Aboriginal Science Fiction, Issues 57–58 — page 40: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

This is no small task! I found myself not only believing that they might have been real, but Barnes’s description of their cities made me want to visit them. He manages to make the conflict between them seem plausible and intractable. It’s a fine job. Giraut and Margaret are dumped into a very tense, very complicated situation and asked to do what they can. I won’t try to explain the details (the book is beautifully complicated), but the complexities all work into the story: two cultures at each oth- ers throats, two people whose mar- riage is shaky, and two beautifully realized cultures, both with admirable and not-so-admir-able features. And even the interfering Ambassador isn’t cardboard. I also enjoyed Barnes’s rumina- tions on the nature of a society with- out want. Technology can give peo- ple as much food and as comfortable a life as they want. There is no real overpopulation and there is no war. The scientific advances left to be dis- covered are difficult, and few people can be scientists. There a thousand years’ worth of literature and paint- ing and music at everyone’s finger- tips. So what do you do with your life? This is certainly Barnes’s best work to date and is, in my opinion, a very strong Hugo contender for next year. Rating: Yeveveve 1/2 Ports of Call By Jack Vance Tor, 1998 300 pp., $24.95 I reviewed Vance’s last book, Night Lamp, as “quintessential Vance” with a good plot, interesting places, and characters whom one might even like. Well, Ports of Call is just like that, but without the plot. There’s not a shred of plot here. None at all. Nothing. A somewhat aimless young man studies astrogation rather than art. His eccentric aunt happens to win a spaceship as settlement of a libel suit and decides to take off in pur- suit of a fabled Medical Clinic of Youth with her nephew as captain of the ship. So far so good. About 40 pages into the book, the 40 Aboriginal Science Fiction — Summer 1998 ‘ aunt fires her nephew, leaves him at a spaceport with enough money to buy passage home, and wanders off in her ship with a _ neer-do-well boyfriend running things. The young man is miffed, but instead of returning home, he signs on as a crewman on a tramp freighter. We’re now at page 45. Nothing else happens for the rest of the book. The tramp freighter with the young man aboard spends the remainder of the book going from port to port picking up freight and passengers and discharging the same. The ports feature interesting, very Vancian, cultures, and interest- ing, very Vancian, things happen to the people at them. The book is a series of unconnected, often absurd, (but always entertaining) events. Imaginative and inventive, but unrelated. If you’ve read much Vance, you'll know what I mean — this is like that but more so. And if you liked that sort of thing when you read it before, you'll like this too — it’s very well done. But if you’re looking for a story, read Night Lamp or the Demon Princes novels. This is not Vance for Beginners, but it is great fun for people who like Vance. Rating: Yxveve 1/2 Helm By Steven Gould Tor, 1998 330 pp., $24.95 Steven Gould’s first two books, Jumper and Wildside, were spectac- ular. Helm is very good, but not at the level of the first two. A war in the mid-21st century rendered Earth uninhabitable, leav- ing about 9,000 survivors alive in space, many of them refugees who crowded onto every Earth-to-orbit rocket available. Because facilities don’t exist to support that many peo- ple, and because the process of ter- raforming a nearby extra-solar plan- et had already begun, most of them were shipped off to this colony to live or die without help from Earth. (This whole business of near-Earth space facilities being so primitive, and yet the terraforming of an extra- Solar planet being underway, is most implausible. The dead hand of the Author intrudes. ) It’s now hundreds of years later and mankind has thrived on the colony planet, which has fallen back to an early 1800s level of technology and is divided into numerous coun- tries. The Helm is a piece of technol- ogy brought from Earth which turns out to be an educator that can be used only once a generation. The Helm is used to educate the heir to the throne of the most advanced statelet. A younger son, who was not sup- posed to be the one to use the Helm, uses it, and is sent into a rigorous physical training program which, while interesting, seems mainly there to introduce lots of detail about Aikido, a martial art in which Gould is evidently very interested. His personal affairs form one thread of the story, while the political machinations in his father’s statelet and in the kingdom of which it is a part form another, culminating in a civil war. The young man saves everyone and everything. Helm was entertaining, but, ulti- mately unconvincing. And the young man was far too lucky. Still, Gould’s worst book to date is better than most. Rating: vevere 1/2 LJ Gomichbooksicom