Books: SF Times Six

[woodwardiocom]

-In rough order of publication . . .

Tom Swift and his Motor Boat by Victor Appleton

-Actually, this one isn't technically SF, since there's no speculative science in it, just solid engineering and technophilia. A fun period piece from 1910, though I wish Tom wasn't so persistently dense about obvious clues.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow/The Fairy Chessmen by Lewis Padgett.

-Two short novels in one volume. Tomorrow is about the mental strain of caring for nuclear power plants, fear of progress, and what happens when rebels find out that a little war might be a good thing. Chessmen is about a world already in a perpetual, stalemated war, and the threat posed by a power intruding from outside. Mildly recommended.

The Mile-Long Spaceship by Kate Wilhelm

-A collection of short stories, published in 1963. Which makes it unusual that the author is a woman, and wasn't hiding behind a pseudonym. I really enjoyed these stories, particularly "Fear is a Cold Black" (about the harsh decisions the captain of a spaceship must sometimes make), "Andover and the Android" (about a man who hates women, but also wants to appear normal, at all costs), and "The Last Days of the Captain" (in which two people who have no reason to like each other are crushed together by the stress of a long, grinding road trip). Though it seems trite and a bit condescending to point it out, these are early SF stories that actually have a woman's perspective, in that there are real female characters, who are interesting and competent and such. It's a refreshing thing to find in SF written before I was born.

Escape Across the Cosmos by Gardner Fox

-When he wrote comics, Fox created DC Comics' multiverse by declaring that there was an Earth-Two, in its own dimension, separated from Earth-One by its differing vibrational frequency. He returns to that idea here, where a scientist discovers another such vibrationally-distinct world, realizes it poses a threat, and rebuilds a veteran into a weapon capable of dealing with that threat . . . and all that happens before the first page, in which the veteran is being marooned on a far planet for the crime of murdering the scientist. Though Fox throws the neologisms around a bit freely, this is still a fun slice of space opera — though I'd almost call it space-opera-punk, with the original meaning of the "-punk" suffix, in that the heroes spend most of their time crawling through the underworld.

Mars, We Love You, edited by Jane Hipolito and Willis McNelly

-I picked this up back when I was writing Transhuman Space: In The Well, but never got around to reading it until now. It's an anthology of stories about Mars, including excerpts from Schiaparelli's "Reports on Canali", Percival Lowell's "Mars as the Abode of Life", War of the Worlds, A Princess of Mars, and Double Star. Highlights include Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" (a quasi-comedic journey across the desert by a human and a genuinely alien alien), Miller's "The Cave" (in which we learn about the social contract that binds all life on a world that's slowly drying up), and Ellison's "In Lonely Lands" (in which a man and a Martian explore a new frontier in friendship).

Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven

-A great big huge improvement over Ringworld Throne. Niven finds ways to make strengths of the weaknesses of Known Space. E.g., when writing in the KS setting you have to deal with the fact there are three different nigh-invulnerable building materials around: General Products hulls, stasis fields, and scrith (Ringworld structural material). So, what does he do? He invokes our sense of wonder by giving us spacecraft built in GP hulls, with a layer of scrith armor, and rigged with emergency stasis fields, and sends them out to fight against enemies equipped with weapons which render two of the three defenses useless . . . Not to mention that he ties in tiny plot threads from a dozen of his previous works. Yeah, Niven returned to Thinking Big with this one, and it's a heck of ride. Highly recommended.

Comments

[jamesaach.livejournal.com]

FYI: fiction about the mental strain of caring about a nuclear power plant from soeone who actually works in one: http://RadDecision.blogspot.com

[supercheesegirl.livejournal.com]

Oh. I've read Ringworld up through Throne, I think, and then stopped because I was annoyed with it. Children is the fourth, right? Maybe I should pick it up. I loved the first one but got a little bored by all the rishathra sidetracks. (I probably spelled that wrong after all this time, but you know what I mean.)

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-Yah, Children is the fourth, Children is darn good. (Though it helps to have read a lot of his other Known Space books, like Crashlander and Neutron Star.)