Does Lulu even still exist?

Another vintage review

Andaluz, Michael, 2003, Ascent Stage 1: tales from the fantoon dynasty: www.lulu.com/freon, 221 pages. Perfect bound paperback.

Freon could have sold most of these stories to major magazines, but as far as I can see it's the original publication for everything. In a way that's too bad, these stories are that good. On the other hand, that makes the book a particularly nice find. It is tough to sell a single-author collection nowadays, even if you are well-known, which probably explains why this book was done through Lulu. Still, I fear that not too many people have seen "Ascent Stage 1," which is why I am reviewing it even though it's five years old. A book is never too old if you haven't read it. Unless it's written in a dead language. Which this one isn't.

The seven stories published here range in length from a scant six pages to almost 70 pages. The book is not really about "the fantoon dynasty." Only the first and last stories make explicit reference to the dynasty, which isn't really a dynasty, since only one member of the family is mentioned. It seems that the other stories could be shoehorned into the fantoon universe, but I think it's more likely that the title is meant to encompass the stories more metaphorically than literally. These are tales of the near future. We have not wiped ourselves out yet, but we still have the same problems we have always made for ourselves. We just have new toys to make them with, and Freon is a good storyteller. He reminds me of Heinlein without the misogyny.

My favorite is "The Jam," which is a good long piece about the dangers of too much complexity, too much computerization, and what happens when we build things that we don't understand. You know the train wreck is coming, but you don't know how it will happen or what will happen to the several characters about whom you have come to care quite a lot. I really enjoy Freon's deft characterization. Motivations and reactions seem totally believable.

"The feedback was tremendous and uncontrolled, infecting the pattern yet more. SoCal ignored the phenomenon entirely; a light washed findings for lack of a clear answer, and disclosed a wait time ratio that was artificially held down, to an optimistic 40%. Garbage out. But to make things worse, other uninformed researchers fed that same projection into the system as input. Garbage in. Everything slowed down."

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

"Hey! That was encrypted!"
Lansdale shrugged, unimpressed. "So?"

And if your air car isn't flying, you have to fall back on more primitive methods.

"I'm going to be ill, Hank," she'd pleaded, "could you slow it down? This isn't even a road."

"Ripper," the other long story in this collection, is pure cyberpunk. The protagonist is employed ripping abusive or destructive users out of a complex and sophisticated virtual-reality world. Imagine the world of Blade Runner, but virtual. In some ways online interactive games like World of Warcraft are halfway there. Gambling with imaginary money and wearing an imaginary body is fun and you meet all kinds of people you would never meet in the flesh. But some of these people seem to be quite literally insane, not to say dangerous. Okay, let's go ahead and say they are dangerous – they might destroy the entire virtual world. Are they members of a cult, and what or whom do they worship?

We've gone from classic hard science fiction to cyberpunk, and back again. The last story in the book is "The Ice Train," a shorter hard science fiction piece about bringing ice from the outer reaches of the solar system to Earth. Or rather, it's about what you do when things go wrong on the ice run.

I really enjoyed "Ascent Stage 1" and I hope this review induces a few people to order copies.