.

What are they actually about?  Well, the first one deals with a teenage girl who is semi-addicted to a drug used to track aliens.  She and her mother don't get along until she is recruited by the agency, trained to be a killer, and then demonstrates that she can be responsible.  Oh, and she goes to bed with her instructor after lusting after him a lot.  The second one, slightly better, a coming of age story with another teenage girl, this one inadvertently putting an undercover operation in jeopardy before her help is enlisted to ensure its success.  Completely implausible scientifically and logically, these will drive science fiction readers crazy.  If the MTV crowd is less demanding, they may find these moderately entertaining.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald, Pyr, 5/07, $25, ISBN 978-1-59102-543-6

Ian McDonald's latest is a panoramic view of Brazil, or a kind of Brazil.  We see the country through three separate story lines.  The earliest is 1732.  A monk has been sent from Europe to deal with a problem that is exacerbating tensions between religious orders as well as with the mundane authorities.  A priest in a remote part of the Amazon has undertaken a dangerous and possibly heretical course.  The monk's mission is to recall or neutralize him, reminiscent of the central plot in Apocalypse Now.  The mission is complicated by rumors that a band of angels has appeared, slaughtering the unworthy and carrying off others. 

The second plot is set in the present.  An ambitious young woman makes a living developing reality shows, but rivalries within her organization as well as a changing political climate are causing her considerable frustration.  Adding to her woes is a series of incidents where an apparent doppelganger acts in her name, endangering her own plans.  The third sequence is set thirty years in the future.  A small time thief gets involved with a woman who specializes in quantum physics involving multiple universes.  When she is killed, she is replaced - not by a ghost but by a version of herself from an alternate reality.

The real focus of the novel is the setting, which McDonald illustrates in three different eras, pulling them all together through the device of quantum physics and the malleability of reality.  His prose is, as always, a joy to read.  This is a major novel from a major talent.

Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol, Canongate, 2007, $13, ISBN 978-1-84195-883-5

Sometimes the most unprepossessing book can be a real find.  That's the case with this title, originally published in Spanish in 2002, translated by Cheryl Leah Morgan.  The novel is something of a re-imaging of Karel Capek's classic The War With the Newts, played out on a smaller, more intense stage.  The nameless narrator has agreed to operate a weather station on a remote island in the Antarctic, living by himself for a full year.  He explains that he hopes to catch up on his reading, although there are vague suggestions that he may have other motives which he has not admitted even to himself.  When the ship arrives to drop him off and pick up his predecessor, there is no sign of the other man.  In fact, the only other inhabitant of the island is found in a nearly comatose state, living in the lighthouse.  Gruner appears almost certainly insane, refuses to say what happened to the other man, and is even suspected of having murdered him.

The narrator decides to stay against the advice of the captain.  That first evening, his house is assaulted by a horde of bipedal amphibians who are very much like the salamanders in Capek's novel.  He manages to fight them off, but when they leave at daybreak, he is exhausted, injured, and nearly prostrate with terror.  When he seeks refuge in the lighthouse, Gruner refuses to let him in, even threatens to shoot him.  Dismayed, the protagonist returns to the cottage, finds two rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition among his supplies, and decides to fortify his own lodgings, hopeless as that might be.  He feels such hostility toward Gruner that he is tempted to shoot him and, later, attempts a physical assault that reveals an odd fact.  Gruner has been keeping one of the female creatures as a servant, even dressing her in human clothing.  The narrator takes the servant prisoner, which drives Gruner into a frenzy, although it is only later that we learn that she is also his sexual partner.

Spoilers follow. Gruner is forced to allow the narrator into the lighthouse, which he has transformed into a fortress, and the two of them become more amicable as they fend off increasing numerous and desperate attacks by the creatures.  The level of violence escalates rapidly, from shotgun to modern rifles to deadly explosives on one side, from random assaults to constant major offensives on the other.  Much of what follows is nightmarish, but the narrator begins to undergo a slow epiphany, realizing that the creatures share many attributes with humanity, that they are just seeking to defend the one piece of land that belongs to them, that they are capable of entering negotiations and abiding by agreements.  He even imitates Gruner by having sexual relations with the female, and later adopts one of their orphaned children.  Unfortunately, Gruner cannot see them as anything but a threat and that is ultimately his undoing.  The narrator reaches an accord which Gruner violates, resulting in his own death, and the hostilities resume just as his own relief arrives.  If there was any doubt in the reader's mind that this was designed to illustrate the endless cycle of war, the author dispels that by revealing that Gruner is NOT the lighthouse keeper.  He's the missing weather station operator.  And the relief crew mistakenly believes that the narrator is Gruner.  The new replacement is attacked the first night of his stay and the contretemps with the narrator starts a recapitulation of his own confrontation with Gruner.  If the man really was Gruner.

The pointless waste of it all is pretty evident.  One might wonder why the weather station on an uninhabited island would contain so much weaponry, but I think that's deliberate, reflecting the propensity of governments to stockpile armaments for which there is no obvious purpose.  This can be taken as SF, as satire, or even as horror, but it should definitely be on your reading list.

Shadow Worlds by Darrell Bain & Barbara M. Hodges, Twilight Time, 2005, $16.95, ISBN 978-1-933353-79-1

Alien Infection by Darrell Bain, Twilight Time, 2005, $16.95, ISBN 1-933353-72-4

I don't know much about this publisher but they appear to be a small press, mostly print on demand, and none of their writers are anyone I've heard of previously except for Darrell Bain, who has had a few previous small press titles .  They recently sent me a selection of their past books, and I managed to fit a couple of them into my reading schedule.  Both are relatively short and attractively packaged.  The first one has an intriguing setup.  Exact duplicates of people begin appearing out of nowhere, plopping down beside their originals, but unlike the Body Snatchers, these creations are all dead.  But where are they coming from, and why?  Some of the speculation comes straight out of the old pulps and isn't very plausible, and that a scientist could come up with the right theory - supercomputers in an alternate universe - seems a bit of a stretch.  It's the kind of invasion story that John Russell Fearn and Robert L. Fanthorpe based their careers on, but considerably better written. 

The second title borrows its plot from "B" SF movies.  A medical worker is accidentally infected by blood from an emergency room patient, who is taken away by armed government officials in a very secretive manner.  He subsequently falls ill, but recovers feeling better than ever before, and passes on the infection to a friend.  Old physical defects are repaired and sex is greater than ever, but he has essentially become a fugitive. Eventually they are enlightened by an alien who tells them they are carrying an alien symbiont which, unfortunately, will kill most humans who are infected.  The story lost me a little at this point because of some shaky science; the alien is indistinguishable from humans, and tells them that there are hominids on every Earthlike planet her people have visited.  A protracted chase sequence follows with the government finally helping the aliens to leave Earth. 

Both books are competently written, probably not well enough to please one of the major publishers but better than much of the small press stuff I see.  The collaboration has a more original plot, but the second title is slightly better constructed.  Neither book is good enough for me to run out and buy other titles by either author, but both are good enough that I'd probably read more by them if it came my way. Available through Amazon and the Twilight Tales website.

Next by Michael Crichton, Harper, 2006, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-06-087298-4 

Despite his occasionally hokey science, I’ve always enjoyed Michael Crichton’s thrillers.  He is a consummate story teller with a superb sense of pacing and tension.  Most of the time.  I was very disappointed by his last book, State of Fear, not so much because of the message it was designed to convey – Crichton believes that much of what we have been told about global warming is fantasy – but because he spent so much time lecturing the reader that the story just never came together.  So I had put off reading this new one because I knew it was about genetic manipulation and feared that it would be very much the same. 

The good news is that it is better than the last, at least for the first two thirds.  Crichton does raise a good many ethical questions, but he doesn’t attempt to answer them all and he leaves the clear impression that this is such new territory that we need to tread carefully so that the benefits of this new knowledge can be realized without too many of the less savory side effects. His opinions are expressed more forcefully in an afterward, but teven there he often suggests that we need to know more before making decisions. The novel tackles everything from gene therapy to attempts to increase the intelligence of animals through transgenic mutation to societal engineering to the ethics of experimentation on human and/or animal subjects.  Some of the characters are appealing and some are not, but even the latter occasionally give voice to rational, even compelling arguments from their point of view.  It appears that Crichton wants to make us think this time, but isn’t so determined to shape our conclusions.

The first bit of bad news is that the novel tries to cover so many things that it is very unfocused.  There is a huge collection of characters and situations, and we jump from one to the other so frequently that the first half of the novel has a lot of false momentum that falters because none of the individual story lines seem to be moving toward a resolution. There are the makings of at least two or three good novels in here, but none of them ever coalesce sufficiently.  The shotgun approach raises lots of interesting questions, but the diffusion robs them of any immediacy.

Worse, for me at least, are those places where Crichton makes leaps of extrapolation before he has properly properly prepared the groundwork.  For example, it’s quite a jump from proving a company’s legal right to market a line of disease resistant cells harvested from an individuals while he was under medical treatment, to assuming the legal authority to kidnap his grandchildren and perform surgical procedures on them because they are committing a felony - theft - by having inherited the same genetic material.  To say nothing of the fact that no corporation would ever openly declare that they had such a right and risk the public outcry that would certainly ensue. The fact that there is a subsequent legal opinion overruling their conclusion doesn't make up for the fact that their initial acceptance of the fact, and the advice of their attorney that they can legally kidnap children to harvest their DNA, is simply implausible.

Nor did I believe for a second that a man could successfully enroll a transgenic ape in school as a human being – without a birth certificate or physical – by claiming that it was a human child with a birth defect and a genetic defect that resulted in excessive hairiness.  These two incidents alone were so unrealistic that I was no longer able to emotionally invest myself in the story from that point onward.  It’s a shame, because Crichton raises legitimate issues, and because he still writes crackling prose when he’s concentrating on that instead of his message, but this is another one of those books were the well intentioned message swamped the storytelling.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi, Tor, 5/07, $23.95, ISBN 978-0-765-31697-4

This is the third in the series that started with Old Man's War.  John Perry has fulfilled his military obligations and settled with his family on a colony world, but having once had a taste of the wider universe, he finds his new environment pale and tame.  It appears that the planet Roanoke has been settled for the usual good reasons, but if the name of the planet didn't warn you that something sinister is underway, events soon will.  Humans are playing a delicate diplomatic and military balancing game with an alien empire that wants to see an end to human expansion.  Although ostensibly supporting Roanoke's colonists, the authorities actually have decided that it will play a very different part in the game, and I don't want to tell you too much here and spoil the surprise, although you should be able to guess at least most of what's going on well in advance.  Petty and his wife object to being pawns, no matter what the ultimate objective might be, and they eventually take a hand that will alter the rules of the game.  A blend of military SF with the planetary adventure story.  Scalzi has been compared to the early Robert Heinlein and the comparison is a valid one, and I don't imagine it will be long before he moves his first Hugo Award to his mantelpiece.

One Jump Ahead by Mark L. Van Name, Baen, 6/07, $24, ISBN 978-1-4165-2085-6

Jon Moore is a kind of low key James Bond, an interplanetary adventurer who makes use of nanotechnology and an artificial intelligence named Lobo to accomplish his missions.  The conflicts around him are less military than commercial, although sometimes it's very difficult to tell the difference, and dead is dead regardless of the attitude of the killer.  His latest job is to rescue a kidnapped girl, but some very odd developments arise in the aftermath, making him wonder just what it is that he has gotten involved with this time.  The hi-jinx escalate from there, with intervals of banter between Moore and Lobo that would have been more interesting if Lobo had been individualized a bit more.  There's plenty of action though as they thread their way through traps, treachery, and the terrors of corporate finagling.  There have been short stories featuring this duo as well, and I would not be at all surprised to see more novels.  Nothing deep or relevant here, just good old fashioned murder and mayhem.

Deadstock by Jeffrey Thomas, Solaris, 2007, $7.99, ISBN 1-84416-447-0

The first science fiction novel in the new Solaris line is one of Thomas' visits to Punktown, an urban setting on a distant world where humans and aliens interact, with more than a touch of cyberpunk but somewhat wider horizons.  A darker and more complex version of the Mos Eisley spaceport of Star Wars. Jeremy Stake is a somewhat seedy private detective who is hired by a prominent and rich local man to find a rare living artifact, a doll that belongs to his teenaged daughters and which is mysteriously missing, presumably stolen. 

Stake has an unusual talent, although some times it's as much a curse as an asset.  He's a chameleon, a shapechanger whose appearance can be altered very quickly to resemble others. But Stake is not the only one who isn't what he appears to be.  His new employer hasn't told him the whole truth, and the living doll he's pursuing is more than just a very sophisticated plaything.  Lots of revelations, twists, and turns will follow.  Although there's a pretty good mystery here, the real charm of the book - if that's the right term for a novel about a generally repulsive society - is the evocation of a corrupt, many layered, city where high tech and low morals co-exist, where gangs prowl the lower levels in an entirely different environment from that of the wealthy who live, literally, above them.  Stake is a brooding figure whose personality fits perfectly, and I was reminded at times of the promising early works of Piers Anthony (pre-Xanth) like Chthon.  Thomas seems to have grown more confident of his material with each book, and this is far and away the best he has done, clear evidence that he is evolving into one of the more exciting talents in the field.

Phytosphere by Scott Mackay, Roc, 6/07, $6.99, ISBN 978-0-451-46158-2

The alien Tarsalans have no true concept of personal property, so when their negotiations to settle on Earth prove unfruitful, they act precipitously, creating a barrier around the entire planet that cuts off sunlight and communication with the colonies sprinkled through the solar system.  As the ecological situation begins to degrade, teams of scientists desperately try to find a way to pierce the shield.  The sections dealing with the interactions between humans and Tarsalans are the high spots in the book, but they're not as engaging as the similar interactions in his earlier Tides. The plot is otherwise a semi-interesting scientific puzzle with a few brief action sequences.  I wasn't really attracted to any of the characters either, which made the story seem rather flat.

Water Rites by Mary Rosenblum, Fairwood Press, 2/07, $17.99, ISBN 0-9789078-1-7

Mary Rosenblum's first novel, The Drylands, appeared way back in 1993, developing a theme and setting she had used in earlier short stories.  It is the Pacific Northwest of the future after global warming has altered the ecology of the world dramatically.  Water is so scarce in North America that it is the most valuable commodity, administered by the Army Corps of Engineers, conducted through massive pipelines.  While the populace alternates between apathy and rioting, it seems that the situation is getting worse rather than better.  Life in the barren areas is also having an effect on human heredity.  This new volume includes that novel, plus three short stories using the same setting.  There are two other Drylands stories, not included in this volume.  In the novel, a military officer tries to intercede between the army and a group of farmers who have become increasingly desperate.  An undercurrent through all is the fear felt by those with subtle mutations caused by the drought conditions - a presumption that takes something of a leap of faith - but it provides another degree of depth to the conflict.  Her most recent novels are more polished, but this one remains entertaining as well as thought provoking.

Slan Hunter by A.E. van Vogt and Kevin J. Anderson, Tor, 7/07, $24.95

It has been around forty years since I first read Slan, A.E. van Vogt’s first full length novel.  The popularity of Slan among fans in the 1940s is not surprising.  Slans are mutants with superior physical and mental skills, including telepathy, believed by humans to be the product of some exotic artificial manipulation of the DNA of infants.  They are believed to have been designed by a scientist named S. Lann six centuries before the events of the novel, and they are named after their supposed creator, but it is never clear how the world comes to believe that he could propagate millions of them among the population, or how the knowledge that they were being born as a natural form of evolution could not have emerged during the centuries of their existence.  Although they were briefly in the ascendant in human society, there was a war and they are now in hiding, hated, feared, and persecuted because they were different.  Since many SF fans also felt persecuted and despised for their bookish ways, identification was inevitable and the phrase “fans are slans” became part of the fannish vocabulary.  Groups of fans lived together in “slan shacks”.

Rereading the novel now, I was struck almost immediately by its lack of imagination.  Although we are told that centuries have passed and that Earth is now ruled from the city of Centropolis by a nearly absolute dictator, there is little to technologically distinguish it from the present.  People drive around in cars, carry handguns and anti-aircraft batteries, and apparently live very much like we do.  True, a secret organization has space travel, but their secret is closely held, and the highly advanced airships don’t travel much faster than present day aircraft. There is a brief attempt to explain all of this late in the sequel, presumably by Anderson, but not convincingly.  It doesn't matter in any case.

The original story is told from the point of view of two young slans.  Jommy Cross narrowly escapes capture when his mother is killed and lives with a grasping, repulsive old woman for several years, waiting for the day when a post hypnotic compulsion will lead him to his father’s discovery.  During that period he discovers the existence of the tendrilless slans, slans who lack the tendrils in their hair that makes telepathy possible.  For some reason, this group is as hostile to true slans as are the humans.  The second viewpoint character is Kathleen Layton, a slan held prisoner by the dictator, Kier Gray, apparently because her ability to eavesdrop on the thoughts of his enemies proves useful. 

 Layton later becomes the target of a lustful councilor, Jem Lorry, who purportedly wants to discover if slans and humans are interfertile, although we learn in the sequel that he is himself a tendrilless slan and that his excuse must therefore be no more than that.  She attempts to avoid his attentions by lying to a council meeting in the most awkwardly written sequence in the book, wherein they set out their rather unbelievable plans to eradicate the slans before realizing that they are revealing their intentions to a telepath.  We also get confirmation that Kier Gray, the supposedly anti-slan world dictator, has some secret sympathy for the girl, if not for slans on the whole.  The sequel opens with the revelation that he is himself a slan, and that he has been arrested by his security chief, John Petty, who plans to rule the Earth himself.

Reading the early chapters, presumably by van Vogt, I was struck by how little the author's style had changed even after a gap of fifty years.  There is the same lack of sophistication in the characterization, the same awkward phrasing and casual attitude toward science, the same naiveté about the way politics unfolds and human interactions intermesh.  The second half of the novel has smoother prose, but Anderson wisely doesn't try to radically alter the style and does in fact capture a great deal of the spirit of van Vogt.

The story itself is almost secondary.  This is an exercise in nostalgia rather than a fresh new novel.  The tendrilless slans have a secret base on Mars from which they launch thousands of ships to attack the Earth, which they do primarily by dropping bombs.  Jem Lorry is revealed to be one of their agents, a megalomaniac who tries to become dictator of both races.  Jommy and Kathleen rescue Kier Gray and are chased about the countryside as it appears that the human race is headed for extinction or slavery.  And where are the true slans?

Slan was not van Vogt's best novel, but it is certainly his most famous.  It is fitting that the sequel he began should also be his last published.  Readers unfamiliar with the field are probably going to be puzzled when they read this, because it's so unlike what currently appears in the field but long time fans are going to find in it a ticket back to their own past.

Echoes of an Alien Sky by James P. Hogan, Baen, 2007, $24, ISBN 978-1-4165-2108-2

James Hogan's latest is rather less ambitious in scope than most of his earlier work, even though it involves the extinction of human life on Earth.  Venus is a thriving human community which has sent extensive research teams to the now dead third planet in an effort to figure out just what it was that led the human race to extinction.  We see most of the action through the eyes of a spaceman and a scientist, but there's not a whole lot of action to see.  Much of the novel consists of ruminations about international politics, the short sighted polices of the 20th Century and onward, followed by the discovery that tailored viruses were created which targeted specific ethnic or racial types.  Unfortunately, these viruses mutated and it seemed inevitable that everyone would eventually become vulnerable.

Unfortunately for the novel, there really isn't much in the way of surprises for the reader.  The secret of what happened to the human race is pretty obvious, and the side plots involving Venusian politics adds no real suspense to the slow unraveling of various puzzles in the ruins of Earth.  This hovers somewhere between hard science fiction and a cautionary novel, but it doesn't really settle in any one place.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, Pantheon, 6/07, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-375-42486-1

The interest in superheroes in the movie industry has been substantial in recent years, and the headline news of the death of Captain America in Marvel comics recently reflects how much the formerly despised "comic books" have become a part of our culture.  There have been many superhero novels, most of them tie-ins to films or graphic material, most of them not particularly elevating.  There have been a few exceptions.  The Wild Cards series edited by George R.R. Martin is the most exceptional, a series of mosaic novels in which mutated humans become a part of ordinary life.  There have been occasional other novels of merit as well, but few of them as interesting as this debut novel from a writer who also designs interactive games.

Grossman creates a cast of original super-powered characters in this, including the cyborglike Fatale, the martial artist Blackwolf, the villainous Doctor Impossible.  Their powers come from a variety of sources, ancient gods, accidents, mutation, curses, alien technology, radiation, or just plain magic.  Heroes and villains interact but this isn't about physical battles as much as it is about the characters, and it is actually remarkably non-violent.  It's also an alternate history because the superheroes have been around for quite a while - a long while if you include time traveling events.  It's surprisingly effective, particularly in bringing such unlikely characters to life.  I hardly even noticed that it was written in the present tense, which normally drives me to distraction.  An excellent testimony to the fact that in the hands of a talented writer, even the most unpromising premise can be turned into something marvelous.

1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint and David Weber, Baen, 5/07, $26, ISBN 1-4165-2102-X

I think this is the tenth book in this series, if you count the anthologies, although it's more of a shared world than a series at this point.  This particular title advances the main story line which, if you haven't read the others, involves a town from contemporary America sent back through time to the 17th Century.  There they try to influence human civilization to adopt more democratic and libertarian policies despite the inertia of ages of political repression.  In those earlier books, particularly 1633 (also by Flint and Weber), the influence of the Americans has had some effect, but it has also led to the formation of two alliances in Europe.  Opposed to the new progressive movement are the government of England, Spain, France, and other countries who view this reformist program as a direct threat to their status quo.

The authors introduce a number of military anachronisms including the use of ironclads in the Baltic Sea, which makes for some impressive cover art, but most of the story is spent following the adventures of several Americans scattered through Europe on various missions designed to advance their agenda and interfere with the plans of their opponents.  The novel is big enough to cover all of their individual stories adequately and I was particularly fond of the naval sequences, having recently read two books about the early ironclads in the American Civil War.  Flint and Weber have consistently proven to be best of Baen's team of writers, and this is certainly their most effective collaboration.

Eldar Prophecy by C.S. Goto, Black Library, 2007, $7.99, ISBN 1-84416-451-9

My biggest problem with Warhammer novels set in the distant future is that I find the juxtaposition of starships and space marines with demons and magic so jarring that I'm often unable to get involved with the story.  A secondary problem is one common to all military SF, that a large proportion of it is repetitious and trite.  There are just so many times I can read about a young cadet saving the day, a rugged commander beating the odds in a complicated space battle, a crew of misfits turned into heroes, or a mutinous crew subdued and taught the error of their ways.  There are exceptions, of course,