Tides
Scott Mackay
Prometheus Books, 340 pages, $25
A sea journey across half a world to discover another intelligent race on your home planet could be a grand and terrifying adventure. Robert Sawyer did a nice rendition as part of his Quintaglio Ascension trilogy. It doesn't work as well in this novel, Scott Mackay's eighth.
Hab is a successful whaling captain out of a land of truth and justice and plenty, a younger son of a wealthy family. Undoubtedly human characters populate the first part of the book, even though there are two moons in the sky, moons that cause the horrendous and implausible tides of the title.
Gripped by a scientific obsession, Hab risks everything, betraying his religion, his family and his king, to travel those perilous oceans to the other side of the world, driving this reader barking mad with the abuse of terminology, logic and physics. In a metal-poor society, Hab ballasts his expeditionary ships with lead. (Rocks would work.) The tides come as immense waves, miles apart, tall enough to take five minutes to sail up; this is with a fleet that can travel a thousand miles in three days, an average of over a dozen knots. Near half of the book is filled with sea voyages, Hab's invention of the wooden submarine and such niceties as the first sextant "that takes into account the curvature of the world." (And why would it? And how would that help? Is that even possible?)
Mackay pitches in a rolling litany of vessel types and rig plans and salty terminology, used wrongly much more often than not. A quarter of the way into Hab's adventures, the urge to make an appointment with the author in a dark alley with a foam-rubber belaying pin all but overcame me.
Soldiering on, we find a reptilian civilization on the far side of the world, a war, and predictable, pedestrian plot elements enough to numb my sense o' blunder. Mackay's "Omnifix" (2004) wasn't quite as dreadful, though it had its moments. Go away, Scott Mackay! Go away, and take your acquisitions editor with you!
Counting Heads
David Marusek
Tor, 336 pages, $24.95
Then we have an urban dystopia, a Chicago under a bubble to keep bioweapons away. There's nanotech, and little spy slugs that sample people's blood to find out if they're infected, and a horridly grinding society. Lots of little Artificial Intelligences serve those who can afford them. Lots of technology, including life extension, is around for the even more fortunate.
When the hugely powerful, uber-rich Eleanor K. Starke is assassinated, and her daughter Ellen maybe survives the air crash as a cryonically frozen head, a lot of lives get disturbed. Clones wind up working out of their grades and supposed competencies. Free citizens, including Starke's ex-husband, get involved in the attempts to find Ellen. Housing co-op "families," of all descriptions, worry where their next pot of soup, their next medical, their next gig, will come from, while more superrich plot to take over Starke's assets.
Marusek keeps a deep and textured tale spinning along, filled with stresses, shocks and sidelong looks at extrapolations of present-day trends. I took extra care to keep my copy pristine, so it'll be presentable when I hand it off to another reader who'll enjoy it as much as I did.
Random Vectors
In a different very American vein, Allen Steele is wrapping up his lovely Heinleinesque Coyote trilogy with "Coyote Frontier" (Ace, 352 pages, $24.95). Things aren't so bad on the pioneering world Coyote, as the former colonists have shaken free from the exploitive back-home rule of the Western Hemisphere Union. They're exploring their frontiers – really, a whole new world, larger than Mars – and coping with the slow decline and disutility of the pieces, parts and products they'd brought from Earth.
Then a European Alliance ship shows up with a starbridge, an artificial wormhole that offers instantaneous transportation back and forth from an Earth that's being overwhelmed by ... but look for yourself. Fend for yourself. We eventually have to, on Coyote or here at home.
Yet another America shows, through a mirror darkly, in "The Necessary Beggar" (Tor, 316 pages, $24.95), Susan Palwick's novel of interdimensional exile. When Darroti, a young man of Timbor's family, kills a Mendicant, he's exiled from his idyllic home world to a parallel Earth – ours, later in this century. His close-knit family goes with him, as their mores say they must. There's no return; they're stuck with us.
That's the us that's suspicious of foreigners. The family starts off in a resettlement camp, without papers, without history, without any legal way to get out. What would you do in Zamatryna's place, or Timbor's, or Darroti's? Would you, could you cope? How could you reconcile your old life with your new-and-forever world? This is a sweetly intended and well-written book.
"Amazing Adventures From Zoom's Academy" (Ballantine, 150 pages, $12.95), by writer-illustrator Jason Lethcoe, is a fun little book, apparently with a movie tie-in on the way. Full of gosh-wow surprises, it seems suitable for grade-schoolers: simple enough, but also a good deal of fun. Y'see, Summer Jones' very ordinary-seeming dad is actually an instructor at Zoom's Academy, where superheroes are trained, and, contrary to her klutzy opinion of herself, Summer Has Potential – and even gets to realize some of it.
Jim Hopper, of Normal Heights, reluctantly acknowledges that the intent of striking an author with a Nerf belaying pin is nearly as wretched as wishing to use rock maple, English oak or immutable iron.
