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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Here’s the trick to Cherryh: She doesn’t explain herself. Another author might say, “Jane saw him strike the girl. Memories of her own father’s abuse welled up inside her and filled her with an uncontrollable rage. She raced over and threw herself upon him, her fists pummeling him. Every blow was a cathartic release, blotting out her memories.” Cherryh, on the other hand, will simply have Jane become uncharacteristically quiet on page 25 when someone asks about her father. Later, on page 122, she’ll switch off a television program about child abuse with a shiver. And then, at the climactic moment, all you’ll get is: “Jane saw him strike the girl. Faster than thought she was on him, her fists beating a staccato rhythm. Tears welled in her eyes, poured down her cheeks. And then it was done, and she dropped to her knees, shook with the sheer relief of it.” And if you weren’t paying attention – if you didn’t catch the clues – you’ll have only the most superficial understanding of what just happened.

The result is a work which demands attention; it demands that you work for it. And the pay-off, as a result, is rich and full and complex. Because it’s not just that Cherryh cloaks her resolution; it’s that her resolution transforms your understanding of what has come before.

I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand a Cherryh novel without re-reading it. In fact, I doubt it’s possible to ever fully understand a Cherryh novel. Her novels are too finely crafted; too dense; too real to be fully captured in the imagination. I have seen the smallest detail in her work completely transform my understanding of both character and plot. And I suspect that, because of this fine detail and because she forces you to draw your own conclusions from what you see, where you are in your own life will have a profound effect upon the impression the narrative leaves upon you.

And it almost goes without saying that this remarkably powerful technique is extended not only to Cherryh’s characters, but throughout the entire work. In fact, every Cherryh novel I’ve read makes me feel as if I’m standing on an iceberg: I can only see the ten percent of my environment lurking above the surface, and that environment itself is merely a single set of crystallized events floating upon the vast, supporting ocean of Cherryh’s fully-realized universe, the true depths of which are only hinted at with abyssal contours.

Which brings me to 40,000 in Gehenna.

Imagine that you’re one of forty thousand colonists dispatched to an alien world. Your mission is to lay the foundation for the full-blown colony ships which will be arriving in three years: You’re breaking the frontier, establishing the agriculture, and building the homes of those who will come after. You dream of creating a fresh, new society while exploring the wonders of your new home.

But within only a few months those dreams have turned to black nightmare: The weather, far worse than the scout ships reported, washes out your fields and rusts your equipment. Accidents claim the lives of your most effective and important leaders. Fear and desperation settle into your heart. Of course, everything will be all right once the ships arrive, carrying new supplies and new people and new hope.

But three years pass. And the ships don’t arrive. And with each passing month it becomes clearer and clearer that they aren’t just late… they aren’t coming at all.

And that’s when it all falls apart.

40,000 in Gehenna is a grim story. It starts with a shattered dream and flows seamlessly into a dark age. But what makes the book unforgettable is what emerges from that dark age — a thing shaped of strange humanity, alien biology, and unimaginable hardship.

Looking at this slim volume it may be hard to believe that it contains a generational epic, but it does. Cherryh is masterful at taking the stories of her individual characters, each drawn with laser-like precision, and crafting them into a larger narrative telling the story of an entire society.

And then, of course, there are the hidden agendas; the secret behind the missing relief ships; and the mysteries of Gehenna itself. Because Cherryh is never content with simply telling a story on one level: She tells it on three or five or ten. A single sequence of events will tell a simple-yet-powerful story. Then she’ll pull back the curtain and show how those events were, in fact, part of a completely different story. And then she’ll move on and you’ll realize that both of those stories — possibly even the story you thought the whole novel was all about — were, in fact, just a small part of her much larger story. (Which, in turn, has layers all its own.)

In another universe we might have read the Saga of Gehenna in seven volumes. Gehenna could have been the next Pern or Dune and presaged the Mars Trilogy. Instead, Cherryh has given us a single volume. And she’s made it work. And the result is powerful and moving and intense.

GRADE: A
C.J. Cherryh
Published: 1983
Publisher: Out of Print
Cover Price: Out of Print
ISBN: Out of Print
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C.L. Moore is a forgotten master of speculative fiction. During the golden age of science fiction, she and her husband, Henry Kuttner, were rightfully lauded among and above the masters of the genre. They were the envied peers of one generation of writers and inspired another before Kuttner’s young death in 1958 cut short their careers. Over the next decade, without new works to keep the interest of fickle publishers, their works slowly fell out of print. If you’re under thirty, there’s a good chance you won’t even recognize their names.

But you’ve probably read their work. A handful of their short stories continue to see nearly perpetual reprint as a dim testament to their once titanic stature and limitless talent. Of these, the story you’re most likely to have read is “Shambleau”: C.L. Moore’s first published work of fiction and a lasting masterpiece of the genre.

But “Shambleau” is only one small part of a much larger tapestry. Between 1933 and 1936, Moore would write nine stories featuring “Shambleau”’s star, the enigmatic Northwest Smith.

To put this in some context, imagine if the world only knew of Conan through a continual and isolated reprinting of “The Tower of the Elephant”. Or if James Bond was only remembered because Casino Royale was occasionally squeezed into an omnibus between three unrelated novels with an introduction touting the fact that it was once one of JFK’s favorite novels.

Such has been the fate of Northwest Smith – an anti-hero and a rogue; an utterly captivating figure drawn with a stunningly vivid reality. His stories sweep us into a pulp future of science fantasy. His boots track their way through the dusty sands of Mars and the murky jungles of Venus, threading their way through a queer mixture of young border towns and the ruined remnants of ancient civilizations beyond human comprehension.

It is this latter dichotomy which give the Northwest Smith stories their unique flair and quality. Humanity, with the fervor and rawness of the Wild West, has pushed out into a solar system superficially drawn from Burroughs and his ilk. But lurking scarcely beneath the surface of these worlds are elder gods and forgotten civilizations utterly alien – their essentially Lovecraftian nature fundamentally inimical to humanity.

I think it can be strongly argued that, even as Robert E. Howard was transforming the fantasy genre with a strong Lovecraftian influence, C.L. Moore was doing the same to science fantasy. Of course, like Howard, Moore was not simply grafting Lovecraft’s Mythos, she was making her own unique contributions to it. A strong influence of Hellenic myth lends her vision a singular identity, but it is ultimately her disturbingly sensual take on Lovecraftian madness which makes Moore ’s work stand apart.

The universe which Moore crafts from all these disparate elements is made utterly believable through Moore ’s sheer skill and attention to detail: You can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the fantastic vistas she conjures forth before your mind’s eye. There is a tangible, persistent texture to her creation, achieving the nigh-impossible goal of making you forget that it is a creation: You are left with the sensation of having read a chronicle which scarcely scratches the surface of a depth you will never see.

At the center of these tales, of course, there is Northwest Smith. And like the worlds we see through his eyes, the larger-than-life Smith is drawn with absolutely compelling depth and detail. Moore takes you directly into the heart of Smith’s soul and sets up residence, giving you a blow-by-blow accounting of Smith’s very being. Yet somehow, despite this easy – yet stunning – intimacy with the character, Northwest Smith remains an enigma.

And, ultimately, it is Northwest Smith who I foresee drawing me back to these stories time and time again.

GRADE: A+
C.L. Moore
Published: 1933-1936
Publisher: Paizo
Cover Price: $12.99
ISBN: 1601250819
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Late last year I read Gods in Darkness, the omnibus from Night Shade Books which collects the Kane novels written by Karl Edward Wagner. Upon completing Midnight Sun, the companion volume which collects the short stories starring Kane, I was immediately struck by how different the short stories are from the longer works.

In the novels, for example, Kane is essentially the villain of each piece: An Evil Overlord drawn with such compelling and fascinating depth that any hint of the cliche is neatly avoided. In the short stories, on the other hand, Kane is clearly cast in the role of the anti-hero: He lacks the barbarous chivalry of a Conan or the derring-do of a Gray Mouser, but he is consistently cast into situations where his self-interest guides him onto a path of near-heroism.

The short stories also reveal a very different facet of Kane’s unique tragedy: In the novels we see a Kane whose frustration with the world creates a desperate need for power and control. In the short stories, on the other hand, we see a Kane at the nadir of his eternal cycle: An introvert dulled by immortality and withdrawn from the world. Either of these characters is interesting unto itself, but when contrasted one against the other upon a single soul, a poignant portrait of psychological horror begins to reveal itself. In Kane, Wagner has created a character who cannot be contained to a single story: His revelation requires distant counterpoints charted across an immortal life.

It is here that the Kane stories succeed where so many imitators of Howard, Burroughs, and Leiber fail: At the center of these tales there is, ultimately, a fascinating, unique, and larger-than-life character. Unlike lesser works of swords-and-sorcery, the monsters, magicks, and mayhem serve not only to tell a rip-roaring tale, but are also the means by which Wagner reveals to us the majesty of Kane.

The short stories are also notable for their distinctly gothic horror. Their tone is actually quite different from the Lovecraftian-tinged adventure fiction of the novels. Instead, one feels the distant beats of Stoker and Poe echoing through Wagner’s masterful storytelling.

I would like to be able to say that Wagner’s creation is flawless. But, unfortunately, I can’t. The most significant problem, for me, is the inconsistency of his dialogue. In many, but not all, of the stories found here, Wagner’s characters will suddenly slip into a jarring 20th century colloquialism. In an afterword at the end of the volume, Wagner claims that this is entirely intentional — the goal, apparently, being to “translate” the prehistoric dialogue into a purely modern equivalent (rather than a faux-Elizabethan). If such a goal were diligently pursued it might work (although I doubt it). Unfortunately, Wagner doesn’t stick to his guns: His characters will randomly shift from typical fantasy dialogue into a sudden barrage of “okays”, “hold ons”, and other 20th century speech patterns. The effect is even more disconcerting because of the powerful poetry typically to be found in his prose.

You will also find several weaker stories in this collection. There are three stories set in the modern era which seem particularly out of place. At first I was excited by the idea of Kane in the modern world: What role would he assume? What type of life would he lead? But the actual stories themselves seemed to relegate Kane to the minor role of facilitating whatever improbable and pornographic magical gimmick Wagner wanted to unleash upon his main character. In fact, the character named “Kane” in these stories scarcely seems to resemble the dynamic and compelling figure seen throughout the rest of the collection.

But, ultimately, what you’ll find in Midnight Sun are at least a dozen of the finest fantasy stories ever told — several of which easily deserve a place on your personal best list. I strongly recommend both Midnight Sun and Gods in Darkness.

GRADE: A-
Karl Edward Wagner
Published: 2003
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Cover Price: $35.00
ISBN: 1-89-238951-7
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The FDA needs to add Bujold novels to its list of controlled substances. They’re too damn addictive.

I recently locked myself out of my apartment. I was stuck sitting around for a couple of hours until someone with a spare set of keys could come by. Fortunately, I had a stack of books available to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the book I’m currently reading (Midnight Sun by Karl Edward Wagner). So, rather than start something new, I picked up Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold: I’d read it before, so I figured I could dip into it and then drop it again to go back to my Wagner.

Six hundred pages and a sleepless night later I’d finished re-reading not only Komarr, but A Civil Campaign as well.

Sigh.

I’ve talked before about all the things which make Bujold, arguably, the best SF writer working today, but they bear repeating:

(1) The smooth, perfectly natural use of her science fiction. After finishing A Civil Campaign I actually thought to myself, “There was scarcely any science fiction in this novel at all.” And then, after another moment, “Except the functional sex change. And the bioengineered bugs. And the uterine replicators.” All of which the plot is directly dependent upon. Not to mention the clones, gene therapy, hover cars, automatic traffic systems, stunners, wormholes, terraforming, contraceptive implants, and force fields which you’ll find laying around.

Whoops. Guess there’s quite a bit of science fiction in there after all.

The reason people say this type of thing about Bujold – and why even my subconscious will occasionally spew up such thoughts – is that Bujold is simply masterful in her ability to create a world utterly of the future yet, at the same time, utterly believable in its organic detail. You literally don’t think about the uterine replicators, clones, and terraforming as being particularly remarkable because Bujold makes them seen perfectly natural.

And, of course, that’s pretty dang remarkable.

(2) The detailed, believable, and moving portrayals of her characters. Bujold is one of those authors seemingly incapable of producing cardboard characters. Even the bit parts who show up for no more than a page or so are given a unique identity, personality, and presence. And her main characters are drawn with a depth and humanity which make them either beloved or hated without ever hitting a false note.

(3) The compelling and well-paced plots. Bujold’s books are, quite simply, page-turners. The compulsion to find out what happens next simply never lets you go, even when the book comes to an end. Plus, Bujold never drags her feet or rushes her tale – she tells the story in precisely the amount of space it needs to be told in, neither more nor less.

(4) The clean, expressive prose. Reading a Bujold novel is like looking through a clear window. The characters and their actions simply present themselves before the mind’s eye, without obstruction or distraction.

(5) The accessibility. Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels are the only series in which a new reader can pick up any single volume and enjoy it fully and completely. No matter which book you’re reading, Bujold somehow manages to accomplish the impossible – neither boring long-time readers with constant recaps nor expecting new readers to be familiar with her previous works. (The trick seems to be that, in any given book, the previous continuity is seamlessly handled like background information would be in any other novel.)

And, when all is said and done, the sum of all these strengths is stunningly greater than its notable parts.

Bujold’s one intermittent flaw as a writer, in my experience, is her peculiar variation upon the deus ex machina. I call it her “random meeting in a space station” plot point. In short, she will occasionally hinge an entire plot upon – literally – a random meeting in a space station. This particular flaw crops up significantly in Komarr, which results in my grade for that novel being knocked down from an A+ to a mere A.

A Civil Campaign, on the other hand, is without flaw. It is a masterful mixture of romance and high politics played out in a rip-roaring comedy of manners. Several scenes – including Miles’ infamous dinner – easily earn the work its place among such classics as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The result is startling unique and utterly captivating.

As with everything Bujold writes, these come highly recommended.

GRADES:

KOMARR: A
A CIVIL CAMPAIGN: A+

Lois McMaster Bujold
Published: 1999 / 2000
Publisher: Baen Books
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBNs: 0-67-157808-1 / 0-67-157885-5
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