Vernor Vinge’s output as an author can be described as almost tepid. Over the span of four decades (from 1965 through 2005), his total output consists of only 25 works: 19 short stories and 6 novels.

That’s a slim opus, indeed, but it’s an opus which has completely transformed the entire genre.

Usually when you say stuff like that you’re speaking hyperbolistically. But not in the case of Vinge: At least half of the significant science fiction authors of the last two decades owe Vinge either a direct or indirect debt of enormous proportions. And, as a result, pretty much everyone else in the field has been influenced by his ideas to one degree or another.

A lot of this importance can be credited to Vinge’s conceptualization of the Singularity, which I’ll discuss at more length as it comes up in his work. But he’s also responsible for the modern vision of cyberspace. That, combined with his anarcho-capitalistic social thought experiments, puts him solidly behind the nascent origins of the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s. He is also arguably responsible for the Neo Space Opera Renaissance of the past decade and his most recent work (represented by “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, “Synthetic Serendipity”, and the forthcoming Rainbows End) would seem tantalizingly poised to shape major genre trends for the decade to come in ways we can perhaps scarcely imagine.

But until recently, I, like many others, had read only Vinge’s two most recent, Hugo Award-winning novels: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. I had been previously turned away from his earlier works partly because they were frustratingly unavailable and partly because I’d heard that his earlier novels just weren’t of the same quality as his more recent work.

Then, a few weeks ago, I finally cracked open The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Over the course of the following month I proceeded to devour (or re-devour) every word Vernor Vinge has ever published.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF VERNOR VINGE

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge is a very strong testament to the quality and nature of Vinge’s career. At the time it was published in 2001, this was arguably a complete collection of Vinge’s short fiction. It contains less than two dozen stories spread thing across four decades of work, but almost every single story is a masterpiece. The collection contains every word of short fiction published by Vinge, but it reads like another author’s “Best of” collection.

I have to assume that Vinge is essentially a methodical craftsman: Each story painstakingly fashioned like a jewel, with each facet carefully cut to reveal its inner strength and beauty to the utmost. This can create seemingly agonizing waits between the appearance of each work, but it also means that the wait is always worthwhile.

The highlights of this collection include:

“Bookworm, Run!” – This is basically the story of someone who gets Google plugged straight into their brain. A version of Google fully stocked with the mainframes of the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI all rolled into one. The result is the ability to instantaneously access an essentially infinite library of networked information in a fashion almost, but not quite, as if it existed in your own memory.

Lots of science fiction authors have been known to let genies out of bottles: Ideas so powerful that they come to define their careers and create a shockwave which percolates throughout the field or transforms our understanding of the genre. Smith’s space opera. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Herbert’s Dune.

But most of these authors don’t reveal their genies until they’ve got a few dozen stories under their belt. By contrast, Vinge, in the very first story he ever sold, whips out his bottle, smashes it to smithereens, and starts interrogating the genie. The result is a revelation which has been haunting his work, and the entire genre, ever since.

What, exactly, are we talking about? The Singularity. In “Bookworm, Run!”, Vinge asks a very simple question: “What happens when human science creates the first truly superhuman intellect?” And Vinge’s answer is evocative, “You get something incomprehensible. You get a point beyond which the merely human is no longer capable of understanding.”

Vinge’s argument, essentially, is that as you begin to grow intelligence, you reach a point at which that growth becomes essentially exponential. For example, in “Bookworm, Run!”, when you reach the point that your natural memories can be supplemented by artificial databases, you don’t get a situation in which intellect gradually improves: You have an explosive, essentially infinite growth in personal knowledge. And that sudden expansion from knowing a few things to knowing everything creates a dynamic which is, essentially, unimaginable – it can only be thought of in the grossest and most imprecise of ways by those of us who have not yet undergone that change.

In “Bookworm, Run!” Vinge saddles his protagonist and his specific technology with some… unique limitations. In this way he sidesteps the essentially incomprehensible nature of his proto-Singularity (since he hadn’t fully developed the concept yet), and instead sidles up to it from the side. But he doesn’t simply ignore the implications, either, as the end of the story reveals.

This reveals the unique problem of dealing with the Singularity in fiction: How do you tell a story about something incomprehensible by its very nature? Trying to meet that unique challenge of storytelling can give rise to some fascinating solutions and some wondrous world-building. In many ways, his many varied solutions to this problem have come to define Vinge’s career.

“Bookworm, Run!” is also quintessentially Vingean, revealing the future contours of his career, for another reason: In addition to the central conceit of the story, Vinge also casually drops a few other bombshells into his world-building which fundamentally transform society even before the story begins. Not only is he not content in running just a single thought-experiment through his story, the entire setting is permeated with detailed extrapolation.

In this case, the most notable change after the proto-Singularity at the centerpoint of the story, is the availability of cheap fusion reactors. Vinge postulates that this prevalence of cheap energy will create an economic depression, requiring the government to impose a period of strict economic controls. His logic here makes no sense to me, but it’s particularly interesting to look at the story as a starting point for Vinge’s experimentation with the economic organization of a high-tech society, a theme he’ll return to time and again in his work.

(Although I find it interesting to note that if you replace the words “cheap fusion reactors” with “self-replicating nano-factories” I probably wouldn’t have had the reaction of, “How do you figure, exactly?” Is that indicative that self-replicating nano-factories are just the latest “utopia gizmo” of science fiction, or is it that science fiction has finally found the utopia gizmo it’s always been looking for?)

“The Ungoverned” – This question of the ways in which technology can restructure an entire economy and, by extension, society is central to Vinge’s world-building in “The Ungoverned”. Basically, Vinge seems to have quickly reached the conclusion that sufficiently advanced technology inevitably breaks down central authority.

“The Ungoverned” is a novella lying between two novels: The Peace War takes place before it; Marooned in Realtime takes place after it. In The Peace War we see the last desperate efforts of a central authority attempting to cling to power by artificially suppressing technology. In Marooned in Realtime, Vinge takes this question to its extreme: What use is a central authority when an individual is an entire economy unto themselves? “The Ungoverned” lies quite literally between; an anarcho-capitalist society in rapid transition.

But all that is just the world-building. It’s the groundwork and the thematic substance which opens up the door for the rip-roaring war story which is the actual meat of the story. It makes for a fascinating reading because, on the one hand, it’s a fast-paced, no-holds-barred action story; but, on the other hand, it doesn’t take much to peel back the surface and see some frightening conclusions being drawn about the future being drawn. What does it really mean when a handful of people are capable of wielding as much power as a 19^th century superpower? Or even a 20^th century superpower?

“Conquest by Default” – This story takes a slightly different approach to Vinge’s vision of technological profligacy leading inevitably to extreme libertarianism. Here we have a system with a central control designed to deflect the monopolistic tendencies within the anarcho-capitalist structure. And if you think that Vinge is whole-heartedly endorsing the anarchic chaos which he appears to believe inevitable, then this is a story which will make you think twice.

“The Peddler’s Apprentice” – This story, which is a collaboration between Vernor Vinge and his ex-wife Joan D. Vinge, highlights several of the ways in which Vinge sidesteps the enigma of the Singularity. Once again we have a centralized authority artificially holding society’s technological progress in check, but we also get to view the Singularity through the eyes of a primitive. We also get to see Vinge’s willingness to dream across incredibly vast scales of time: A vision of civilizations rising and falling; or rising and disappearing into the Singularity; with the vestiges of either being given a chance to rise again over the spans of hundreds of millennia.

“The Science Fair” – Vinge also has a real flair for developing completely alien cultures with a great depth of thought. In reading “The Science Fair” I was reminded of something John Campbell once said: A good science fiction author, writing in 1900, would be able to predict the automobile. A great science fiction author would predict the traffic jam. In similar fashion, Vinge doesn’t just create imaginative and memorable alien races, he follows through on the basic qualities of their nature to logically produce the cultures, societies, and technologies such a species would naturally create.

“Original Sin” – This talent for creating alien races and then extrapolating upon their biological imperatives to create unique and multicultural societies is the foundation which makes “Original Sin” such a classic. The other element which deserves comment here is Vinge’s ability to invest a relatively large cast of character with a lot of individual depth. The result is a multi-faceted character drama which is made even more impressive given that several of those characters are completely alien in their countenance and in Vinge’s ability to create that character drama within the confines of a crisis capable of reshaping the known universe.

“Original Sin” is also notable because it shows Vinge hitting the central thesis of A Mote in God’s Eye several years before Niven and Pournelle.

“The Barbarian Princess” – It’s also interesting to note how most of Vinge’s novels have grown out of his short fiction. “The Barbarian Princess” is part of his pastiche novel Tatja Grimm’s World, which will be dealt with at length in its own reaction.

“The Blabber” – This short story is probably most famous because it’s the genesis point of the Zone universe, which serves as the setting for Vinge’s two best-known works, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. But “The Blabber” is a damn fine story in its own right.

The conceit of the Zones universe is a way for Vinge to cheat the exponential growth curve which ends inevitably in the Singularity. Basically, if Vinge is right about the Singularity, humans don’t get to go to space: Long before the industrial trends give us interstellar flight, the informational or biogenetic or artificial intelligence trends result in humanity becoming something transhuman.

So Vinge sidesteps the issue by, basically, waving his authorial hand and saying: “These technologies would surely be nifty… but they just don’t work. Too bad.” Vinge is hardly the only author to do this, but what makes Vinge’s experiment interesting is that he makes his authorial hand-waving explicit to the universe itself AND varies those technological limitations.

The result is a galaxy split into multiple “zones” (hence the name applied to the fictional milieu): In the Unthinking Depths at the galactic core, intelligent thought itself is impossible (or, at least, intelligent thought as we know it). If you and I were to jump on a spaceship and head down towards the galactic core, at some point our brains would simply stop functioning at anything but an animalistic level.

One step up from the Unthinking Depths is the Slow Zone. That’s where we are now: Human-level intelligence is possible, but not much more than that and the limits of physics are already pretty well known to us: FTL and gravity-control systems are impossible, for example.

The next step up is the Beyond. Here you can get some pretty sophisticated AI systems and other forms of superhuman intelligence. FTL, gravity-control, and some other amazing, physics-bending technologies are easily achievable. Basically, the Beyond is the realm of classic space opera.

And beyond the Beyond there is the Transcend: Here Vinge’s Singularity is possible. And, in fact, due to the nature of the Zones universe almost inevitable: A High Beyonder civilization has been artificially arrested on the precipice of the Singularity. Take them into a Zone where the Singularity is possible and they practically fall into Transcendance.

The net result is a universe where you, as an author, can literally scale the technology to whatever your current needs are, while also profiting immensely from unique interactions between the Zones. For example, “The Blabber” takes place near a border between the Zones, on a human colony world just far enough within the Slow Zone to be inexorably stuck, but close enough to the Beyond to know what they’re missing out on.

As a story, “The Blabber” begins to show a truly mature Vinge working his craft like a maestro. It mixes crafty and subtle storytelling; a character drama and coming of age story told with touching sincerity; marvelously intricate extrapolation and world-building; a cleverly conceived alien species; and at least a dozen nifty ideas thrown around to create sensawunda on a grand scale.

“Fast Times at Fairmont High” – As “The Blabber” was the genesis point for A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, “Fast Times at Fairmont High” is the genesis point for Vinge’s forthcoming Rainbows End. In this new cycle of stories, Vinge chooses to examine the Singularity by jumping onto the on-ramp and taking us down the gaping maw of the rapid plunge into computer-assisted super-consciousness.

What makes “Fast Times at Fairmont High” so very interesting is that Vinge’s technological predictions are not particularly outrageous. Indeed, what makes this story so utterly compelling, on a level beyond its immediate characterization and plot (which are both sterling), is Vinge’s completely believable extrapolation of the effect that technology scarcely more advanced than our own will have on the daily lives of every man, woman, and child alive.

Indeed, you can begin seeing signs of that change around us even now: The experience that I had in high school in the mid-to-late ‘90s was only tangentially different in the slightest of ways from the high school experience kids had twenty years earlier. Less than ten years later, ubiquitous proliferation of ‘net access, cell phones, wireless devices, online communities, and more have fundamentally changed the high school experience. It’s easy to say “this changes everything” – and it’s so very rarely true – but it’s actually happening right now. These new technologies are fundamentally changing the way you study; it changes the way you learn; it changes the way you socialize – it changes the way in which you live. And when you change the way people live their lives at a societal level, you change the very nature of that society. And it’s not just the change which is notable, it’s the pace of the change: Meaningful generation gaps which begin shrinking into spans of less than a decade.

What gives Vinge’s effort it’s distinction is that he doesn’t simply take a look at current trends, extend the graph lines by a few years, and then present the result. Instead he narrowly looks at the trends in the advance of computer technology and extends those graph lines a few years. Then he imagines what types of applications those technologies will make possible. Then he imagines what people will do with those types of applications. Then he imagines what a whole society of people doing those things would look like; what types of synergies would be created; what other technologies would be pursued. It’s a gestalt; it’s the traffic jam lurking behind the automobile.

OTHER SHORT STORIES

In the four years since The Collected Short Stories were published, Vernor Vinge has published two additional short stories: “Synthetic Serendipity” and “The Cookie Monster”. (These stories are both available legally online — follow the links.)

“Synthetic Serendipity” – This story takes place in the same near-future universe as “Fast Times at Fairmont High”. What I find interesting is that, despite sharing largely the same locales and a similar cast of characters, there is little thematic or content overlap between the two stories. This seems to go back to the discipline which lies behind the austerity of Vinge’s artistic output: He may go back to visit the same settings and even the same characters, but somehow he finds the ability to keep everything *completely* fresh.

I’m reminded by a story that my friend David Kloker told me the other night: The first time he went to New York City he spent the night sleeping on the floor of his friend’s dorm room at NYU and, in the morning, went to an anti-nuclear rally. The second time he went to New York he stayed at a 5-star hotel in Manhattan , supped beneath a glass chandelier, and spent the evening at the opera. The two experiences, though separated by scant miles, seemed to take place in two completely different cities. And, as my friend David says, if you stand on a busy, bustling street corner and reflect upon this, you can be humbled through the understanding that there is a reality which can only be understood through disparate views – at the interstice of diffracted experience.

Similarly, the Fairmont High we see in “Synthetic Serendipity” is the same school as the one we see in “Fast Times”… yet the experience is fundamentally different. And by refusing to hit any of the same beats a second time – by showing a completely fresh facet of his creation – Vinge adds remarkable depth to a setting which has only had a few thousand words dedicated to it.

“The Cookie Monster” – It’s difficult to do a review of this story because any substantive discussion of it would necessarily reveal the central mysteries which Vinge so very skillfully unwraps for you over the course of the story itself.

So let me speak in generalities for a moment: The escalation of the story’s central mystery and the execution of the plot are solid and well-paced. The characters not only have distinct personalities and unique roles, but genuinely make you care for them. The story, as a whole, explores a lot of different dynamics within the situation in a very efficient, entertaining, and creative fashion. There’s essentially no dead air in the story, and Vinge manages to hit a wide thematic range without beating you over the head with any particular message: Slavery. Genocide. Resistance. Freedom. Hope. Despair.

In “The Cookie Monster” I find a summary of Vinge as a whole: He excels at mixing old and new ideas alike, analyzing their implications to an unprecedented depth, twisting them in original ways, combining them in great quantities, accelerating the pace of change, and waiting to see what comes out of the mix. And then, once he’s got all that worked out, he’ll quite casually figure out where the crisis points and character dramas naturally arise and then execute the resulting story in a flawless fashion.

That’s “The Cookie Monster”. That’s Vinge. That’s genius.

GRADES:

COLLECTED STORIES OF VERNOR VINGE: A+
“Synthetic Serendipity”: A
“The Cookie Monster”: A+

Vernor Vinge
Published: 1966-2005
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $16.95
ISBN: 0-31-28758-43
Buy Now!

You would think that, after twenty years, Han Solo and Chewie could have finally gotten the kinks worked out of the Millennium Falcon. But apparently Star Wars tie-in novelists are just too damn enamored with cribbing their jokes from Empire Strikes Back. (Apparently without ever noticing that not only did the Falcon not have these problems before Empire Strikes Back, but that the ship had been fully repaired before Empire Strikes Back even came to an end.)

That is the beginning of this incredible train wreck.

Here’s the basic plot of the first novel of the trilogy, as I understand it: President Bush sets up an economic summit in Texas. When he arrives, he is completely surprised to discover that Texas has been in a depression for the past twenty years; Dallas is plagued by nightly race riots; independent militias are roaming the countryside at will; Austin, Corpus Christi, and Odessa have declared independence; and Laura has been kidnapped by an insurrectionist group. For some reason, despite the ready availability of telephones, the governor of Texas has not bothered, even once in the past twenty years, to pick up the phone, call the White House, and say: “Hey, we might have a problem down here.” The President’s response to this crisis? “Hey, I think we all need to play tourist while pretending that nothing is wrong.”

What? That plot doesn’t make the least bit of sense?

Yeah, that was kind of my impression, too.

Basically, there’s a consistent and pervasive lack of logical thought throughout the entire novel.

For example, on one page Allen will have one of his characters reflect on the fact that, if they were to jump into Corellian space outside of the regulated arrival zone, they would be instantly pounced on and possibly destroyed by the Corellian navy. Literally two pages later, Allen will have the exact same character make an uncontrolled, emergency jump into Corellian space, completely outside the regulated arrival zone and practically on top of the planet itself, and then conclude that she has certainly gone completely unnoticed.

Another example: The New Republic’s intelligence agency believes that something very bad is going on in Corellian space. They aren’t quite sure what it is, yet (because their agents keep getting killed), but they suspect it might be a threat to the New Republic itself. Leia Organa Solo, the New Republic ‘s Chief of State, is planning to go to Corellia with her family for a vacation with minimal, almost nonexistent security. Does the New Republic intelligence agency think it might be a good idea to tell Leia that going to Corellia might pose a dangerous security risk? Of course not. Instead, one lone agent alerts Han Solo that there’s serious trouble brewing. Does Han think it might be a good idea to alert Leia to the problem? Of course not.

Speaking of the keen minds of the New Republic ‘s intelligence agency, let’s talk about the latest operative they’re sending to Corellia: She knows that agents are being killed. She knows that there’s probably a security leak in her agency which is compromising the Corellian missions. Yet, despite this, after getting ambushed upon her arrival at Corellia (and I quote): “She had not spent any time at all wondering why the Corellians — or some group of Corellians — was so intent on killing NRI agents, or on how they knew her arrival plans.” I am literally left speechless at the stunning incompetence of such a statement. (But it’s actually a double-whammy, because only three pages earlier we watched her spend considerable time wondering exactly those things and heard about some of the contingency plans she’s taken based on her suspicions. So she’s not really incompetent, Allen just wants us to think so.)

The same agent is the clever girl who came up with the “warn Han Solo” plan: She wants him to poke around Corellia, causing a visible ruckus from his relatively safe position of diplomatic immunity in order to provide a distraction from her own, covert mission. Brilliant! What’s her mission? Well, apparently, to spy on the Solo family and keep them out of trouble. That’s right: She wants Han to get into trouble in order to distract people from her covert mission of keeping him out of trouble. Sigh.

And it’s not just the New Republic ‘s intelligence agency that’s suffering from mind-boggling brain damage. Han Solo is deeply concerned at the idea of safety inspectors taking a close look at the Millennium Falcon. Because the Falcon might fail to meet safety standards? No.  Because, for some reason, Han was supposed to have removed all the military-grade hardware and weaponry from the Falcon years ago, but “never got around to it” — so he’s worried that the safety inspectors might notice this stuff when they’re doing their inspection. Okay, two problems: First, Han, you may not have noticed this, but your wife is the New Republic ‘s Chief of State. Just have her sign-off on the Falcon not being modified and be done with it. Second, you remember those quad laser cannons? The big ones, with dedicated turrets on both the dorsal and ventral sides of the Falcon? Yeah. Those are still there. So anyone even casually walking past the Falcon should notice that it still seems to be overly-endowed with weaponry. (And don’t even get me started on the fact that not only does everyone apparently think Leia is departing on a long trip without any security forces, they think she’s departing on a long trip without any security forces in a completely unarmed ship. This is roughly equivalent to George W. Bush hopping into a Cessna and taking the wife and kids for a quick flight to Moscow.)

But, apparently, no one’s really that good at thinking things through: “Luke thought he knew Coruscant fairly well, but Lando led him through a labyrinth of passages and tunnels and lifts and moving walkways that Luke had never seen before.” City the size of a planet and Luke is surprised that there’s parts of it he’s never seen before. Right.

And here’s another blooper from Han. Remember how the NRI agent told him to stir up trouble on Corellia to provide a distraction from her own mission on Corellia? Well, when she predictably shows up on Corellia: “Somehow, Han was not at all surprised. She was just the sort of person who would pop up out of nowhere, light years from where he thought she was.” Uh… What? Light years? How big a planet do you think Corellia is, Han?

And while I don’t expect space operas with dogfighting spaceships to have the most rigid of scientific bases, I do expect a certain internal consistency and logical follow-through. For example, at one point during the story Allen unveils an interdiction field capable of covering an entire solar system. In the Star Wars universe, an interdiction field is essentially a huge, artificial gravity well designed to yank ships out of hyperspace.

I want you to stop and think (in precisely the way that Allen didn’t), about what would happen if you created a huge gravity well right in the middle of the solar system. In fact, to make things a little more interesting, imagine that you take a gravity well more massive than any planet and pop it down right inbetween the Earth and the Moon.

Other things that bug me without being completely illogical:

– Luke gives Leia a red lightsaber. I don’t even know where to start. (“Hey, sis, I’ve got a black helmet with a ventilator mask built right in! Wanna try it on? It’s very fetching!”)

– Lando the professional lothario didn’t feel right to me. (There’s a difference between being a lady’s man and hunting around for a big bank account to marry.) Luke agreeing to tag along as a chaperone was worse. The fact that their lady huntin’ took them, oh-so-coincidentally, straight to the Corellian sector just makes me roll my eyes.

– The New Republic apparently has no standing military. Given the massive, epic battles which have featured in every other Star Wars tie-in novel I’ve read, I’m at a complete loss in understanding why Allen would assert such a thing. I’m even more baffled that an editor at Bantam didn’t instantly red-line such an obvious gaffe.

– The art of carbon dating is unknown upon the world of Corellia.

– Giving Han an evil doppleganger (complete with goatee) is just… painful.

And just to make sure the pain lasts for as long as possible, the trilogy is badly padded in an obvious attempt to stretch a single novel worth of plot across three volumes. There are places where Allen literally takes a lengthy paragraph to describe something that should have only taken two sentences… and then proceeds to give you six different variants of that paragraph. The man literally takes fifteen pages to describe a crash landing, using a narrative technique lifted from Voltron and best explicated by this Sluggy Freelance comic.

In short, there are three things which happen during the crash landing: The pilot applies thrust. An object falls off the ship. The ship shakes violently. These are repeated, in nauseating detail and seemingly randomized order, until the ship finally crashes into the ocean.

And folks, here’s the scary part: That’s only the first volume.

The plot of the second novel, as far as I can tell, looks something like this: “Ms. Flowers, we understand that you once had a romantic relationship with Bill Clinton. We really, really need to use the United States Army. Could you go and ask Bill Clinton if we could use it for awhile?” For the full effect, you need to imagine that conversation taking place right now, in 2005.

Then the maddening exposition sets in again. Not only does Allen continue to inundate you with six paragraphs of repetitive exposition when a couple of sentences would do, but he begins repeating about ninety percent of the expository lumps from the first volume out of that bizarre and misguided belief that large swaths of people will be picking up a trilogy starting with book two.

So why did I keep reading? Well, partly because I’m clearly a glutton for punishment. But largely because the plot, no matter how ineptly handled, still managed to keep my curiousity piqued. In many ways the trilogy was a political thriller transplanted into the Star Wars universe, and the central mystery of the thriller was just intriguing enough to keep me turning the pages, even if I was reduced to skimming across Allen’s endless repetition.

You might find the same thing to be true: Having started, you may find yourself curious enough to endure the literary pain.

And that’s why you really shouldn’t start reading these books to begin with.

GRADE: D

AMBUSH AT CORELLIA: D-
ASSAULT AT SELONIA: D-
SHOWDOWN AT CENTERPOINT: D+

Roger Allen MacBride
Published: 1995
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Cover Price: $6.99
ISBNs: 0-55-329803-8 / 0-55-329805-4 / 0-55-329806-2
Buy Now!

VOLUME 1: THE PARADISE SNARE

It’s books like this which make reading tie-in fiction worthwhile. What makes this book really tick is Crispin’s ability to take the familiar character of Han Solo and vividly capture him on the page: Han Solo walks, talks, acts, and thinks like Han Solo, and Crispin uses that to tell a really solid character drama wrapped into your standard Star Wars sci-fi action fare.

Speaking of that sci-fi action fare, the other notable strength of The Paradise Snare is Crispin’s ability to craft a Star Wars story without cribbing all her material from the the films. This is actually a fairly difficult line to walk: On the one hand, you get the authors whose novels feel like modern SF novels with a thin veneer of Star Wars glossed over the top. Those just don’t have the right mixture of classic space opera and Saturday serial heroism. They don’t feel right. On the other hand, you’ve got the authors who simply take the themes and elements already present in the films, throw them into a blender, and pour out the result. Those feel right, but they don’t offer anything of particular interest.

Crispin, on the other hand, manages to craft a novel whose plot and theme are very distinct from those found in the films, but which still feels like a Star Wars story. That’s no small accomplishment and it kept my turning the pages compulsively from cover-to-cover.

I’d like to be able to say more, but that really sums it up: The Paradise Snare is a tightly written, very well-done novel that’s a lot of fun to read. Perhaps the highest praise I can pay it is that this a novel that I’m likely to come back and read again some day. As I put it aside, I was eagerly looking forward to the next two books in the trilogy…

VOLUME 2: THE HUTT GAMBIT

Unfortunately, the promise of The Paradise Snare is not fulfilled by The Hutt Gambit.

This is a novel which doesn’t seem to have made the transition from outline to finished product. Far too many sequences are told instead of shown. For example, Han goes through several girlfriends in the course of the novel, but every single one of them follows the same course: We see Han ask them out, we get several paragraphs summarizing their months-long romance, and then we get another scene with them breaking up. The result is just words on a page — there’s no connection; no emotional resonance; no meaning.

I think Crispin is struggling with two problems here: First, the amount of time covered by the novel — at least three or four years, if not more. Such a timespan invites the author to summarize with broad strokes, and once they’re in the habit of doing that its easy for the telling-rather-than-showing to creep into the smaller sequences as well.

Second, she has a lot of previously-established continuity from the Expanded Universe to work into her stories. It’s continuity from over a dozen different stories from a half-dozen authors who were more interested in establishing their immediate dramatic needs than coming up with a coherent narrative.

As a result, there are some things which work very well. (For example, the history established between Han and Boba Fett provides some nice depth to the saga.) And there are some things that don’t. (For example, the first meeting between Han and Lando felt very flat to me.) And there are quite a few things that feel as if Crispin is going through the motions. (For example, establishing Solo’s history at Smuggler’s Run seemed very mechanical to me.)

On top of this fundamental problem, there are a lot of contributory flaws.

For example, I find the narrative itself to be poorly structured. There are numerous occasions where Crispin could have established crucial knowledge early in the book in order to lay a firm foundation for events later in the story. Instead, she opts time and time again to wait until the later events are actually playing out before dropping the crucial knowledge in as a lump of awkward, hamfisted exposition.

Crispin also gets repetitious: During one short section of the novel, for example, Han thanks another character for their help on about three or four different occasions, getting the same stock response every single time. If this happened just once, one would try to find meaning in Han’s excessive gratitude. But it happens again and again and again, until you begin to wonder whether or not Crispin even realizes that she’s already hit this narrative beat before.

The final battle sequence is solidly planned, but poorly executed. The problem is that there’s no twist or hidden back-up plan for our heroes to exploit at the last minute to snatch victory from almost certain defeat. Instead, the heroes spend more than a hundred pages minutely planning out every single detail of an ambush… and then the ambush works just the way they planned. It’s as if you were watching an episode of Mission Impossible where absolutely nothing went wrong with the plan. Or if the Rebel leaders at the end of the original Star Wars movie had spent fifteen minutes of screen time minutely planning out the final attack run exactly the way we see it happen: “Okay, and then Luke will take the lead. And he’ll turn off his targeting computers right here. And we’ll keep Han Solo in reserve just in case any TIE fighters put Luke in danger. And then Luke will take his shot and destroy the Death Star. Now, let’s go over that another half dozen times…” Oh, and Vader should be paid off AND ordered to let the Rebels win, just to remove any lingering suspense.

I also feel as if there’s some big, gaping plot holes lying around in the novel as well. Maybe I’m just missing some crucial piece of information from some other tie-in novel that would make the whole thing fit together, but the result is just deeply unsatisfying.

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Hutt Gambit, however, is that it doesn’t seem to have any coherence. It doesn’t feel like a story. It just feels like a bunch of stuff that happens, rambled off in a scrambled stream of consciousness.

In short, I found The Hutt Gambit to be a serious let-down after the extremely enjoyable Paradise Snare. Hoping for a recovery, I turned to the third volume in the trilogy, Rebel Dawn…

VOLUME 3: REBEL DAWN

While Rebel Dawn represents an improvement over The Hutt Gambit, it still doesn’t live up to the promise of The Paradise Snare. Once again I feel as if Crispin’s hands were tied by the need to incorporate continuity from other novelists. There’s a lengthy section of Rebel Dawn which essentially consists of Crispin saying, “And then Han Solo went off to Star’s End and did a bunch of stuff which you can read about in HAN SOLO AT STAR’S END, available from Bantam Books…” Followed by, “And then Han Solo went off to some other adventures which you can read about in HAN SOLO’S REVENGE, also available from Bantam Books…”

I simply would have preferred to see a coherent narrative in THIS novel. And that could have been done without violating the continuity of the previous Han Solo novels.

And, although the book’s execution is better than The Hutt Gambit, Crispin still seems to be struggling with some of the most basic storytelling techniques. Let me give you a couple of examples of the type of stuff I’m talking about:

In desperation, Han sent the Falcon closer to the black hole clusters than any sane person would ever go. Only the ship’s breakneck speed might save them.

The Millennium Falcon skimmed so close to the black holes in the Maw that only her terrible velocity kept her from being captured and sucked in.

What’s with the repetition there? It’s like Crispin tried writing the same passage two diferent ways and then forgot to delete one of them.

Bria smiled excitedly. “Muuurgh and Mrrov!” […]

“Muuurgh!” Han shouted, so glad to see his friend that he ended up thumping the huge felinoid on the chest with his fists while his feet dangled. “How are you, buddy?”

“Han…” Muuurgh was nearly choked with emotion. “Han Solo… Muuurgh very happy see Han Solo again. Too long it has been!”

He obviously hasn’t been practicing his basic, Han thought, amused. […]

“Hey, Muuurgh! Mrrov! It’s great to see you both!”

After their greetings were over, Mrrov explained that there was a contingent of Togorians who’d had run-ins with Ylesia over the years who wanted to be part of the assault. “Six of our people were either enslaved or close to enslaved there, Han,” Mrrov said. “We wish to have a part in making sure that no other Togorians will ever again be trapped in that terrible place.”

Again you’ve got a little bit of weird repetition. (Bria and Han have already shouted out the names of Muuurgh and Mrrov. So who’s shouting out their names again in that unattributed line of dialogue? There’s nobody else in the scene.) And then you segue into one of Crispin’s puzzling tell-instead-of-show dialogues. Why slip into the distancing, amateurish technique of summarizing dialogue when you could have just as easily written:

“It is good to see you, both,” Mrrov said. “And we are not alone in wishing you well. There are six others here who were either enslaved or close to enslaved at Ylesia and who want to be part of your assault. We all wish to have a part in making sure that no other Togorians ever again be trapped in that terrible place.”

I dunno.

Of course, if this type of thing only cropped up once or twice in The Hutt Gambit and Rebel Dawn, that would be one thing. But these techniques, and other amateurish missteps like them, crop up again and again and again, constantly jerking you out the narrative.

The ending also fails to ring true for me. Not only does it seem incredibly rushed, but I also find it impossible to believe that two weeks before the beginning of Star Wars, Han Solo was actively helping the Rebellion. Nor do I find it believable that 24 hours before meeting Obi-Wan and Luke, Han Solo learns that [SPOILERS] happened to [SPOILER].

And speaking of being rushed, I’ll also say that I think a big problem with both The Hutt Gambit and Rebel Dawn is that Crispin simply tries to cram too much into each novel, and ends up shortchanging everything. For example, Crispin sets up a huge sabacc tournament at the beginning of Rebel Dawn for Han to win the Millennium Falcon at. (This also rings false to me for several reasons, but those are separate issues.) But then, after hyping it up, Crispin only spends about eight pages on it. It’s an anti-climactic waste.

When all is said and done, I give a big thumb’s up to The Paradise Snare. And, fortunately, it can stand on its own: So I recommend checking the first volume of this trilogy out and then giving the rest of it a pass.

GRADES:

THE PARADISE SNARE: B+
THE HUTT GAMBIT: C-
REBEL DAWN: C

A.C. Crispin
Published: 1997-1998
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Cover Price: $6.99
ISBNs: 0-55-357415-9 / 0-55-357416-7 / 0-55-357417-5
Buy Now!

Shadows of the Empire constitutes one of the largest tie-in events in the Star Wars Extended Universe: It featured simultaneous releases of a novel, comic books, video games, and even a specially-commissioned soundtrack, along with ancillary releases including action figures, trading cards, and the like. Multiple, interlocking stories between the three mediums aimed to tell the untold saga of the events between the end of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

The opening of Steve Perry’s novel exercises an interesting conceit to both hook the reader into the action and immediately cement the legitimacy of this “missing chapter”: His prologue begins with the conversation between Darth Vader and the Emperor in Empire Strikes Back. But rather than viewing the conversation from Vader’s end of the holographic communication (as we did in the film), Perry flips to the other end of the line and shows us what’s happening just off-screen as the Emperor speaks with Vader.

(Ironically, Lucas decided to re-script this entire scene for his “extra special” DVD edition of Empire Strikes Back. Ten years from now we’ll have ignorant Star Wars fanboys reading Shadows of the Empire in college and wondering why Steve Perry couldn’t get the lines right.)

I found that this opening worked for the length of the conversation, but then did something of a pratfall as it wrapped up. The problem is that, throughout the conversation, Perry necessarily shows us Lucas’ use of heightened language: “The Force is strong with him. The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi.” But once the conversation wraps up, Perry finds himself needing to script some original dialogue for the Emperor. What do we get? “Now, where were we, Prince Xizor?” Chatty cliche.

The book’s ability to convince me that I was actually reading the events between the films went down hill from there. For example, early in the novel we get a lengthy explanation that Chewbacca won’t leave Leia’s side because Han told him to look after the Princess and Chewie owes Han a life-debt. This would make a lot more sense, of course, if the last scene in Empire Strikes Back didn’t involve Lando and Chewbacca flying off in the Millennium Falcon… leaving the Princess behind.

There’s always been an open question in my mind about what, exactly, the plan conceived off-screen at the end of Empire Strikes Back was. It involved Lando and Chewbacca going to Tatooine as an advance team, with Luke and Leia following later. Somewhere along the line, that plan shifted — with Lando infiltrating Jabba’s palace; Chewbacca teaming up with Leia; Luke providing mop-up; and R2-D2 inserted as an insurance policy. Apparently, rather than describing how that plan developed, Perry has decided to simply ignore the continuity of the films altogether. Which, in an effort like this, leaves one wondering: What was the point again?

(Perry also manages to screw up the continuity at the other end of the book, too, having the Emperor leave for the second Death Star about a week before Vader does, rather than the other way around.)

These little inconsistencies are strewn all over the book. For example, Perry also claims that Leia was present on the Millenium Falcon for the conversation in A New Hope which took place on the hyperspace journey between Tatooine and Alderaan (when Leia was, in fact, still imprisoned on the Death Star).

And the problem is that, when the little details are wrong like this, it becomes impossible to accept Perry’s larger leaps. If he can’t even get Chewie’s continuity to track, why would I accept his revelation of Prince Xizor, an Imperial servant wielding as much power as Darth Vader himself? (It doesn’t help that Perry can’t seem to grip Vader’s character. Vader as petulant, sulky, and sarcastic isn’t a portrayal that works for me.)

Perry’s inability to execute this novel effectively is so frustrating, in part, because there are some big ideas here which could have been so right if they’d been done well. For example, the reptilian Prince Xizor — cold and precise in all things — is conceptually a perfect counterpoint to Darth Vader’s essentially emotional nature. Putting Leia in a position where her newfound love for Han is put to the test is dramatically perfect for this transitional period in the saga. The emotional confusion of both Luke and Leia as they grope to understand the true nature of the love and bond between them is very well done.

Unfortunately, there’s those pesky details. And it’s not just a matter of those details sometimes being distracting, it’s also a matter of those details frequently sabotaging the strongest elements in the novel:

If Prince Xizor actually was the coldly calculating, fiendishly clever, incredibly subtle crimelord that the novel keeps claiming he is, then he’d be a villain capable of standing toe-to-toe with Darth Vader. But when it comes time to show us the actual details of Xizor’s cunning plans and machinations, what we actually see is irrational, illogical, and frequently thuggish. (Of course, Vader himself isn’t particularly up-to-snuff, either. In one scene he’ll be amazed at the Emperor’s ability to see a hidden truth with nothing but the Force to aid him. In the next, he’ll be apishly destroying video cameras in an attempt to keep the Emperor from seeing a hidden truth.)

If Leia’s love for Han were actually put to the test, you’d have some interesting drama and character development: A crucible from which Leia’s love could emerge stronger and purer than before. Instead, Perry just slips her some date rape drugs.

I also found the “revelation” that the Bothan spy mission which uncovered the existence of the Death Star was actually carried out primarily by Luke Skywalker to be fairly insipid. One of the things which made the original trilogy of movies special was the implied depth of the universe: There were things happening in the galaxy which didn’t directly involve the main characters. The Bothan spy mission was a prime example of that, and “revealing” that it was Luke Skywalker all along doesn’t add depth to the Star Wars saga — it cheapens it.

There’s also the problem that the main plot of the novel makes no sense: Vader wants Luke captured alive so that he can convert him to the dark side. Xizor wants Luke killed in order to thwart Vader, his rival. The problem? Well, simply having Xizor say, “I wanna thwart Vader just ’cause!” is kinda weak and relatively pointless. So Perry tries to raise the stakes by having Xizor set things up so that it will look like Vader had Luke killed. Why? Because Vader promised the Emperor that he would deliver Luke alive; so if it looks like Vader killed Luke, instead, the Emperor is going to be pissed off at Vader.

The only problem here is that Vader did not, in fact, promise the Emperor that he would deliver Luke alive. What he actually says is: “He will join us or die, Master.” And, in fact, the Emperor wanted Luke dead from the get-go; Vader was the one who suggested the possibility that he might be turned instead. Xizor, remember, knows this because he watched the whole conversation.

So you’ve got an Emperor who wanted Luke dead, but is willing to entertain the possibility that he might be turned into an asset. Why, exactly, would killing Luke piss the Emperor off?

And you’ve got Vader who just got done convincing the Emperor that Luke might be more valuable alive than dead. Why, exactly, does Xizor think it would be believable, in any way, to make it look like Vader then promptly turned around and ordered Luke’s assassination?

Xizor’s plan is just stupid. Which is the problem with most of the plans in this novel:

Attacking an Imperial outpost because Boba Fett’s ship is docked there may make some kind of sense. Failing to (a) anticipate that Boba Fett might simply fly away in his ship; or (b) keeping some kind of look-out to track him if he does fly away… that’s stupid.

Arranging for the destruction of a rival’s shipyard in order to send a message to their leadership that you’re not going to tolerate them honing in on your territory makes sense. Of course, it makes more sense if you didn’t simultaneously dispatch your top assassin to kill the organization’s entire leadership.

Failing to learn a vital piece of information until it’s too late for you to do anything about it does not constitute a devious plan on your part. No, the fact that your rival also found out about it too late to do anything about it doesn’t make it devious, either. And, no, cackling into the narrative camera isn’t going to change anything.

Other bits of stupidity:

– Leia’s top secret password for receiving secret intel is “Alderaan”. (It will no doubt baffle the Imperial crypto-analysis teams for weeks.)

– Leia is baffled that Vader isn’t disguising his interest in tracking down Luke. (Because after confronting Luke directly on Cloud City , chopping off his hand, and telling everyone involved that his real goal was luring Luke to him, it would make perfect sense for Vader to suddenly start pretending that he has no interest in Luke.)

– I never knew this before, but apparently Vader hates subterfuge and deceit. (Did Perry even watch Empire Strikes Back?)

– Leia goes to considerable effort and calls in a life-debt to confirm that Prince Xizor runs the Black Sun crime syndicate. Once she’s done that, she says: “Well, it seems as if that much of X’s story is true.” The only problem? X didn’t tell her that. Lando did. (And it proves nothing. If I said, “I’m the Vice President of the United States . The President of the United States is George W. Bush and he would like to meet with you.” You couldn’t prove the veracity of my statements by calling in a life-debt to confirm that George W. Bush is, in fact, the President of the United States .)

– The introduction of cross-species mating to the Star Wars universe seems a trifle Trekish.

– Princess Leia’s inner voice will be played this week by none other than… Queen Latifah.

– If you’re in a large high-rise building full of work-a-day stiffs, you should feel absolutely no compunction about blowing the building to kingdom come. After all, the guy who owns the building is a crook — so anyone working in the building must be equally complicit. The building is in the middle of an incredibly crowded urban area? Well, all for the better. After all, anyone living anywhere near a building owned by a crook deserves to die.

– The Rebel Alliance does not, in fact, have any problem dropping military vessels into orbit around Coruscant, blowing a bunch of stuff up, and then leaving again. The Imperial navy won’t even bother responding to activity like that.

– The Empire has a holonet which stretches from one side of the galaxy to the other… but Coruscant doesn’t have a communication network that will let you place a phone call to any point beyond the planetary horizon.

In the end, the novel’s very structure fragments. Scenes become shorter and shorter, until — finally — they’re little more than three-paragraph segues of disjointed action. Under those conditions it becomes impossible for Perry to maintain any kind of character development or plotting. The short, staccato beats of his narrative become a discordant mess.

GRADE: D-

What I’d like to know is the identity of the editor at Bantam who sent out the memo to all the Star Wars novelists: “Princess Leia is to be portrayed as a complete retard from this point forward.”

In the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy I was willing to accept it as merely a character arc which had gone wrong in the execution. But now I find the exact same misfire as I read The New Rebellion. Leia isn’t quite as stupid as she was at the beginning of the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy (thank god!), but she’s still wandering around with only half her braincells firing.

…

Okay, I needed to get that off my chest. Now, on to the good news: The New Rebellion is a lot of fun wrapped up in a clever little plot. The result is a quick, compelling dollop of entertainment.

We’ll come back to that in a second, but first I need to do some anal retentive bitching about continuity:

In reading The New Rebellion immediately after the Black Fleet Crisis, I’m struck by the fact that the books almost seem as if they take place in alternate timelines. Continuity simply doesn’t track from one to the other:

In the Black Fleet Crisis, Luke has long-since abandoned his X-Wing for the newest model of fighter and Artoo is with Leia on Coruscant. In The New Rebellion, supposedly set only a year after the Black Fleet Crisis, Luke is still flying his X-Wing and Artoo is with him at the Jedi Academy .

In the Black Fleet Crisis, Leia faces a vote of no confidence and numerous, fractious political debates. In The New Rebellion, Leia is concerned that a recent constitutional change allowing members of former Imperial governments to run for the Senate will lead to factious political debates previously unknown to the New Republic. Later, she’s shocked when she faces a vote of no confidence.

Nothing seems to track quite right. And I rather suspect it’s because Rusch originally intended for The New Rebellion to take place at a much earlier time in the post-ROTJ timeline. I could be wrong, but there just seem to be a lot things in this novel which feel as if it were originally meant to take place only 6 or 7 years after ROTJ, not a decade and a half. It also seems that a lot of the references to recent events (such as the Black Fleet Crisis) are tagged onto the novel in a somewhat haphazard way.

In any case, if you’re someone who’s going to get bent out of shape due to continuity lapses, you’re probably going to have some serious issues trying to get the Black Fleet Crisis and The New Rebellion to co-exist in your mental landscape of the Star Wars universe.

For my own mileage, though, I was able to consider such inconsistencies as little more than intellectual curiosities and enjoy The New Rebellion for what it was: A unique vision of Star Wars future history.

I think what I like best about The New Rebellion is the fact that the villain has more up his sleeves than a simplistic “get a really big fleet, sow discord among the leaders of the New Republic, and get the crap beaten out of me in a big space battle at the end of the story”. There’s nothing wrong with such a plot, per se, but between the Thrawn Trilogy and the Black Fleet Crisis it had already worn thin. (And I understand that in several of the tie-in novels I’ve skipped that it gets run through the wash a half-dozen times more.) By contrast, the villain in The New Rebellion is subtle, complex, and indirect.

Other highlights for me include Rusch’s handling of the Solo family: As the crisis grows and the personal threat to the Solos increases, you can really empathize with Han and Leia as the emotional and physical pressures being to weigh upon them.

Actually, with the exception of Leia’s stupidity in the earlier parts of the novel, Rusch is really spot-on in her handling of characters throughout. Evil plots from dastardly villains aside, the real strength of The New Rebellion, for me, were the character dramas which played out upon the stage set by the emerging crisis. I was impressed by Rusch’s ability to put an emotional truthfulness down on the page, revealing all of her characters (both new and old) as fully-rounded human beings. (Or aliens, as the case might be.)

GRADE: B-
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published: 1997
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Cover Price: $6.99
ISBN: 0-55-357414-0
Buy Now!