Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 1)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 1

Table of Contents

Part 1

Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach

Dead in the West
Kevin Anderson

Never the Twain
Peter Rubenstein

Part 2

Waste of Trees Quarterly, Part 1
Alan Wexelblat

Part 3

Waste of Trees Quarterly, Part 2

Part 4

Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint

Part 5

Triplet
Danny Low

The Stars Like Islands
Steve Bellovin

Guardians of the Flame
David M. Shea

Stuff Received

Part 6

Northshore
Barbara Jernigan

African Adventure
Mike Resnick

Voice of the Whirlwind
Danny Low

Songmaster
Kevin Anderson

Soldiers of Paradise
Neal Wilgus

Part 7

Pico Reviews, Part 1

Part 8

Pico Reviews, Part 2

Part 9

Interview: Gardner Dozois

Toolmakers Koan
Steve Bellovin

Prisoners of Arionn
Neal Wilgus

Part 10

Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Part 11

Words of Wizdom
Chuq Von Rospach

Stallion Gate
Kevin Anderson

Part 12

No Prisoners!
Laurie Sefton

Letters to OtherRealms
Melissa Scott
Tom Galloway
Wayne A. Throop
Fred Bals

Editor's Notebook

Chuq Von Rospach

Rotten Reviews

I'm going to recommend to everyone involved in the publishing field, including readers, that they take a look at Rotten Reviews, a Penguin book by Bill Henderson. It's a short, mini-sized paperback collection of some of the truly horrible reviews against major literary classics, and it's hilarious. For example, New Yorker is quoted as saying about Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner: The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.

What this has to do with this magazine should be obvious. Reviews are, in the end, one person's opinion of someone else's writing. Reviewers sometime blow it. Then again, so do authors, which is why reviewers exist. If authors never wrote bad books, you wouldn't need watchdogs, you could pick up anything from the shelves and be satisfied.

Rotten Reviews is a great source of perspective for me, and anyone considering reviewing books out to read it. Reviews are read once and discarded; the books themselves can live on forever, no matter what the critics say. And they often do. Reviewers should not overemphasize their importance in life. We interpret art, we don't create it, and reviewers that feel they need to step across the line will simply make themselves look silly.

One thing I'm noticing as OtherRealms continues to grow is that I'm rejecting more and more material. Not because I can't fit it in (I will, in general, make room for everything I can that fits OtherRealms' style) but because it isn't publishable. I'm getting fiction, I've gotten con reports, and poetry, and movie reviews. This stuff is expected, since people who smit without reading OtherRealms (it is always a good idea to get a sample before trying to write for someone) can make an honest mistake.

What bothers me, though, is the growing number of truly bad reviews I'm seeing. Reviews that debate the author's politics. Reviews that argue the author's religion. Reviews that second guess (and at times, rewrite) books. Multi-page diatribes about how Big Name Author is a senile hack, or is getting paid too much for the quality of the books (in many cases, there is a subtext of "and I can't get MY book published, even though it's MUCH better"). Hack jobs ("this author should go slit his throat, and do humanity a favor"). Treatises on why Fantasy is terrible.

The common threads in this stuff are hidden agendas and pain. Many of these people have hidden agendas: My stuff is good, nobody will publish it, there's a conspiracy; I don't like Fantasy, so it isn't good; I don't like Big Name Author, so he shouldn't be published.

Needless, I return this stuff. I'm not here to promote hack jobs on people and I firmly believe that you review the work. You don't use the work as a stepping off point for your own crusade. If you want to crusade about something, write your own book on it.

I've said this before, but it's a good time to say it again. On the reviewer's side, you review the work, not the author. On the author's side, a bad review is not an attack at you.

My job in all of this, of course, is to decide whether or not a review is fair, without necessarily having read the book. That's fortunately easier than you might think, but not foolproof. And when I (or someone else in OtherRealms) makes a mistake, I hope someone will bring it to my attention, so I can try to fix it.

My policy on mistakes is simple. An error of fact will be fixed, to the greatest extent possible. If the factual error skews the review, we'll either correct the review or I'll have the work reviewed again in a later book. This is one reason I try to make sure that any author reviewed in OtherRealms gets a copy -- I certainly don't believe in saying things that I wouldn't say to the author directly, and the author is in the best position to point out problems. But if you do find a problem, tell me.

Brash
Obvious Plugs

I'm happy to point out that Avon has released Brian Aldiss' Trillion Year Spree in paperback ($9.95, 511 pages of tiny, tiny type, ISBN 0-380-70461). If you didn't pick it up as a hardback (Atheneum, 1987) then you don't have any excuses remaining. This was the book that won the 1987 Non-Fiction Hugo, and is a serious literary look at the genre by someone who knows and understands it. This is a book that deserves a place in your reference library if you're at all serious about SF.

Now if only someone would put out the new edition of Peter Nicholls' Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Doubleday/Dolphin, 1979). Mine's getting tired and dogeared, and this is one that cries for updating.

Toeing the Line

In case anyone out there is wondering how closely I monitor the reviews in OtherRealms, you need look no further than Alan's column this issue. My editors are chosen because they have strong, interesting voices. Mimicking the party line isn't very high on my list; in fact, I've tried to put together a group of regular contributors that has as wide ranging a set of interests in the field as possible. I think OtherRealms has the best overall coverage of any magazine I've seen because of this.

I strive to avoid hidden agendas in OtherRealms. I'm not pushing a movement, I try to avoid pushing Science Fiction over Fantasy, Hard SF over People SF, or Elves over Dwarves and Hobbits.

OtherRealms has two goals in life. First, to help people find good books to read, books that might otherwise have been missed (as a corollary, OtherRealms also tries to help people avoid the dogs, but as a matter of policy I'd rather point towards something good than away from something bad, so if I have room for one of two reviews, the better book will get the notice).

Also, I feel strongly that OtherRealms should be a place where the newer authors get noticed. I keep a close eye out for first and second novels, and do what I can to get them read. Sometimes this works great (as in the case of Emma Bull's wonderful War for the Oaks) and sometimes it doesn't (see Alan's column). The only special guidance I give on first novels is that the reviewers look not only at the work as it stands, but at the potentials of the author as well. First novels generally aren't as polished as later works (although, of course, there are exceptions) and I'll let a new author get away with a some minor glitches that I might rate a seasoned author down on a lot stronger.

But bad books are bad books.

Publishing
Notes

Leigh Ann Hussey has "The White Wolf" appearing in Jane Yolen's Werewolves anthology and "The Door" in another untitled Yolen anthology of "creepy" stories.

Tim Powers will be the Guest of Honor at Boskone XXVI, to be held January 27-29, 1989. Official Artist is James Gurney.

L.E. Modesitt, Jr. has delivered the prequel to The Ecologic Envoy, tentatively titled The Ecolitan Operation, to Tor. He's currently working on a prequel to his first book, The Fires of Paratime.

The Sterling/Gibson collaboration went to auction on February 25. It's an alternate universe based on the premise the Babbage got the analytic engine working.

William Gibson's third Sprawl novel is written and in the editing stages.

Sterling has three books in the queue for 1988. In April, Involution Oceans (rated three stars in OR #13), his first book, will be re-released. In June, Islands in the Net, his new novel, comes out in hardback. And in July, Mirrorshades, the Cyperpunk anthology, comes out in paperback.

The publication of the paperback edition of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth series will begin in May, 1988. The first four of the ten volume series will be published by the end of 1988. There will also be a book-tape edition of each volume published by the Random House Tape Division.

Upcoming titles from Franklin,Watts include Norman Spinrad's Agent of Chaos (April Hardcover) , The Mercenary by Jerry Pournelle (March Hardcover) and John Shirley's A Splendid Chaos (March Hardcover).

The 1987 winners of the Writer's of the Future contest have been announced. For the first quarter, the winner was Jane Mailander, second was Mary A. Turzillo, and third was Pat MacEwen.

Second quarter winners were first, Nancy Farmer, second, R. Rayson Deike and third, Mark D. Haw. Third quarter first was Paul Edwards, second R. Garcia y Robertson and third Rick Urdiales. Fourth quarter first was Michael Green, second was Flonet Biltgen, and third was Larry England. The Grand prize winner will be announced later this year in Los Angeles.

Vaporware....

I'm starting to sympathize with Ann Arbor Softworks (now part of Ashton-Tate and publishers of the most publicized piece of vaporware, the long delayed FullWrite Professional word processor for the Mac). My long delayed OtherRealms book index is now on hold, this time for at least the next four to six months.

Why? I'm now writing regularly for Macintosh Horizons, a magazine put out by the Call-A.P.P.L.E people. I'm actually getting paid for it, but it takes up a lot of time I'd planned for this project, and I just committed to doing a multi-part in-depth case study of Acius' 4th Dimension database. As a practical example, I'm going to be implementing a full featured subscription fufillment database (another long delayed project for OtherRealms -- my current system, based on FileMaker+, is creaking at the hinges) and that's going to take up all my time for a while.

The good news is that I've now got some unplanned income coming in, which I hope to use part of to let me take OtherRealms to offset. More good news is that once I get this database done, I'll be making it available in some form or another to interested parties, either as freeware or shareware (folks who want customized versions for their own use can drop me a note). The bad news, of course, is that the book index, a project I really am looking forward to, has to take a back seat.

Sleep? What's that?

Back Issues
on USENET

For folks who live on USENET or one of the connected networks, I've installed an archive server on my computer that makes all of the OtherRealms back issues available. For information on using the archive server, send mail to "archive-server@plaid.sun.com" with a subject line of "help".

I'm looking for....

The person who wrote the article on Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. I've got the article, but the information on who wrote it has disappeared. Please contact me so I can print this thing, it's wonderful!

This Issue

There are a few layout changes in this issue. The one that really affects contents is in the Pico Review section, where I am now printing reviews that are larger than one paragraph but shorter than a page. The one paragraph limitation never sat well with me and came across as rather arbitrary; at the same time, the shorter reviews were difficult to get laid out cleanly. I plan, probably next issue, to start splitting up the Pico Review section and using it to help fill out the dead areas in the layout, which I think will give me better flexibility. This initial change, though, should make the magazine look cleaner.

This issue is huge, I'm currently looking at something like 72 pages. This is because I'm making a serious attempt to clear out some of the material that has been hanging around waiting for room, and I'm trying to set things up so that, except for the specialty articles like interviews and Behind the Scenes, reviews don't sit more than one issue. Once this issue is done, my review inventory should be down to about zero, so things won't wait as long. This assumes, of course, that people will continue to send in material for the next issue -- or next issue will be rather short.

Anyway, if you've held up material because of the delays in getting it into OtherRealms, the wait should be more or less over. As long as I can afford to publish the pages, I plan on getting things out as quickly as I can.

Speaking of affording to publish, as we speak the Post Office is trying to raise postal rates. Assuming it goes through (and everyone seems to be resigned to that fact) it looks like the cost of mailing OtherRealms is going to go up somewhere about a quarter a copy. Since I'm committed to keeping OtherRealms as first class mail, there's not a whole lot I can do. This issue will (hopefully) be mailed before it goes into effect. Once it does, I'm probably going to have to raise cover and subscription prices to cover at least some of the cost. I may be able to take reduce some of it by going to mailing without an envelope (which will save the cost of the envelope and about an ounce of postage) but only if I decide it'll get there in one piece. Perhaps I'll have to put a paper wrapper around it to protect the art.

Anyway, you can expect some kind of price increase announcement next issue. So now is a great time to subscribe if you want to save some money.

Upcoming
Issues

Next issue will have an interview with author Bruce Sterling by contributing editor Alan Wexelblat. The Behind the Scenes article is by new author Kevin Anderson on his book Resurrection, Inc.

Future issues will include an interview with Joel Rosenberg, an article by M. Elayn Harvey, a look at Brian Aldiss, and lots of the normal stuff. Stay tuned!

Dead in the West

Joe R. Lansdale

Space & Time books, 1986, 126pp, $6.95

Reviewed by Kevin Anderson
kanders@lll-ncis.ARPA
Copyright 1988 by Kevin Anderson

For the past twenty years, Gordon Linzner has been publishing one of the best and most diverse small press fiction magazines, Space & Time. In 1984, Linzner's wife, Jani Anderson, branched out to publish limited-edition books under the Space & Time imprint; Dead in the West by Joe R. Lansdale is the fourth such publication.

In the dedication, Lansdale states that "This is not a book of 'Big Thinks.' It's a lot like the late night horror films you used to watch on television." And it succeeds marvelously in what it sets out to do. The people in the small East Texas town of Mud Creek are trying to forget that they got carried away one night, formed a mob, and lynched a traveling Indian medicine man and his woman for some imagined crime. But the Indian manages to curse the town before the people can string him up and...you guessed it -- the old Indian comes back from the dead to get his revenge, and before you know it the whole town is infested with ghoulish vampires. But, there's a gun-slinging Reverend who just pulled into town, wrestling with his own doubts and guilt, and feels called by God to some final showdown in Mud Creek. "And you, Reverend -- there is something about you," says one character, "You're a man of God, but you're also a realist."

Many readers will be familiar with Lansdale through his award-winning non-fiction column in The Horror Show, or from the earlier version of "Dead in the West" that was partially serialized in Eldritch Tales, or from his chilling psychopathic murder novel Act of Love. But if you've never read anything by Joe Lansdale, you couldn't pick a better starting place -- Dead in the West is almost impossible to put down, and it's one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time. The story is an unabashed tribute to the pulps and to schlock movies like Curse of the Undead and borrows very heavily from George Romero's Day of the Dead. But, surprisingly, the prose is elegantly and vividly written, not what you'd expect from a "tribute to pulp horror." "He stuck his face out into the rain and the wind, as if inviting lightning to reach down from the sky and shatter his head like a pumpkin."

Some of the suspense is really incredible, and comparable to anything the 'Masters' of horror have produced. In particular, look for the scene where the dissected corpse laboriously reassembles itself in a darkened morgue while the horrified doctor watches on. Occasionally, though, Lansdale goes overboard with the blood and guts and gore and graphic dismemberments, which cheapens the genuine suspense and, when repeated so often, becomes boring in the long run. The ending is somewhat of a letdown, and I'm a little puzzled as to where these hundreds and hundreds of walking corpses came from in a tiny East Texas town which shouldn't have had a population of more than 40. But the book flies by so fast that the reader doesn't have time to think about such things until after the book is put safely on a shelf.

Dead in the West is terrific. If you like old monster movies, and good exciting suspense, and enough walking corpses to satisfy an entire chain of undertaker stores, this novel could be your best buy all year.

Never the Twain

Kirk Mitchell

Reviewed by
Peter Rubenstein
Peter_Rubenstein@wally.ceo.dg.com
Copyright 1988 by Peter Rubenstein

I like time travel/alternate history stories. In fact, you could say that I'm an unabashed fan. I liked Lest Darkness Fall and The Cross-Time Engineer. I also enjoyed "Procurator" by Mitchell. So when I saw Never the Twain by the same author, I jumped at the opportunity to read it. One of my favorite genres, and by an author I knew could handle it!

It took very little time for the disappointment to set in. For those readers interested in recommendations of books to read, go no farther! Leave this one in the bookstore. In fact, don't bother picking it up from a freebie heap.

This book is filled with inadequately developed characters. Sadly, there are no other kinds to be found here. The protagonist oscillates between anti-social stupidity and aimless stupidity. I couldn't find anything about him to identify with, or to sympathize with at all. Should the reader manage to overcome this obstacle, he/she will merely be frustrated by the character's inane behavior.

The reader hoping to read about Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), will be disappointed too. Clemens appears only in the periphery. While several interesting facts about his early career are mentioned, his activities take place almost entirely off screen.

Distressingly, a situation that is laboriously, if incomprehensibly, developed at the beginning of the book is totally abandoned. (Since I didn't really understand the situation, I must admit the possibility that it was resolved without my knowledge, but I don't believe it for a minute.)

If this were Mitchell's first effort, I would advise a career change. What makes this book so inexplicable is that Mitchell has done fine work before. If I see another novel by Mitchell, I will do my best to put Never the Twain out of mind and decide whether to read the new work based on its cover description. Other readers can accomplish this more simply and cheaply than I by following my advice and not reading Never the Twain at all.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 2)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 2

Waste of Trees Quarterly
[Part 1]

Reviews by
Alan Wexelblat
wex@mcc.com
Copyright 1988 by Alan Wexelblat

Reviewed in this Issue

The River of Time [***+]
by David Brin
1986, Bantam
0-553-26281-5, 295pp

The Princess Bride [**+]
by William Goldman
1973, Del Rey fantasy
0-345-31532-4, 283pp

Cybernetic Samurai [**+]
by Victor Milan
1985, Ace SF
0-441-13234-0, 337pp

Charon's Ark []
by Rick Gauger
1987, Del Rey SF
0-345-31773-4, 375pp

Thinking on Paper [****]
by V.A. Howard & J.H. Barton
1986, Morrow hardback
0-688-04873-0, 156pp

A Death of Honor [*+]
by Joe Clifford Faust
1987, Del Rey SF
0-345-34026-4, 326pp

The Tomorrow Makers [****-]
by Grant Fjermedal
1986, Macmillan hardcover
0-02-538560-7, 272pp

The Artificial Kid [****]
by Bruce Sterling
1980, Ace SF
0-441-03095-5, 233pp

Schismatrix [****+]
by Bruce Sterling
1985, Arbor House hardcover
0-87795-645-6, 288pp

Watchmen [****] Alan Moore, writer; Dave Gibbons, illustrator/letterer; John Higgins, colorist 1987, DC Comics paperback 0-930289-23-4

Burning Chrome [****+]
by William Gibson
1986, Ace SF
0-441-08934-8, 191pp

Count Zero [****+]
by William Gibson
1986 Arbor House hardback
278 pp.

The River of Time

David Brin is the current master of what I call 'weird physics.' He is one of the new generation of hard science fiction authors -- people writing about space travel, aliens, and giving it the authentic air that hard SF demands. Brin's twist on this is that he can take a principle or idea and stretch it to an extreme end. For example, his novel The Practice Effect dealt with a natural extension of the idea that 'practice makes perfect.' The River of Time collection contains a couple of stories in the weird physics vein.

The title story of the collection is a short one dealing with the possibility that people could move 'faster' or 'slower' through time. That is, they perceive that 'ordinary' people are moving very slowly or very quickly. Similarly, "A Stage of Memory" deals with a person who uses a drug that allows him to re-live past memories. The question, of course, is what happens when he starts reliving a memory of himself reliving a memory?

Another of Brin's fascinations is the first contact theme. In particular, he delights in speculation about why we appear to be alone in the universe when logical principles seem to indicate that we should not be. The Hugo-winning "The Crystal Spheres" deals with this idea, suggesting that there may some form of imposed isolation that prevents other races from making contact with us. Specifically, our solar system is enclosed in a crystalline egg that has been manufactured to be invisible from the inside. In addition, it can only be cracked from the inside; thus, each race must make its own way into space.

"Lungfish" also tackles the first-contact theme, working from the old SF idea of self-replicating probes. The idea is to explore a large segment of the galaxy very quickly. This is inefficient if done from a single point. However, if you can construct probes that not only travel between stars but also carry enough information to replicate themselves, then you can quickly cover a large volume of space. The problem here is that if you can make these probes that sophisticated, then you can also program them to do other things -- some of which can be beneficial, and some not. And it only takes one rotten apple to spoil the basket.

The story "Tank Farm Dynamo" is Brin's most traditional hard-SF work. The story, as Brin says in the author note, is one "...in which a point of science is the real protagonist." However, this is not typical of the stories in this collection. Most often, Brin spends his time on characters and social themes. For example, "The Fourth Vocation of George Gustaf" examines a world in which robot labor has reordered human society. Humans now have mandatory, rigorously-controlled lives which include prescribed vocations, prescribed hobbies, and required leisure activities. Of course, some people react differently to this than others, and Brin examines one of the possible outcomes.

Similarly, "Senses Three and Six" is almost not an SF story. Although there are aliens created to provide motivation for the protagonist, they're not really necessary. The story is really about a man trying to hide from his past. He does this by burying his true self behind the facade of a made-up personality. This is a very psychological story, and shows off Brin's ability to work with complex characters.

And this brings us to the reason I was given The River of Time -- the short "Thor Meets Captain America." Brin warns the reader not to judge a story by its title -- and he's right. This tale, written for Gregory Benford's anthology Hitler Victorious, is not about the comic-book characters Thor and Captain America. Rather it is about a parallel world in which the Nazis won what we think of as World War Two, and now threaten America, with the help of beings who have the powers and personalities of the Norse gods. The story is really about different types of people, the type personified by Thor and the type personified by Captain America and the roles technology and the supernatural can play in the world. I haven't yet read the Hitler Victorious anthology, but if this story is typical of the quality Benford put together, it will be worthwhile.

The River of Time is a good anthology and a good introduction to Brin. The author's notes give the book a nice flow and give the reader some insights into how Brin practices his craft. The new hard-SF writers are often touted for their attention to character, setting, and society, things that used to be rare in hard SF. I look forward to seeing more of it from David Brin.

The Princess Bride

Okay -- it's time for me to commit my heresy of the month. The Princess
Bride is one of those books that everybody likes. Except me.   Let me
try to explain why.

For the uninitiated, The Princess Bride is William Goldman's abridgement of S. Morgenstern's classic fairy tale of the same name. Goldman's name will be familiar to afficionados of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; he's also done more serious works, such as All the Presidents Men and Marathon Man. The Princess Bride, though, is definitely in the humor division.

According to Goldman, The Princess Bride was his favorite tale as a child, as read to him by his father. What he didn't know was that his father was editing the story as he read it. It seems that Morgenstern had used the original story as a vehicle for propounding his long and boring essays on Florinese history. These essays had been skipped by Goldman's father and now he is passing this favor on to the world by producing a "good parts" version.

At each place where something was excised, Goldman notes this to the reader, often at some detail. And this is the crux of my problem with the book. You see, the heart of the story -- the romance between Buttercup and Westley -- is actually a very good and engrossing fairy tale. But the more interested I got in the story, the more boring and annoying Goldman's interruptions became.

He starts off by telling, in a very humorous way, about his wife and son and his efforts to get a copy of the book for his son. I laughed a good deal at the less-than-complimentary descriptions of his family life. Also, the first few descriptions of the excised portions were interesting. However, as the book progressed, Goldman's continued interruptions became less and less funny. I didn't laugh at all during the second half of the book. In fact, it became like one of those interminable shaggy dog stories that some people insist on telling. I just wanted him to be quiet and get on with the story.

And the story is quite good. As I noted before, the fairy tale, at it's heart, is about Buttercup, the most beautiful girl in the world, Prince Humperdink, whom she is to marry, and Westley, her true love. Supporting roles are played by Inigo Montoya, arguably the best swordsman in the world, and Fezzik the Giant, arguably the best brawler in the world. The basic problems of the story are that Westley runs off, leaving Buttercup heartbroken, and that Prince Humperdink turns out to be... well, a son-of-a-bitch.

Along the way to solving these problems there are sword fights, heroic deeds, love, hate, and so forth. In short, all the elements of a great fairy tale. If Goldman could have resisted the urge to be clever and meddle it would have been a much better work.

Cybernetic Samurai

Cyberpunk is everywhere these days, it seems. It's controversial, it's new, and it's flashy. With its apparent emphasis on technology and an often bleak outlook on the future, it's cashing in on two growing trains of thought in modern society.

Victor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai fits to a Tee most of the pre- conceived stereotypes about cyberpunk. It takes place in a post-trade-war, post-WWIII future in which America has fallen apart into warring regional nations. Refugees from the strife have fled to (among other places) a Japan dominated by the zaibatsu -- the high-tech, semi-feudal corporations -- and MITI, the Ministry of Trade and Industry. MITI is a sort of government-within-a-government; most of the leaders of the zaibatsu follow MITI's directions in ruling the country, while the official Japanese government plays at paper games.

The corporations also control the orbiting satellites and space stations which provide communications facilities as well as being orbital factories for the ground-based conglomerates.

The story starts off with American Dr. Elizabeth O'Neill's efforts to create a truly intelligent computer for her Japanese employer, Yoshimitsu Telecommunications. The effort, code named Tokugawa, creates a machine intelligence inculcated with O'Neill's interpretation of the values of the ancient Japanese warrior code of Bushido.

O'Neill sees her creation as a new samurai -- a potential savior for the world, which is rapidly crumbling toward a fourth world war. She especially wants to keep it out of the hands of MITI, which is why she works for Yoshimitsu, a small company which fiercely maintains its independence from MITI.

However, MITI doesn't want to see any saviors, especially not ones controlled by corporations not under its aegis. In addition, Dr. O'Neill appears to have some motives that are not so pure as she claims.

Tokugawa himself is more powerful than O'Neill imagined. When she is killed, he sets about achieving a cybernetic revenge on her murderers. The latter two thirds of the novel establish Tokugawa as the protagonist and revolve largely around his actions.

Milan writes fairly well, even though the ending of the book is telegraphed way in advance. He has a reasonable grasp of the writer's craft, having written six previous fantasy works. Cybernetic Samurai is his first SF novel, and overall I didn't like it. First off, it's too formulaic. Milan seems to have reduced the cyberpunk idea to its component parts and in the process lost some of the flair that identifies good cyberpunk. In cyberpunk terms, the novel has no "edge."

Second, there's the computer issue. As a person who makes his living in the computer field, I found Milan to be exceptionally heavy-handed about computers. Yes, his basic idea on how to create intelligence is plausible, but he really shouldn't have spent the first twenty-five pages proving he did his homework and knows something about computers. As the story goes on he allows himself flights of fancy about the computer world in order to advance the plot. In addition, I found his attitude toward and repeated references to the Japanese fifth generation computer project to be patronizing at best. I suspect a Japanese person would have been even more insulted.

Lastly, I was disturbed by the pornography. Yes, that's the word I meant to use -- pornography. Now, I'm a fairly liberal sort and enjoy a love- or sex-scene in my reading. I think it's a normal part of life and authors should treat it that way. However, Milan goes out of his way to set up situations in which O'Neill can make it with Tokugawa. Ok, that's not so bad -- we can write off the scientific mumbo-jumbo as necessary for the plot and to show how attached Tokugawa becomes.

But then Milan goes on to describe, in great anatomical detail, just exactly what each of them does to the other's bodily parts -- including some acts that are technically illegal in some states of the US. When Locus used the adjective "rousing" about this book, they probably meant it in the literal sense. Who needs it? As far as I can see, it adds absolutely nothing to the story to use that level of detail. I found it a distraction.

All in all, Cybernetic Samurai was a big disappointment.

Charon's Ark

What's worse than a stupid protagonist? How about a stupid, obnoxious, teenage nerd protagonist. What's worse than a hackneyed plot with inane dialogue? How about a hackneyed plot about UFOs and insane computers with moronic teenage dialogue, written by an author who obviously didn't bother to do his physics homework? This is truly the worst book I've read in years. The only good thing about it is that I didn't have to pay for my copy. I wish they'd saved the trees.

Thinking on Paper

One common trait among fans and readers of SF and fantasy is the desire to be writers. Many of us dream of, and some actually do, write short stories and novels. Still more of us are required to write as part of our everyday lives, whether it's students writing papers and essays, or professionals writing technical reports or proposals. For all us writers, this is a book to have. In addition, if you ever want to be a writer, or are troubled by occasional writer's block, this book also has something to offer you.

There are a number of books out that are useful for writers practicing their craft. The prototypical example is Strunk & White's Elements of Style, which is a concise and very handy guide to punctuation and the mechanics of sentence formation. However, Strunk & White typifies the school of writing thought that is commonly taught in the American educational system -- all the emphasis is on the mechanics, almost none on the style.

Thinking on Paper, on the other hand, attacks the problem from a different perspective. Howard & Barton tell you from the outset that they are not going to deal with mechanics, and provide excellent references to other authors who do. Instead of mechanics, they deal with the process of writing -- the series of cognitive and physical steps necessary to put together a coherent piece of written work.

The book is organized into two sections, "Writing for Thinking" and "Thinking for Writing." Throughout the book, Howard and Barton attempt to relate and combine the processes of writing and thinking. This is also in direct contradiction to American schooling, which traditionally teaches that the two are separate processes, and that thinking necessarily precedes writing.

Although Howard and Barton concentrate on technical rather than creative writing, their process steps are useful for everyone. In particular, creative writers suffering from writer's block will find a great deal of useful information in Chapter 2, "From First to Last Draft: Generating, Composing, and Expressing Ideas." Some writers I know would also benefit from the section entitled "Don't Wait for the Muse."

This brings me to another interesting point about the book. Instead of being written in the usual linear style, the book's six chapters and two appendices are each designed to stand alone. They can be read in any order; each is self-contained and avoids depending on material explained elsewhere in the book.

As noted before, this is a good reference work for anyone interested in writing. My only complaint is that the authors are a little superficial, since they are trying to appeal to a mainstream audience, rather than to writing specialists. Nevertheless, their approach to the combination of writing and thinking is unique and worth looking into.

A Death of Honor

This is a first novel, so Chuq says I should be nice. Ok, let's see. It's not as bad as it could have been. I suppose that if you weren't a lesbian, or a liberal, and didn't know anyone with AIDS you could manage not to be offended by this book. It would help if you hated the Russians and the US government, too.

I've learned, over the course of many debates, to separate the writer from his or her writings. For all I know, Joe Clifford Faust might be a tolerant, liberal kind of person. It's just that he doesn't write that way.

A Death of Honor is a futuristic detective story. It is set in an America under siege. The communist hordes of Russia have stormed the last bastions of freedom in Europe. American society is slowly crumbling as energy shortages take hold. People are paid to procreate, and the centers of meeting and mating are dance clubs.

One evening the protagonist, Payne, comes home to find a naked woman sprawled dead in the middle of his living room. The police have a nine-month waiting list for homicide investigations, so private citizens are allowed to investigate crimes of which they are a victim. Since Payne does not know the dead woman, he declines the chance, until a large bruiser comes to kill him.

Payne is a bioengineer, working at a genetic-engineering lab. He uses his lab skills to trace down the woman's killer. She has no marks on her; the mystery is: 'How did she die?' Unfortunately, the mystery is not well-handled. There are none of the usual mystery trappings -- no bevy of suspects, no red herrings. The reader figures things out long before Payne does.

The supporting characters are fairly one-dimensional. There's the 'good buddy,' the 'loyal secretary,' and other stock players. The villain is very badly handled; he seems to have almost no motivation for anything he does.

Faust appears to have done his biology and genetics homework; I could not spot any serious blunders. He has some trouble imagining how the future will deal with computers, though. Give this one a miss.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 3)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 3

Waste of Trees Quarterly
[Part 2]

Alan Wexelblat

The Tomorrow Makers

Speaking of how the future will handle computers, all you future- oriented people might be interested in this work. Grant Fjermedal is a science writer, with interests and publication credits mainly in physics and medicine. For The Tomorrow Makers he moves out of these worlds and into the worlds of the midnight hackers and the robot builders.

The Tomorrow Makers is somewhat like a diary. It chronicles Fjermedal's travels across the country as he visits the futurists' labs first at CMU, then at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Thinking Machines, and on to Japan. It is chock full of interesting stories and quotes. The author is quite good at conveying the atmosphere of the places he visits.

We start out meeting Terragator, the creation of Carnegie-Mellon's Autonomous Mobile Robot Laboratory, and its builders. These people are struggling to build something that may one day become the world's first robot warrior, or that might be the first miner on the moon; meanwhile, the Japanese are building robots that can play the piano. One of the strongest points in the book is Fjermedal's careful examination of the relationship between robots, AI and society. He takes a look at questions of machine feeling (could we hurt or enslave our creations? would they know it if we did?) and of the uses to which robotic and AI technology might be put.

After CMU, we move on to the AI creations and parallel machines of MIT. Here Fjermedal gets to play with one of his favorite topics. He, and many of the researchers interviewed in the book, believe that it may be possible to analyze the contents of a human brain and reproduce them in silicon.

This process, called downloading, would theoretically allow humans to cheat death, to travel to the stars, and so forth. While many AI critics and non-scientists publicly sneer at this idea, it is interesting to see that most of the 'names' in the AI field agree that this is a likely possibility. There seems only to be disagreement about when. Some think that we will be the last generation to die in carbon-based bodies; others think it's something that their children or grandchildren will live to see.

It's hard to give a sense of the book to someone who hasn't read it. It's not really a story in the conventional sense, but it's something more than a simple chronology of Fjermedal's travels. It's a strong book, with strength in the feeling you get that you are looking over Fjermedal's shoulder and in the feeling that he is really capturing the edge of emerging technology.

Despite its overall strength, I found the book somewhat lacking. It is a little disorganized; Fjermedal is constantly referring to meetings that the reader hasn't been taken to yet. Also, he has the 'gosh-whiz' attitude of a newcomer to the computer field and this comes across in The Tomorrow Makers. He is aware of the implications of what he is investigating, but seems overly optimistic about the probabilities of success. Overall, I found this to be an excellent bedtime book, and it makes a pleasant change from SF authors who don't know their science.

The Artificial Kid

Before we start, it's personal notes time: at the last Armadillocon, I had the pleasure of making Bruce Sterling's acquaintance. Over the succeeding months we've traded fun information back and forth and I hope to interview him for a future issue of OtherRealms; I am therefore reading everything of his that I can lay my hands on. I hope that won't color my reviews of his books, but at least you were warned.

The Artificial Kid is an unusual and very original book. It is futuristic SF, but not cyberpunk in the sense that others have characterized cyberpunk. It is set on the world of Reverie, which has been terraformed and colonized by humans. The society is divided between ground dwellers, who live in a semi-anarchic technocracy, and orbitals who live in space colonies. At its inception, Reverie was ruled by a Board of Directors founded by Moses Moses. However, Moses had himself frozen and hundreds of years later, his cryocapsule and the reigning board of directors were destroyed by an assassin's bomb. Stories of a mysterious Cabal abound, but no one is really sure who did what.

Now entering its five-hundredth year, the planet's society as a whole is supported by mineral wealth which is divided more or less evenly among the citizens. Consequently, leisure activities have assumed heightened importance to the point where a Decriminalized Zone is established. In this zone, punks and gangs fight for territory, blood, and prestige. Each combat artist is constantly surrounded by his or her cameras, which record every detail for later editing and broadcast.

One of the fastest-rising of these self-made stars is the Artificial Kid. With the help of his backer, Mr. Money Manies, he is establishing himself on the fight circuit. Manies is a very eccentric, very rich gentleman. At one of Manies' regular social breakfasts, the Kid earns the enmity of a powerful enemy, Professor Angeluce. Angeluce is an old enemy of Rominuald Tanglin, the Kid's father, and Professor Crossbow, the Kid's mentor and guardian. The argument quickly heats up and ends with the Kid tossing Angeluce off a balcony into the sea. The Professor sets out to destroy the Kid, and incidentally take over Reverie.

At this point, the unconventional nature of The Artificial Kid begins to surface. Most authors place their protagonists square in the center of the action. Sterling operates more in the manner of a Greek tragedy, however. Most of the action takes place offstage or around the Kid, with the Kid only reacting to it as news reaches him or when people seek him out. It makes for an unusual story.

The Artificial Kid was Sterling's second novel, and as such it has some weaknesses. At one point, Sterling dumps his characters onto the ocean so they can tell each other stories so that the reader gets necessary background information. A bit amateurish, but still interesting. I enjoyed the book in part because it is written at a fairly intellectual level; Sterling assumes a high level of educational in his audience, making the book somewhat more challenging than average.

Schismatrix

Until cyberpunk burst on the scene, Sterling was best known for his Shaper/Mech stories. These stories told of the ongoing war between the two basic branches of human evolution: the Shapers, who use biological techniques of mind self-control and body regeneration, and the Mechanists (or Mechs), who replace their worn-out body parts with mechanical limbs and organs. In addition, there are also the sundogs, dregs of both societies who prey on whatever is available without concern for which side is winning.

Schismatrix is the story of Abelard Lindsay, Shaper exile, sundog, and his quest for revenge on Philip Constantine his one-time friend who, for political reasons, murdered the woman they both loved and tried to kill Lindsay. It is also the story of the end of the war between Shaper and Mech, and its restart and final end. It is also the story of the first contact between human and alien. It is a story that covers centuries.

Naturally, this much story couldn't be told in 288 pages in conventional narrative style. Just as The Artificial Kid used the style of Greek tragedies, Schismatrix uses the style of the Greek epics like the Odyssey. What Sterling does is follow Lindsay through several series of important episodes. The book is divided into three sections, each of which tells a mostly complete story. Enough threads are left to spin into the next section, but they are thin enough threads that Sterling can slip past decades of time between the sections.

The story begins with Linsday banished to exile in the sundog colony of Mare Tranquilitatus People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu. Here, exiled from family and friends, he must depend on his wits and his training to rebuild. The kinds of talents he shows here will remain with him throughout the story. He is a facile liar, extremely competent at 'handling' people. He is quick to analyze a situation and take advantage of it. He uses these talents to insinuate himself with the powers that be in the Zaibatsu, and ultimately to escape from it.

The second section of the book shows Lindsay in his prime. He is one of the first to have contact with the Investors, the aliens who are revolutionizing human history. For the first time, the warring factions of humanity are united by a peace as they jointly deal with the outside forces of trade and diplomacy with the aliens. This section also covers Lindsay's downfall at the hands of a resurgent Constantine and the final meeting between the two. Along the way, the alien presence is reduced and humanity begins to recover from the culture shock imposed by the outsiders.

The last section shows Lindsay in his final years, first as the head of a family, then as the architect of an impossible project -- the terraforming of Mars. The pace of the story accelerates until we are covering years in a single section and at the end, Lindsay meets his final destiny.

Schismatrix has none of the rough edges that The Artificial Kid demonstrated. The characters are well-drawn and complex. The technology is fascinatingly present, but it never overwhelms the reader. The aliens are also well-drawn, though sometimes they seem less alien than some of the strange people that make up the Shaper/Mech universe.

Readers may have some trouble finding this book. With the imminent release of Sterling's new novel, Islands in the Net, the hardcover of Schismatrix has been remaindered, and I have yet to see it in paperback anywhere.

Watchmen

To call Watchmen the comics sensation of the year would be an understatement. Coming, as it does, on the heels of Dark Knight it will make the graphic novel impossible to ignore.

It's hard to know where to start in describing Watchmen. Let's begin with the form. A graphic novel is unique in that it provides a medium in which the author can do things that would be impossible in pure print. This was done well in Ronin and is essential to Watchmen. There are images and actions that would be impossible to convey in print. Moore and Gibbons have created a tight, multi-layered, visually-oriented world and the story moves the reader around in it.

The art as art is not that revolutionary. There are none of the new techniques that were tried in Ronin, for example. However, the layers of detail and background are well-done and subtle. Points are made almost without the reader being aware of what is being shown.

The story, however, sets Watchmen apart from any graphic novel that has come before it. The story is as complex and multi-layered as a print novel. There are well-developed characters, love interests, conflicts, and finally resolutions. The basic plot is fairly simple. Watchmen takes place on an alternate Earth where there were no real superheros. Instead, there were groups of normal people who, for different reasons, enjoyed dressing up in costumes and playing at being heroes and villains. The heroes had some successes and some failures and eventually vigilanteism was outlawed in 1977.

However, three heroes remained. The first was Edward Blake, the Comedian, a cynically amoral mercenary who avoided enforced retirement by becoming a government agent, first in Vietnam, then in Nicaragua.

The second was Jon Osterman, Dr. Manhattan, an ordinary man who got trapped in a physics experiment. He became a true superman, able to control matter and overcome the barriers of space and time. The government used his abilities to keep the Russians in check, to win in Vietnam, and in general to maintain US dominance in the world. His ideas on technology have reshaped the world.

The third is Rorschach, a psychopath of the highest order. His reply to the Keene amendment was to dump the body of a wanted serial rapist- murderer on the steps of a police station. He sees himself as a man with a mission to cleanse the world. The story begins with the discovery of the murdered Comedian; Rorschach sets out to investigate it and the story unwinds around him.

There are a number of themes running through the book. The simplest of these is the question of "who watches the watchmen?" from which the novel's title is taken. Moore and Gibbons examine issues of social and political responsibility in both a personal and a global context. Other ideas, such as the morality we claim to live by, are also examined. I found the treatment of these ideas very interesting. No sermons are delivered; instead, Moore and Gibbons allow the characters' actions to speak for them.

Last time around, Chuq opined that Watchmen might not be a good Hugo candidate for the future of graphic novels. I disagree; I think that the visual and story complexity rival most print novels and the combination of the two makes this a definite contender for a Hugo. In addition, it is something that will make people new to graphic novels sit up and take notice.

Even with all its good points, Watchmen has two problems which are worth mentioning because they are problems that future graphic novelists may face. First, Watchmen was written in twelve parts -- published as individual comics. Thus, readers had weeks between issues to assimilate all the material. However, the majority of readers will read the softbound volume with all the issues back-to-back. Given that the level of the story is extremely intense, the cover-to-cover reader is easily overwhelmed. By piling on image after image, Moore and Gibbons can easily lose the casual reader who does not take time to sink into the world of Watchmen.

The second problem is one that print novelists have faced for some time -- Watchmen lacks a sympathetic character. There's almost nothing for the reader to latch on to -- no one to identify with. Unlike a conventional comic, which revolves around a central hero designed to appeal to readers, Watchmen really has no central character and none of the major players is designed to be identified with. In fact, insofar as it is Rorschach's story, it alienates the reader. I confess that I really 'got into' Rorschach; he is starkly beautiful in a sick way. Insane characters are hard to make real and not caricatures. Still, I didn't identify with him and I certainly didn't like him.

So where does that leave us? Watchmen will be hard to top, but I look forward to seeing who will try. And if you don't already own a copy, go out and buy one. But read it slowly.

Burning Chrome

There's hype and then there's hype. William Gibson is just about as hyped as a new author can get. He's been written up everywhere, given credit for siring an entire new subgenre of SF, won a Hugo and a Nebula, and been copied to death all within the space of the last four years. But can he write?

Unequivocally, YES. He has a flair and a talent that are awesome to watch. As Sterling says in the intro to Burning Chrome:

In Gibson we hear the sound of a decade that has finally found its own voice. He is not a table-pounding revolutionary, but a practical, hands-on retrofitter. He is opening the stale corridors of the genre to the fresh air of new data...

What makes Gibson so wonderful to read is his ability to catch the reader up; reading his writing is a bit like shooting the rapids in a kayak. It requires a level of attention and intensity from the reader that is not often required.

Burning Chrome is a collection of all of Gibson's short fiction -- seven originals and three collaborations. Nine of the stories have appeared previously, most in Omni. The most well-known -- and perhaps most prototypically cyberpunkish -- of the stories are the Sprawl series: "Johnny Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel," and "Burning Chrome."

These three stories sketch the future world of the cyberpunkers -- urban decay, bio-enhancement, cultural fragmentation, and individual rebellion against enormously powerful corporations. Central to it all is the concept of cyberspace -- the idea that the information webs of these corporate giants and smaller players could be linked. In this shared artificial reality run the cowboys who are the central characters of most cyberpunk works. And of course, there's the ICE (Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics), the corporate defense against the cowboys' raids.

Of the three sprawl stories, I liked "Burning Chrome" best, in part because it's something of a surprise. For ninety percent of the story, you're running with Gibson at his normal intense pace and then the ending comes and ... well, read it for yourself.

The other stories of the collection are also interesting. "The Gernsback Continuum" is something of an off-handed swipe at the Hugo-Gernsback type SF writer -- the Utopia-seekers. Gibson's brand of realism doesn't tolerate the starry-eyed SF writer who refuses to see the problems of society and meet them head on; Gibson calls them "...uninhibited technophiles."

His protagonist in "The Gernsback Continuum" is a photographer, assigned to do a photo essay on "The America That Never Was." In the course of the assignment, he tracks down the architectural relics of failed predictions, like aircars, boundless cheap nuclear power, and so on. Unfortunately, as he gets deeper into the job, the job gets deeper into him and the boundaries of reality begin to blur. It's a good story, not least because Gibson is not too heavy-handed in getting his message across.

"Fragments of a Hologram Rose" is indicative of the style Gibson and his contemporaries are working in. At first glance, it appears to be a story about a piece of technology: the ASP or Apparent Sensory Perception. This technology uses the recorded sensory perceptions of a subject to give the user pre-recorded experiences of almost any variety, with full sensory feedback. In fact, though, the story is really about the aftermath of the narrator, Parker's, breakup with his girlfriend. The technology is only a support vehicle for the real story.

"Hinterlands" is an unusual first-contact story. It purports to be about contact between humans and aliens who pluck human spaceships from the heavens almost at random and send them back with bits and pieces of knowledge -- the table scraps of races far more advanced than we. In fact, the story is really about the kind of person who wants to be a spaceman, who would risk his or her life on a one-way ticket to the unknown.

"The Winter Market" is a hard story to describe. It's about a lot of things -- a girl with an all-consuming ambition, about the people who make the ASP tapes from the artists' raw input, and about the dream that some people have of cheating death. As I mentioned earlier in talking about The Tomorrow Makers, many futurists believe we may be able to avoid dying by preserving ourselves in silicon. Gibson looks at the dark side of downloading -- what might it do to the people who want it when it's only available to the very rich, and what might it do to those of us still in the flesh, when our 'dead' lover calls us on the phone?

As good as he is alone, Gibson also excels in concert with others. "The Belonging Kind," cowritten with John Shirley, is a creepy story about aliens in our midst. The story is a little weak in that it seems to lack purpose. The narrator encounters the aliens and tracks them, eventually being caught up in the pursuit as an end in itself. But his motivations are not made clear and this lessens the story's impact somewhat.

On the other hand "Dogfight," cowritten with Michael Swanwick, is a startlingly clear story. The narrator is a single-minded lowlife and we follow him as he schemes and tramples his way toward his objective, never realizing how hollow a victory can be. Hidden just below the surface of the story is a message of warning about a government which is callously cruel both to those who attack it and those who serve it.

In my opinion, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" is the best story of the collection. Cowritten with Bruce Sterling, it deals with affairs leading up to the Russians' abandoning of their space station. On the surface it is the story of the last crew of that station and their struggle to survive. As with the other stories, the subtext is about people, in this case the types of people who want to move out into space -- the pioneer types who first settled the majority of America. I liked this story in part because of its ending -- it's more upbeat than the rest of the collection -- and in part because Gibson's talents mesh very well with Sterling's. The result is a pleasure to read.

I really enjoyed Burning Chrome; it's nice to see that sometimes there's some substance behind the hype.

Count Zero

There's a concept in cyberpunk writing called "edge." Turner, the protagonist of Count Zero, characterizes it this way:

It was that superhuman synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated. ...the edge let him collate the factors he had to deal with at the site, balancing clusters of small problems against single, larger ones. ... Instincts sharpened, on the edge; things got witchy.

Count Zero is all edge. It takes place in the world of the Sprawl, some decades after the events of Neuromancer. There are three main threads to the story. In the first, Turner, a mercenary, is hired to stage the defection of Mass Biolabs' top technical man, the man who holds all the basic patents for the new biochips which no one else has been able to duplicate. In the second, a young would-be cowboy named Bobby Newmark almost gets killed on his first run, in large part because he's using an untried icebreaker on a well-prepared target. In the third, Herr Josef Virek, the world's wealthiest single individual, hires Marly Krushkova, disgraced art-gallery manager, to find the anonymous artist who has produced some works Virek is interested in.

Turner's story is fairly straightforward: he sets up and executes the extraction as best he can, then tries to put the pieces back together when things go wrong. Marly's story is also fairly simple: she finds a lead on the artist and follows it back as far as she can, in almost classic detective style. Along the way she is aided by Virek's agents and money.

Bobby, the self-named Count Zero, has a more convoluted tale. Having been rescued from certain death in the ice by an unknown force, he goes looking for Two-A-Day, the stringer who loaned him the icebreaker. He ends up involved with people whose primary interest is in the presence that saved Bobby. They believe that the presence came from the uninhabited section of the consensual reality called cyberspace. Uninhabited by humans, that is. They claim that the ancient gods of Vodou inhabit the matrix and that one of these gods saved Bobby. They want to know what makes Bobby special enough that one of those gods would notice him at all, let alone exert the effort to save him.

These people -- Lucas, Jackie and Beauvoir -- help Bobby trace the icebreaker back to its source and initiate him into the mysteries of their interactions with cyberspace. On reflection, it seems to me that these characters are the spiritual descendants of the black mafiosi James Bond fought in "Live and Let Die," though here they are heros instead of villains.

The three main stories of Count Zero are told round-robin fashion, alternating each chapter. As the novel goes on they begin to draw together, something Gibson handles well. Each story has its own edge and reading Count Zero is like watching a three-pronged spiral grow tighter and tighter. In addition to the peoples' stories, there is a meta-plot about the nature of cyberspace and the artificial intelligences that have grown up there (despite the efforts of the Turing police). Gibson is deliberately ambiguous about whether there are unexplained forces in cyberspace.

As with other Gibson works, the characters are developed through the non-stop action of the plot. Each starts off sounding like a stereotype and quickly grows into much more. Unfortunately, this style doesn't work well with the secondary characters who aren't on stage a great deal. They never develop beyond one or two dimensions, and this weakens the book a little. Some, like Finn from "Burning Chrome," already have some history in the readers' mind, but most are lost in a blur.

Nonetheless, Count Zero is still an intensely enjoyable book. I don't think it's fair to say the book is better or worse than Neuromancer. Each has its strong points and it's clear that Gibson is still developing as a writer. Along with the majority of the civilized world, I am eagerly waiting to see what he will produce next.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 4)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 4

Scattered Gold

Reviews by
Charles de Lint
Copyright 1988 by Charles de Lint

Reviewed in this Issue

The Secret Ascension [***+]
by Michael Bishop
Tor, November, 1987, 341pp, $16.95
0-312-93031-3

           Fairie Tale   [***+]
          by Raymond E. Feist
Doubleday, February, 1988, 415pp, $17.95
             0-385-23623-9

Memory [*****]
by Margaret Mahy
J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987, 234pp, $7.95
0-460-06269-7

Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences      [*****]
              by Ursula K. Le Guin
        Capra Press, 1987, 196pp, $15.95
                 0-88496-270-9

The Tommyknockers [****]
by Stephen King
Putnam, November, 1987, 558pp, $29.95
0-339-13314-3

       Soulstring    [****]
        by Midori Snyder
Ace, November 1987, 182pp, $2.95
         0-441-77591-8

Marlborough Street [****]
by Richard Bowker
Doubleday, 1987, $12.95
0-385-19753-5

Mercedes Nights [****]
by Michael D. Weaver
St. Martin's Press, December, 1987; 240pp; $16.95
0-312-01066-4

             The Scream    [***+]
       by John Skipp & Craig Spector
Bantam/Spectra, February, 1988, 416pp, $3.95
               0-553-26798-1

     Tea with the Black Dragon     [*****]
              by R.A. MacAvoy
         Hypatia Press, 1987, 210pp
                0-940841-037

Lightning [*****]
by Dean R. Koontz
G.P. Putnam, January 1988, 352pp, $18.95
0-399-13319-4

A Truce With Time [****]
by Parke Godwin
Bantam/Spectra, February, 1988, 310pp, $16.95
0-553-05201-2

A quick glance at the ratings in this column will call up a preponderance of four and five star generals marching along, each to their own rhythm, through the following pages. Before you ask -- no, I haven't gone mad with my asterisk key. There've just been a lot of very good books crossing my desk in the past couple of months. And since, as I mentioned when we first met, I prefer to talk about the good books, I'm concentrating on the Good Stuff I read recently, rather than the material I'd rather just as soon not have cracked open in the first place.

Alright. The books are formed up for full-dress parade, ready for your inspection, so let's get straight to them.

The Secret Ascension

I'm not sure if a familiarity with Philip K. Dick's canon is necessary to appreciate this novel -- I have to admit that Dick is on of the classic SF writers that I still have to read -- but its apparent from reading The Secret Ascension that a familiarity will certainly add a deeper resonance to what's a fine novel all on its own.

Subtitled Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas, Bishop's newest novel is set in a dystopian alternate America where the Vietnam war was won, Nixon has held office for sixteen years, and a writer named Philip K. Dick -- known for his startling and original mainstream novels, but not for his Sf -- has been blacklisted by the government for writing anti-government works that are only available in samizdat circulation (much like the works of certain Russian authors in our world).

Dick has died at the opening of the novel and become an avatar of sorts -- a catalyst that sets into motion a series of events that will hopefully bring this alternate world back into a more positive timeline -- such as our own.

Bishop's prose has never been better. His characters are fully realized and his alternate history stands not only as a fascinating speculation, but also illuminates our own. So don't worry if you're familiar with dick's work or not. bishop's novel stands on its own, though I don't doubt that if you are unfamiliar with Dick's work, it will pique your interest, as it has mine, to go out and read something by the man.

Fairie Tale

After a number of very successful forays into high fantasy, including one in the company of collaborator Janny Wurts, Raymond Feist is staking out some new territory with his latest novel Fairie Tale. The packaging tells us that this territory is Stephen King country -- by which I mean horror that's sold as mainstream -- even though King's name is noticeably absent from the blurbs. Barker, Streiber and Straub have been called in to take his place as a comparison. But the packaging, while it doesn't lie, isn't quite right.

This is in fact a contemporary fantasy, or more properly a mainstream novel with vague fantasy traces that grow more pronounced the further we get into the book.

How does it fare? Quite well, although it does have a few problems.

Successful screenwriter Phil Hastings moves with his family from California to their new rural home in upstate New York where Hastings plans to get back into writing novels. They meet Hasting's old friend, Abigail Cook, and make new friends. but unknown to them all, the forest behind the house is inhabited by Fairie and an ancient mystery cult, which humans caught in the crossfire.

Feist's prose has never been better and he's done a wonderful job of bringing in all sorts of Faerie lore to the storyline. The problems that the book has aren't enough to spoil it by any means. But they are present.

The first is that all the human characters are simply too nice. They're kind and considerate, brave, rich, and good-natured and not one of them has a single flaw. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this -- but it does become a little tiresome. Some conflict between the characters -- and we spend most of our time with these paradigms -- would have lent some well-needed tension, especially to the first two thirds of the book.

Because that's the other problem. Until about two thirds of the way through, the only tensions delivered are some reasoning tidbits dealing with the Faerie that are thrown in here and there, almost at random. Other than that, we know what's going to happen. The rich daughter is going to get together with the poor student; of course the researchers are going to become good friends with the family; the twin boys will fit right in with the other kids in the area, etc., etc. it's not until there is only a third of the book left that the conflict really rises above the tantalizing hints of Faerie menace.

Be that as it may, Faerie Tale is still an entertaining book, due mostly to Feist's control of the language. the prose is so deftly laid out and rolls ahead so smoothly that it's very easy to read on and if everything does tie up neatly with only one casualty among the cast, well, this is a fairy tale, isn't it?

I hope this book does well for Feist because I'd like to see him try something else in a similar mode -- only with a more varied cast. A little bit of treachery and betrayal wouldn't hurt -- just to keep us on our toes. he's proven himself capable of this with his high fantasy books and I'd like to see him translate that to a contemporary fantasy.

Memory

I get on a big of a crusade at times when it comes to some books that are marketed as YA, but completely ignored by the greater part of the SF/F reading public. I can remember when this applied to Patricia McKillip, Jane Yolen and Diana Wynne Jones. And it still applies to New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy, though I was happy to see her last book The Tricksters (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1986) make the final ballot for the World Fantasy Awards.

It should have won.

Mahy's writing has everything one could hope for: complex plots, rich characterizations, and a way with words that makes each individual paragraph worth reading on its own, as well as in the context of the story. There's a different flavour about her writing which might, perhaps, be due to the New Zealand setting of most of her books, but I'll wager it's more because of her skill as a writer.

And while, yes, her protagonists are young, their situations are timeless. We were all young. We all went through the difficulties of adolescence. And such subject matter is just as relevant as any other -- so long as it's in the hands of a skilled author.

Her earlier novels (as opposed to her picture books aimed at very young children, which have their own charm) usually have a fantasy or SF flavour. Besides the above-mentioned The Tricksters, my other two personal favorites that I can whole-heartedly recommend are The Haunting (J.M. Dent, 1982) and The Changeover (Atheneum, 1984), each of which won the Carnegie Medal in their respective years of publication.

Her new novel Memory is less overtly fantasy-oriented; in fact, its fantastical elements are not so much overt as to be found in between the lines. Nineteen-year-old Jonny Dart is haunted by his past, especially the death of his sister. On the fifth anniversary of her death, he sets out to find his sister's best friend, Bonny Benedicta, who was a fortune teller as a young girl. Instead he meets up with Sophie West, an old woman living by herself in a house with a giant sculpture of a tap attached to the wall of her house.

If Jonny has too much memory, Sophie, suffering from Alzheimer's, has too little. How a street punk and a senile old lady get along might not seem like the basis for a very exciting novel, but let me assure you, Memory is a riveting book. The storyline moves strongly, while Mahy's descriptive passages, her insights into the humans psyche, and the book's underlying resonances make the trip through its pages extremely rewarding.

Buffalo Gals
and Other Animal Presences

This is a rare treat from Le Guin -- especially following the fascinating and experimental, but ultimately unsuccessful novel Always Coming Home (Harper & Row). Again it's a collection of bits and pieces; this time the unifying whole of the short stories and verse collection together is a common theme of communication between mankind and others -- animals, plants, stones, aliens.

The centerpiece of the collection is the new novelette "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" (just reading that title brings the melody of that song to mind), an outstanding contemporary exploration of native American totem animals. It's about a young girl, a child really, who survives a plan crash in the desert and finds herself in a kind of Dreamtime where she meets, first Coyote, then a whole village of totem animals. The prose is sharp and clean the characters wonderful, and the story itself, with all of its asides and SF speculations mixed in with Native lore, is a real treat.

Other material includes stories from the perspective of an oak tree ("The Direction of the Road") to those of ants and penguins ("The Author of the Acacia Seeds"); from a laurel tree ("The Crown of Laurel") to an alien tapped in a scientist's laboratory ("Mazes"). But no matter what the individual subject matter, the theme running through each offering, including the author's introductions to each piece and her forward, all deal with communication.

In that sense, Buffalo Gals becomes a must read. For that's what the expression of creativity is all about. communication. And what Le Guin has given us here are compass directions to help us broaden not only out understanding of the world around us, but of those others that we share it with as well. Strangers and aliens. She's given us the blueprints to open lines of communication not only between men and women (and too wide a gap lies there too often), but between human and non-human -- a valid need if we're all to survive the coming years.

And if talking animals seem too juvenile for you -- think of them as archetypes. It won't change the voices, but if it helps you to hear them, then it won't matter what label you put on them.

The Tommyknockers

The is it; after five novels released rapid-fire in the past fourteen months, The Tommyknockers will be the last of Stephen King's original fiction to hit the stands for the next five years. If, of course, King holds to his promised retirement. Considering how prolific he has been, and his own avowed "need to write," he could very easily change his mind.

The Tommyknockers is the first novel-length Science Fiction to come out under King's own name, but it's not the SF of Gregory Benford and other Hard SF writers. It owes its inspiration instead to the B "Sci-Fi" movies that King takes such delight in. He describes it himself as "a gadget novel -- it's about our obsession with gadgets. That's what our nuclear weapons, our Sidewinder missiles, all of those tools of destruction are -- just gadgets. Our technology has outraced our morality. And I don't think it's possible to stick the devil back in the box."

He goes on to add, "Every day, when I wake up and turn on the news, I wait for someone to say that Paris was obliterated last night...by a gadget. it's only the grace of god that has kept it from happening so far." That sense of moral outrage comes through in The Tommyknockers, hard and clear.

As in Misery, the two main characters here are writers -- Bobbi Anderson produces western novels, her old friend Jim Gardner is a poet. But this time the characters' occupations aren't intrinsic to the novel. we're not exploring the craft of writing; we're watching the impact of an alien artifact upon the sensibilities of a wide spectrum of human beings.

It beings innocently enough with Anderson stumbling over a piece of metal in the woods behind her house in the fictional township of Haven, Maine. Subsequent unearthing proves that it's just the tip of a much larger object, buried for millennia in the Main woods. Anderson becomes obsessed with its excavations, first drawing her friend Gardner in to help, then the rest of the township.

Gardner is an alcoholic and upon the brink of suicide when he goes to help Anderson. Because of a metal plate in his skull, he remains unaffected by the madness that soon takes over all the other residents of Haven. First the artifact exudes an influence that awakens a burst of creativity in the townspeople and they find themselves capable of putting together all kinds of gadgets. Hot-water heaters are run on flashlight batteries; portable radios become teleportation devices.

But then the artifact begins to pervert people. They become telepathic, eventually sharing a group mind, and physically change. The more alien they become, the more Gardner realizes that they present a danger not only to himself, but to the world as a whole. Unfortunately, he's alone, against five hundred of what he calls "the tommyknockers," naming the aliens after the old nursery rhyme.

If you can run with the basically silly "Sci-Fi" premise, The Tommyknockers is a lot of fun. Faithful King readers will also enjoy the usual references to other of his books -- including the nearby town of Derry (from It) through mentions of John Smith (from The Dead Zone) and the C.I.A. "shop" (from Firestarter). King's books themselves are described as one character speaks of Anderson's westerns being good reading, not "full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the ones that fellow who lived up in Bangor wrote."

Also present is a very strong sense of rural and small town Maine -- one of King's strengths, though the fact that he's such an excellent regionalist writer often gets lost behind talk of how he's just a horror writer, or how much his latest book sold for.

The characterization, always King's forte, is as excellent as ever and it's because of that and the sheer verve of his writing style, that the five year drought coming up is going to be hard to take by his admirers. But in the meantime we have The Tommyknockers and there are always the old books to reread. And King will be back, because just as the butler Stevens in his novella "The Breathing Method" (Different Seasons), King lives by the words "Here, sir, there are always more tales."

Soulstring

Because of the vast body of work that's been built up in the high fantasy genre over the past decade and a half, it's difficult for writers to come up with something fresh. Some, like Stephen Donaldson, overcome this by bringing characters with modern sensibilities from our world to a magical one. Others, like Judith Tarr, get by on the sheer verve of their storytelling and characterization, so that while the story itself might not be entirely new, the telling of it is.

Midori Snyder can be added to the latter company with her first novel.

In Soulstring, Magda de'Stain Moravia has inherited the family magical strengths to the great disappointment of her father. Because she's not male, she can't rule, but her father has hopes of at least marrying her off, thereby making an alliance with some powerful lord and salvaging something out of his disappointment. Naturally Magda has different ideas about her future and the book tells the story of her struggle to free herself from her father's influence and make a new life for herself with the husband she's chosen on her own. Unfortunately, her father's put a most interesting curse on her husband.

What makes the old story work is Snyder's fresh approach to the material. It's high fantasy, but it reads like something else again as she combines a lean edge to her passages of lyric prose. The warmth of her characters is effortlessly conveyed to her readers, the traditional mock medieval setting has a grittiness that rings true and, old story or not, she's still added some new twists to the brew.

Marlborough Street

There's a lot of talk in Marlborough Street about baseball and psychics; the plot's about a young psychic -- mostly ineffectual, but good-hearted -- caught in a life-and-death struggle with another psychic who uses his power towards evil ends; but mostly the book is about awareness and growth. It's refreshing to read a book where the protagonist makes mistakes, but you don't consider him a loser; where you can enjoy following the change and actual growth of his character as the story unfolds; where the interaction between characters reads so well that you feel as though you're eavesdropping on their conversations, rather than reading a book.

I enjoyed parts of the novel Bowker followed this with (Dover Beach, Bantam/Spectra, 1987 -- reviewed last time around), but Marlborough Street really engaged me. What strikes me odd, however, is that, in looking back, I can't really find what the difference is between the way Bowker told either story. This one just clicked up for me, right from the opening page, but it's not simply the plot that grabbed me (although there is a much better plot this time). there's something going on between the lines of Marlborough Street that lends it a deeper resonance -- and I'm neither a baseball fan nor overly enamoured with psychics.

Mercedes Nights

Sometimes in the near future the top vidstar is one Mercedes Night; talented, intelligent and beautiful, everybody wants a piece of her, just as they do the screen goddesses of the present century. Now someone has cloned her. The replicas are prefect and anyone with enough money can own one and do anything they want with her.

Naturally, the original Mercedes Night isn't particularly enamoured with what's going on when she finds out about it. to further complicate matters, those behind the clones plan to use them to disrupt the political and economic structure of this future world. The clones are expendable to them -- as it the original Mercedes. And to yet further complicate matters, the clones have such developed personalities that each of them is certain that they're the original.

This is Mike Weaver's second novel (written before the Avon fantasy Wolf-Dreams which came out earlier this year, but appearing later). Unlike Wolf-Dreams, which while it was entertaining, still trod some well-travelled ground, Mercedes Nights is a unique blend of believable extrapolation, strong sympathetic characters, a hard boiled plot that never lets up, and enough ideas to fill a dozen standard novels. like Heinlein at his best, or some of the current writers like William Gibson, Weaver doesn't spend a lot of time explaining the background. Future tech is simply presented as there while the story move on, leaving the reader to go back and enjoy all those background ideas on their second time through.

A quick look at the plotline and Weaver's style of telling the story might leave you with the idea that this is just another cyberflash rip-off, but this simply isn't so. Mercedes Nights has got the flash, and verve and vigor, too, but it's got substance as well and this time around Weaver's not treading any old ground. Behind the striking cover by comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz is one of this year's most entertaining reads.

The Scream

It's rock'n'roll horror -- a battle of the bands like you wouldn't believe.

On the one side we have The Jake Hamer Band, fronted by Vietnam vet, Jake Hamer himself. Serious musicians, dedicating their craft to entertaining their fans, yes, but also to making a statement to the world at large, that music can be a force for good. Defending themselves and rock music against the political and religious onslaught that is currently trying to bring it down.

On the other side we have The Scream, and all they want is your blood.

The novel ends with a literal battle of the bands -- and I don't mean who plays the hottest licks. To get there we find out a lot about the music scene, TV evangelists, how Vietnam lives on in some vets, and we meet a cross-section of characters that run from those we wouldn't mind sitting down to have a beer with, to those who'd make us move to another continent -- just so that we wouldn't chance running into them on the street one day.

John Skipp and Craig Spector know the music scene and life on the streets -- something that's come through with startling clarity in their previous works. The Light at the End (Bantam/Spectra, 1986) was about a vampire loose in New York's subway system -- standing against it were the employees of a messenger service. Although there are moments of sloppy writing (incredibly sloppy writing) the book had such a powerhouse sense of energy that almost anything could be forgiven.

They followed that up with The Cleanup (Bantam/Spectra, 1987) in which an aspiring musician is given godlike powers and uses them to try to clean up New York. In it the authors appeared to simply lose control for while there were the usual sections of just plain bad writing, the energy level of the book wasn't nearly as high as the previous one and the plot was downright silly.

How do they fare in the new one? The uneven writing continues -- brilliant passages run side-by-side with material so awkward you wonder how it got past the editor -- but the energy level's back, the straight-ahead assurance of what they're about, and in that sense, the book's a rousing success.

Think of it as going to the drive-in for a couple of B-movies and just being blown away by the cinematography -- the pacing, slow pans, quick editing cuts of one of them. It's the surprise of the parts that are so good, squeezed in amongst that B-movie material you went to see, that really startles. The good parts, the energy, are such that you'll catch it again -- or look into the next flick that director's involved in -- and that's exactly the way it is with Skipp and Spector's work.

While the craftsmanship isn't always of the level it should be, it still works. Or in other worlds, while The Scream ain't good English, it's still rock'n'roll.

Tea with
the Black Dragon

Tea with the Black Dragon was one of the best fantasy novels to be published in 1983 -- a perfect little book, unmatched by any of MacAvoy's later fine works except for perhaps The Grey Horse (Bantam/Spectra, 1987). It introduced us to the middle-aged Celtic fiddler Martha Macnamara and her friend Mayland Long, a centuries old Chinese dragon in the shape of a man, both of whom later appeared in Twisting the Rope (Bantam/Spectra, 1986).

What MacAvoy did with that first novel was weave some new twists into our venerable genre by mingling old dragon magic with new computer magic and topping the whole brew off with a liberal dose of realistic characterization and a snappy plot. And she pulled the whole affair off with aplomb and bravado.

Yes, yes, you're saying, but the book's five years old, so why review it now?

I thought you'd never ask. You see, it was a paperback original -- a nice enough edition because the original publisher Bantam makes decent paperbacks that don't fall apart in your hands the second time you read them, but it's still just a paperback. A book this good was just crying for a durable hardcover edition and that's just what Allan Newcomer's Hypatia Press has done for us now.

The trade edition -- which is all I've seen -- is printed on acid-free paper in a fairly nice design (I think larger margins all around would have added to the visual appeal of the interior pages), with a leather-like finish on the cover and dustjacket -- both of which are very attractive: gold on black. I'm not sure of the price, but I think it ran twenty dollars with a slipcase offered for an extra five dollars.

There's an introduction by Anne McCaffrey and an afterward by MacAvoy, signatures by both, and for the price, I don't think you could ask for more. For ordering information, write to Hypatia Press, 86501 Central road, Eugene, OR 97402.

Lightning

Ever since I discovered Dean Koontz's work a half dozen years or so ago, his books have gone to the top of my "to be read" list as soon as they've been published. The prime reason for this is that they're just so damned good. They're literately written, thrillers that never let up their tension, but more importantly, at least for me, the characters -- and especially the sympathetic ones -- that Koontz creates are so real you feel that any day you could bump into one of them on the street.

Each subsequent book's been better than the one before it, but with last year's Watchers, I really didn't think they could get any better. happily, Koontz has proved me wrong again.

Lightning is ostensibly a thriller. Laura Shane has an apparently ageless guardian angel who comes out of nowhere at various times in her life to help her in moments of great danger. But what happens when the angel needs help from her?

I won't give you more than the above thumbnail sketch of the plot, because Lightning is definitely one of those books in which half the pleasure is discovering just what happens next. Twenty pages into the novel, Koontz has what other authors would make the climax of the book, but he just keeps rollercoasting along, the plot as tightly wound as a coiled spring. The narrative technique he uses in certain sections -- juxtapositioning present actions with flashbacks -- actually maintains the books impetus, rather than slowing it down.

But it's Koontz's skill with the language, and his characters, that keep me coming back to his books. In Lightning, it's the friendship between Laura and her childhood friend Thelma Ackerson that gives this novel its true heart. The warmth and humor with which Koontz conveys their relationship would be enough to make a wonderful story all on its own.

Have I convinced you to try it yet? Yes, I know. It looks like a novel that takes place in "Stephen King country," but trust me, it's not. That's just the packaging. Under that cover is as warm a group of characters -- caught up in a high speed thriller of a plot, it's true -- as you're likely to find anywhere.

In other words, Good Stuff.

A Truce With Time

This novel is for those readers who loved Parke Godwin's contemporary short fiction such as "Influencing the Hell Out of Time and Theresa Golowitz" and "The Fire When It Comes" (both of which are available in the excellent collection titled after the latter story, published by Doubleday, 1984). For Godwin himself, it might well have been an exorcism of past ghosts, though only those who know him would be able to assign how much truth to that there is.

It is a brave novel.

It deals not with quests and dragons and unicorns, nor with Faerie running through city streets. Rather it chronicles the lives of some middle-age characters -- old enough to realize the mistakes they've made with their lives, young enough to try to change them.

Pat Landry is a writer who's known some success with his craft, but only in a limited way. His relationships with women have all slipped away and he is approaching a crisis point in his life when he meets the artist Lauren Hodge.

What follows is a love story -- but not a Harlequin romance. It's a very real and searching study of what it means to be human, to grow old, to fall in love, to spend half a lifetime wanting to make something of oneself, but always having that success lie just out of reach.

It's also a novel about ghosts, for as Landry is working through his present problems, he also has to deal with ghostly visits from his late family. Landry learns that to be at peace in one's present, one needs to be at peace with one's past.

I said that this was a brave book, and I meant it. Godwin could just as easily have gone on to write yet one more Arthurian novel. One more fantasy. One more SF collaboration with Marvin Kaye. And any of those would have undoubtably been very good. But they would also have been safe.

Godwin is a writer who isn't afraid of stretching his talents, nor, would it seem, of exorcising his ghosts in public. And that's something we all benefit from: a writing who isn't afraid to bare his heart on the page.

That's it for this time. Next installment we'll look at how effective Orson Scott Card's continuation of his Tales of Alvin Maker series is with the second volume, Red Prophet and who knows what else. Until then, be merry and well.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

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to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

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OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

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Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 5)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 5

Triplet

Timothy Zahn
Baen Books, 369pp, $3.95
[****]

Reviewed by
Danny Low
hplabs!dlow
Copyright 1988 by Danny Low

The title refers to three planets (Threshold, Shamsheer and Karyx) with some unique qualities that are also know as the Hidden Worlds. To start, they are connected by a tunnel that is some sort of transporter. Threshold is a planet that has been blasted lifeless but Shamsheer is a world where there is a very advanced science that is indistinguishable from magic and Karyx is a world where spirits are real and can be made to perform work for people with magical spells. In addition, the people of Shamsheer and Karyx appear to be real humans beings and not just humanoid. The level of technology demonstrated by the tunnels and the gadgets in Shamsheer are way beyond that of the Twenty Worlds but the people of Shamsheer and Karyx are unaware of the tunnels and the technology that makes their worlds work. It's all literally magic to them.

The Twenty Worlds, once they realized what they had found, quarantined the planets and restricted access to it, mainly to study teams although some limited tourism is allowed. Danae Panya is a spoiled rich brat who wants nothing more than to escape from the smothering protective arm of her very rich and powerful father. She sees a study trip to the Hidden Worlds as a means to establish herself as an independent person. The story is basically a mystery disguised as an adventure story. Actually, there are several mysteries in this story and in one way or another, all are solved or have plausible theories brought forth about them. The background mystery is who created the Hidden Worlds and why. The foreground mystery is what is happening on Karyx? The story is a well handled mystery. The appropriate clues are dropped throughout the story. While there are not too many red herrings, the clues are also not obvious. Incidents and knowledge that appear to be mere background detail often turn out to be important.

For those who like exciting action packed adventure, this book will not disappoint them once the story gets underway. Unfortunately, the first third of the story is taken up with introductory material for the story but once things get underway, it's full throttle action. Those who expect another science fictional chop sockey super ninja story like Zahn's Cobra series will be disappointed. This is not a martial arts story. Zahn has thought out not only the details but the implication of his story situation. The story proceeds in a logical fashion. The obstacles faced by the main characters are resolved in a logical fashion. There are a few cases where Zahn does explain something after the fact but these are minor. The plotting is very tight. There are no extraneous expositions inserted to show off the author's creation. This is always a potential problem when an author has created a well though out universe. The temptation to show off the creation at the expense of the story can be too much for some authors.

In the end, the foreground mystery is solved but there is only a suggestion of a solution to the background mystery. Yes, there is a possibility of sequels but the story in this book is complete and does not require a sequel. This book is the best novel produced by Zahn so far and is significantly superior to his previous work.

The Stars Like Islands

Steve Bellovin
ulysses!smb
Copyright 1988 by Steve Bellovin

It's the oldest plot in the galaxy -- without warning, Our Hero swoops down from hyperspace and liberates a planet from the clutches of an Evildoer. Time after time, this happens, until the Evildoer's empire is reeling. Great! But does this make any sense at all? Is it really conceivable that a single planet can be liberated that easily, let alone several of them? Let's take a closer look, by focusing on the one inhabited planet we really know something about: Earth.

The first conclusion we come to is that a planet is really a very large place. Think of how many distinct cultures inhabit our planet, and how many different economies exist. Think how long it takes any one nation to conquer another, as a rule. Now multiply this by N, for an entire planet. How many troops would it take? How many spaceships would be needed to carry these armies? Is it possible? Probably, especially if the attacker's technology is far ahead of the defender's. But if they're at all close, the defender is drawing on a population of billions, with essentially unlimited resources and power. In that situation, conquest is likely to be extremely difficult indeed.

Why, then, is the plot so common? The answer, I claim, lies in the mental model authors use, consciously or not. To them, star systems are not composed of entire worlds; rather, each is more or less the size of an island. Fleets of starships are really fleets of battleships -- or perhaps outrigger canoes, for the spaceship and sword folks. The vast reaches of hyperspace are really the vast stretches of an ocean. And the galaxy -- yes, the Milky Way, composed of the proverbial billions and billions of stars -- is really about the size of Planet Earth. (Another possible analogy is city-states, rather than islands; the problem of traversing space seems to be more like crossing a sea, though. Most authors seem to agree, or we'd have fewer space navies and more space armies.)

Let's take a look at some stories. Perhaps the best place to start is with Asimov's Foundation series. In it, we are told, the emperor sometimes travels to the "summer planets." Planets? More than one? Each of which has both summer and winter at any one time? Granted, this is a very decadent emperor, but it still seems a bit extreme. Elsewhere, a general describes a strategy of "englobement." Now, this makes eminent sense if we are looking at a single battle between opposing fleets. But here, we are talking about surrounding a large number of star systems! Take any reasonable estimate for the median interstellar distance. Then calculate just how many star systems are contained in, say, a sphere 100 light years across. Does it sound plausible to capture even the perimeter? (We won't even ask what good it does to hold that perimeter; given the apparent state of detection gear in that universe, sneaking between two stars a few light years apart should be no trouble at all, even for a large fleet.) Oh, well -- at least Asimov realized he had to generalize "encirclement" into the third dimension. (We have some external evidence, too. Asimov himself has written that his theme came from the decline of the Roman Empire.)

The classic example, of course, is "Doc" Smith's Lensman series. To Smith, every planet has a single culture. None of the inhabitants of Lyrane II have any concept of beauty. Klovia is a giant banana republic, with the coup d'etat formalized as the mechanism for transfer of power. And Lonabar is Al Capone's Chicago.

Let us conclude by looking at Schmitz's "The Witches of Karres." In it, we are told of the "Megair Cannibals" -- beings who use spaceships to waylay other spaceships, and then eat their crews. These cannibals, it seems, occupy a star cluster. But please -- it's only a small cluster...

Do any authors get the scale right? Some do, though the number is far from impressive. In some senses, Smith does; when he wants a massive fleet, he really does multiply the number of planets involved by some constant, and accepts the huge number that results. (Of course, for space opera huge numbers are better.) And he notes the difficult any ship has attacking a fortified base on a planet, though he concentrates mostly on energy availability.

Another good example is Pournelle's Co-Dominium series. His planets are (mercifully) finite in number, his hyperspace drive is carefully designed so that strategic locations exist, and his political structures seem commensurate with the scale of his empires. There are failings -- the planetary cultures seem too homogenous -- but that can probably be justified, as discussed below.

Poul Anderson probably does the best overall job of handling galaxy- sized empires. In fact, in several of his books he calculates just how many stars and planets are involved. As with Pournelle, the political structures he employs do scale; there is no pretense that the Emperor can keep track of every planet's troubles, for example, and the bureaucracy is portrayed as an almost-insurmountable obstacle in an empire of that volume. Best of call, several of his stories (i.e., "The Man Who Counts" or "Tigry by the Tail") turn on planets having more than one culture.

Before we are too harsh on our favorite authors, let us consider whether there is any justification for their apparent failings. Are they right to assume, say, that most planets are monocultural? In some cases, that may indeed be a defensible assumption, though I'm not really convinced. Still, there are several ways in which such a situation can arise.

The first, and perhaps most likely way, is when the planets in question are colonies started by a small, distinct group. (We'll ignore the question of whether or not it makes sense to claim an entire planet as a single colony; nations have done stranger things, and there are some political advantages to trying.) In any event, Pournelle uses this argument; his (and Niven's) planet of New Caledonia was settled by Scots, for example.

Some authors (Niven, for example) claim that high-bandwidth communications and transport mechanisms can homegenize a culture. This is certainly true to some extent, but one can argue how far it will go. There is a countervailing tendency, whereby distinct cultural groups try to maintain their own identity. Just walking through Brooklyn, one can find more distinct subcultures than the average author has in a galaxy.

Finally one can argue that biology is destiny. Perhaps Smith's Eddorians really are evil and treacherous by nature, and their culture couldn't turn out any different. Perhaps -- but until more authors stop turning out "aliens with zipper suits" -- pull down the zipper and a human being pops out -- I'll remain a skeptic.

Guardians of the Flame

The Sleeping Dragon
The Sword and the Chain
The Silver Crown
The Heir Apparent

Joel Rosenberg
Signet, $2.95 each
[***-]

Reviewed by
David M. Shea
Copyright 1988 by David M. Shea

Like Yossarian's fish, I have ambivalent feelings about this series. The premise is one I regard as fundamentally unsound: the game players trapped in the world of their game. This has generally resulted in such one-dimensional works as the stupefyingly boring Tron. Even Andre Norton couldn't do much with this notion (Quag Keep, regarded even by faithful fans as one of her lesser efforts). Also, Joel Rosenberg seems to have hit every standard fantasy item along the way; elves, dwarves, dragons, wizards, magical spells.... Well, lets be fair, I don't recall any unicorns. There is also a great deal of graphic violence. The author tells us any number of times, with a sort of sadistic glee, about how the anal sphincters relax at death. One such reminder would have been ample for this reader.

However, there is also much to like about these books. Rosenberg's characters are all fully developed, credible people with believable motivations. His prose is crisp and vigorous, not cluttered with the rhetorical gimcrackery, pseudo-medieval dialogue and interminable strings of adjectives which bog down so much contemporary fantasy. Even better, he knows how to get on with telling a story, surely a prime requisite for a fiction writer.

In the first volume, a group of American college students find their harmless game of D&D interrupted when they are suddenly catapulted into the world of the game. Their natural attempt is to get back to their own familiar continuum, in the face of numerous obstacles, is the bulk of the first volume. In the process, they suffer a fatality. On the Other Side, even death need not be permanent; so the companions decide to go back again and salvage their friend's life. This forms the basis of the second book. Even in a magical realm, however, reversing the death does not come cheaply; and in the course of acquiring the price, they run afoul of the local slave-traders. The abuses suffered at the slavers' hands are such that Karl, the group's leader, vows to stay and wipe out slavery no matter how long it takes. The others decide to join the abolitionist movement also. (These things come easier when you have a tame dragon on your side). By the third book, having come into conflict with the local barons as well, they come to the reasonable conclusion that the best way to change government policy is to take over the government.

The fourth volume begins some twenty years later. Karl and his group, and their many local followers an allies, have become a power to be reckoned with; but an arch-enemy slaver hasn't given up on revenging himself on Karl and his family. Karl's son Jason, now sixteen, is an obvious target; and to protect him, Karl and the others must stage a violent showdown with all their lives on the line.

No one is going to mistake this material for, say, The Book of the New Sun; but on the other hand, it's several cuts above the routine bad-Tolkien-imitation swill which infests the market. If you're looking for some good old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery adventure with lots of (occasionally gory) action, you could do a lot worse. The entire series is in print as well.

Stuff Received
Ace

Stith, John E. Memory Blank, 230pp, January, 1986, $2.95, 0-441-52417-6.

Stith, John E. Death Toll, 230pp, September, 1987, $2.95, 0-441-14214-1.

Ace/Putnam

Herbert, Frank and Ransom, Bill. The Ascension Factor, 381pp, 1988,
$18.95, 0-399-13224-4.

Arkham House

Shea, Michael. Polyphemus. 245pp, December, 1987, $16.95, 0-87054-155-2.

Avon

Aldiss, Brian W. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction,
510pp, March, 1988, $9.95, 0-380-70461-7. Winner of 1987 Non-Fiction
Hugo.

Betancourt, John Gregory. The Blind Archer, 233pp, Februrary, 1988,
$2.95, 0-380-75146-1.

Deitz, Tom. Fireshaper's Doom, 306pp, December, 1987, $3.50, 0-380-75329-4.
Sequel to Windmaster's Bane.

Ferguson, Bruce. The Shadow of his Wings, 278pp, March, 1988, $2.95,
0-380-70415-3.

Haldeman, Joe. Mindbridge, 207pp, February, 1988, $2.95, 0-380-10689-3.
Reprint of a 1977 book.

Longyear, Barry. Sea of Glass. 375pp, January, 1988, $3.50, 0-380-70055-7.
Recommended.

Martine-Barnes, Adrienne. The Crystal Sword, January, 1988, 278pp,
$3.50, 0-380-75454-1. Part two of the Chronique D'Avebury.

Smith, L. Neil. Bright Suit Macbear, 212pp, March, 1988, $2.95, 0-380-75324-3.
First in the Tom Paine Maru series.

Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story, 302pp, February, 1988,
$4.95, 0-380-70388-2.

Baen Books

Allen, Roger MacBride. Orphan of Creation, 345pp, February, 1988,
$3.50, 0-671-65356-3.

Anderson, Poul. The Broken Sword, 266pp, January, 1988, $3.95, 0-671-65382-2.
Reprint of a 1971 novel.

Baen, Jim. New Destinies, Volume III, 273pp, February, 1988, $3.50,
0-671-65385-7.

Bowker, Richard. Marlborough Street, 232pp, March, 1988, $3.95, 0-553-27167-9.

Bretnor, Regniold. Thor's Hammer, 276pp, March, 1988, $3.50, 0-671-65394-6.
Volume 1 of The Future at War anthology series.

Busby, F.M. The Breeds of Man, 294pp, March, 1988, $3.95, 0-553-27008-7.

Dalmas, John. The General's President, 420pp, February, 1988, $3.50,
0-671-65384-9.

Davidson, Avram & Davis, Grania. Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty,
300pp, March, 1988, $3.50, 0-671-65372.

Heinlein, Robert A. Sixth Column, 248pp, January, 1988, $3.50, 0-671-65374-1.
Reprint of a 1949 novel.

Jennnings, Phillip C. Tower to the Sky, 316pp, March, 1988, $3.50,
0-671-65393-8.

Laumer, Keith. Retief to the Rescue, 250pp, 1988, $2.95, 0-671-65376-8.
Reprint of a 1983 novel.

Kingsbury, Donald. The Moon Goddess and the Son, 471pp, December,
1987, $3.95, 0-671-65381-4.

Kotani, Eric & Roberts, John Maddox. Between the Stars, 225pp,
March, 1988, $2.95, 0-671-65392-X.

Morris, Janet. Masters in Hell, 280pp, $3.50, 0-671-65379-2. Latest in
the Heroes in Hell anthology.

Peat, E. David. Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Think, January,
1988, 356pp, $4.95, 0-671-65377-6. Revised Edition.

Reaves, Michael. The Burning Realm, 278pp, February, 1988, $3.50,
0-671-65386-5.

Saberhagen, Fred. The Broken Lands, 192pp, $2.95, 0-671-65380-6.
Empire of the East book one. First paperback edition.

Saberhagen, Fred. The Black Mountains, 185pp, $2.75, 0-671-65390-3.
Empire of the East book two.

Saberhagen, Fred. After the Fact, 285pp, March, 1988, $3.95, 0-671-65391-1.

Scarborough, Elizabeth. Songs from the Seashell Archive, Vol. 2, 390pp,
$4.95, 0-553-27009-5. Contains the novels Bronwyn's Bane and The
Christening Quest.

Shaw, Bob. Medusa's Children, 217pp, February, 1988, $2.95, 0-671-65387-3.
Reprint of a 1977 book.

Stiegler, Marc. David's Sling, 346pp, January, 1988, $3.50, 0-671-65369-5.

Sturgeon, Theodore. To Marry Medusa, 251pp, $2.95, December, 1987,
0-671-65370-9. Contains two novellas: To Marry Medusa and Killdozer.

Thomas, Thomas T. First Citizen, 373pp, December, 1987, $3.50, 0-671-65368-7.

Thompson, W.R. Sideshow, 346pp, January, 1988, $3.50, 0-671-65375-X.

Wylie, Jonathon. The Center of the Circle, 281pp, March, 1988, $3.95,
0-553-27056-7. Servants of the Ark Volume 2.

Zahn, Timothy. Cobra Bargain, 409pp, February, 1988, $3.95, 0-671-65383-0.
Sequel to Cobra and Cobra Strike.

Bantam

Busby, F.M. The Rebel Dynasty, 1987, 475pp, $4.95, 0-553-26988-7.
Reprint of The Alien Debt and Rebel's Seed.

Charnas, Suzy McKee. The Silver Glove, 162pp, March, 1988, $13.95,
0-553-05470-8. A Bantam Starfire Young Adult novel.

Effinger, George Alec. When Gravity Fails, 276pp, 1987, $3.95, 0-553-25555-X.

Godwin, Parke. A Truce With Time (A Love Story with Occasional
Ghosts), 310pp, February, 1988, $16.95, 0-553-05201-2.

McDonald, Ian. Desolation Road, 355pp, February, 1988, $3.95, 0-553-27057-5.

McDonald, Ian. Empire Dreams, 220pp, February, 1988, $3.50, 0-553-27180-6.

Norwood, Warren C. True Jaguar, 324pp, February, 1988, $3.95, 0-553-27127-X.

Weis, Margaret & Hickman, Tracy. Forging the Darksword, 391pp,
1987, $3.95, 0-553-26894-5.

Wilson, Robert Charles. Memory Wire, 219pp, 1987, $3.50, 0-553-26853-8.

Wylde, Thomas. Pitfall, 198pp, February, 1988, $3.50, 0-553-26946-1.
Volume 2 of Alien Speedways.

Carroll & Graf

Sladek, John. Roderick at Random, 317pp, 1988, $3.95, 0-88184-341-5.
Reprint of a 1983 book.

Sturgeon, Theodore. The Dreaming Jewels, 180pp, $3.95, 0-88184-351-2.
New edition of a 1950 novel.

DAW Books

Adams, Robert, Greenberg, Martin H. & Adams, Pamela Crippen.
Hunger for Horror, 256pp, March, 1988, $3.59, 0-88677-266-4.

Asimov, Isaac & Greenberg, Martin H. The Great SF Stories #17, 349pp,
1987, $3.95, 0-88677-256-7.

Carter, Lin. Callipygia, 252pp, February, 1988, $3.50, 0-88677-262-1.

Cherryh, C.J. Gate of Ivrel, 191, 1988, 0-88677-257-5. Reprint of a
1976 novel.

Cherryh, C.J. Exile's Gate, 414pp, 1988, 0-88677-254-0.

Green, Sharon. Terrilian V: The Warrior Victorious, 415pp, March,
1988, $3.95, 0-88677-264-8.

Green, Sharon. Terrilian I: The Warrior Within, 224pp, $3.50, 0-88677-146-3.
Reprint of a 1982 novel.

Ingrid, Charles. Lasertown Blues, 286pp, February, 1988, $3.50, 0-88677-260-5.
Book Two of the San Wars.

Johnson, James B. Mindhopper, 269pp, March, 1988, $3.50, 0-88677-265-6.

Lackey, Mercedes. Arrow's Fall, 319pp, January, 1988, $3.50, 0-88677-255-9.

Roberson, Jennifer. A Price of Princes, 453pp, February, 1988, $3.50,
0-88677-261-3. Book Five of the Chronicles of the Cheysuli.

Dell

Smith, James V., Jr. Beast-Maker, 382pp, March, 1988, $3.95, 0-440-20042-3.

Franklin Watts

Pollack, Rachel. Alqua Dreams, 256pp, November, 1987, $16.95, 0-531-15070-4.

Pocket Books

Barker, Clive. In the Flesh, 255pp, January, 1988, $3.95, 0-671-61270-0.
New collection of horror by the author.

Brandewyne, Rebecca. Passion Moon Rising, 480pp, February, 1988,
$3.95, 0-671-61774-5. Historical Romance with strong fantasy element
crossovers.

Dillard, J.M. Bloodthirst, 264pp, 1988, 0-671-64489-0. Star Trek #37.

Kinder, Gary. Light Years, 308pp, February, 1988, $4.50, 0-671-66120-5.

McCammon, Robert R. Stinger, 538pp, April, 1988, 0-671-31138-7

St. Martin's Press

Green, Terence M. Barking Dogs, 214pp, April, 1988, $15.95, 0-312-01424-4.

Kahn, James. Timefall, 295pp, 1987, $16.95, 0-312-00195-9.

Stewart, Michael. Blindsight, 258pp, March, 1988, 0-312-01392-2.

Swigart, Rob. Portal, 346pp, March, 1988, $18.95, 0-312-01494-5.

Watson, Ian. Queenmagic, Kingmagic, 205pp, February, 1988, $14.95,
0-312-01503-8.

Wells, H.G. Complete Short Stories, 1038pp, March 1988 $19.95, 0-312-15855-6.

Wilhelm, Kate. Crazy Time, 245pp, March, 1988, $16.95, 0-312-01411-2.

Space & Time
138 West 70th St. (4B)
New York, NY 10023

Ford, Jeffrey. Vanitas, 167pp, February, 1988, $7.95 trade paperback,
0-917053-07-9. Small Press Science Fantasy/Horror cross genre novel.

Starblaze Graphics

Cherry, David A. Imagination, the Art & Technique of David A. Cherry,
144pp, 1987, $12.95, 0-89865-563-3.

Foglio, Phil. Buck Godot -- Psmith, 72pp, December, 1987, $7.95, 0-89865-459-9.

Russell, P. Craig. The Thief of Bagdad, 120pp, #12.95, 0-89865-523-4.

Van Hamme, Jean. Thorgal, The Archers, 48pp, September, 1987,
$6.95 color hardcover graphic novel, 0-9617885-0-X.

Wagner, Matt. Mage -- The Hero Discovered, Vol. 2, 144pp, $12.95,
September, 1987, 0-98965-560-9. Color Graphic Novel.

Tor

Bova, Ben. Vengeance of Orion, 342pp, February, 1988, $17.95, 0-312-93049-6.

Chetwin, Grace. The Atheling, 445pp, January, 1988, $18.95, 0-312-93059-3.
Volume 1 of the Last Legacy.

Grant, Charles L. For Fear of the Night, 277pp, March, 1988, $17.95,
0-312-93046-1.

Preuss, Paul. Starfire. 310pp, $17.95, March,1988, 0-312-93056-9.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Gold Coast, 387pp, February, 1988, $17.95,
0-312-93050-X.

TSR

Salvatore, R.A. The Crystal Shard, 333pp, January, 1988, $3.95, 0-88038-535-9.

Warner Books

Cherryh, C.J. Cyteen, 688pp, May, 1988, $18.95, 0-446-51428-4 (galley).

Workman Publishing

Barlowe, Wayne. Barlow's Guide to Extraterresterials, 144pp, $10.95,
0-89480-324-7. A classic art book for the field back in print. Highly
recommended.

Hartman, William K & Miller, Ron. Cycles of Fire: Stars, Planets and the
Wonder of Deep Space, 188pp, full color plates. $27.50 cloth, $24.95
paperback, 0-89480-510-X (cloth), 0-89480-502-9 (paperback). Non-
fiction high quality look at the Universe.

Fanzines and
Magazines

Delineator #5. Alan White, ed. Irregular, available for the regular or
$5.00 to 455 E. 7th st. #4, San Jacinto, CA, 92383-8401. This
issue contains con reports on Westercon XXXX and a picture of
the OtherRealms company car's license plate.

Dillinger #55 & #56. Arthur Hlavaty, ed. bimonthly from P.O. Box 52028,
Durham, NC 27701.

Fosfax #122 & #123 & #124. Joseph Major, ed. Available from FOSFA, P.O.
37281, Louisville, KY, 40233-7281. Reviews cons, books, and
other material. Well written.

Gegenschein #53. Eric Lindsay, ed. Available from 6 Hillcrest Avenue,
FAulconbridge, NSW 2776 Austrailia. supporting Terry Dowling's
DUFF bid

Holier Than Thou #26. Marty Cantor, ed. Irregular from 11565 Archwood
St., North Hollywood, CA 91606-1703. Available for the usual or
$5.00, whichever comes first.

The Insider #137 & #138. Clubzine from the St. Louis SF Society, P.O.
Box 1058, St. Louis, MO, 63188.

Lan's Lantern #24, Lan Laskowski, Ed. Irregular, from 55 Valley Way,
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48013. Honoring Frederik Pohl and L.
Sprague deCamp.

Locus. Charles Brown, ed. $24/year from P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, Ca, 94661.

Phlogiston #14 & #15. Alex Heatley, ed. Quarterly personal/reviewzine
from P.O. Box 11-708, Manners Street, Wellington, New Zealand.

Renaissance Fan #1. Rosalind Malin & Dick Pilz, ed. 2214 SE 53rd,
Portland, OR, 97215.

Rune #77. David E. Romm & Jeanne Mealy, Ed. For the regular from P.O.
Box 8297 Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN, 55408.

Scavenger's Newsletter. Janet Fox, ed. Monthly from 519 Ellinwood,
Osage City, Kansas, 66523-1329 for $8/yr. Small press market
reports.

Short Form #2. Orson Scott Card, Ed. Quarterly from Hatrack River
Publications, P.O. Box 18184, Greensboro, NC 27419-8184.
$9.00/1, $20.00/4. Short fiction reviewzine, also includes the
Green Pages, full of strange stuff.

South Pacific Penguin #1. Lon Levy, P.O. Box 1505, Milwaukee, WI,
53201-1505. Perzine, available for the regular.

Stigmata Junction. Poetry Chapbook by Thomas Wiloch, available for
$3.00 from Thomas Wiloch, <address deleted by request>.

Take Your Fanac Anywhere #1. Andrew Hooper, ed. from Drag Bunt Press,
214 Brearly St., Madison, WI 53703. Fanzine of trip reports
supporting the TAFF bid of Pam Wells.

The Texas SF Enquirer #22. Pat Mueller, ed. Irregular from Box 9612,
Austin, Texas, 78766.

Thrust #29. Douglas Fratz, ed. $2.50 from 8217 Langport Terrace,
Gaithersburg, Md. 20877. Semi-pro review magazine.

Twilight Zine #39, Janice Eisen, Ed. Mitsfs, room W20-473, 84
Masachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA, 02139.

Velocities #5. Bruce Boston, ed. From Box 5293, Berkeley, CA 94705.
Speculative poetry magazine, $3.50.

Weird Tales, Spring 1988. Terminus Publishing, Box 13418, Philadelphia,
PA, 19101-3418. Quarterly, $18/six issues. Latest incarnation
of the pulp magazine, edited by George Scithers, Darrell
Schweitzer and John Betancourt. This issue is a Gene Wolfe
special issue, with about half the material by or about the
author.

YHOS #42. Art Widner, Ed. Irregular from 231 Courtney Land, Orinda, CA
94563 for the regular.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 6)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 6

Northshore
The Awakeners, Volume 1

Sheri S. Tepper
St. Martin's Press, March, 1987

Reviewed by
Barbara Jernigan
Copyright 1988 by Barbara Jernigan

A favorite Russian toy is a palm-sized, brightly painted, babushka (old woman). The better examples have intricate detailing, almost concealing the seam around the waist. What? She comes apart! The toy opens to reveal another babushka, as brightly-painted as the first. She, too, has a seam; she, too, conceals another babushka, who conceals another babushka, who conceals....

Sheri Tepper's Northshore is like that Russian toy. Each chapter is carefully wrought, full of detail describing the land, then the peoples, then the cultures, then the reasons behind the cultures, then the reasons behind the reasons... of a place called Northshore. But more, each chapter opens another layer, revealing a new complexity underneath. Like the Russian toy, the reader thinks, "Ha. This must be the innermost layer, there can't possibly be more." Yet each succeeding chapter shows that there is more. And more. And more. Until -- But that would be cheating.

For me, however, there aren't many books that I would recommend without hesitation that you purchase in hardbound. This is one of those few -- though I should admit one minor drawback: this is Volume I of a duology. If you can't stand lengthy suspense -- though Northshore ends, while leaving a sense of impending action, is not a cliffhanger -- wait for Volume II (Southshore: The Awakeners), which the coverslip of Northshore promises is "soon to be released."

Northshore is a complex read. Nearly every word, and certainly every image and concept, seems to matter, every brushstroke counts. It is a well thought out book, from the landscape to the food chain, to the inhabitants' cultures and beyond, and all fascinating. The world turns under three moons, which are physical manefestations of the three reigning gods. It is equatorially split by "the World River," almost a deity in its own right, an ocean-wide tidal current that follows the moons. The events of Northshore, unsurprisingly, take place on the northern shore of the River; "Southshore" is a mythical place, none in memory have attempted to traverse the River.

Two known sentient species dwell on Northshore (there is much to Northshore that does not meet the eye): humans, and the birdlike Thraish. Each species' culture is highly stratified, particularly the humans', which ranges from the Rivermen, tradesmen whose tide propelled boats ply the seven-year world circuit, to the Noor, darkskinned clans that inhabit the steppes to the north. And then there is Northshore itself, with its Awakeners and frag powder merchants, its oracular Jarb Mendicants and blue-faced priests of Potipur, glittering with sacred mirrors. Northshore, with its processions of black Melancholics, flailing away at the citizens with their fishskin whips and given good metal coin to do it. Northshore, with its puncon orchards and frag groves and wide fields of white-podded pamet and blue-tasseled grain. And Northshore's River edge, where lean forms of stalking Laughers, tight-helmed in black, announce their approach with cries of scornful laughter, ha-ha, ha-ha, making the heretics run for cover. Echoing the Laughers, stilt-lizards hoot through their horny lips, scattering the song-fish from around their reedlike legs only to snatch them up one by one to gulp them down headfirst. Ha-ha ha-ha. Northshore is a mood piece, and the mood is a dark one. The land-dwellers live in enforced ignorance, praying to be "Sorted Out" at their deaths. Those not sorted become workers, zombies who slave under the piercing gazes and mirrored staves of the Awakeners, until their bodies no longer hold together, and they become meals for the Thraish. This you discover within the first chapter.

The rest of the book progresses from this, moving deeper into the reasons that make Northshore what it is -- and into the currents of change that are building, even as the tides surge at the Conjunction of the three moons. Although there is quite a lot of action, Northshore, in retrospect, has the feel of a setting-up for the events of the next book, much akin to the first third of a Masters' chess game. Like the the nested babushkas, Northshore is an intriguing puzzle of uncovering. Tepper's images are so evocative and so carefully crafted, it matters little that it is only a first piece. Only! This is a book that may well aspire to the literary heights of this and any genre. Northshore is a book to be savored; to quote the Independent Press blurb on the slipcover, "Step into Tepper's world...then try stepping out of it." What lies at the center of Tepper's babushka puzzle may be the ultimate emptiness, or it may be a wondrous revelation yet unguessed. It will be an impatient wait for the second and concluding volume.

Behind the Scenes

Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future

African Genesis

by

Mike Resnick

Copyright 1988 by Mike Resnick

Chuq has sent out a call for some Where-Do-You-Get-Those-Crazy-Ideas articles, and since the genesis of my forthcoming novel, Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future, is still fresh and clear in my mind, I thought I would take him up on it.

Back in 1983 or 1984, while I was researching something quite different about Africa, I came across a mention of an animal known only as the Kilimanjaro Elephant. It was an evocative name that seemed to have a mythic quality to it, so I began finding out what I could about this elephant -- and what I found fascinated me.

In the Roland Ward Book of Big Game Records, the top 200 trophy animals of every African species are listed. Usually the difference between the Number One and Number Twenty animal is half an inch, or a quarter of a pound. Not so with the Kilimanjaro Elephant: his tusks weighed 237 and 225 pounds, and no other tusk in history ever went over 190 pounds. He was a monster among his own kind.

There was more, too -- or, rather, curiously less. With almost every other animal in the book, they know the date it was killed, who shot it, what kind of bullet was used, where it was shot, who the guide or white hunter was, what the animal's measurements were. Not so the Kilimanjaro Elephant: they think, but do not know, that he was killed on the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro; they suspect, but do not know, that he was killed in 1898; they surmise, but do not know, that he was killed by an escaped slave. And that constitutes everything that is known about him.

Well, everything prior to his death, anyway. His ivory turned up for auction at Zanzinbar in 1898. One tusk, the larger one, was bought by an American, who was to pick it up at Cairo. It was shipped north with a slave caravan, but the caravan was raided, and the tusk disappeared for 12 years, finally turning up in Brussels. The other tusk went to Belgium, then India, and ultimately England. Finally the British Museum of Natural History bought the pair of them in 1932, and after an attempt was made to steal them in 1937, they were taken off exhibit and stored away in a vault beneath the museum, where they still reside. I wrote to the curator for permission to examine them, and finally got to see them in May of 1985. They are magnificent, each going more than ten feet long and two feet in circumference at the base.

I began tracing every reference I could find in my voluminous African collection, and finally plotted out a mainstream novel, which would follow the Kilimanjaro Elephant for the last month of his life, and then follow the ivory on an entirely fictitious journey until it wound up in the British Museum.

I called Eleanor Wood, my agent, bubbling with enthusiasm about the story. She listened politely, then told me that if I did a bang-up job on it, she might be able to get me as much as I could get for a short story from Omni. Whereas, she continued, if I would remember that I am supposed to be a science fiction writer and that that's where my audience is, and if I would follow the ivory not just to England but into space, and not just for a period of 34 years but of five or six millennia, she could get me 30 or 40 times as much as a short story for Omni.

A word to the wise was sufficient, and I began expanding the scope of the book -- and suddenly realized that I could tell a much more powerful tale with this approach. I created two framing devices, a future researcher for the 65th-Century equivalent of Rowland Ward, and the spirit of the Kilimanjaro Elephant himself, and each told alternating sections of the book. The main novel, about 60,000 words, was a straight-line narrative by the researcher. But as he keeps searching for the ivory, the story segues into about a dozen incidents, perhaps 90,000 words total, in which the tusks appear at various times and places -- as stakes in a poker game, as objects of alien religious rites, as pawns in a scholarly battle between paleontologists, and so forth. I told these tales of the ivory non-sequentially for reasons that I hope are clear to the reader.

This approach allowed me to write about the foibles and nobilities of Man, which is the business of every writer, rather than some silly hide-and-seek adventure about a pair of elephant tusks, and the main continuing story allowed me to enlist the metaphysical as well as the factual in assessing the human condition.

Since a couple of the stories occurred during the elephant's lifetime, all that remained was to take a safari to Kenya in 1986 and retrace his steps on his last journey from the Tana River to the slopes of Kilimanjaro, which I did -- and which I also wrote up and sold as a factual article for Swara, the journal of the East African Wildlife Society.

Then it was just a matter of sitting down and writing Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future, which took about 5 months. I think the hardest part was creating differing technologies and backgrounds -- none of them important to the plot, but all important to the versimillitude of the story -- for a dozen different future eras. The two pre-publication reviews it has received thus far claim that it is my best novel to date, and I have no argument with that assessment. When it is published by Tor this summer, it will not only have a jacket by Michael Whelan, but will also feature the only known photograph of the Kilimanjaro Elephant's tusks -- quite possibly the first time in history that a fiction book featured a frontspiece displaying its non-fictional source.

Voice of the Whirlwind

Walter Jon Williams
Tor Books, $16.95
[***]

Reviewed by
Danny Low
Copyright 1988 by Danny Low

The story begins after the death of the hero, Etienne Njagi Stewart. Fifteen years ago, Stewart bought clone insurance, so when he died, he was resurrected. The problem is that Stewart never updated his memory wire during the intervening 15 years and the new Stewart has no idea what he did during those 15 years. What little he discovers about his old self all indicated that the old Stewart was engaged in questionable activities and died under suspicious circumstances. The old Stewart was also clearly rather psychotic. The 15 year lapse gives Stewart a chance to start anew but certain events makes him believe that what he does not know about those missing years could result in his death again and it could permanent this time.

What follows next cannot be told. The book is a well enough crafted mystery that it is very difficult to tell much about what happens without giving away clues. Williams has written a proper mystery. There are clues throughout the book at the appropriate places so the reader can figure out the mystery. The only flaw in the mystery is that an experienced mystery reader can figure out exactly what is going on about 2/3 of the way into the story if not sooner. There is no real attempt to disguise the fact that the plot is a rather old and well used one.

The book could be best described as cyberpunk as it might have been written by Keith Laumer. Williams style is very similar to that of Roger Zelazny but Williams' heros, while they appear to be typical Zelazny style heros, have a heroic quality about them that is reminiscent of a Keith Laumer super hero. Both Laumer and Zelazny create very similar super heros. Laumer's heros are basically pure (often to the point of being rather stupid) and are heroic as a consequence whereas Zelazny's heros have a veneer of fake cynicism that make them unheroic. Laumer's heros do right because that's what a man gotta do whereas Zelazny's heros do right because of sentiment. Williams blends the two styles creating heros that have a fake layer of cynicism but do right both because they are sentimental and because they are heroic. It is an interesting blend that Williams has been developing in his previous books and has perfected in this book. It is a sufficiently different style that it can now be called the Williams style.

The whole book is very derivative. This is not necessarily bad. Originality sometimes mean you have found something new that you do not like. The book is well crafted and is good basic entertainment. It is a very well done example of action escapist SF.

Songmaster

Orson Scott Card

Dell books, 1980, 338pp, $2.875
[Also re-issued by Tor books]

Reviewed by
Kevin Anderson
kanders@lll-ncis.ARPA
Copyright 1988 by Kevin Anderson

This review was written seven years ago when Songmaster first came out in paperback. As you will be able to tell, I loved the book, and was annoyed at the publishing vagaries that have kept it out of print for so long. Now the novel is once again available and worth looking for.

How can anyone describe the feeling a reader gets the first time he reads Dune, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant -- and knows, with certainty, that this is one of the best books he has ever read. And then you read countless other books, searching for the same feeling. And then, finally, you stumble upon Songmaster by Orson Scott Card.

This novel grew from Card's novelette "Mikal's Songbird," which was the runner-up for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and winner of the Analog Reader's Poll for "Best Novelette of the Year." The novel has terrifying potential (which is fully realized) and a fascinating idea -- the author has a damn good story to tell, and he knows it, and so does the reader as soon as he starts to read. Ansset is a singer, a special singer with a phenomenal power in his voice that can make people helpless before the naked emotion in his songs.

But then he changed his song. Still without words, he began telling them of the sweating cooks in the kitchen, of the loaders, of the dentist, of the shabbiness behind the buildings. He made them understand the ache of weariness, the pain of serving the ungrateful. And at last he sang of the old woman, sang her laugh, sang her loneliness and her trust, and sang her death, the cold embalming on the shining table. It was agony, and the audience wept and screamed and fled the hall, those who could control themselves enough to stand.

And then Ansset becomes the special Songbird to Mikal, the Emperor of the Galaxy; and they learn to love each other.

It was a soft song, and it was short, but at the end of it
Mikal was lying on his back looking at the ceiling. Tears
streamed out from his eyes.

"I didn't mean the song to be sad. I was rejoicing," Ansset said.

"So am I." But an Emperor has many enemies, and Ansset loses almost all of the people he loves...before he learns to use his voice as a weapon.

This is a book you'll want to read slowly, merely to enjoy. Words don't make up this novel -- they are quanta of sheer joy, pure horror, rending sorrow, absolute ecstasy in reading with an intensity I have felt only one or two times before. I could quote paragraphs and pages of writing brilliance, hoping to convince others to rejoice as I have done. Songmaster is the best I've yet seen from the best new author I've yet seen. Card should win every award in every field of literature for this masterpiece. Orson Scott Card is a Wordmaster.

I still recall this book as one of the best I've ever read. Without having reread it, I cannot say whether it is better than the magnificent Speaker for the Dead, but it is certainly something that should be on your Must Read list. I believe poor distribution and poor publicity was, in part, at fault for Songmaster not winning any awards in 1980. But the book deserves your attention now.

Soldiers of Paradise

Paul Park

Arbor House, 1987, 280pp, $17.95
0-87795-861-0

Reviewed by
Neal Wilgus
Copyright 1988 by Neal Wilgus

If War and Peace had been written by Aldous Huxley, Frank Herbert and Conan the Barbarian the result might have been Soldiers of Paradise. Paul Park's new novel of the far future resembles Tolstoy's masterpiece in that it paints a broad picture of human behavior during times of drastic change, and in the use of maverick aristocrats as main characters. But Park's ironic satire is closer to Huxley than Tolstoy, while his bizarre landscapes and weird cults are comparable to Herbert -- and only Conan could truly comprehend Park's unique creatures called Antinomials.

The times that are a-changin' in Paradise are seasonal -- for on this much changed future Earth the months are thousands of days long and a full turn of the seasons will cover a generation or more. The story opens in the last phases of winter and progresses, slowly, into early spring -- a time of upheaval, fire and flood, and the dreaded but life-giving sugar rain. The war that has been raging for the past year (i.e., generation) is not going well and the strange religion of the land -- worship of a phallic dog-like god name Angkhdt -- is also caught in revolution.

The aristocrats of Paradise are the Starbridges -- a family of the rich, the royal and the righteous which has dominated the rest of the population for so long that even when the Starbridges fight each other the masses only shrug and go along. (Sound familiar?) But it's the maverick Starbridges -- Abu and Thanakar -- who are the most interesting and who are the main characters in this complex social comedy and haunting fantasy. Both of these Starbridges are misfits who have escaped the responsibilities that accompany their names -- Abu because he's a fool and a drunk and a poet, Thanakar because of his crippled leg which disqualifies him for any of the serious roles the Starbridges must perform.

And then there are the Antinomials -- a bizarre subset of the human race (maybe) that has grown so disgusted with civilization that they have abandoned all thought and "normal" communication, living only from moment to moment, substituting their music for speech, moving further and further from Starbridge culture with each generation. Justifiably, perhaps, since that culture is our own unjust and straightjacketed culture taken to even more ridiculous lengths -- with super rich and super poor, each restricted and distorted by cruel and unusual behavior codes carried to illogical extremes. And it is with the super poor and the Antinomials that Abu and Thanakar hobnob from time to time, adding spice and dimension to a story already rich in invention, insights and madness.

Paul Park is described on the dustjacket as a resident of Manhattan who cast off his corporate chains and took a trip around the world -- ad who still has no fixed address. Be warned that Soldiers of Paradise is the first volume of the Starbridge Chronicles and that the sequel, Sugar Rain, has already been completed. For that reason Paradise ends with many loose ends dangling, but in this case I didn't mind at all.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

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35111-F Newark Blvd.
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Newark, CA 94560.

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Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 7)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 7

Pico Reviews, Part 1

The Alexandrian Ring Book One of the Gamester Wars
        William R. Forstche     [**]
        Ballantine Books 295 Pg. $3.50

Despite the subtitle, the story is completed in this book with only a vague hint as to the next story. The story, the background universe, the culture and the characters are all very familiar. An experience reader can even predict the ending. Betting on the outcome of wars is a favorite past time of the Kohs (or nobles) of the Magellanic Cloud. One, Corbin Gablona, plans the ultimate war. Alexander the Great will be brought up from the past and set down on a ringworld populated by retrograde Humans and Gavarians. Alexander's Gavarian equivalent, Kubar Taug, will also be brought back from the past and set down on the ringworld as well. The resulting war between the Humans and Gavarians turns out to be very popular. Every Koh in the Cloud becomes involved in the betting. Gablona, of course, has plans to rig the game.

Despite its unoriginality, this novel has several good points. The
story is well told. The description of the war between Alexander and
Kubar has a realistic appearance. The main strength of the story is the
characterization. The characters are stereotypical for the most part
but they are well drawn stereotypes. The character of Alexander is very
well drawn. One could feel the charisma of the man and believe this is
what the real Alexander was like. On the whole, this book could be
described as entertaining journeyman quality SF.
-- Danny Low
hpccc!dlow

The Architects of Hyperspace    Thomas R. McDonough      [*]
        Avon Books 265 Pg. $2.95

The story is a journey of wonders. The wonders encountered are suitably wonderful but everything else about this book is rather bad. The worst is the characterization. The characters are all one dimensional cliches. The love relationship is infantile. All the main characters act far too stupid and childish to be believable. The most plausible characters are the minor characters. They act like reasonable adults instead of spoiled retarded children. Amazingly, even the motivation for the journey is handled poorly. A journey of wonder story has a very simple plot. A group goes to a strange place, wander around for a while and has many glorious adventures while seeing many wonderful sights. The only thing that the writer has to supply is a motivation for the characters to want to do all this since the journey can also be very dangerous.

The main character, Ariadne Zepos, has a perfect motivation. She wants to find her long lost father but the author does not use this very valid motivation well. Instead, some flimsy excuse about scientific exploration is given. Since the first expedition, which was far better equipped, all died leaving almost no indication of what had happened, the logical thing to do was come back with a full scale expedition that is much better prepared than Ariadne's ragtag expedition.

Long past the point when the expedition should have stopped, she continues on ranting about the scientific wonders that still need to be explored. Eventually it is revealed that her desire to find her father was her real motivation but that was the whole reason Ariadne undertook the expedition in the first place and everyone knew it. This is very bad handling of the motivation. The book does punch the right sense of wonder buttons and if this were the 1930's, it would be a good book but this is the 1980's and an SF book today must also meet minimum standards of literature. This book does not do that.

-- Danny Low

Armor   by John Steakley        [**]
        DAW #605, 1984, $3.95 426 pgs., 0-87997-979-8

John Steakley tries a difficult maneuver in Armor and only partially succeeds in pulling it off. Steakley shifts from a point-of-view and world in which he's invested 93 pages establishing to a completely new group of characters and a new setting for the remainder of the novel. It's a jarring transition for the reader, and seriously hurts what is otherwise a good book. The initial plot deals with a mechanized suit of combat armor and its user, who is up against an implacable, ant-like enemy. Since this sounds evocative of Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers, I'll note that Armor focuses much more than Heinlein's book upon the effect which the "boredom punctuated with moments of total fear" that is warfare has upon the psyche. The remainder of Armor details the discovery of the suit - sans owner - on a colony planet. The story stalls at this point and never really regains its feet. With all its flaws, Armor is still worth picking up if you're interested in "combat" science fiction. My thanks to OtherRealms columnist Alan Wexelblat for sending me a copy of Armor.

-- Fred Bals

Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials
        Wayne Barlowe, Ian Summers, Beth Meacham        [****]
        Workman Publishing, $10.95, 0-89480-324-7

Back in print at last, Wayne Barlowe's book of illustrations of classic SF characters. If you've ever wondered what a Mesklinite or a Puppeteer looked like (or how your view of it differs from other people's) this book is for you. Well worth looking for.

-- chuq von rospach

A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro [**]
Berkley, 1986, 243pp, $3.50

This book was a disappointment. The idea is fun - a fantasy of a prince
capturing a dragon, a witch's enchantments and rival kingdoms,
presented as a musical comedy. Characters break into song, music
provided, at every opportunity. But where it should have been light and
spritely, the story plods along and seems to take forever to get
anywhere (though that may be my own fault, since I was reading it right
after finishing The Princess Bride). The lyrics are fine to read as
poetry, but don't rhythmically fit the music, strong syllables are
always falling on weak beats. This probably won't bother a
non-musician, but a main reason I picked up the book was because it
included the music to "sing along" with the songs.
-- Mary Anne Espenshade
mae@aplvax.jhuapl.edu

Crazy Time      by Kate Wilhelm [****]
        St. Martin's Press, 1988, $16.95 248 pgs., 0-312-01411-2

If you enjoy the great screwball comedies of Hollywood's Golden Age -- movies such as "Bringing Up Baby," "Here Comes Mr. Jordan," and "Topper" -- you're going to love Crazy Time. In fact, Kate Wilhelm's latest novel would make an excellent screenplay itself. Crazy Time has all the right elements in just the right mix. There's the shy, straightlaced, and career-oriented main character, Lauren Steele, a psychologist working in Seattle. There's the male lead, "Corky" Corcoran, who fixates on Lauren and disrupts her life after being turned into a ghostly figure by the accidental misfiring of an experimental laser. There's a frothy story that careens happily along to a satisfying ending. And like all good screwball comedies, there's a quirky group of supporting players in Crazy Time -- most notably Col. T.H. "Trigger Happy" Musselman, a Cold War holdover who is convinced that Lauren and Corky are "Commies." A welcome departure from the bleak worlds and grim antiheros currently popular in science fiction, Crazy Time is highly recommended. Don't wait for the paperback. Buy it now.

-- Fred Bals

The Crown Jewels        Walter Jon Williams     [**]
        Tor Books 247Pg. $3.50

This book is intended to be a wry witty comedy of manners. While it will not go down in history as a classic, it did invoke some chuckles and outright laughs. Drake Majistral is an Allowed Burglar. He is allowed to steal but only with style. In addition to the money he makes from his thefts, Majistral also sells the videos of his exploits to the media. While in Peleng City for a routine business trip, he takes a commission to steal an object for someone. Like the Maltese Falcon, the object is not what it appears and there are a lot of people who want it very badly and are willing to kill for it. Complicating matters for Majistral is the fact that his two assistants have bias towards the two main contenders for the object. The only serious problem with the novel is that Williams tries to present certain scenes using a cinemagraphic technique that he does not translate well into words and as a result, it is very difficult to keep track of what is going on. These are the dance scenes. On the whole, I was amused.

-- Danny Low

The Doomsday Effect     Thomas Wren     [***]
        Baen Books, $2.95, 288pp

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a gurgle- swoosh as a runaway micro-black-hole vacuums up Earth's interior until the planet collapses. Such at least is the fateful prediction of Ariel Ceram, UC Berkeley seismologist, and Grace Porter, chief troubleshooter of a San Francisco robotics company, as they work back from a dramatic aerial incident and a major quake. World ends in seven years: film at eleven. In fact, they have difficulty convincing either the news media or the government, who elect to play ostrich in the hope that time will prove the boffins wrong. A mere problem without a solution has little dramatic credibility, however, and so the two women head up a self-appointed task force to brainstorm for an answer, however difficult the execution might be.

Here is SF in the Campbell tradition: take a scientific fact or theory and extrapolate an extreme situation. It seems to me I've seen this basic idea before, but Write does a creditable job with it. Fans of Clement should enjoy this book. The characters are reasonably well done, though occasionally they do implausibly dumb things. The plotting is as solid as one would expect of the hi-tech tradition, and the level of writing is acceptable. Those who like their SF straight up will probably find this book worth their time.

-- David M. Shea

Dragon's Gold   by Piers Anthony and Robert E. Margroff [***]

Although perhaps not a major new fantasy event, as the cover claims, this story is an amusing and entertaining journey into an extremely simplified setting. Anthony and Margroff provide an easy to grasp background by eliminating any extraneous detail. While this runs the risk of supplying too little information, or detracting from realism, the authors have, in this case, done an admirable job.

The story concerns the travails of Kelvin Knight Hackleberry and his sister Jon. They strive to free their land from the personification of evil, fulfilling their destiny in the process (Kelvin's in any case).

Characterization in this book is clear, if somewhat less than three dimensional. While this falls short of the ideal, the authors have not allowed the simplicity of the characters to prevent them from undergoing growth and change as the story progresses.

The pace of the story is quite rapid. In fact, it is sufficiently rapid that it obscures what would otherwise be significant flaws. There is a prophecy so clear that a child could understand it. A magician of obvious power who is strangely impotent until it's too late. There is a healthy (unhealthy?) heaping of gratuitous coincidence (i.e. why, out of all the people in the world does Jon run into old acquaintances and their families just when she needs their help?). Fortunately, the plot moves along fast enough that the reader probably won't care.

I recommend this book to younger readers particularly, and to anyone
not looking for deep philosophical content. An excellent way to kill an
afternoon.
-- Peter Rubenstein
ceo!WALLY!Peter_Rubinstein

Faces   Leigh Kennedy   [***]
        Atlantic Monthly Press,, $15.95, ISBN 0-87113-140-4

It's hard to know what to say about Faces, a collection of short stories by Leigh Kennedy. Some are fantasy, some are soft science fiction, others are mainstream. In all of the stories, the focus is on the writing and the characterization, rather than on the plot. Most of the plots are, in fact, rather weak, sometimes leaving issues unresolved and often (in the non- mainstream stories) leaving mechanisms unexplained as well. As such, the stories are somewhat unsatisfying to one who reads primarily science fiction.

It is not fair, though, to judge the stories only by this metric; they were not intended to compete with, say, Pournelle's or Niven's works. Instead, or in addition, we should ask how well Kennedy succeeds at her chosen task. Here the answer is more positive. The stories are carefully constructed, with artfully-drawn characters. Not that the characters are admirable -- most aren't -- or even particularly normal; still, they are realistic and believable. Kennedy takes us into the heart of a child abuser, lets us follow a left-over hippie as he visits old friends, and shows us a scientist who relates better to his work than to his lover. All of these portrayals ring true. To be sure, the writing isn't on a par with, say, Atwood's (I commend her recent book The Handmaid's Tale to all, though the ending is a cop-out), but it's still a cut above most genre fiction.

The stories in general are about love or failure to love. That is, the actions of the protagonists turn on their love, or lack of love, for others. This is especially apparent in a pair of linked stories, about a child abuser and a childless couple.

Faces is generally worth reading if you care about art more than
artifacts; hard SF fans are likely to be disappointed. For those who
are concerned with her credentials, several of the stories originally
appeared in IASFM. One caveat -- the hard-cover price is rather steep
for 152 pages.
-- Steve Bellovin
ulysses!smb

Fever Dream     Ray Bradbury    [***-]
        St. Martin's/Night Lights, 31pp, $6.95, 0-312-57285-9

This is one of the first books in a new childrens series of story books that glow in the dark. This one contains an 1948 story by Bradbury illustrated by Darrell Anderson. It'd make a great gift for a youngster, although I think the material is too intense for the very young (which I would view as the most likely to be interested in a glow in the dark book).

-- chuq von rospach

First Flight    by Chris Claremont      [****]
        Ace, December 1987, $2.95 243 pgs., 0-441-23584-0

An exceptional first novel by the writer of the X-Men comic book
(Claremont notes his various mutant characters as "paying the rent" in
his acknowledgments and makes a continuing in-joke reference to the
comic in First Flight). A strong "coming-of-age" plot, a remarkably
real female protagonist and very well-handled attention to
technological detail makes the early half of First Flight reminiscent
of early Heinlein. Unfortunately, the deus ex machina introduction of
aliens in the latter section side-tracks First Flight into a weak
conclusion. Still, First Flight is one hell of a first flight into
science fiction by anyone's standards, and should be a Hugo contender.
I'm eagerly looking forward to Claremont's next book. Recommended.
-- Fred Bals
bals@nutmeg.dec.com

Flowers for Algernon    by Daniel Keyes [*****]
        1966 Gollancz Classic SF $7.95 Australian

Flowers for Algernon is a poignantly beautiful book about Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded adult who desperately wants to be smart. Algernon is a mouse which has had its intelligence tripled by an operation which the doctors try on Charlie. The book consists of the "progris reperts" that Charlie makes during his transition from the subnormal to the exceptionally gifted and then his terrifying descent back to his original state.

In Flowers for Algernon, Keyes highlights the cruelty and ignorance in the way society deals with the mentally retarded and the callousness of the scientific community towards its experimental subjects. He makes the reader view the world from a completely different perspective. The way in which Charlie's writing style changes with his intelligence absorbs the reader, His simple desire to become smart, his bewilderment with the world around him; "And the other ten times we did it [the maze] over Algernon won evry time becuse I coudnt find the right rows to get to where it says FINISH. ... I dint know mice were so smart"

After finishing Flowers for Algernon I locked myself in the bathroom
and wept for 15 minutes. It left me feeling incredibly sad, yet it gave
me a sense of hope and faith in humanity, that in spite of everything
there are still people who dedicate themselves to those who have less.
In many ways this book is similar to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in its
gentle handling of the retarded and its moving portrayal of mankind.
-- Sue McPherson
sue@murdu.mu.oz

Frame of Reference      Jerry Oltion    [**]
        Questar, $3.50

It's going to be difficult to review this book without blowing its simple plot wide open but lets take a shot. The author has begun by taking two old chestnuts of plots, and by melding them together has produces a curious by viable hybrid which avoids the worst features of both; though by no stretch of the imagination could this book be called original.the models seemed to have been the Heinlein juveniles strongly leavened with V and a dash of David Palmer's Emergence, though the book of which it most reminded me was Tom Monteleone's The Time Connection.

LeAnne and Donivan, a couple of troublemaking kids, get exiled from the Starchile, which has been their people's home for many generations; the phrase "a thousand years" gets bandied about rather often. Instead of remaining crew, they are set by the ships computer to explore a world unknown to anyone on the ship. To this task they bring considerable enthusiasm, if a lamentable lack of talent; their attempting to light a campfire, and their eventual solution make for hilarious reading. In due course, however, they find that the world they wish to colonize has already been settled by an alien race. from that point on the author spins a routine but moderately lively first contact, good-alien/bad-alien story. There are the usual clangingly obvious coincidences needed to resolve the plot which one expects in a first novel, but on the whole the author succeeds well enough to justify a modest pat on the back. This book will not challenge your imagination, but it's sufficiently engaging as to be worth reading for a few hours light entertainment.

-- David M. Shea

A Hidden Place  Robert Charles Wilson   [**]
        Bantam/Spectra, $2.95, 212pp

This book made the final ballot for the Comton Crook award, given for the best first novel in SF. It's not surprising that some people might like the book very much. As a piece of writing, it is excellently done. The author's evocation of a Thirties/Midwest/Depression small town is lovingly, painstakingly hand-crafted in exquisite detail. Though the style is not at all reminiscent of Delany, one gets that same feeling of each individual word having been carefully selected and delicately fitted into place. On those few occasions where word choices are obviously incorrect it stands out conspicuously.

The problems with the book are subtle but real. In the first place, the solitary SF/Fantasy element which is its only claim to being a genre book is an old and familiar one; "cliche" is a harsh but not unfair term. Once one pins down this element, which is fairly early on, it is apparent that there is only one possible direction in which the story can go. It is also a very small story, in terms of content: basically this is just not a novel-length idea The net result is an exquisitely crafted, baroque little miniature, swaddled in an excess of superbly chosen but essentially superfluous detail. This would have made a very nice novella, or possibly a decent mundane historical; as a Science Fiction novel it struggles against, and ultimately fails by means of, its essential smallness.

-- David M Shea

The Ice King of Oz      Eric Shanower   [****]
        A First Graphic Novel, $7.95, 0-915419-25-4

Shanower has taken on an impressive task. To put together new Oz stories and draw them into a graphic novel format; to be true to the original Oz stories while keeping the stories fresh and interesting. He's doing a wonderful job at it, too, writing what are to me the best Oz stories since Baum's originals. The Ice King of Oz is no exception. A few glitches in the plot don't matter (besides, the originals were full of them, and it didn't stop us from enjoying them....) -- this is pure, wonderful Oz. These are original graphic novels, not collections of comics; and this series, more than anything else being published in the GN format, shows what you can do with the format when you really care about your material. Highly recommended.

-- chuq von rospach

Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories #17 (1955)   [****]
        edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg
        DAW, January, 1988, 349pp, $3.95, 0-88677-256-7

The latest in the series of anthologies that prints the classic works of yesteryear. For someone looking for older, hard to find stories, these are gems. This collection is especially strong and includes two of my favorite stories of all time, Walter Miller's 'The Darfsteller' and Cordwainer Smith's 'The Game of Rat and Dragon'.

-- chuq von rospach

Killashandra    by Anne McCaffrey       [*****]
        Del Rey, 1985, 373pp, $4.50

Once I started reading this novel, I couldn't put it down. Sent to install white crystal to replace part of a damaged organ in time for the Summer Music Festival on Optheria, Killashandra Ree, Crystal Singer, lands in another adventure. What is the Optherian government hiding, why do they discourage all music other than their great organs and why doesn't any native ever leave their 'natural' world? The unofficial reason for Killashandra's visit is to find the answers. SF with music and mystery thrown in.

-- Mary Anne Espenshade

Lord of the Crooked Paths       Patrick H. Adkins       [*]
        Ace Fantasy Special, 1987, $2.95, 216pp

It is a Fantasy writer's perogative to draw on the classical mythologies for source material. The best known, lying as they do at the heart of our cultural heritage, are the Greek Myths, mined for 3,000 years of poets, storytellers and scholars. Charles Sheffield has rightly remarked that the first and greatest of these was wise enough to write the Oddysey only once.

Possibly there is room for another re-telling of the myth of Cronos (or as Adkins would have it, Kronos). However, I'd frankly prefer to see it in more secure hands. It is obvious the author is familiar with the source material, and I'm not rabid purist enough to quibble over some of the modifications he's introduced. The problem here is that Mr Adkins is, to put it kindly, no Homer. His prose tends to the "and then he did this and then she said that" school; and when he puts into the mouths of the gods such leaden American dialogue as "I guess so", "Are you just going to sit there?", and "I didn't sleep half the night", the mind croggles. Unfortunately, this is not quite consistent enough to render the book readable as a camp farce; the author is earnestly, nay deadly, serious. Alas, Adkins' good intentions overrun his narrative skills. Unless you're a Greek myth completist, I suggest you give this book a pass.

-- David M Shea

Mage: The Hero Discovered, Volume 2     Matt Wagner     [****]
        Starblaze Graphic Novel, $12.95, 0-89865-560-9

Wagner and Starblaze continue the collection of the classic comic book Mage (to be completed later this year in Volume 3). It's a great story, the biggest gripe I have is that the volumes break at issue endings, so they aren't standalone -- you better plan on buying all three volumes if you want any of this to make sense. Fortunately, this is a story that you'll want to have, so plan on buying the third volume when it comes out.

-- chuq von rospach

Marlborough Street      by Richard Bowker       [***]
        Bantam Spectra, March 1988, $3.95, 232 pgs., 0-553-27167-9

The first paperback release of a novel originally published in early 1987, Marlborough Street is a well-handled crossover between the science fiction and mystery genres. Fans of either will find it an enjoyable read, fans of both will find it an excellent example of this rapidly growing cross- genre. Billed as a "novel of psychic detection," Marlborough Street concerns itself with Alan Simpson, a psychic who is also something of a nebbish. In coming to terms with his "gift," Simpson has erected barricades around his life and emotions, neutral to almost everything happening in his world except the travails of the Boston Red Sox. Asked to locate the kidnapped son of Boston's mayor, Simpson is shocked out of his complacency by his involvement with a woman under the control of a person whose psychic talents may exceed Simpson's own. Bowker has a strong talent for creating characters and a sense of place. The scenes taking place in Boston's Back Bay are especially striking - comparable to mystery author Robert Parker's Spenser series. And readers who have lived on both Coasts will also find Bowker's comparison of the Los Angeles and Boston lifestyles amusing and right on target. Recommended.

-- Fred Bals

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 8)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 8

Pico Reviews, Part 2

Masterplay      William F. Wu   [**+]
        Popular Library, $2.95, 0-445-20504-0

Masterplay, I'm afraid, is evidence that doing one's homework is not enough. The basic idea is simple: some court cases are decided by a computer-mediated wargame between two master gamers. (Wu constantly italicized that phrase, which grated on my nerves a bit.) Unfortunately, I find the concept quite unbelievable. Nor is Wu's justification -- that this is a reasonable thing to do when technology has outstripped statutes and case law, so why not (in effect) flip a coin -- acceptable, either. Worse yet, debate on this point is central to the plot, but there's never any evidence that enough people could like the idea for the system to get started.

The wargames are always re-enactments of famous battles in history, ranging from Richard III's defeat at Bosworth Field to the battle of Kadesh about 3000 years ago. The gamers take the part of the opposing generals and try to win the battle. Here is where Wu's homework shows; he clearly knows the battles he presents, and understands enough about tactics and strategy to discuss variations. (Many science fiction authors don't do nearly as well; Gordon Dickson comes to mind.) In passing, Wu subtly reminds us that not all of the great generals and great battles were Western; a number of Asian and African examples are presented as well, though generally not in as much detail. (These subtle reminders about cultural biases are present throughout the book. The two main characters are of Chinese ancestry, for example, though there is little or no use made of their cultural background.)

The writing quality is generally acceptable, though there is one oddity. Periodically, we are presented with some minor detail in a totally obtrusive fashion. It is all well and good to be told that the videophone in the gym has a small, recessed screen, for safety reasons; the way we are told, however, totally breaks the flow of the narrative.

-- Steve Bellovin

Memory Blank    by John E. Stith        [*]
        Ace, January 1986 $2.95, 230 pgs. 0-441-52417-6

Cal Donley wakes up covered with blood, not knowing why, not knowing where he is, not knowing who he is. By the end of the book, all these questions -- and more -- are answered, but the reader probably won't care. Stith's prose is so unprepossessing as to be totally forgettable. The setting takes place on an orbital colony, but this has so little to do with the plot that it could as well have taken place in Anytown, USA. Characters, action and dialogue are all equally uninteresting. The exceptions are some of the interchanges between Donley and his talking wrist computer, which at times show traces of a Zelazny-like humor which Stith would do well to try to develop to better effect in his future writing. And finally, Annoying Thing That Publishers Do Case #333: It will be obvious to anyone who actually reads the book that the writer of the back-cover blurb didn't.

-- Fred Bals

Mercedes Nights by Michael D. Weaver    [**]
        St. Martins Press, 1987, $16.95., 240 pgs., 0-312-01066-4

The dustjacket synopsis of Mercedes Nights relates an intriguing plot; a black market operation has made illegal clones of a popular and beautiful video star, Mercedes Night. The clones are being sold to those who want to indulge their fantasies of doing, well, of doing whatever they want with their Mercedes replicas. If author Michael D. Weaver had stayed focused on that one idea, I think I would have enjoyed Mercedes Nights much more than I did. Unfortunately, Weaver weaves -- if you'll excuse the pun -- a variety of other confusing and convoluted storylines into his main story. On page 80 of a 240-page book, I realized that the black market cloning operation had been barely referred to up to that point. I also realized that I didn't have the slightest idea what was happening anymore, and worse, didn't care. Weaver had blitzed me with so many different storylines, with no connecting thread among them, that I was completely lost. Weaver's writing is sharp and hard-edged, especially when it comes to action and descriptive scenes. But the lack of a solid, straightforward plot makes the book difficult, and some will probably find, impossible, reading. Fans of comic books will enjoy the dust jacket art for Mercedes Nights, drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz.

-- Fred Bals

Mercedes Night  Michael D. Weaver        [***]
        St. Martin's Press 240 pg. $16.95

Except for the ending, this is a very good book. The ending is a deus ex machina ending. The reader has some forewarning about the ending. Still, the ending is a cheat. The story starts with the illegal cloning of video star Mercedes Nights to create sex slaves for the rich and depraved. Mercedes is a strong willed woman and her clones share this trait. Some escape and threaten to expose the cloning operation. Since the cloning operation could not exist without help in high places, the exposure threatens a lot of very powerful people. Weaver has stacked the odds against Nights and her clones so much so that he seems to have been unable to think of a way to end it except through a deus ex machina.

The story is told as a series of separate story lines involving disparate people that converge in the end. Weaver uses this technique very well. What seems to be irrelevant characters and story lines all turn out to be relevant in the end. The novel is a mystery as well. The mystery is who backed the cloning operation and why as it quickly becomes clear that selling the clones as sex slaves is really a cover for the real purpose. The mystery is well done. The reader has a good chance to figure out the mystery before it is revealed although it was not all that hard to solve it.

The greatest strength of the novel is the personalities of the people. They may be stupid or bright, nasty or nice, but they are all rememberable as distinctive personalities. The future has a distinctive cyberpunk feel but is restrained enough that it also has the feel of a future society that could really occur. This book is definitely worthwhile reading although it is probably more worthwhile to wait for the paperback edition.

-- Danny Low

Metrophage      by Richard Kadrey       [*****][*]
        Ace, February 1988, $2.95, 240 pgs., 0-441-52813-9

The disparity between the ratings above is caused by the fact that Metrophage is something of the quintessence of cyberpunk. If you like cyberpunk, specifically the cyberpunk style of William Gibson, Metrophage is going to blow the top of your head off. But if hardcore high-tech, street- smart losers, and a kinetic, surrealistic storyline leaves you flatlined, then avoid Metrophage at all costs. According to the introduction by Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey is "... well known for his dadaistic collage illustrations." Kadrey's artistic background is sharply evident in the descriptive scenes which pervade Metrophage. The images throughout are as vivid as a hologram, as biting as a hypodermic needle, blasting at the reader with such intensity that your eyes will be bleeding by the end of the book. Indeed, I found it necessary to put down Metrophage at times - so saturated with information overload that I had to absorb what I had just read before I could go on. If there is any justice, Kadrey will have a profound impact upon the field. Even with it's early release date, I guarantee Metrophage will certainly be one of the best books you'll read in 1988. Do your imagination a favor and buy it. The high rating is for Cyberpunk fans, the low rating for all others.

-- Fred Bals

Midnight City   by Robert Tine  [***]
        Signet, December 1987 $3.95, 284 pgs., 0-451-15036-8

If you have a taste for the hard-boiled, I commend Midnight City to your attention. Although not marketed as SF, Midnight City does have some familiar science fiction elements to it. The story takes place in a near- future New York City realistically extrapolated from the present. Jake Sullivan, a member of an special force police unit, familiarly known as the "Rovers," is charged with bringing a cop killer to justice. Readers who like specifics may find the book annoying, as Tine paints his future setting with a very wide brush, seldom giving any details. But those who like realistic crime stories, crisp dialogue, and tough characters should find Midnight City a good read.

-- Fred Bals

Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections  Robert Asprin   [**]
        Starblaze graphics, 189pp,, $7.95, 0-89865-529-3

Another long running series that's running long in the tooth. This time, Skeeve heads off to Perv in search of his friend and mentor Aahz. If you're looking for an interesting exploration of Perv and it's society, you'll be very disappointed -- it's little different from downtown New York or any major metropolitan area. The book, when all is said and done, basically falls flat, and is one of the weakest links in the series. This is two weak books in a row, which, to me, means it's time to think about retiring the series.

-- chuq von rospach

Night and the Enemy     Harlan Ellison & Ken Steacy     [***]
        Comico graphic novel, $11.95, 0-938965-06-9

An illustrated collection of some of Harlan Ellison's stories, including 'Run for the Stars' and 'Life Hutch.' Nicely executed drawings, and I always enjoy reading Ellison, but I think the book is a little too expensive for what you get.

-- chuq von rospach

Shade of the Tree       Piers Anthony   [*-]

If I have read the back cover correctly, this is Anthony's first attempt at the supernatural/Stephen King genre. I freely admit I have never really read any of these types of books before, but having read a lot of Piers Anthony before, I thought this might be very interesting. It turned out to be incredibly boring.

I suppose it is part of the formula to hint at the mysterious supernatural events that must come later, but the various deaths and events recalled are so similar to one another that each new one introduced just seems to add more pages to plow through until one finds out the cause. Only those readers who just cannot put down a book will bother to do so however.

And, if the idea is to build suspense and curiosity about that cause, I can only say that by the time I got to within the last 60 pages, I could really have cared less. I kept thinking Anthony would pull it out of the fire somehow, but he never really did.

I'd hate to truly ruin the ending for those who might care (though I
would tend to classify giving away the ending as an act of mercy in
this case) -- so let me just say that the computer analogy drawn at the
end will ring false to anyone in the industry, and that it is never
really drawn to a full conclusion anyway, thus complementing a boring
beginning and middle with a weak ending.
-- Larry Kaufman
lsk@sun.com

Silverglass     J.F. Rivken     [**]
        Ace books, $2.95, 186pp

It would be pleasant to report that under the apallingly sexist cover of Silverglass is concealed a pretty good book. Alas, this is not quite the case. It is an adequate, routine little Fantasy of no particular distinctions and no conspicuous flaws. It has a little magic, a little romance, some tepid AC/DC sex, the obligatory whiff of violence, and a fair amount of mildly pretty writing. As a first novel, it is not bad, but not that good either; the seams are occasionally visible, and the authors habit of breaking the book into micro-chapters of about four pages each is a trifle annoying. However, the reader who is particularly into Fantasy about women might find some modest light reading here. You can always tape some plain brown paper over the cover.

-- David M. Shea

Spectre by Stephen Laws [**+]
Tor; 275 pp; $3.95

Stephen Laws is the author of Ghost Train -- the book that this summer had its ads removed from the English train station walls by British Transport Advertising because they were "offensive to the general travelling public." It seems British Rail wasn't too pleased with the idea of haunted trains. Which makes me wonder what the photography industry is going to say when they read Laws' new novel Spectre.

In the district of Byker in Northern England, six boys and a girl band together as the "Byker Chapter" while growing up -- shades of Gary Kilworth's Witchwater Country [The Bodley Head, 1986] or Stephen King's It [Viking, 1986[, but nonetheless effective for this. Inseparable while growing up, they each went their own way upon finishing collect -- each keeping a copy of the same momento photograph from their last good night together.

But then one by one they begin to die, their images disappearing from the photograph as they do, and the remaining few have to band together once again to try to survive.

Laws' language is good. His characters, while veering slightly into stereotype at times, are still mostly well-delineated. And he's got a good touch with the scare, bringing some fresh frights to some ordinary household items. But there's one major flaw that comes at the end of the book that spoiled a good deal of the tension for me.

Laws rightfully lets us follow his characters as, through their own initiative, they slowly discover what's going on, but then he allows his principal antagonist to step into stage-center right at the high-point of the climax and blather on about cosmic horrors a la Lovecraft by way of Greek myth for far too many pages. It isn't realistic (something that's desperately needed in horror fiction to maintain its believability and tension), but worse, it's boring and stops the story dead.

Still, that aside, Spectre has some fine moments, some especially chilling imagery, and a good solid story at its heard. And say, in that high school picture of you and your friends, wasn't there someone standing beside the teacher last time you looked...?

-- Charles de Lint

Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight        by Mike Resnick [***+]
        TOR, 1987, 314pp, $3.50

John Justin Mallory, New York private eye, is hired by an elf to find a unicorn in an alternate/parallel universe New York City that sounds a lot more fun than the one in our universe. Along the way he joins forces with a cat woman, a big game hunter/unicorn expert and a 9 inch high horse against double crossing leprechauns and eventually the demon-in-charge, the Grundy. If you're in the mood for light comic fantasy, try this, though it did stretch out a bit too long to maintain the pace. The ending doesn't definitely say 'series' but it could be just the beginning of Mallory's bizarre adventures.

-- Mary Anne Espenshade

The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted    Harry Harrison   [**]
        Bantam Books 256 Pg. $14.95

This is the latest Stainless Steel Rat book to be published although it is the second book in terms of story chronology. Unlike the previous diGriz stories, this one is not an independent story. It is a sequel to A Stainless Steel Rat is Born. The story and the opening chapters in particular, do not make much sense unless one has read the prequel. Harrison also seems to have caught the Heinlein disease with this book. A good portion of the book is taken up with much philosophizing at the expense of the story. To a certain extend, such a philosophical discussion is necessary as Harrison has deliberately created two diametrically opposed societies, one clearly Good and one clearly Bad, and brought them into conflict but the extent of the discussion goes far beyond what is needed to explain the situation.

The Stainless Steel Rat series has always been at the comic book level of reality but with this book, Harrison has gone beyond that to a pure cartoonish level of unreality. The stereotypical characterization of people and society is so exaggerated in this book as to be totally unbelievable. In the previous books, there was enough restraint that one could accept the people and situations as stereotypical but real.

In all, this book is only for the completist. The original book in the series, The Stainless Steel Rat, is still the best book to start with for anyone who is interested in discovering why the series is so much fun.

-- Danny Low

The Starwolves  Thorarinn Gunnarsson    [***]
        Questar/Popular Library 281 pg. $2.95

This is one of those rare Star Wars imitations that is actually good. The main reason for this is characterization. The characters are stereotypes but well done stereotypes. There actually is a well thought story universe and the story itself is well plotted. The story also has a sly sense of humor. Of course, there is lots of action and hints of a great future for the hero, Velmeran.

50,000 years ago, the Union was formed to unify all of known space. Many systems did not want to be part it as the Union was and is clearly a tyranny. One of these was the Terran Republic. They called upon the Aldessans for aid. The Aldessan provided the Terrans with the technology to build warships better than those of the Union and an artificial race, the Kelvessans, to crew the ships. However, by overwhelming numbers the Union forced the Kelvessans to abandon Terra and retreat to the fringe worlds where they have been fighting a guerilla war against the Union ever since. This is the situation at the beginning of the story.

This book is good basic fun SF. There's no startling scientific wonders to dazzle the reader and no thought provoking examination of the human condition. It's just an enjoyable story. While it is the first book of a series, the story in the book is resolved before the end.

-- Danny Low

Sweet Silver Blues      by Glen Cook    [*]
        Signet, August 1987, $3.50 255 pgs., 0-451-15061-9

In all honesty, I have little love for elves, gnomes, or other High Fantasy elements and opened Sweet Silver Blues because of its implied promise of a "hard-boiled detective" style. Lovers of fantasy may find some redeeming qualities to this book. I found it a queasy mishandling of the P.I. genre which at times seemed to be reaching for parody but never quite made it. The story - such as it is - concerns a human detective hired to track down a missing heiress in a world filled with the standard cast of fantasy creatures for no apparent reason. I was unable to finish this book, something which happens so rarely (I'm compulsive about finishing everything, but most especially free review copies) that I feel duty-bound to report it.

-- Fred Bals

Ten Little Wizards      by Michael Kurland      [**]
        Ace Fantasy, 188pp, March, 1988, 0-441-80057-2

Based on the late Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series, Michael Kurland does attempts to do what may be impossible -- step in a great author's footsteps. The story is a reasonably executed locked room mystery (based pretty closely on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, as the title implies). If you're looking for a good Fantasy/Mystery mix, this is a good book. If you're looking for a Lord Darcy book, you'll be disappointed. The character names are the same, but the life and levity and depth that Garrett wrote into his characters are missing.

-- chuq von rospach

Tesseract       Joseph Addison  [***]
        Del Rel/Ballantine Books 246pg. $3.50

Tesseract is a mysterious being with godlike powers but some strange weaknesses. It needs the help of humanity to save another race on another planet. The problem is that mankind has destroyed itself in a nuclear Armageddon. Tesseract decides to travel back in time and alter human history to save mankind from itself so mankind can save the other race.

Mark Johnson is an up and coming young executive in the Tyson financial empire. One day he receives an urgent call from Jonathan Tyson to report to him immediately. This is the beginning of Tesseract's plan. Or is it the end? The story is a very convoluted time travel story with all the complications and confusion to be expected when cause and effect are turned around.

However, the time travel paradoxes are not the point of the story. The story is a series of mysteries within mysteries. Why, if Tesseract is so powerful, does it need the help of humanity and Mark Johnson in particular to save the other race? Who is the other race? What is the menace? What can mankind do to save them? And why mankind? The mysteries and questions are all nicely resolved at the end and the answers are logical and sensible as well.

The characters are well developed but very familiar. The Reluctant Hero, the Weary Mentor, the Power Mad Villain, etc. However, Addison does a good job of developing them into realistic people. The whole book is a recycling of familiar SF ideas and characters but done in a fresh new way. This book is well worth while reading.

-- Danny Low

Thieves' World #10: Aftermath   edited by Robert Asprin & Lynn Abbey    [**]
        Ace Fantasy, November, 1987, 273pp, $3.50, 0-441-80597-3.

I've been a big fan of Thieves' World shared world anthology. Unfortunately, it is starting to show its age and losing its originality. Still interesting to hardcore fans, but there are more interesting books to spend your time on. Unless #11 picks up dramatically, I'll be dropping the series.

-- chuq von rospach

Time Pressure   by Spider Robinson      [**]
        Ace (Hardcover),October 1987, $16.95 216 pgs., 0441-80932-4

I've formed the opinion that Spider Robinson hasn't had a novel (in both senses of the word) idea worthy of his talents since the one which engendered the Hugo-winning Stardance. Unfortunately, Time Pressure did nothing for me but lend added weight to that opinion. As usual, Robinson has created some of the most intriguing, fully-developed, and just plain real characters in science fiction with Time Pressure. And you have to love an author who flies in the face of good sense -- or taste -- by deliberately starting his book with the nadir of bad opening lines, "It was a dark and stormy night," and makes it work. The plot of Time Pressure concerns itself primarily with the interaction between Rachel, a visitor from the future on a mysterious mission and Sam, something of an unreconstructed hippie living in Nova Scotia. While Sam's narration always stays interesting enough to keep you reading the book, the plot of Time Pressure simply never goes anywhere, finally culminating into a near-joke answer to the question which no one has been asking, "Where have all the hippies gone?" Something of a sequel to Robinson's earlier Mindkiller, Time Pressure will only be of interest to his most ardent fans. The rest of us will have to wait -- and hope -- that his next idea will finally be something equal to his writing skills.

-- Fred Bals

The Vang (The Military Form)    Christopher Rowley      [***]
        Del Rel/Ballantine Books 369pg. $3.50

This story takes place 1000 years after Starhammer and uses an event from that book as the basis for the story but otherwise has no connection with that book. An illegal prospecting ship working near the colony of Saskatch discovers a Vang lifeboat and unwittingly brings it aboard, releasing the Military Form Vang inside it. It takes over the ship and begins the conquest of the universe that its race had started millennia ago that was rudely interrupted when another race destroyed the Vang race in self defense.

The story is told in three separate story lines that converge at the end. The first story line is that of the prospectors who find the Vang ship. The second is that of a group of Saskatchers trying to rid their planet of corruption. The third is that of a group of environmentalists who are trying to prevent humanity from destroying Saskatch in their quest for the illegal drug TA45 which is found only on Saskatch.

The characterization is superb. Not only are the characters distinctive but they act as you might expect real people with their personalities to act. The action starts out at a fast pace and quickly speeds to an all out run that doesn't stop until the end. The ending is also well done. Rowley has had problems in previous books finding a proper ending for his books. All too often, a deus ex machina (and it was literally that in Starhammer) would descend and resolve everything. In this book, the ending is logical and realistic. This is an excellent action SF story with superb characterization as well.

-- Danny Low

War for the Oaks        Emma Bull       [***-]
        Ace Fantasy Special, 309pp, $3.50

Emma Bull is best known as co-editor of and contributor to the Liavek shared world Fantasy series. In this, her first solo novel, a similar sensibility is shown. The reader encounters an uneven mix of love, war, and rock-and-roll as two dissident Faery factions battle for control of Minneapolis. Eddi, girl guitarist/vocalist in a local bar band, is drafted as the token mortal in this conflict, and her assigned bodyguard is a shape- changer who occasionally turns into a large nasty dog. Ditching her boyfriend and his band, Eddi begins to form a new and better band, since music is to be her weapon in the stylized but brutal Faery rumble in a city park.

Bull has a pretty good grasp of the hot Minneapolis rock scene, post Prince; and she does about as well as anyone could at conveying in cold prose the mortal magic which is rock music in its better moments. It would be fun to jam with her. The book is reasonably well written, though not terribly difficult to anticipate. Is the problem with me? Am I the only SF/fantasy reader who has had Faery stories up to here? Evidently so. If you like this sort of thing -- and clearly lots of people do -- this is a reasonably good example of the type. Enjoy.

-- David M. Shea

When Gravity Fails      George Alec Effinger    [****]
        Arbor House, 1987, $16.95. 290 pgs., 0-87795-851-3

I've seen When Gravity Fails cited in some quarters as Effinger's entry into cyberpunk. Actually, it has much more in common with the works of Raymond Chandler, turf which Effinger stakes out immediately by opening the book with an excerpt from Chandler's definitive treatise on the private detective, "The Simple Art of Murder." Like Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, Effinger's main character, Marid Audran, is a "good" man in a bad place, trying to maintain honor and dignity in a society which places little weight on either. "Good" is in quotes because, on first blush, Audran isn't represented as a particularly nice individual, making his living through dope dealing and (Effinger implies) pimping in an Arabic ghetto known as "the Budayeen." Yet, Audran has a code of honor as strict as a samurai's sense of bushido. When a series of apparently senseless murders begin to take place in the Budayeen, Audran finds himself caught up in trying to find the killer, even though his involvement will ultimately force him to compromise his values. On the final ballot of the Nebula awards at the time of this writing, When Gravity Fails is a book worthy of your attention, especially if you like works in the growing cross-genre of mystery and science fiction.

-- Fred Bals

Wulfston's Odyssey      Jean Lorrah & Winston Howlett   [*]

Sixth in the "Savage Empire" series, Wulfston's Odyssey is a superficial book. The characters are not nearly as well defined as in the other entries in the series. Lorrah and Howlett fell into a trap in their previous offering. They gave some of their most entertaining characters too much power. In this book, they concentrate on one of their remaining characters.

While the treatment is very light, the characters remain true to their previously established personalities. We follow two of the savage empire's most interesting characters to a foreign setting. All the elements of an exciting story are provided. A kidnapping, a beautiful princess, a powerful enemy, poisonings, a ghost from the past, even enough family intrigues for the Dynasty fans. Somehow the authors never manage to pull it all together. The reader, at least this reader, never becomes involved in the story.

The solutions to the problems in the story are not very inventive either. Any story is in trouble when the obvious comes as a surprise to all the characters. Still and all, fans of the series will find this book a reasonable way to kill several hours while waiting for the next book in the series.

-- Peter Rubenstein

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 9)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 9

Interview with Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois is the author or editor of 23 books. Currently editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and of the Isaac Asimov Presents novel series published by Congdon & Weed. Also editor of the annual anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, as well as the Magic Tales series of anthologies, edited in collaboration with Jack Dann: Unicorns!, Magicats! Bestiary!, Mermaids!, Sorcerers!, & Demons!, and so on. He has won two Nebula Awards for his own short fiction. He has been a World Fantasy Award Judge, and several times chairman of the Nebula Award Jury.

If you are interested in joining the Science Fiction group on Delphi, the local access number can be located by calling 800-544-4005. Log onto Delphi with account JOINFICTION and password URANUS. This will qualify you for a special discount when the account is validated.

Chip Delany> Where are you planning to take Asimov's in the coming year?

Gardner Dozois> I had planned on taking it on a long leisurely drive
down by the seashore, but... Actually, to wax serious, (if you
can find one to wax), I don't really have any Grand Master
Aesthetic Plan for Asimov's.

Pat Cadigan> Did you have anything in mind when you first became editor?

Gardner> Mostly to survive for the first few months. My major concern
has always been to try to get a fairly wide range of stuff into
the magazine while still keeping the quality level up. So that
you have a chance of finding something you'll like in the
magazine no matter what your tastes are, whether you're after
literature or just fun, or both.

Chip> Do you find the association between Asimov's and cyberpunk has
turned into a liability?

Gardner> No, it doesn't seem particularly like a liability to me
There's some bad imitation cyberpunk stuff in the slush pile,
but there's always bad imitation something in the slush pile,
so it doesn't make that much difference. Better than bad
imitation Jerry Pournelle, anyway. One reason why I've
published some stuff that people can call cyberpunk if they
like, is that it's just about the only hard science stuff that
I can find that I actually like, that rings some kind of button
aesthetically with me. I'd publish more good, new, interesting
hard science stuff, if I could find it. But don't see much.

Janet> Are you seeing a lot of fantasy? Do you think it's taking over?

Gardner> We've always seen a lot of fantasy. I don't think we're seeing
any more now, necessarily, than we did. 80% or more of it is
just not right for our magazine. We do use some of it if it's
something out of the ordinary. What you see more than fantasy,
other than hard science, is soft sociological SF.

Pat> Do you think that a lot of hard science stuff will be called
cyberpunk reflexively?

Gardner> I think bits and pieces of the cyberpunk milieu will be
showing up for years...

Pat> But it seems like you can't write a hard science story lately
without someone calling it cyberpunk.

Gardner> I think, that people react to things as cyberpunk or not
because of the aesthetics of a story. Poul Anderson can talk
about computers and so forth all through a story, and its still
not going to feel like a cyberpunk story, because his universe
doesn't have the same feel to it, the kinds of things that
happen to people, and how they fell about them.

Arlan Andrews> How does the slush pile look for Asimov's Presents?

Gardner> We don't see a tremendous amount of slush for the novel line,
compared with the amount of slush for the magazine, anyway. For
the first six books, we read maybe 50-60 books to find them.

Arlan> Gardner, is cyberpunk necessarily always depressing? Can't it be
fun, too?

Gardner> I don't think that cyberpunk is necessarily always depressing,
or even always mostly depressing. Several of Pat's stories are
not downbeat at the end. "Pretty Boy Crossover," for instance,
ends on an upbeat note, with the character turning down an
offer which is pretty clearly the equivalent of Temptation.
Even some of Sterling's stuff is not ultimately downbeat.
Schismatrix, for instance, is long-term optimistic. And
Sterling himself makes a big deal recently about how
"transcendental mutation" or somesuch is an essential part of
the mix. Of course, if you follow Sterling's latest definition
closely, you see that it clearly omits most of Gibson's work,
including Neuromancer.

Mike Resnick> Gardner, does your mail indicate your readers prefer
cyberpunk, or don't they care?

Gardner> Most of our mail seems to ignore the question altogether, as I
suspect is true every time one of these teapot tempests comes
along. As a subjective judgement though, I'd have to say that
it seems to me that more people are in favor than not.

Mike> If no cyberpunk except Gibson makes it onto the SF bestseller
lists, how much effect can cyberpunk have in the book field?
It's effect in short fiction is noticeable, but it seems to me
that it's a bit self-limiting to comprise a hefty portion of
our book production other than Gibson, it's too early to tell
who's going to eventually make it.

Gardner> I suspect that Sterling will eventually make it on to at least
the SF bestseller lists, though it may take him a while to
build an audience.. Others may make it too. As far as it not
having a big effect on SF because it's not on the bestseller
lists I think you're dead wrong about that. Evolutionarily
speaking, the new stuff usually has its biggest effect at the
bottom of the ladder, and I think that the field has been
affected more by short stories by then-unknown writers than by
the stuff they're doing later when they've made it onto the
nationwide lists.

Chip> It tickles me that the quintessential cyberpunk story is "All My
Darling Daughters" by Connie Willis.

Mike> I'm not making myself clear, I guess. How do you tell a publisher
to dump Chalker and/or Foster in favor of cyberpunk and failing
that how do you convince him to spend enough on cyberpunk so
that the practitioners can afford to keep writing it

Gardner> Do we really have to dump Chalker and Resnick to make room for
newer authors?

Godzilla> It is all dependant on whether enough people read it no?

Gardner> I'd like to think that there's room for all of them. Naive, perhaps.

Arlan> Hope we don't have to dump the good writers. Just want more room
for us new ones.

Mike> The dynamics of the marketplace say that not everyone can get big
advances; small advances sooner or later have discourage
serious writers.

Janet> Small advances haven't discouraged us so far, Mike.

Mike> It's early yet. But during the last Wave they sure as hell
discouraged Silverberg and Malzberg. It's simple economics.

Chip> Small advances have encouraged a lot of new writers too. They're
better than nothing.

Gardner> If all of us were discouraged from serious work by small
advances, I myself would have given up years ago! In
Silverberg's case, however, it just took him a while to build
up a new audience for what he was doing. He complained at the
late middle of the '70s that all of his books were out of
print, no one liked them, etc., but they are all back in print
now, including the most depressing ones, and they all seem to
be doing pretty well.

Mike> Yeah, but he was doing Dying Inside then, and he did Lord
Valentine trilogies when he came back.

Chip> Most of Silverberg's income came from non-fiction up until the
last ten years. Sometimes it just takes a while.

Mike> It's a problem we all have to face. I just have a feeling that
cyberpunk's audience is smaller than most, at least in the book
marketplace. I would be happy to find out I'm wrong.

Gardner> This is, of course, incredibly naive, and may well be the sour
grapes of someone who doesn't have the stuff to make it on to
the bestseller lists, but I like to think that I'm not just in
it (writing) for the money. I could have made a lot more as a
PR man, if I'd stuck to it.

Pat> The hell with the bestseller lists. You're the best writer here.

Mike> No one is just in it for the money, Gardner. (Well, almost no
one.) But one still has to pay the bills, and one still has to
live with the knowledge that 10-part trilogies outsell the good
stuff. It can get discouraging from time to time

Gardner> One thing you may, or may not, be overlooking is that Gibson
seems to appeal to a large audience outside the traditional
genre audience even more than he appeals to the inside
audience. You'll notice that it was places like The Village
Voice, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, and so on who were
really hotly impressed by Gibson. Locus wasn't calling up to
do stories about him, it was mainstream journals that were
interested in him. The same thing may be happening right now
with Lucius Shepard.

Mike> And since no cyberpunk but Gibson seems to have hit it big in
book form, I can't help thinking it must be harder on them than
on most of us (As I say, I'd be delighted to have to apologize
for being wrong)

Pat> I don't think hitting it that big is really so important.

Mike> I think it is important to the leadership of a revolutionary
literary movement; how else can they tell that they're being
accepted? Editors and critics didn't kill the new wave;
readers did, by not buying it.

Gardner> I've heard that one about how the readers killed the New Wave
before, but I don't really believe it. You'll notice that all
the writers who were supposed to be pushed off the newsstands
because of lack of reader support are not only still on them,
but doing better than ever saleswise in most cases. For
instance, Delany, Spinrad, Moorcock, Silverberg, etc. And most
of the classic stuff from the time is still in print, or back
in print, so obviously there is an audience for it.

Pat> I don't feel the New Wave was killed myself. Just assimilated.

Gardner> Pat is right. A lot assimilated. You wouldn't have half the
new writers you have now, if not for the New Wave, both
cyberpunks and not.

Mike> Part of it -- the best part -- was of course assimilated. But a
lot of new wave writers, especially English, couldn't sell
here, or couldn't sell for enough here. Ballard comes to mind,
or Chris Priest, who has a couple of fine books that still
haven't seen print in the USA.

Pat> Ballard just hit the movies with his autobiographical novel --
Spielberg's doing it.

Mike> But there was never enough of an audience to change the shape of
the field. The dinosaurs and the series-writers still dominate
the lists.

Chip> Ballard's Empire of the Sun just spent half a year on the
bestseller list, Mike!

Mike> Not as science fiction, Chip -- and only after a rave in Newsweek.

Gardner> The fact is, no one ever knows what's going to survive.
Melville would probably be horrified to know that he was
remembered for Moby Dick alone.

Pat> Anyway, it seems like we're trying to have an instant movement
here. And I don't think it works that way.

Janet> What ever happened to that novel you were doing for Timescape?

Gardner> Janet, the novel was unwritten, is unwritten, and probably
will remain unwritten for the foreseeable future. I have much
less time now than I used to, and didn't finish it then! Maybe
if I live long enough, I'll get back to it.

Dave> Was Lucius Shepard so burned by the publication of Green Eyes or
is short story writing being that good to him?

Gardner> Lucius's new novel Life During Wartime, just came out from
Bantam, and he has at least two more novels in the works. He's
not only a good short story writer, he's a fast one, so I don't
discourage him from writing them.

Scott> I was rereading your 1977 anthology, in which you said '77
established SF as a moneymaker and voiced the fear that the
bean counters would "force a junk food mentality on SF.". Has
this happened?

Gardner> It hasn't happened nearly as much as it could have happened,
which should be something of a relief to us. Good work, and
unusual work, has continued to be [published, although there
were a couple of years there where things were looking chancy.

Chip> Do big names on the covers substantially affect the monthly sales
of Asimov's?

Gardner> There's not enough data to be really sure (what other factors
afffected sales, for instance -- color of cover, artwork,
etc.), but my own opinion is yes, Big Names on the cover do
have some effect. I try to put them there when I can get them,
although I like to think that I won't buy indifferent work from
Big Names just to get them on the cover.

Pat> Resnick said that SF seems to be a book field rather than a
magazine field and it seemed to him that one thing stalling the
cyberpunk movement was that they don't have a book editor
committed to them whereas New Wave had 3 or 4.

Gardner> Not entirely true that there are no book editors committed to
cyberpunk. Shawna is buying some at Bantam, so is David
Hartwell, so is Beth Meacham at Tor. Nobody's buying nothing
but cyberpunk, but nobody bought nothing but New Wave either.

Gardner> Certainly most of the major authors are having no real trouble
getting their books into print. Although I still say that most
of the important changes, the evolutionary ones, take place in
the short story field, and always have. So is SF really
dominated by books, or is that just what most people have
easy-enough access to to buy?

Toolmaker Koan

John McLoughlin

Baen Books, $16.95, 1987, 0-671-65354-7
[*****]

Reviewed by
Steve Bellovin
ulysses!smb
Copyright 1988 by Steve Bellovin

Reviewing a book like Toolmaker Koan is somewhat difficult; it's hard to discuss the wondrous turns of plot without giving too much away. On the other hand, there are some things that are easy to say about it. For example, it should be a very strong contender for the Hugo next year. I'll go a step further: it's one of the best SF books I've read in several years.

Oh, it's not without its quirks and a few weaknesses; few books are perfect. But the theme, the plot, and the author's knowledge of his subject matter are quite overwhelming.

The koan is quite simple to state: intelligent species evolve (in a cultural sense) too quickly for their own good, and hence destroy themselves. The book opens with Earth about to prove it true again. The planet is partitioned into two hostile camps (U.S. and Soviet), and is teetering on the brink of what Niven has called "the Last War." A deep-space probe detects an anomalous mass under apparent intelligent control. Each nation launches a piloted spacecraft to investigate; they attack each other and are all but destroyed. The Third Party rescues the few survivors and brings them aboard a giant (i.e., 400 km long) space habitat.

Once aboard, the real fun begins. It seems that there is not just a Third Party, but a Fourth, the Whileelin. They in turn are survivors of another group of cultural toolmakers who destroyed their own planet; only the one space habitat survived. The interactions between the humans and the Whileelin occupy the latter half of the book, about which I shall remain silent.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the explanation of the biology of the Whileelin. It sounds totally alien but quite believable. I wasn't at all surprised to turn to the back jacket flap and read that McLouglin is a professional evolutionist (whatever that is) with strong interests in biology and paleontology. One nit that I don't think affects the plot much: I do not believe that their language abilities could evolve naturally; it is quite clear that they are an artificially-constructed species.

McLoughlin's writing style is strongly reminiscent of Larry Niven. Perhaps not coincidentally, the theme also reminded me of Niven; in particular, there are very strong resemblances to The Mote in God's Eye, by Niven and Pournelle. The Whileelin talk like some of Poul Anderson's aliens, though.

There are some annoying points; the characters are constantly chanting Toolmaker Koan whenever they feel frustrated, whether it makes literal sense or not. And more attention should have been paid to character development; while we are told something of their backgrounds, we never really feel it.

Enough! Go read Toolmaker Koan, especially if you like hard science fiction by an author who has done his homework.

Prisoners of Arionn

Brian Herbert

Arbor House, 1987, 356pp, $17.95, 0-87795-886-6

Reviewed by
Neal Wilgus
Copyright 1988 by Neal Wilgus

This is Brian Herbert's fifth novel, but it's the first book of his I've read and I'm impressed. The basic premise -- that a group of highly advanced aliens "steal" the San Francisco Bay Area -- is rather bizarre and would be pretty hard to swallow, except that the gimmick is mostly kept in the background and the meat of the book is in its characters. More specifically, in the Fouquet family, whose daily problems are engrossing enough -- and amusing enough -- that the wayward aliens are largely forgotten.

Not completely, of course, since the entire Bay Area (with ocean) is contained inside a huge bubble which is zooming through space towards the alien's home planet and all contact with anything outside the bubble is cut off. But the Foquets have other troubles -- Granmere Liliane, the head of the family, is now the acting mayor of San Francisco and must deal with her human subject's waywardness as well as the aliens. her son Henry must deal with his even waywarder wife Rachel, his three legitimate children and his unacknowledged fourth child who has come seeking his father just as the bubble is lifted from Earth. Henry, a powerhouse of a man who must hold down three jobs in order to hold his family together, is a study in grinding endurance, while Rachel, who drinks heavily and ignores the daily needs of life, liberty and sanitation, is a study in -- well, let's say maddening independence. Like his father, Dune-master Frank Herbert, young Brian likes to throw in a few mystical superscience wildcards -- but with much more restraint than his old man. There is, for instance, the "button pack," a doomsday device capable of destroying the entire San Francisco bubble, which is presented to Granmere Liliane by the mysterious General Oso when she becomes acting mayor. There is also Granpere Gilbert, her shadowy husband who dies halfway through the book, but who just might be a more powerful and important figure than Granmere Liliane herself. And, of course, there's Beauregard, who is either the ghost of a Civil War General, a gigantic flea, of some kind of extra-dimensional creature whose life happens to impinge on the Foquets, for better or for worse.

All of which adds up to a fascinating novel of superscience and commonplace drudgery which would be highly recommendable except for one thing -- the climax. Alas, the ending of this book is completely inconclusive, leading to the belief that this is only the first volume of a trilogy or series -- although the publisher nowhere hints this is so. Personally, I'm looking forward to reading a sequel -- one that tells us what happens when the San Francisco bubble finally arrives at Arionn -- and what happens to Rachel and several of her children, who have escaped from the aliens at the last minute.

Meanwhile, I do recommend this book -- with reservations -- to anyone who enjoys a combination of the totally fantastic and the completely mundane. Whatever else it is -- it's unique!

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 10)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 10

Much Rejoicing

Reviews by
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Copyright 1988 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Reviewed in this Issue

Vale of the Vole
by Piers Anthony
Avon, 1987, $3.95, 0-380-75287-5

Life During Wartime
by Lucius Shepard
Bantam New Fiction, 1987, $7.95, 0-553-3481-5

The Bridge of Lost Desires
by Samuel R. Delany
Arbor House, 1987, $17.95, 0-87795-931-5

Metrophage
by Richard Kadrey
Ace Books, 1988, $2.95, 0-441-52813-9

Vengeance of Orion
by Ben Bova
TOR Books, 1988, $17.95, 0-312-93049-6

Alien Island
by T.L. Sherred
Ballantine Books, 1970, $0.75, 345-01815-075.

Installment Five: The Problem

Debbie Notkin once explained Xanth to me from a bookseller's point of view. People would come in to the store, she explained, see Xanth on the "New Releases" rack, and groan. "Oh, no...not another one."

And then they'd buy it.

It's like that. Xanth is an addiction, almost a guilty secret.

Actually, I think that the best explanation of Xanth from the reader's point of view is this: Xanth is Oz for grown-ups.

The parallels are there, and very clear. An ever-growing but basically familiar cast of characters lives in a fairyland of limited but indeterminate size, and in each book, they face some new (magical) threat, meet new (magical) friends and see new (magical) sights. There is never any doubt in the reader's mind that all will work out well in the end, if only because all is watched over by a powerful Good Magician, much like Baum's Glinda. And along the way, no effort is spared by the writer to introduce the most wretched and groansome puns known to mankind.

All of which is by way of beginning to review Piers Anthony's new Xanth book, Vale of the Vole.

Vale, like all its predecessors, delivers fair entertainment value for the reader's money. It claims to be the "first volume of a new Xanth trilogy," which I take to be a polite way of informing the reader that Anthony has moved to a new publisher. Something in the way of a real trilogy may be intended this time, though, for unlike all its predecessors, Vale leaves significant plot threads unresolved -- particularly the disappearance of the aforementioned Good Magician.

The central "gimmick" of the book in hand is the search of a motley (and ever-growing) crew of Xanthics to rescue the titular Vale from an invasion of demons, evil but normally insignificant, who have made the place uninhabitable for its resident Voles. Each of the three central characters (Volney, a vole; Chex, a centaur-hippogriff cross, and Esk, a human-ogre-nymph cross) is further burdened with a significant personal problem.

Anthony, whatever else might be said about him, is a superb plotter. He manages to spend most of the novel raising the stakes on all these problems, general and personal, and resolve them all with a single, unexpected stroke in the last few pages.

As I said above, an honest entertainment value. I wouldn't suggest beginning Xanth with Vale -- I wouldn't, honestly, suggest beginning it at all: it is, as I said, an addiction -- but if you're already addicted, don't pass it up.

Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime is a terrifyingly honest book. I almost feel guilty mentioning it in the same column as Xanth, but, in fact, I read them at about the same time, and the contrast between my reactions to them brought home to me one of the central problems of SF today.

Life is, to be blunt, a killer novel. It kicks ass. I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone except for the Problem -- and that, as Paul Harvey says every day at six thirty, is The Rest Of The Story.

Life During Wartime is the tale of David Mingolla, an American soldier in a nasty little brushwar in Central America sometime early next century. The war and all its details are astonishingly well-realized through Mingolla, who, as a result, becomes one of the most complete and believably human characters in recent SF.

Mingolla meets and falls in love with Debora Cifuentes, a Guatemalan who has one significant feature in common with him: They both have momentary flashes of prescience; they both can touch other minds. They are like cat and dog.

Mingolla is transferred to the Army's "Psicorps," trained to use his psychic talents in battle. He finds himself pitted against Debora. Ultimately, they both defect from their Sides to fight a stranger and darker battle.

As the novel proceeds, Mingolla discovers more and more of "what's really going on." The US and other governments are only part of the answer; the truth appears to lie in a conspiracy of psychics dating back centuries. It isn't that simple, and I'm not spoiling much by telling you that.

Mingolla's psychic powers (and Debora's) grow tremendously, continuously. In the end, he has become that fixture of SF, the Mental Superman. But Shepard doesn't let the pulp figure sit undisturbed; the same things that make Mingolla superhuman make him inhuman, a monster. By novel's end, he is drenched with blood, and still a believable, sympathetic character; though he is a monster, there is nowhere he could have done other than he does. The monstrosity is not so much his as the power's, and the greatest horror is in the inevitability of his dehumanization.

It's difficult to tell you how good this really is. The reviewer, surrounded by the superlatives which appear on every book on the market these days, is reduced to invidious comparisons.

The whole book reflects and refracts itself, in a manner that reminds one of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The constant revelation of deeper and deeper mysteries reminds one of Phil Dick, or the "Illuminatus!" books without all their attendant silliness. The gritty revelation of war and the horrors underlying the war make Joe Haldeman's Forever War seem optimistic. And the whole is overlaid with a mystical feel that leaves one thinking that Shepard, perhaps, has actually had the experiences that Carlos Castenada fakes up for his long-running "Don Juan" series.

It is, in short, an incredible book. A book that looks seriously at serious moral problems; a books that accepts and offers no easy answers; a book that challenges the reader at every turn.

Which brings me, at last, to The Problem.

To make one last invidious comparison, Life During Wartime is a better book -- a tremendously better book -- in many, many senses than Vale of the Vole.

But I read Vale of the Vole practically in a single sitting; I found myself putting Life During Wartime down again and again, preferring to watch television (or read Vale of the Vole) to continuing with it.

Why?

I could say that Life was hard to take in large doses, and that would be partly true, but it isn't the main truth.

An easy and inaccurate way to state the main truth is this: somewhere in all his meaning, truth, and beauty, Shepard forgot to be entertaining.

But that is inaccurate. Life During Wartime is entertaining: more, it is recreational; you emerge from it, at the end, refreshed, renewed.

But -- and this is the accurate statement -- Life During Wartime is a damned hard book to read. Vale of the Vole is almost insipidly easy to read.

I read a lot of SF. I read a hell of a lot of SF; what I review in this column is maybe a third of it. But most SF, and most of what I read, is, finally, cheap and easy entertainment.

There's nothing wrong with cheap and easy entertainment. Anthony is, as I said above, an honest craftsman. So is Jack Chalker, and so is Isaac Asimov, and so on.

We are pleased to see SF "finally" on the best seller lists. The reason is not that the mainstream has finally accepted SF; the intelligent and unprejudiced general reader always included some small amount of SF in his reading diet.

The reason writers like Anthony and Asimov consistently make the best seller lists is just the opposite: they have accepted the standards of the mainstream, or, more precisely, of the mass audience that buys best sellers. They have made SF easy for the reader: they do not challenge.

A steady diet of porridge makes the digestion lazy; one finds a good steak and asparagus nearly indigestible.

So too with the mind. A steady diet of Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker leaves the mind lazy, wanting a book that can be read almost as fast as the hand can turn pages. A book like Life During Wartime demands much more of the reader, and many readers are unwilling to give that these days.

Only a steady infusion of the hard stuff into the mental diet can toughen those muscles back up, and to that end I recommend Life During Wartime to almost anyone.

If you don't want to work, stay away from it.

Another book that may help to strengthen the mental muscles is Samuel R. Delany's The Bridge of Lost Desire. This is the latest in another series with devoted readers, the "Neveryon" books.

Bridge contains two new long stories and a significantly expanded version of the very first story in the series, "The Tale of Gorgik." The three are (perversely? Certainly purposefully) placed in reversed chronological order in the book, which ends with a Foreword to the entire series.

Neveryon, for those who don't know, is an imaginary country on the borderland between prehistory and history, between barbarism and civilization. The tales are almost metafictional, commenting as they do on the nature of fiction and storytelling; but these comments are really only a legitimate part of Delany's larger concern, the nature of signs, symbols, and desire, and how they affect and are affected by minds and cultures.

The first tale in Bridge "The Tale of Time and Pain," is the last in the series, dealing with Gorgik as quite an old man, having finally won all his battles. In a deserted castle he meets a boy, and relates his life in very different terms than we have seen before. It is a recapitulation of all Delany's themes and concerns, and something of a coda, a summation of the series.

The second, "The Tale of Rumor and Desire," tells of an aging bandit in a small village. He has nearly outstayed his welcome there, and, in a peculiar set of circumstances, meets another traveller, his "ideal" woman in terms of desire, and one who also finds him tremendously desirable. Their meeting and parting is a strange reflection and refraction (through the prism/mirror/lens of Neveryon) of Delany's most recent science-fictional novel, Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand.

There is a strange dullness to the first half of the tale, but it is redeemed by the clarity of the final scenes. Still, it comes off as the weakest tale of the entire series.

Finally, "The Tale of Gorgik" (repeated and amplified from Tales of Neveryon) serves as a da capo to the whole series. Some of the expansions seem too explicitly designed to tie "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" to Gorgik in some small way; others expand on the tale's original theme, bringing Delany's ten years of improvement as a writer to bear on it.

The Bridge of Lost Desire is as good a place as any to enter Neveryon for the first time. I would recommend such a reader go through the tales in reverse order, however (as does Delany himself).

And, as mentioned above, the reader must be prepared to work at it.

From the (latest) (ostensible) ending of the "Neveryon" series, we move on to a rather more definite ending, and a very sad one: the end of Terry Carr's "Ace Science Fiction Specials." I've been waiting for this with mixed emotions, looking forward to it, but not wanting it to come because there wouldn't never be no more. It's Terry's very last and final gift to us.

And, sadly, it could be better.

Richard Kadrey's Metrophage is not a bad book by any means. It's a new and very different version of the canonical cyberpunq world: we see it through the eyes of a man with no jacks, no artificial parts. His name is Jonny Qabbala, and he's a dope dealer who used to work for the Committee for Public Safety, a governmental organization that has pretty much shoved the police to one side in its efforts to bully the public into being safe.

A strange disease is loose on the streets of Los Angeles: it's kind of like leprosy, but when you're not looking it turns into something a lot more like meningitis. In this phase is reduces you to an idiot, then an animal, then a vegetable, and finally a stiff in a few weeks.

Jonny's connection has been hit.

Jonny wants to find the man who hit his connection.

The Committee wants Jonny.

In fact, suddenly everyone seems to want Jonny, and they're willing to hurt anyone he cares about to get him.

And what does this have to do with the aliens on the moon?

It's not a pleasant story, but it's a very exciting one.

"But wait! There's more!"

Kadrey's language is occasionally stunning. He's as good a stylist as Gibson was in Neuromancer, with some differences which indicate that he may ultimately become a better writer than Gibson is now: particularly, he has a sense of humor, something lacking even in Gibson's best passages. Also, his imagery is manic. In the introduction, Rudy Rucker calls Metrophage a surrealist science fiction novel. I don't agree with that, but the imagery shows definite surrealist inclinations.

"Now how much would you pay?"

"Don't answer yet!"

Kadrey has one other "feature" lacking in Gibson's "sprawl": national governments. It's hard to tell in the standard cyberfuture whether national governments have "withered away," or if the characters simply don't pay much attention to them.

Not so in Kadrey's future. The governments are clearly there, and their influence is terrifyingly logical given the nature of the world. In addition, they allow Kadrey to make some very succinct points about government -- and especially the U.S. government -- in our world today.

"Operators are standing by for your call!"

It isn't steak, but is sure ain't porridge. You can't launch into Metrophage the way you can into this week's Star Trek novel: but you can read it on the bus without going insane. Call it a gourmet hamburger.

Somehow, I seem to have become the Official Ben Bova Reviewer for OtherRealms.

I don't mind; actually, I'm rather glad, because it's opened me up to a writer I'd had some poor experiences with in the past. Last issue, for example, I reviewed in this space the exceptional The Kinsman Saga; now before me I have his new book, Vengeance of Orion.

Reviewing a sequel to a book you haven't read is a strange business. Bova manages, mostly in the first few pages, to give the reader enough information about Orion that the rest of Vengeance is not utterly confusing. He manages to do this without (as far as I can tell) giving away the basic plot of the first book, which is something of an accomplishment in my eyes.

Orion himself is a created human being, a Hunter created by the "gods" (and one god in particular) to perform a series of tasks in their ongoing shaping of human history.

At novel's opening, he is enjoying a well-earned respite from his tasks of Hunting with the woman he loves.

A page later, he finds himself unexpectedly on the shores of Troy, a paid laborer digging the defensive ramparts of the Achaian army. We learn that Achilles has just performed his infamous sulking withdrawal, and the Achaians are in a bad way.

Orion saves the day. In doing so, he shows himself to be yet another science-fictional superman: the novel's weakest point. Bova accepts the classic trope of the superman (though he is at pains to deny it) and in many ways, Vengeance is just another adolescent power fantasy.

What redeems it is its philosophical content. Spider Robinson is quoted on the cover, describing the first Orion book as "speculative theology." This is actually quite an accurate description of the situation; Bova has created a reality where all gods are real, all religions essentially true, and there is no conflict between them. He does this in a science-fictional, not a fantastic, manner: which makes the "gods", finally, not gods at all. I won't spoil the joy of discovery by explaining what all that means.

Bova has researched Vengeance extensively. He moves Orion from the walls of Troy to the walls of Jericho (did you know that both cities fell at roughly the same historical moment? Or that the Hittite empire also collapsed at the same time? I didn't), and from there to Egypt. Along the way, he participates in both famous sacks, which allows Bova to give rationalistic explanations for the Horse and the collapse of Jericho's walls. I don't like this kind of revisionism; I prefer my mythology straight up. But I'll grant that they're both damn good explanations, well within the cultural and technological possibilities of the day.

As I said, it's well-researched. Bova introduces the details of the cultures and technology Orion encounters naturally, and if the environment does not live and breathe the way, say, Shepard's Guatemala does, well, very few fictional environments do. Vengeance is a well-crafted, well thought-out book, and I can recommend it as a good evening's read.

Closet Classic: Does anyone out there remember when Ballantine Books was run by people named Ballantine?

Ian and Betty Ballantine. They were two of the best publishing minds in the history of paperbacks, and produced an absolutely dynamite line of science fiction originals.

Part of this was because they knew how to take a chance with a strange book. And, friends, I've got a gonzo strange book for you here.

T.L. Sherred's Alien Island is a tale of first contact in the classic mode. The aliens have landed in Michigan. They open their gangplank, and a lone, brave man enters. A lone brave drunk. See, they landed in the parking lot of a bar, and their landing craft looks like a giant beer keg.

They aren't invading. They aren't interested in slaves, or human flesh. They don't even want to invite Earth to lay down its nuclear arms and join the interstellar comity of worlds.

They just want to trade. Which, all these years later, makes their name seem prophetic: they call themselves the Regan Group.

So guess who they pick as their representative on Earth?

Yep. The drunk. His name is Ken Jordan, by the way.

They supply him with billions of dollars in hard cash (gold and other heavy metals) and a list of what they want: Irish whiskey, Burmese tea, and numerous other consumables and luxury goods. And cultural artifacts. Especially cultural artifacts.

The governments of Earth are puzzled and annoyed. They all want alien technology; they each want a bigger share of the trade; they want to know what the hell is going on. So does the reader.

So does Dana Iverson, the tale's narrator. She's a CIA operative. We see the first part of the story from a distance, as she isn't directly involved; but she soon manages to become Jordan's personal secretary, and, eventually, the manager of his entire operation.

With her assistance, Jordan buys an island and surrounds it with the ever-popular Impenetrable Force Shield. Attempts to raid the island for its gold result in puddles of goo where the would-be raiders used to be. There's a rather grisly image of Jordan cleaning out the entry with a firehose...

In the meantime, Jordan's been gathering the best and the brightest young people -- recent high school graduates from the Detroit/Windsor area, hiring them and letting them live rent-free on the island. Their parents protest, particularly when one of them gets another pregnant and Jordan won't turn them over to the authorities.

It's all part of the Regan master plan. They've done this on dozens of worlds. The Regans are not merely capitalists. They've got a damn good, if not exactly altruistic, reason to buy all this stuff and take it off Earth. To say more would be a major spoiler.

Suffice it to say, Alien Island is a damn silly book, but one with painful (if not particularly original) points to make about the ways and the directions of human governments in the twentieth century. Some of its details seem a little dated (particularly the benevolence of the CIA), but the whole stands up well after eighteen years.

Hey, kids! Nominate your own favorite long-out-of-print books as Closet Classics. You'll be sharing a wonderful secret with OtherRealms' thousands of readers, and accumulating good karma to see you through your next incarnation.

Alien Island was pointed out to me several years ago by Debbie Notkin...which brings us full circle.

See you next issue.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 11)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 11

Words of Wizdom

Reviews by
Chuq Von Rospach
Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach

Reviewed in this issue

Taltos [***+]
by Steven Brust
Ace Fantasy, March, 1988, 181pp, $2.95, 0-441-18200-3

Great Sky River [****+]
by Gregory Benford
Bantam/Spectra, 326pp, December, 1987
$17.95, 0-553-05238-1

First Flight [***+]
by Chris Claremont
Ace Science Fiction, 243pp, December, 1987
$2.95, 0-441-23584-0

The Kindly Ones [****+]
by Melissa Scott
Baen Science Fiction, 371pp,
September, 1987, $2.95, 0-671-65351-2.

The Dark Lady, A Romance of the Far Future [***]
by Mike Resnick
Tor Science Fiction, 279pp, November, 1987
$3.50, 0-812-55116-8

Jack the Giant Killer [***+]
By Charles de Lint
Ace Fantasy, 202pp, November, 1987,
$16.95, 0-441-37969-9

New Destinies, Volume III [***+]
Edited by Jim Baen
Baen Science Fiction, 273pp, February, 1988,
$3.50, 0-671-65385-7

The Masks of Time Born with the Dead Dying Inside [*****] by Robert Silverberg Bantam Spectra, 561pp, April, 1988, $4.95, 0-553-27286-1

Buck Godot: PSmith [****]
by Phil Foglio
Starblaze Graphics, 72pp, December, 1987,
$7.95, 0-89865-459-9

Taltos

Steven Brust is one of the few writers that is invariably moved to the front of my reading list. The reason for this is that he's a great writer and he's never disappointed. Taltos, the fourth book in the series about Vlad Taltos, paid assassin, is no exception.

Taltos is actually the first book in the timeline, and tells about the time when Vlad is setting up shop and how he meets Sethra Lavode, the vampire of Dzur mountain. Within the pages, he spends a lot of time trying to not get killed while tracking down the future leader of the Draegaeran's, who, it happens, is currently living in the Land of the Dead.

This book, unlike the previous, very somber and emotionally charged Teckla, is much closer to the first books in the series with a lightning paced plot and a strong subtext of black, almost gallows, humor. Vlad's attitude seems to be that he expects to die at any moment, so he's not going to let it bother him; it's also never very far from his mind, though.

I found Taltos to be primarily an entertainment book. Teckla, and to a lesser degree the other books in the series, had Messages and Heavy Thoughts attached. Taltos, on the other hand, is primarily a fun, enjoyable read. There isn't a lot of depth, but it makes for a very fine afternoon.

Great Sky River

Greg Benford writing Cyberpunk? No, although I'm sure someone will try to add Great Sky River into the camp. Because this latest novel from the Hard SF Maestro is much more than just Hard SF, and because this is a book that any movement would want to have attributed to it.

Great Sky River is set in the far future of the universe of Across the Sea of Suns and In the Ocean of Night. The great battle between the machines and the humans has been fought.

The machines won.

The novel is a story of survival, of the remnants of a family unit making their way across the face of Snowglade, not with any hopes of getting somewhere, but simply to stay ahead of destruction. The mechs, sentient robots, have taken Snowglade and the remnants of the civilization are slowly being exterminated.

This book is a real downer. It is also probably the best book Benford has ever written. Here he's taken a strong Hard SF novel and used it as the skeleton for an emotionally overpowering study of a group of once dominant people who are losing the only thing left to them: hope.

My only complaint with the book is the ending, which simply seems to fade away as Benford tries to install a (somewhat artificial and forced) message of Hope Trancendent, giving the humans a pyrrhic victory that looks good, but in the end doesn't really mean anything (but on the other hand, if he'd let the book end on a downer, I don't know if the book would have been tolerable; it would have likely been too depressing. So you can't win, either way).

Regardless of your reading preferences, Hard or Soft, Techie or Psyche, this book should be on your must read list. Benford has proven that he's not only the master of Nuts&Bolts SF, but of the written word.

First Flight

First Flight is a first novel by long time comic writer Chris Claremont. It's an auspicious start, as Claremont writes a fascinating action adventure yarn. Claremont's attitude seems to be that if you can't figure out what else to do, throw something nasty at the protagonist, which keeps the book moving at an almost hypersonic speed.

Nicole Shea is a space jockey, a pilot going on her first flight. As usual, the rookie trip is a milk run, designed to give a new pilot experience without a lot of risk.

Some milk run. After she's attacked by pirates, loses most of her crew, and is left streaking for the outer planets in a powerless spacecraft, it starts getting interesting.

It's about then the aliens show up, you see.

If this had been written humorously, I'd be comparing it to a Gilbert&Sullivan play, since the action is that complicated. But Claremont plays it straight and pulls it off -- it's not slapstick, this is a spacer's greatest nightmare come true.

There's a gritty realism here I like. About the only thing I didn't like was the sex, which seemed contrived, artificial, and sort of wedged into the story in an unrealistic, mainstream-fiction sort of way. Fortunately, it isn't overdone, but I got the feeling it was in the book because Claremont felt like putting it there rather than growing naturally from the story.

All in all, though, it's a successful, interesting book. And while Claremont is working on a sequel, this book stands very well on its own. As well thought of as Claremont is in comics, I'm glad to see him stretching his wings and spending some time on our turf as well.

The Kindly Ones

Melissa covered this book in depth in last issue's Behind The Scenes. I hadn't gotten a chance to read it prior to setting up that article, so I was looking forward to comparing my reactions to the story to Melissa's expectations in the article.

I'm happy to note that The Kindly Ones is by far Scott's best book yet. For those that missed last issue, it is about a culture on a cusp, as a series of actions occur that will irrevocably change it in ways nobody understands or can really predict. Orestes is based on an extreme set of honor codes in a strict and rigid society, an extreme form of the Japanese Bushido. These are starting to break down due to both internal and external influences, and the story is told from various viewpoints that allow a close look at the tears in the fabric.

It's a complicated plot with a fairly large cast of characters and a number of different viewpoints. Melissa covers the ground surely and quite successfully. The Kindly Ones will give you material to chew on long after the book itself is finished. Highly recommended.

The Dark Lady

I've decided that Mike Resnick refuses to re-use ideas. The last book of his I read, Stalking the Unicorn, was a light, almost farcical hard boiled detective thriller. The Dark Lady, however, is an intense, brooding piece that ultimately calls into question the definition of humanity.

It seems that there is a timeless woman, someone who has been seen across the Universe, throughout time. Some people who see her are motivated to trying to reproduce her through art; most who see her, however, die a short time later. Is she real? Is she a Fantasy? And if so, how can so many people through so many cultures see the same woman?

She is the Dark Lady, and her face shines out from paintings across the centuries.

Leonardo, of the house of Crsthionn, is an alien in the midst of a Xenophobic humanity. He's also one of the top experts in the field of human art, and when a second rate piece goes for a large sum at auction, he investigates. The painting is one of the Dark Lady, and he is ultimately hired to search out other instances of her throughout time and acquire them for his employer. Leonardo travels around human space, which ultimately leads him into a philosophical search for his own humanity.

The Dark Lady is another fine book from Resnick, who turns out consistently good work. About the only thing you can be sure of them, however, is that they'll be very different from each other. In an age of trilogies, ninety book series and multi-book sagas, I find an author that is interested in researching and writing different material each time to be refreshing and encouraging. You may not know what's coming from him next, but you will know that it's good.

Jack, the Giant Killer

Jack, the Giant Killer is the second book in Armadillo Press' Fairy Tale series, published and distributed by Ace. Because of shakeup's at Armadillo, this may well be the final book, which would be a pity because this series, re-telling classic fairy tales for adults, is a real joy. And while this book is written by Charles de Lint, who just happens to be a Contributing Editor for OtherRealms, I'm going to talk about it anyway, conflict of interest or no, because it's a really good book that deserves to be talked about.

A couple of issues ago I raved about Emma Bull's first novel, War for the Oaks. In Jack, we have a rare but fascinating case of parallel development. You could almost believe that Bull and de Lint started out with the same set of notes and went out to write the same story their own way. Here, the Good and Evil sides of Fairie are fighting for Ottawa. Into the midst of the struggle stumbles Jacky Rowan, who joins the cause for Good.

The parallels between this book and Bull's are stunning. Both have taken on the task of merging a traditional Fantasy element into a contemporary reality by allowing an outsider a glimpse into Fairie and giving them a Cause. There are significant differences as well. Bull's warfare and violence are ritualized and stylized, while de Lint has a straightforward, gritty reality. Bull's bad folks are to some degree archetypes, the necessary force that Opposes Good. For all that they're bad people, you get the feeling they're doing it because that's what they're supposed to be doing.

The baddies in Jack, though, are really nasty. They like being evil. They're mean, ugly, smelly, sadistic beings who are in it for the ego and the power, which makes Jacky's ultimate success (definitely not pre-ordained, and by the skin of her teeth) that much more enjoyable. Bull's bad Fairies deserved to lose. de Lint's deserved to die.

I'm personally very glad I don't have to choose which one I prefer. They're both really good books. And, if you think about it, what these two books really show is that good, strong, contemporary Fantasy is on the upswing. If you're tired of generic Celtic historical fantasy clones like I am, that's something to cheer for and encourage. And this is a good book to pick up if you haven't tasted contemporary fantasy yet.

New Destinies

New Destinies is a quarterly SF-Magazine-In-A-Book, a format created a number of years ago by Jim Baen at Ace Books with Destinies. The thought, of course, is to make the SF Magazine available to book readers, since many people who read SF novels don't read the magazines. This edition features fiction by Larry Niven, Dean Ing, and Dafydd ab Hugh as well as fact and opinion pieces by Jim Baen, Charles Sheffield and Hans Moravec.

This is by far the weakest issue for fiction I've read in a while. Both the Niven and the Ing piece are scheduled to be published in other Baen anthologies later this year, and the ab Hugh piece is unremarkable. You could skip New Destinies completely and not miss much.

Except for Charles Sheffield. Sheffield's fact piece this issue is on high-temperature super-conductors, and he's got the subject down cold (sorry, couldn't resist). He's been doing fact pieces for New Destinies for a while, and my respect for him as a writer who can take very complex and esoteric subjects and making them understandable and accessible by folks who aren't trained to understand them. If you can imagine someone taking article with the complexity reserved for Analog fact articles and writing them in a semi-Asimovian, very accessible and open style you've got a feel for what Sheffield is doing. And while Asimov discusses limited factual areas with limited general interest, Sheffield gets down into the guts of things that are happening and important today -- last volume, for instance, he did a very critical analysis of the space program that I found to be both to the point and very depressing.

Sheffield doesn't mince words, and he doesn't hide behind jargon. As a populizer of science, something that Asimov's done successfully over the years (and which others, like Carl Sagan, had mixed success at) he's very good, better, in fact, than Asimov is these days. I'm reading New Destinies just for him, and happy to seem him have a forum where he can write about whatever seems to deserve being written about. Hopefully, someone will notice his articles and put them in their own collection someday, so they can get the attention they deserve.

If you buy New Destinies just for Sheffield, you won't be disappointed. And normally, the fiction is stronger than it is in Volume III, which is just an added bonus.

Dying Inside

Bantam is putting some of Robert Silverberg's long out-of-print novels back into print in omnibus editions. The first contains three novels from the Seventies, The Masks of Time, Born with the Dead, and Dying Inside.

Even though I don't normally review reprints, I'm bringing this to your attention because of Dying Inside, a book that I feel is Silverberg's best novel, and a book that I push on unsuspecting people at every possibility.

Be warned. This is not a fun read. It's a very grim book. But having a happy ending isn't a prerequisite for a good book. It's the story of David Selig, a telepath who never comes to grip with his special powers, and what happens to him when he realizes his power is deserting him. Even though he never came to grip with his capabilities, it is the single thing that defines what he is, and losing it causes him to lose everything he is. This is, ultimately, a character study of failure and dissolution, emotionally overpowering and unrelentingly depressing. but it's also a very real look at the side of a power most authors take for granted (you always thought that being a telepath would be fun?) or avoid the side effects of.

With all the new books published every year, I rarely find time to re- read anything these days. Dying Inside is one of the two books I make sure I find a way to read every year or so. The Lord of the Rings is the other. I don't think I can make a stronger recommendation than that. Buy this book. Be prepared to be depressed. It's worth it.

Buck Godot:
PSmith

I'm not really sure how to explain Buck Godot. Phil Foglio has put together a 72 page color graphic novel (in many ways a comic book with a pituitary condition) about Buck Godot, bounty hunter. What Buck is about and how Foglio makes it all work is beyond description -- Foglio reminds me of the late Randall Garrett, a very strange, warped and funny sense of humor that keeps you trying to decide if you want to laugh or groan. I did a lot of both. If you like a giggle with your SF, track down Buck Godot.

Stallion Gate

Martin Cruz Smith
Random House, 1986, 321pp, $17.95

Reviewed by
Kevin J. Anderson
Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach

Stallion Gate, by Martin Cruz Smith, is a novel of peripheral, but vital, interest to science fiction readers. What event could have been as incredibly influential on the genre as the explosion of the first atomic bomb? Back in 1944, Cleve Cartmill's short story "Deadline" got him slapped with an immediate CIA investigation because he had unwittingly built his story around the Army's most Classified secret. Stallion Gate is a thriller based on the real events behind the Trinity test, the establishment of the secret town of Los Alamos in northern New Mexico, the greatest scientists gathered from across the Allied world in order to create a futuristic weapon that would end the war. "By December 1944, five thousand people were crammed onto the mesa and in the dark without streetlamps because the Army was still trying to hide its most secret project." Making a thriller out of real events is sometimes the only way to force a bit of history down the throats of the public. On the basis of Nightwing, Martin Cruz Smith is no stranger to the fantastic genres, and with the superb Gorky Park, he showed that he can construct a fine, complex, moving, and detailed story. Smith spent about five years researching and writing this book.

Stallion Gate is a historical tale that centers around the usual fictional observer who always happens to be in the right place at the right time to watch history as it takes place. In this case, our observer is Joe Pena, an Army Sergeant who is also an Indian. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, General Groves -- all the historical figures are here, and they are real characters (especially Oppenheimer) rather than just cameo appearances as in a John Jakes book. Unfortunately, Smith assumes his readers already know the background detail and doesn't spend a great deal of time putting things into context.

A bigger flaw, though, is the actual perspective of the book itself. Some of the events behind the development of the first atomic bomb are really just disconnected highlights. The storyline is disjointed, scattered, with a lot of talk and a lot of character interaction, a good dose of sex here and there (gotta aim for those bestseller lists, you know!) -- but not much happens. The prose is lean, and often devoid of real description so that scenes seem to be set in a vacuum. Every few chapters or so we are treated to a gratuitous shoot-out or some rather absurd "spy stuff"; the book does have a good climax, but a too-abrupt ending. The actual historical events are more like peripheral happenings in Stallion Gate, things occurring in the background while the author is doing a character sketch. This novel is more the story of an Army-ized Indian trying to "find himself" rather than the historical epic the promotional copy led me to expect.

I've been to Los Alamos half a dozen times. I've been inside the lab buildings where much of the historical Manhattan Project work took place. I really wanted to like this book, and it's difficult for someone to make the subject boring. I'm glad someone finally fictionalized the story, but Smith could have done so much better! Maybe someone else will.

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC

Issue 20, Spring 1988 (part 12)

Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 12

No Prisoners!

Reviews by
Laurie Sefton
Copyright 1988 by Laurie Sefton

Reviewed in this Issue

Cyteen [*****]
by C.J. Cherryh

Warner Books, 688pp, $18.95, May, 1988, 0-446-51428

P=G+E

Expressed phenotype is the result of the genotype and the environmental influence. A simple equation that tries to explain a complicated issue. Perhaps a better way of writing this equation would be:

P= pG+qE

Where p+q=1.0. The "p" part of this equation is often referred to as the "heritability" of a specific phenotype, the percentage of expression that can be accounted for soley by genetic material. For example, the heritability of the specific gravity of a white potato is 0.7. So the specific gravity of any given white potato is due to 70% genetic and 30% environmental influence.

It's easy to determine the specific gravity of a white potato. In humans, it's also fairly easy to approximate the heritability of something like red hair or blue eyes. Note that I said "approximate." The environment has a nasty habit of throwing biological monkey wrenches into the works. So when we move away from traits like red hair and blue eyes, and move into expresed intelligence, environment starts to play a much larger role. If we wanted a human being with an expressed intelligence in the 99% percentile, and an overriding interest in genetics, we'd have to have complete control of the environment -- if we knew what that environment was.

This is one of the issues addressed in C.J. Cherryh's latest book, Cyteen. Cyteen is the home of Reseune, which produces phenotypes to order. Reseune is the home of Ariane Emory. Ariane Emory is a brilliant geneticist, a genius at producing "tapes", the environment that produces the phenotypes from the genotypes, a consummate politician, an iron-willed director, and a cold hearted cynical bitch. Just as the "tapes" control the "azi", the human product of her laboratories, does she control her underlings. She is admired, feared and loathed by those beneath her.

Enter Jordan, Justin and Grant. Justin is the parental replicate of Jordan, both are gifted developmental psychologists. Grant is an "azi" brother of Justin, taken from the same genetic material as Justin, given a few genetic tweaks to keep him from being a perfect replicate, and subjected to the immediate conditioning that all "azi's undergo from birth. "Azi"s may range in intelligence and abilities; after all, you don't want a soldier as a cook. But they are all alike in one regard; they need the constant reassurance of their "citizen" keepers. They have little to no creativity beyond what has been "programmed" into them. "Azi"s are the ultimate progeny of Brave New World.

Jordan, Justin and Grant find themselves entangled in Ariane's web of threats, bribes, and blackmail. Ultimately, Justin and Grant have nervous breakdowns, and Jordan is sent into exile for Ariane's murder.

This is not the end of the book -- this all occurs in the first fifth of the book. Now the fun begins. Reseune, and the whole of Cyteen have a political structure that falls somewhere in between the Daley democratic machine in Chicago and Byzantine Constantinople. The loss of Ariane Emory would be political suicide for Reseune, so Reseune recreates Ariane; this time with a slightly more tractable nature -- they hope.

The rest of the book parallels the development of young Ariane with the development of Grant and Justin. Ariane as she moves through a pre-arranged environment, including the cloning, training and introduction of her "azi" bodyguards; and Grant and Justin and they both move away from their "programming" -- Grant as an "azi" and Justin as his genetic father's replicate. In addition to this are the sidelights of political dealing, and the nagging reports of a "lost" azi/citizen colony; who, being found after 70 years are longer discernable as azi or citizen. They're simply human. Add this to the revelation that pehaps Jordan didn't kill the original Ariane Emory, and you have a multi-dimensional epic.

Cyteen is neither a quick nor easy read; Cherryh has included so many subplots and tangential plotlines that I had to pay close attention ot the book to keep from missing an important point. It is also a disturbing book; the azi's are treated with no more regard to their inherent humanity than one would treat a highly excitable thoroughbred horse. While their intelligence and abilities meet and exceed those of their citizen "keepers," they are nothing more than expensive lab animals. They are the ultimate differentiation of a slave class; they are the same sex, race, and species of their captors. Their only difference is in their developmental environment.

Cyteen is a thought-provoking study of society as well as one of the best science fictions novels of the year. Don't wait for this one to come out in paperback -- you won't be disappointed.

Letters to OtherRealms

The Kindly Ones

Melissa Scott
Boston, MA

I'd like to correct a problem with the Science Fiction Book Club edition of my novel The Kindly Ones. Due to an error of miscommunications, both the publicity flyer and the dust jacket of the Book club Edition -- and most recently the nomination notice for the Book Club's book fo the year award -- refer the to novel's narrator, Trey maturin, as "she." I did not specify Maturin's gender at any poing in the book, nor do I wish to do so. Rather, I intended to leave that decision to each individual reader, in the hope that this would allow people to examine the reasons behind their assumptions.

Marooned
in Realtime typo

Wayne A. Throop
dg-rtp!throopw@mcnc.org

There appear to be two errors in the electronic OtherRealms version of my review of Marooned in Realtime.

First, I mistakenly separated "realtime" into two words, which Vinge did not. I thought I had sent you a correction, but my archives show no trace of this, sigh. Sorry about that.

Second, the paragraph about how Wil feels about Marta's death (the one
concluding "Someone must die for this") was indented in the original
version I sent you, because it was a quotation from the book. The
format of the electronic version obscures this point, and I wouldn't
want to appear to claim Vinge's text as mine.
-- To err is human
-- to blame the other guy is even more human.
-- Solomon Short
(quoted by David Gerrold)

Well, one small,
sort of, nit

Tom Galloway
GALLOWAY@CLSEPF51.BITNET

Oops. There is one small not-quite-a-nit. In Dan'l's review of Bova's Kinsman, he notes that a) he hasn't read the 1976 Millennium which makes up a good part of the book, and b) Kinsman is heavily SDI propagandized.

Well, I haven't read Kinsman yet, since I refuse to pay hardcover prices for something with a binding like that used by the SFBC, so I don't know if the book really plays up SDI propaganda. But in Millennium, the SDI concept of laser satellites played a major and prominent role in the book. And as noted, this was published by in 1976, when SDI was definitely not a political issue.

[Dan'l Replies: True...but it most certainly was not called "SDI" at that time, as it is from early in "Kinsman" in The Kinsman Saga. I presume this to be a revision from the original editions of the books, as it would have been simply impossible (excepting the microscopic chance of Bova happening to use a term which Reagan would later "invent"). There is no particular plot reason to be calling the project "SDI"; I conclude that Bova made the change to align the books with modern SDI propaganda/terminology.]

Availability of books

Fred Bals
bals@nutmeg.dec.com

Although I support the idea of a quarterly rather than monthly OtherRealms for all the reasons we've discussed and which you cite, I'll note one problem that I've run into. Alan's review of Steakley's Armor sparked my interest enough to search out the book. I can't find it anywhere. Now, admittedly, southern New Hampshire isn't a cultural center at least as sf isn't concerned, but we do have a couple of decent chains with well-stocked sf shelves. But I suspect that a first novel by an unknown writer with little or no publicity attached to it had a shelf life of only a few months at best. And that runs into the second problem, which we've discussed before -- inconsistent publishing info from your reviewers. Without the issue at hand, I'm pretty sure that Alan didn't note the publication date of Armor (though he did list ISBN and publisher). Anyway, I'm going to have to find out how long ago Armor was issued, and then see if any of the specialty shops in the Boston area still have it. But I won't be surprised if they don't -- especially if the book was issued a year or more ago.

So, two problems: One, as you acknowledge, is the lag time between a book's issuance and its review in OtherRealms. The problem is exacerbated when the review is of a lesser-known work, the acknowledged area you want your reviewers to concentrate upon. By the time a respective issue of OtherRealms appears, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the book has disappeared, as seems to have happened with Armor. I don't anything that can be done about this. Perhaps as your reputation among publishers grows, you'll have enough pre-publication copies in to be able to beat this. But I think right now it somewhat hampers the usefulness of OtherRealms for people who want to find new reading material.

[The time lag is a real problem, and one that delayed the switch to quarterly for a number of months. Unfortunately, the reality of publishing and bookselling means that some books, especially paperbacks, are gone. The Bay Area is blessed with a number of good specialty stores with people are work hard at keeping their stock up. Not everyone is that lucky, of course. But given the limitations of my publishing schedule and the realities of publishing, I'm not sure what to do about this. One thing I'd recommend is tracking down a specialty store that you can mail order from for those books that are impossible to find otherwise. One store that I recommend for this would be Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica, at (213) Great-SF. I'm sure there are many others around the country. In fact, if you know of a specialty store that has a strong stock and does mail order, let me know (or better yet, have the store contact me) and I'll give them a free plug. If I get enough of a response, I'll put together a list of specialty shops for regular publication in OtherRealms]

Second problem, which I think can be handled, is the inconsistent publication info. This has improved from previous issues tremendously. But I'd recommend -- and include me in this rule -- that you let your reviewers know that you expect that all reviews include all the standard publishing info and a rating based on your scale. If that information isn't included, then the review will be automatically rejected until it is. A few instances of you enforcing that rule, and I think you won't have a problem.

[A lot of the missing information is coming from older reviews that I've had stockpiled. They're cleaned out as of this issue, and future reviews will have as complete publication information as I can get. The minimum set I am going to require from now on is Title, Author(s), Publisher and ISBN. I also want to see publication (or copyright) dates, pages, and cloth/paper/trade designation. I'll be supplementing this with information out of the long delayed book index database when I get it fully functional, since right now I don't have an easy way to look up a book and get the missing information]

Let's see: I respect your opinion as always, but think you missed the march on Watchmen (which is, btw, only Watchmen, not The Watchmen, sez nit-picking Bals). You make a good point that Watchmen will probably not fare very well in the Hugos due to its inacessability -- at least as compared to The Dark Knight Returns. But I personally consider that a failing on the part of sf fans, rather than on the work. Maus, for instance, has done extremely well in the mainstream, even given that on first glance it might appear to only be a "funny-animal" book. Would that fandom could have as a collective open mind as the people they label "mundanes."

Although I realize that your review of Watchmen was probably somewhat constricted for space reasons, I think you do it a disservice by implying that it's not much more than a parody of superhero conventions. Nor do I think you need a familiarity with the Charlton characters (or comic books as a whole, for that matter) in order to follow the book In fact, in discussions about the series here at DEC, I actually found that most people hadn't realized the Watchmen characters were based on the Charlton heroes.

Rather than Watchmen parodying superheroes, I think what Moore does is to realistically extrapolate what would happen if masked vigilantes and at least one super-powered being actually existed. In many ways, as the title's reference to the Juvenal quotation implies, Watchmen is a cautionary tale in the best tradition of science fiction, dealing with the dangers of absolution power and the ends justifying the means. I still consider it the most impressive science fiction work I read during 86-87.

You generated less of a furor than I expected from HHF #1. The general consensus on the con seemed to follow your opinions, and indeed were reflected by those DECcies who attended.

Not as a complaint, but as a matter of curiousity, what happened to the paragraph breaks in my review of Mindplayers? Did they get stripped out somehow, or did you eliminate them to get the review on one page? It kinda made me appear to have been on speed when I wrote it (gee, gonzo reviewing).

[Actually, I felt the Mindplayers review had that special, cyberpunkish feel to it. Seriously, there was some kind of computer glitch that I didn't catch until too late. MacDuff got hungry and ate all the internal formatting of the piece during layout, and by the time I noticed, the deed was done and I couldn't go back to the source to see where the paragraph markers were. Steps have been taken to make sure it doesn't happen again, but with the wonders of modern day computers, I'm sure something even more amusing will happen as soon as my guard is down.]

Subscriptions

OtherRealms is available for the usual bribes and trades: a copy of your zine, submissions, letters, comments or artwork. If you don't want to be a part of OtherRealms, you can subscribe for one year (four issues) for $8.50. A single issue is $2.50. OtherRealms is available at Future Fantasy Bookstore in Palo Alto, CA.

People in the publishing industry can qualify for a free subscription. Please contact me for details.

Electronic
OtherRealms

An electronic, text-only version of OtherRealms is available on many different computer networks and bulletin boards.

On the ARPAnet, BITNET, CSNet and UUCP networks, send E-mail to chuq@sun.Com to be placed on the mailing list. For people with access to USENET, OtherRealms is available in rec.mag.otherrealms. It is also available on the Delphi Timesharing service.

Submissions

OtherRealms publishes articles about book length Science Fiction and Fantasy. The primary focus is reviews of books, especially the newer and lesser known authors that might otherwise be missed in the crowded shelves of your bookstore. Other material about books and the authors that create them are welcome, including bibliographies and interviews.

Authors are invited to write articles for the Behind the Scenes series, where the background and research that went into a book can be discussed.

Please query on interviews, Behind the Scenes articles, and longer works. Reviews should be sent in their entirety. OtherRealms does not publish poetry, fiction, movie or fannish material.

Submissions can be made either on a Macintosh or MS-DOS disk. With the Mac, either text, MacWrite or Word files are fine. For MS-DOS, please submit ascii readable disks.

Please include an envelope and return postage. If you ever want to see your submission again, you need to post bail. Also, while I don't mind multiple submissions, you need to tell me if something is going to multiple markets. I take first serial rights unless we agree on something else. Folks who forget these rules will find it hard to get published in OtherRealms in the future.

You can also submit via the networks to either the account CHUQ on Delphi or"chuq@sun.COM" on USENET.

Submission deadline is the 15th of the month prior to publication or when I run out of room. Letter column deadline is the first of the month of publication.

Publishing
News

OtherRealms is interested in publishing news about the happenings in the field -- contracts, promotions, deals, sales, market needs. If something has happened to you that you want the word to know about, I want to know about it.

Art

I'm always in need of good genre art, from small clip-art pieces to front and back covers. Anything with a genre flavor is welcome here! I prefer reproductions and photocopies to originals.

Those
Funny Runes

The gobbledygook attached to the names of OtherRealms contributors are addresses. Computers use them to figure out how to get to another computer to pass along a message. If you don't understand them, don't feel bad -- neither do many computers, and they're the experts. Believe it or not, it does work. Most of the time.

The Details

OtherRealms is published using a Macintosh computer, a Laserwriter Plus, Ready, Set, Go! 4.0, Microsoft Word 3.01, SuperPaint, and other pieces of software. The body typeface is Palatino 10/11, the Headers use Bookman Bold and Zapf Chancery in various sizes.

Is This Your
Last Issue?

The number on your mailing label is the issue your OtherRealms
subscription dies.   Negative numbers indicate complimentary
subscriptions. If it is zero, this is the only issue you'll see untilI
decide to send you another (if you hate leaving things up to chance, do
something!).  Don't wait for me to tell you to renew, do it today!
Rates will go up soon, thanks to the Post Office. Lock in current rates!

Book Ratings
in OtherRealms

All books are rated with the following guidelines. Most books published should fall into the range [***-] to [***+]. Ratings are modifed with - or + to show a half step, with [***-] subjectively better than [**+].

[*****] One of the best books of the year
[****] A very good book, Above average
[***] A good book. Recommended
[**] Flawed, but has its moments
[*] Not recommended
[] To be avoided

OtherRealms

Science Fiction and Fantasy
In Review

Editor & Publisher
Chuq Von Rospach

Associate Editor
Laurie Sefton

Contributing Editors
Charles de Lint
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Alan Wexelblat

OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988

Copyright 1988
by
Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved

One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.

OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form
without written permission
of Chuq Von Rospach.

The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain intact.No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way without the express permission of the author.

OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:

Chuq Von Rospach
35111-F Newark Blvd.
Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.

Usenet: chuq@sun.COM
Delphi: CHUQ
CompuServe: 73317,635
GENie: C.VONROSPAC