When I was about half-way through The Uplift War, I sat down and wrote the following:

The saying is that familiarity breeds contempt. In the case of David Brin’s Uplift novels, though, I’m finding that familiarity merely breeds a sense of the mundane. The grand brushstrokes of his galactic civilization seem brilliant and bold when you see them for the first time, as if a reality of epic scope were being polished like a jewel before its presentation. But the longer you look and the more you see, the more mundane the creation becomes — as if some magician had used the polishing cloth to shuffle the jewel away and replaced it with a counterfeit of glass.

When someone says, “Look ye upon a galaxy teeming with alien civilizations beyond count.” There is a promise of grandeur there. But when the same guy wraps up by saying, “And pretty much all of t hem are uni-cultures based on biological cliches and my own fascination with trinary thinking.” Well, the promise kind of evaporates like so much smoke.

Having just completed The Uplift War, I find that my opinion has shifted.

The ending is odd… About twenty pages from the end Brin shifts into a strange storytelling mode where he’s suddenly reminding readers of things that happened less than five paragraphs earlier. It gets even weirder when he begins re-stating the basic relationships between characters. “There was XXX, YYY’s lover…” Yeah, David, we know. They’ve been lovers for three hundred pages. And, yes, we know that Megan Oneagle is Robert Oneagle’s mother. Give it a bloody rest already.

I think the reason I find it so hard to precisely put my opinion of Brin’s writing into words is the blatant inconsistency of it. In Startide Rising I watched him shift seamlessly, time and time again, between hack soap opera and brilliant space opera. In The Uplift War we’re spared from hack soap opera, but the inconsistency simply finds its place in a plethora of Achilles’ heels which, while being less easily summarized, are not less frustrating and debilitating.

Some more random thoughts:

– Intriguingly, while I found the hack soap opera of Startide Rising to be one of the major failings of the novel, I found the romantic sub-plots of The Uplift War to be one of its major strengths.

– As with Startide Rising, Brin gives us a plot of epic scope with a mythic core. To his credit, he manages to resist the urge to have one of his characters explain to us just how amazingly cool the epic scope and mythic core of his novel is. (Something which, in Startide Rising, dulls the luster of the accomplishment. Unfortunately, because he did it in Startide Rising, some of the luster is still lost.)

– The Uplift War is a far more satisfying novel than Startide Rising, in no small part because Brin chose both the right beginning and the right ending.

I wish I could put my thoughts on The Uplift War into some kind of order, but I’ve spent several weeks trying to write this reaction and that order just isn’t emerging. In retrospect, I can say that I liked as much as I disliked. And what I liked, I liked a lot. And what I disliked, I disliked a lot.

In the end, I’d say that The Uplift War is worth reading. But I won’t give it a high recommendation.

GRADE: B

This is, quite simply, a superb collection of short fiction. Within its pages Zelazny ranges freely from science fiction to fantasy; from irreverence to painful truth; from the merely good to the truly excellent and every point in-between.

The collection includes “Walpurgisnacht”, “Recital”, “The Night Has 999 Eyes”, “My Lady of the Diodes”, “The Last of the Wild Ones”, “The Horses of Lir”, “A Hand Across the Galaxy”, “The George Business”, “Home is the Hangman”, “The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current”, “Fire and/or Ice”, “Exeunt Omnes”, “Dismal Light”, “Angel, Dark Angel”, “And I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee”, “A Very Good Year”, “The Naked Matador”, “Go Starless in the Night”, “But Not the Herald”, and the titular “Unicorn Variations”, as well as three short essays and introductory commentary to each story by Zelazny.

The one weakness of the collection, in my opinion, is the number of short-short stories that Zelazny includes: Some are mood pieces. Some are clever ideas. Some are sensawunda. And, in fact, essentially all of them are good little pieces of fiction. But, ultimately, the short-short form is a one-punch fight (or, as Zelazny says himself, a single-panel cartoon). While each stands by itself, the effect of so many short-shorts in close proximity to one another is a pervading sense of gimmickry.

But, that minor flaw aside, Unicorn Variations is peppered with memorable stories providing a tour de force of what speculative fiction is capable of. Particularly notable in my memory are:

“The Last of the Wild Ones”. This is the sequel to another Zelazy short story, “Devil Car”, which I have never read. Despite that, I found this to be a beautiful, emotional sojourn of a warrior at the end of a long and personal journey.

“The George Business”. This is a rather clever twist on the old dragon-slaying chestnut. It’s so clever, in fact, that Hollywood just couldn’t resist lifting it for Dragonheart a few years back. The distinction is that Zelazny spices the story with his unique wit and verve, whereas the Hollywood vehicle choked on its re-treading of fantasy stock pieces.

“Dismal Light”. This story is a prequel of sorts to Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead. I say “of sorts” because it was apparently written as a character study for the novel. I haven’t read the novel, but, like “The Last of the Wild Ones”, I found “Dismal Light” to stand admirably on its own. The bifurcated vision of the first paragraph really drew me into the story: “Right there on his right shoulder, like a general, Orion wears a star. (He wears another in his left armpit; but, for the sake of wholesome similes, forget it.) Magnitude 0.7 as seen from the Earth, with an absolute magnitude 4.1; it was red and variable and a supergiant of an insignia; a class M job approximately 270 light-years removed from Earth, with a surface temperature of around 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit; and if you’d looked closely, through one of those little glass tents, you’d have seen that there was some titanium oxide present. It must have been with a certain pride that General Orion wore the thing, because it had left the main sequence so long ago and because it was such a very, very big star, and because the military mind is like that.” And the extended metaphor of Orion throughout the story lent a metaphorical skeleton to a subtle character drama writ large across a backdrop of star death.

“Unicorn Variation”. The story from which the collection draws its title is a simply delightful little piece of whimsy. It made me laugh and ponder and wonder and, most importantly, turn the page.

But, ultimately, it’s the collection’s centerpiece – the novella “Home is the Hangman” – which makes it shine. This is, quite simply, one of the best robot stories I’ve ever read, summoning up a queer mixture of pre-cyberpunk and noir with an Asimovian sensibility to deliver a poignant and powerful drama on the cusp of revolution. This story deserves every accolade it’s been given (which includes the Hugo and the Nebula).

All of which has led me to a very important question:

Why the hell haven’t I read more Roger Zelazny?

I enjoy every piece of his short fiction that I stumble across. I loved the First Chronicles of Amber. I rave about Lord of Light.

But this collection really brought home to me the fact that, for whatever reason, I’ve never really made an effort to read Zelazny – I’ve kinda just let his work fall into my lap. (Even this collection was a random purchase that I only plucked off the shelf because of a coincidental comment here in the newsgroup about one of the essays.) I think that’s something that’s going to have to change.

GRADE: A-

(I’d rank this as a B+ collection without the lengthy “Home is the Hangman”, which is an A+ story.)

I first encountered Robert Asprin’s Myth novels in a library book sale in Rochester, MN when I spotted a copy of Myth Conceptions in the stacks. I was a young kid at the time and for some reason I thought that Robert Asprin was an author my mother had read and enjoyed, so I picked the book up as a present for her. In reality, she had never heard of him before, so I sat down to read it instead.

The story of Skeeve, a young apprentice who ends up, through a confidence job gone horribly awry, leading a misfit gang of interdimensional adventurers against a massive army of ridiculous size was practically ready-made for a twelve-year old steeped in Tolkien and D&D. The characters were witty and endearing. The plot was clever. The humor warm and entertaining. I immediately started hunting down the other books in the series, and its strong continuity and character growth quickly made for a solid addiction. In the years since I’ve re-read most of the Myth books two or three times.

A week or so ago, while suffering from a rather nasty head cold, I noticed the Myth books lying out on my recently rearranged and expanded bookshelves. Since I was looking for some quick comfort reading, I grabbed Myth Conceptions once again and curled up in my blankets. This, of course, freshly renewed my addiction and I spent the better part of the week plowing through most of the rest of the series.

A few random thoughts on the series and its parts:

Another Fine Myth is the first book in the series, but I’ve never been particularly enamored with it. This may be because I only managed to find a copy after I had already finished the next six books in the series, but I genuinely feel that this is one of the weaker books Asprin has to offer. The humor relies more on the mediocre puns rather than the clever character interactions of the later books. The plot also comes across as formulaic and forced. Basically, there’s a reason why I started re-reading the series with Myth Conceptions (the second volume) instead of Another Fine Myth.

In my opinion, the series really hits its stride with Myth Conceptions: The characters come to life. The plots start to hum. The humor finds its pace. In short, Asprin finds his groove and the result is pure entertainment. From Myth Conceptions through Myth Directions, Hit or Myth, Myth-ing Persons, and Little Myth Marker the series shows consistent growth and improvement.

Unfortunately, that’s when the series does a pratfall.

The next volume, Myth I.N.C. Link, marks a departure in the format of the series: Rather than being told from the POV of Skeeve, Asprin’s intention was for the Myth Inc. volumes to be told from the POVs of the other characters in the series. Myth I.N.C. Link inaugurates the tradition through a series of interlocking short stories, each told from a different POV. In theory, this could’ve been really clever. In practice, it was disastrous.

The first and most immediate problem is that Asprin isn’t as comfortable inside the heads of his supporting cast as he is inside the head of Skeeve. Characters who seem full of life when viewed from Skeeve’s POV suddenly become lifeless and cliched when seen through their own.

The second big problem is that Asprin, apparently spurred on by the desire for new POVs, decides to create a treepony. (For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s a pejorative reference to the treecats of Weber’s Honor Harrington novels by way of Mercedes Lackey. Basically, I’m extending the term to include any SFnal pet which suddenly begins to accrue massive intellect and amazing powers as a series progresses.) The result is as stupid as you would expect.

The series recovers, at least to a large extent, with Myth-Nomers and Im-pervections. The treepony is shuffled off-stage, we’re back in the believable environs of Skeeve’s head, and almost all of the problems which plagued Myth I.N.C. Link have been alleviated.

Unfortunately, the recovery is not quite complete. Myth I.N.C. Link has apparently weakened Asprin’s creative immune system and he is now being devoured by the brain eater. It’s not obvious at first, but the first nagging suggestions can be found lurking here that Asprin is suffering from one of the Three Symptoms of the Brain Eater.

(What are the Three Symptoms of the Brain Eater?

1. Injecting long philosophical rants into the middle of a novel.

2. Bizarre attempts to link a variety of disparate works into a single chronology.

3. A belief that a synopsis constitutes a final draft, usually coupled with rapid scene shifts between characters describing all the interesting things they just finished doing off-camera.)

Specifically, Asprin begins to rant. Not badly at first, but by Sweet Myth-tery of Life the jig is up: At least half of that novel involves Skeeve going from one character to another and listening to each of them lecture him on love and marriage. The other half involves accounting. (I kid you not.) Surprisingly, the result is still mildly entertaining. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the really good stuff that Asprin was producing just a few books earlier.

(You’ll notice I skipped Myth I.N.C. in Action. I suggest you do the same. I read it once, and that was once too many. Fortunately, unlike Myth I.N.C. Link, you can skip it without being completely lost by later continuity.)

After Sweet Myth-tery of Life, Asprin thankfully took a break from the Myth series. I say thankfully, because during that time he was fully consumed by the brain eater and produced a painful barrage of utter tripe. I tried some of that tripe. It hurt. It hurt real bad. So when Asprin returned to the Myth series a couple years back with Myth-ion Improbable I was skeptical, but I was willing to give it a shot.

Myth-ion Improbable is something of a prequel. It’s a previously untold adventure squeezed in between the third and fourth volumes of the series. Asprin specifically wrote it as a light-hearted attempt to get back in touch with his characters before tackling the much more difficult stories waiting to be told after Sweet Myth-tery of Life. The result was fairly mediocre compared to the rest of the series, but it’s also the first readable piece of fiction Asprin managed to produce in nearly a decade.

The biggest problem with Myth-ion Improbable is Asprin’s mind-numbing devotion to detail. Imagine an entire novel in which nobody ever simply waits in town a couple of hours for their friends to show up. Instead, they stop by the saloon for a couple of drinks; walk up and down main street a couple of times; say hello to a few random strangers they happen to pass; go back to the saloon to see if their friends have shown up; head to the edge of town and sit around for awhile; get back up and head back into town… And so forth. It doesn’t help that one of the plot points is that everyone and everything in the novel’s primary dimension looks pretty much the same no matter where you go. The result is the plodding pace of a novella padded out to novel length.

Perhaps the best thing about Myth-ion Improbable, despite its flaws, is that it really does have the feel of Asprin at his best. It promises a recovery.

Asprin has now written several more Myth novels in collaboration with Jody Lynn Nye. Asprin’s previous collaborations have, in my experience, been truly dreadful. Plus, the first of these collaborations was another Myth, Inc. novel, so I haven’t gone out of my way to track these latest volumes down. But if I were to spot them on the shelf of my local bookstore, I’d probably give them a shot.

A few additional thoughts and caveats:

I hear a lot of people compare the Myth series to Xanth. Usually this is along the lines of, “It’s just a bunch of stupid puns. Like Xanth at its worst.” I think a lot of this comes from Another Fine Myth, which (as I noted above) is a lot more punny than the rest of the series. And, frankly, I’ll agree that Asprin is thoroughly mediocre when it comes to punning. But I don’t think the puns ever come close to defining the series (as they do with Xanth).

I also hear a lot of people compare Myth to Discworld, usually unfavorably. And that’s generally true: In works like Small Gods and Reaper Man, Pratchett delivers on a level and with a depth that is far beyond the best that Asprin has to offer.

To sum up: This series gets a rough start in Another Fine Myth, but is a lot of fun from Myth Conceptions all the way through Little Myth Marker. Beyond that, it gets pretty sketchy, but I think all of the Myth volumes (as opposed to the Myth Inc. volumes) are worth your time.

GRADES:

ANOTHER FINE MYTH: B
MYTH CONCEPTIONS: A-
MYTH DIRECTIONS: A-
HIT OR MYTH: A
MYTH-ING PERSONS: A-
LITTLE MYTH MARKER: A
MYTH I.N.C. LINK: C
MYTH-NOMERS AND IM-PERVECTIONS: B
MYTH I.N.C. IN ACTION: D+
SWEET MYTH-TERY OF LIFE: B-
MYTH-ION IMPROBABLE: C+

Robert Asprin
Published: 1978-2001
Publisher: Ace Books
Cover Price: $7.99
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I didn’t mean to read this book.

Awhile back I downloaded all of the free e-books offered through the Baen Library, which included The Tank Lords by David Drake. These got carefully sorted into the rest of my personal e-library, which includes purchases and digital back-ups of books I own in hardcopy.

I remember that I was looking for a digital copy of Asprin’s Myth-ion Improbable because I’d left the paperback copy I was reading at home. I remember discovering that I didn’t have it in my e-library.

I have absolutely no memory of changing directories, opening up The Tank Lords, and beginning to read. But I must have, because a few minutes later I was hooked.

The Tank Lords is a collection of short stories written between 1979 and 1997. It includes “Under the Hammer”, “Rolling Hot”, “Night March”, “Code-Name Firefeitz”, and “The Tank Lords”.

What these stories all have in common are Hammer’s Slammers, a company of mercenaries led by Colonel Hammer across a post-Diaspora galaxy of strife and turmoil. The Slammers’ calling cards are their super-tanks — monstrous, hovering arsenals of fusion-powered firepower.

The result, informed by Drake’s own experience in Vietnam, is an addictive example of what military SF is capable of: A far-flung future provides a perfect backdrop for all the drama, excitement, wonder, and tragedy inherent in humanity’s passion for war. Drake excels not only in vividly portraying his action-packed battle sequences, but also grounds his stories in the profound impact those battles have upon the individuals caught in their midst.

These stories, although at times deeply moving, are not profound or life-changing works. I’m not going to declare them literary triumphs. But they deliver, hard and true. I was compelled to keep the pages turning, and now that I’ve finished The Tank Lords I’m hungry for more. The only question is whether I hunt down the Baen paperbacks or wait for the hardbacks being released by Night Shade Books.

GRADE: B+

(Particularly notable in this collection is “Rolling Hot”, which I would give an A-.)

David Drake
Published: 1997
Publisher: Baen Books
Cover Price: $6.99
ISBN: 0-671-87794-1
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This was the third time I’ve attempted to read Startide Rising. A couple years ago I read Sundiver, the first of Brin’s Uplift books, and enjoyed it enough that I immediately ran out to buy the Earthclan omnibus (collecting Startide Rising and The Uplift War). I naturally started reading Startide Rising as soon as I got home, but after about twenty or thirty pages I simply lost interest and got involved in another book.

I picked it up again about six months later and didn’t even get that far before putting the book down again.

This time I managed to build up a good head of steam and finished the book. But I found the exact same flaws this time which had turned me off the book completely the last two times I’d attempted to read it: Crude characterization, sloppy prose, and a poorly constructed narrative.

The first and most immediate problem is that Brin literally starts his story in the wrong place. I have nothing against in media res openings, but imagine Rendezvous with Rama if Clarke had decided to start the narrative with the alien ship already half-explored. It’s not inconceivable that some other writer could have started the story in the same place and made it work, but it’s certain that Brin didn’t: Large swaths of the first hundred pages is spent conveying heavy-handed chunks of pace-killing, awkward exposition.

And when the exposition isn’t killing your interest in the book, Brin’s clumsy writing takes up the slack. Not only does he literally have characters giving “as you know, Bob” speeches, but he frequently feels a need to explain to the reader why the last paragraph was not, in fact, awkward and out of character (which, of course, only calls attention to the fact that it was, in fact, awkward and out of character).

The cast, meanwhile, is populated by trite clichés who – despite the momentous and deadly circumstances in which they find themselves – seem to be mostly content in playing out mediocre soap opera dramas. In fact, their mundanity is an impressive achievement considering that most of them are uplifted dolphins.

In some ways, it almost feels as if Brin is deliberately on a scavenger hunt for every bad habit of science fiction writing he can find, and Startide Rising is his way of checking off the finds. He even makes one of his characters briefly an aficionado of 20^th century science fiction, and then he follows up by having her claim that if someone were reading about Brin’s Uplift universe back then they wouldn’t believe it (because its oh-so-dark)! I’m pretty sure I audibly groaned when I came across that stinker of a paragraph.

So why did I keep reading through this slop? Because where Startide Rising succeeds is in the sheer creative scope of its future: A galactic society billions of years old, formed entirely of species artificially uplifted to sentience and capable of tracing their ancestry back to near-mythic Progenitors. An anarchic society given constancy only by is adherence to the principles of uplift – that each client species shall give, in payment for its sentience, a hundred thousand years of indentured servitude to its patrons – and to the Library, a body of knowledge contributed to and shared by every sentient species.

Even here, unfortunately, Brin doesn’t quite get the job done. (For example, not only are his aliens limited to uni-cultures that make Star Trek species look positively diverse, but he has those uni-cultures persist for MILLIONS OF YEARS.) But, ultimately, it’s the speculation in Brin’s speculative fiction that captures the imagination and keeps you reading.

In fact, as a general principle, Brin consistently succeeds when it comes to the Big Ideas. It’s only in the details that he falls down flat. For example, all the little mini-soap operas Brin has playing out among his cast of characters ring false; but the greater drama – of a Terran crew desperately fleeing the wrath of the galaxy after stumbling across a secret better left forgotten – works on a compelling level. Similarly, Brin’s future is pedestrian in its part, but epic in its scope: Any given technology is relatively commonplace, but a galactic society so ancient and diverse that they have developed a hundred different ways to break the lightspeed barrier immediately captures the imagination.

It’s also true that, as the book goes on, Brin begins to find his feet and delivers a more reliable performance. But this has as much to do with the fact that, as Brin gets his tiresome exposition out the way, the main plot heats up and he has less and less time to dwell on his mediocre soap operas.

In the final analysis, Startide Rising is disappointing because it could have been so much more. But, by the same token, that failed promise of greatness still results in a good book. A flawed book, yes, but a book which still delivers a lot of entertainment on a lot of different levels.

GRADE: B
David Brin
Published: 1983
Publisher: Spectra
Cover Price: $7.50
ISBN: 0-553-27418-X
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