The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1981 (second quarter)

[james_davis_nicoll]

List courtesy of Andrew Wheeler.

Contents from Contento.

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snip dead links

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April DOWNBELOW STATION by C.J. Cherryh

This is a large (by the standards of 1981) novel about politics and warfare in Cherryh's Union/Alliance universe, mostly set in the space station orbiting Pell (I think), the life-bearing world orbiting Tau Ceti. It won the HUGO but I found it a real slog when I first read it, perhaps due to the relative lack of sympathetic characters and some clumsy info-dumping near the beginning. The aliens are not very, either, and I could never figure out how they made money off the star stations before FTL was developed.

[The more detail provided about Union, the less sense it makes. It has a total population maybe equal to New Zealand, scattered across many systems in communities the size of towns for the most part but somehow it's a superpower equal to Old Earth, with billions of people in a developed economy in a biosphere that won't kill them]


The Last Defender of Camelot Roger Zelazny (Pocket 0-671-41773-8, Dec
'80, $2.50, 308pp, pb)

+ 1 o Introduction o in
+ 4 o Passion Play o vi Amazing Aug '62
+ 9 o Horseman! o vi Fantastic Aug '62
+ 12 o The Stainless Steel Leech [as by Harrison Denmark] o ss
Amazing Apr '63
+ 17 o A Thing of Terrible Beauty [as by Harrison Denmark] o ss
Fantastic Apr '63
+ 22 o He Who Shapes o na Amazing Jan '65 (+1); ; expanded to
The Dream Master., New York: Ace, 1966
+ 113 o Comes Now the Power o ss Magazine of Horror Win '66
+ 119 o Auto-da-Fé o ss Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison,
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
+ 125 o Damnation Alley o na Galaxy Oct '67
+ 209 o For a Breath I Tarry o nv New Worlds Mar '66
+ 245 o The Engine at Heartspring's Center o ss Analog Jul '74
+ 254 o The Game of Blood and Dust o ss Galaxy Apr '75
+ 258 o No Award o ss The Saturday Evening Post Jan '77
+ 267 o Is There a Demon Lover in the House? o ss Heavy Metal
Sep '77
+ 271 o The Last Defender of Camelot o nv Asimov's SF Adventure
Magazine Sum '79
+ 294 o Stand Pat, Ruby Stone o ss Destinies Nov '78
+ 303 o Halfjack o ss Omni Jun '79

I remember this as one of the few Zelazny works I was enthusiastic about, which makes me wonder why I can only remember one story of these, the title story, a modern Arthurian story.

[Seriously, I cannot remember Zelazny for the life of me and I have a decent memory for narrative]


DI FATE'S CATALOG OF SCIENCE FICTION HARDWARE by Vincent Di Fate and
Ian Summers (Alternate)

Presumably an art book by one of the worst artists to get regular work in SF.


May

The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels ed.
Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg (Arbor House, 1980,
753pp, hc)

+ o Introduction o Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg o in
+ 1 o Beyond Bedlam o Wyman Guin o na Galaxy Aug '51
+ 51 o Equinoctial o John Varley o na Ascents of Wonder, ed.
David Gerrold, Popular Library, 1977
+ 95 o By His Bootstraps [as by Anson MacDonald] o Robert A.
Heinlein o na Astounding Oct '41
+ 144 o The Golden Helix o Theodore Sturgeon o na Thrilling
Wonder Stories Sum '54
+ 194 o Born With the Dead o Robert Silverberg o na F&SF Apr
'74
+ 256 o Second Game o Charles V. De Vet & Katherine MacLean o
nv Astounding Mar '58
+ 295 o The Dead Past o Isaac Asimov o nv Astounding Apr '56
+ 338 o The Road to the Sea ["Seeker of the Sphinx"] o Arthur
C. Clarke o nv Two Complete Science-Adventure Books Spr '51
+ 382 o The Star Pit o Samuel R. Delany o na Worlds of Tomorrow
Feb '67
+ 438 o Giant Killer o A. Bertram Chandler o nv Astounding Oct
'45
+ 482 o A Case of Conscience o James Blish o na If Sep '53
+ 537 o Dio o Damon Knight o nv Infinity Science Fiction Sep
'57
+ 570 o Houston, Houston, Do You Read? o James Tiptree, Jr. o
na Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda McIntyre & Susan
Anderson, Fawcett, 1976
+ 620 o On the Storm Planet o Cordwainer Smith o na Galaxy Feb
'65
+ 691 o The Miracle-Workers o Jack Vance o na Astounding Jul
'58


Of these the only one I am sure is previously unmentioned that I recall is the Tiptree, which lands a group of unsympathetic male astronauts in a future with no men and no great need for them. It has a happy ending of sorts.


AFTER DARK by Manly Wade Wellman

No idea.


Spring TO THE STARS (3-in-1 of HOMEWORLD, WHEELWORLD and STARWORLD) by Harry
Harrison

Remember the food-riots of the 1990s and the way oil ran out soon after? Well, in this series because of events like that an unsympathetic cabal has taken over Earth and later its interstellar colonies. One fellow gets on the wrong side of the government and spends the series overthrowing it, as I recall. This is pretty dire stuff, standard Harrison.

As I recall, he and Dickson also used a similar justification for the return to aristocracy in The Lifeboat.

[Wouldn't that sort of crisis kind of preclude interstellar empires? Notice if the Starchild Trilogy comes up I am not nearly so hard on it and The Plan of Man was using pretty much the same reason to conquer the accessible universe]


THE WORLD AND THORINN by Damon Knight

I missed this.


BEYOND REJECTION by Justin Leiber (Alternate)

One of the few novels written by the son of Fritz Leiber. If memory serves this is about a fellow who wakes up to discover he is in a female body and how he deals with it. Not horrifically awful but also not very good.


June DREAM PARK by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

The roleplaying games that were around in 1981 involved paper and dice and anyone with ten bucks could afford to play. This hi-tech version requires expensive equipment and so is only open to the rich and the very talented. Eh. There's a murder mystery which is solved in a manner that should have all those rich people suing Dream Park into non-existence.


TOO LONG A SACRIFICE by Mildred Downey Broxon

Something about Ireland and the modern day violence there. When *will* Celt-on-Celt violence end? Excuse me while I go pummel a Belgae.

[I am in no way an extremist but I would not be terribly averse to an automatic death penalty for North American authors writing fiction set in Ireland]


KINGDOM OF SUMMER by Gilliam Bradshaw (Alternate)

I never read this.


UNACCOMPANIED SONATA AND OTHER STORIES by Orson Scott Card

+ o Tin Men o pm The Anthology of Speculative Poetry Feb, ed.
Robert Frazier, 1980
+ o Introduction: An Open Letter to the Author o Ben Bova o in
+ o Ender's Game o na Analog Aug '77
+ o Kingsmeat o ss Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova, Baronet, 1978
+ o Deep Breathing Exercises o ss Omni Jul '79
+ o Closing the Timelid o ss F&SF Dec '79
+ o I Put My Blue Genes On o ss Analog Aug '78
+ o Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory o nv Chrysalis 4,
ed. Roy Torgeson, Zebra, 1979
+ o Mortal Gods o ss F&SF Jan '79
+ o Quietus o ss Omni Aug '79
+ o The Monkeys Thought 'Twas All in Fun o nv Analog May '79
+ o The Porcelain Salamander o ss *
+ o Unaccompanied Sonata o ss Omni Mar '79

And I seem to have missed this as well since it is not in my
library.

[Actually, I could swear I had this. Maybe I lost it?

Ender's Game everyone knows. Kingsmeat is about a kapo who is unsympathetically treated by fellow former prisoners after their alien oppressors are overthrown. Don't recall the others, cannot be bothered to go up and look]

Comments

[oh6]

I recognize about 6 of the stories in The Last Defender of Camelot, and the titles of "For a Breath I Tarry" and "Halfjack". Upon checking, the former concerns a post-apocalypse machine hierarchy within which one machine labours to understand humans, and the latter is a rather theatrical take on the cyborg concept.

On checking the others, turns out I do well remember "No Award", about an attempted assassination which must evade telepathic monitoring. Beyond that, nothing much comes back to me except "The Stainless Steel Leech", about a robot vampire.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

An excerpt from Beyond Rejection was one of the pieces in Hofstadter and Dennett's collection The Mind's I. IIRC, the body he ends up in is not only female, but is some sort of mutant body that has a tail. I never did read the whole book.

I read the full-length expansion of A Case of Conscience and liked it a lot. The mass social freakout that happens in the second half seems dated now but was probably slightly ahead of its time for the 1950s. The future Catholic Church depicted in the book differs doctrinally from the real one in many regards, but I got the impression that that was intentional.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

An excerpt from Beyond Rejection was one of the pieces in Hofstadter and Dennett's collection The Mind's I. IIRC, the body he ends up in is not only female, but is some sort of mutant body that has a tail.

YRC. The book is the first of a trilogy; I picked them all up years ago after reading The Mind's I, but never read them. I still have them but they are in position 5,271,009 on my to-read list.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I did read all the Beyond books and they ... well, you know, the first was a reasonably nice lightly pulpy adventure thing given a dusting of late 70s science fiction tropes to make it reasonable and there's really only a little bit of rape threat in it. (As I remember, it's used as part of the guy-in-the-woman's-body's therapy, if you can imagine; the idea being that if he fights off space pirates lusting after it, which ... yeah.)

Anyway, the later books delve into the nonhuman primates and how are they really different from humans, which is a nice way to go (and then some aliens too because yeah, why not), and then shovels a bunch of Moral Majority-esque Oppression and Persecution into the backstory in a way that makes the entire ``minds get recorded and can, in principle, be downloaded into new bodies'' thing unworkable. But, you know, if it weren't for facile science fiction stories the Moral Majority totally would've imposed their theocracy on us all.

Bonus general creepiness: one of the key characters in the books (and, really, the most interesting) is a person whose career is getting his/her mind transferred to newborn infants and raising the new bodies to a really fit and vigorous maturity, where they can be sold off to the deserving rich, while he/she goes to a new infant. There's whole subdomains of deviantart that could try working out that one.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Freaking out about the Moral Majority was the thing to do at the time. What was the name of that 80s Isaac Asimov short in which an academic does in one of his rivals by time-traveling and changing history so that the Moral Majority run everything, act like 17th-century New England Puritans for some unknown reason, and convict the guy of witchcraft?

To be fair, the sudden rise of the politicized religious right as a force capable of swinging national elections in the United States was genuinely alarming, most people not in the subculture didn't see it coming, and it had baleful effects continuing to the present.

[(Anonymous)]

"What was the name of that 80s Isaac Asimov short in which an academic does in one of his rivals by time-traveling and changing history so that the Moral Majority run everything, act like 17th-century New England Puritans for some unknown reason, and convict the guy of witchcraft?"

"The Winds of Change"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...collected in the 1983 book of the same name. Which I now realize that I've read, but I don't remember much of it.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Most of the stories in that collection are pretty eh.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

``The Winds of Change'' particularly disappoints me because, for all its other flaws, it's also about the only alternate-history story Asimov ever wrote (I can't actually think of another, but I want to give myself an out just in case, and I don't count that F&SF science essay where he worked out what it would look like if you replaced Uranus with Alpha Centauri B --- apparently a close enough match as that system were understood at the time for bodies in orbit --- and guessed how Greek mythology could have made that out as the myth of Prometheus worked out in the sky, though it's a cool idea).

Given that he had a pretty good command of the development of western civilization, and the temperament to write history as vast forces that work themselves out in the peculiarities and coincidences of individual lives, he could've probably done a fascinating novel where, say, penicillin gets discovered in 19th century Russia, or Leibniz gets to be King George's court astronomer, or something like that, and if he were ever tempted to write one he never mentioned. Instead we got ``The Winds of Change''.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Well, "Living Space" is technically alternate history. At least in the "All the Myriad Ways" sense.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

> The future Catholic Church depicted in the book differs doctrinally from the real one in many regards, but I got the impression that that was intentional.

It was intended. The story puts in a couple mentions of things like the Diet of Basra of the late 90s (remember how that dominated the news from Basra in the 90s?), and apparently left it too subtle that yes, Catholic doctrine evolved over a century. Blish mentions testily (I mean more testily than usual for him) in ... The Issue At Hand maybe? ... that his letters indicated science fiction fans got all worked up about how he got Catholic Doctrine Wrong You Fool, while non-fandom readers (apparently with an interest in theologically-inspired stories) were willing to give him a Catholic church at least as different from 1950's as the physics establishment would be.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He mentioned it in a 1958 foreword:

http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/blish_forward.jsp

Apparently the details that got people most worked up were his description of exorcism as a nearly-vanished practice, and the ability of non-priests to administer extreme unction. (I'd have thought it was the Church's turn to young-universe creationism of the Philip Gosse Omphalos variety.)

[kla10.livejournal.com]

>...and anyone with ten bucks could afford to play

I remember the core AD&D books from that era totaling $35 or so--about what they cost used now, actually. You could technically play with just the $10 PHB, but most everybody wanted the DMG and Monster Manual as well. Boxed game sets (Gamma World, Traveller, etc.) seemed to run around $15-$20, too.

[kla10.livejournal.com]

>The Stainless Steel Leech [as by Harrison Denmark]

Oh, really?

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Yes, really.

Zelazny says in his introduction to that story that his editor, Cele Goldsmith, suggested the pen name - and he didn't even think of the Harry connection.

I wonder if she did.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

After Dark was a novel about Wellman's series character Silver John the Balladeer. I don't remember much about it, except that it involved a race (at least purportedly from Native American legend) called the Shonokin.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I was very fond of the SIlver John short stories when I first read them, but as I recall the character didn't transition to novels very well. He belongs in tall tales, which are hard to tell at length.

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

The more detail provided about Union, the less sense it makes. It has a total population maybe equal to New Zealand, scattered across many systems in communities the size of towns for the most part but somehow it's a superpower equal to Old Earth

I remember having the impression that the Earth Company forces had three main deficiencies: fighting right from the start at the end of a long logistics chain, a great extent of territory to supposedly hold and police, and the fact that Earth as a whole rather quickly grew tired of the war and interstellar involvement in general. By the opening of Downbelow Station. the Company fleet has been operating without funds or supply from Earth for years.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The thing that bothered me about Cherryh's early works was how she seemed confused about how centripetal artificial gravity works.

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

Really? Not sure that's something I remember noticing. (Any book or books in particular?)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Downbelow Station, for one. The ships dock in an ... odd way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was curious about this (I haven't read Downbelow Station) and found this article defending the scheme:

http://www.perrochon.com/cherryh/discussions/archive/msg0581.html

But it seems to me that the ability of the docked ships to take the tensile stress of hanging by their noses at a little over 1G is hardly the biggest problem here! Docking and undocking would be really hairy.

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

That article seems to have the ships docking with their long axes (same as the rotation axis for the ship's main cylinder) in the station plane (perpendicular to the station's rotation axis), pointing radially in towards the hub of the station, which is why the writer estimates that "its tail end would be in the 1.2G range".

But it's pretty clear from various books in the Alliance/Union setting that ships dock with their long axes parallel to the station's rotation axis; this means the entire ship feels (more or less) the same centrifugal force as the outer rim of the station, and that about a fifth or so of the ship's cylinder retains approximately the same "local-gravity-points-toward-the-floor" orientation it has when the cylinder is rotating. (And also that the opposite side of the cylinder is "upside-down" when the ship is docked, which is something mentioned in passing in several of the books.) This matches with descriptions of how people on ships walk out onto the station, or back on board, and also with how ship access points are located within the docking level of the station (they are doors in the wall, not doors in the middle of the floor).

You still have an issue of the ship feeling a lot of stress hanging off the station that way, but if that's the way everyone decides to build their ships and stations, then ships would presumably be engineered accordingly. (It would, I think, argue for ships being relatively compact, rather than long and spindly.)

Given that the station has a known, uniform rotation rate -- and assuming the ships have computers and maneuvering thrusters -- docking is probably not too difficult to automate.

(The remark in that article about stations being picky about when and how ships undock, and unscheduled undockings causing havoc on stations, is something that shows up in the novels.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Is there this enormous yoink like an unpleasant amusement-park ride when the docking mechanism suddenly pulls the ship to 1G acceleration, or do they dock with some sort of engine blasting away at 1G acceleration to reduce the jerk?