davidkm

I just read Starter Villain, a novel by John Scalzi. This book, full of plenty of excitement in the form of explosions, murders, and the like, is also a very sweet book. You can't help cheering on the viewpoint character, a good guy who deserves more than he has. Charlie is a substitute teacher when the book opens, but he was a business journalist until layoffs took away his job. Now, like any teacher, he's burned out as hell, And like any substitute teacher, broker than that.

Also there are cats, very smart cats, and foul=mouthed dolphins. Not to mention trillions of dollars, private islands, James-Bond-level secret weapons, and evil billionaires who want to rob the world for profit. Spoiler alert: some people get hurled into lakes.

A quick read and I loled several times. 4/5 stars.

Vinge, Vernor, 1992, a fire upon the deep: Tom Doherty Associates, 613 pages.

I haven't read everything by Vinge, but I would be surprised if he's written another book better than this one. It is a thriller, in which an extremely powerful and implacable foe pursues relatively helpless and inoffensive people who, paradoxically, are the only ones who can protect the galaxy from it. But what does a plot summary tell you about a good book. This book is full of edge-of-the-seat drama, delightful aliens, futuristic technology, and the equivalent of e-mail messages from a galaxy spanning information network that add realism and allow the author to tell us things the characters can't know. It is sort of a perfect storm of the book, as far as I am concerned, and I can't believe no one's yet tried to make a movie or series of movies out of it.

Here is how it begins. 5 billion years before the story opens an evil computer program that was intelligent and self-aware tried to take over the galaxy. This conquest would have included its extinguishing all independent thought in the galaxy. But something, we never meet in, destroyed the evil thing and all recorded history in the galaxy's civilizations begins 5 billion years ago. That is so long that nobody really thinks about how odd it is to have a clean slate then that's as wide as the galaxy. A chunk of memory, as in RAM or the futuristic equivalent, exists just outside the main civilized part of the galaxy and it is in active. But a human civilization, not a very important one, finds it and tries to mine it for the valuable information it contains. We all know where this is going and soon enough the investigators are destroyed. But that's just the prologue. The entity immediately embarks again on its original plan, interrupted by a mere 5 billion years in suspended animation, and it creates what soon becomes known as "the blight." But I have to tell you another thing. The author hypothesizes that for some unknown reason the interiors of galaxies contain a field that suppresses intelligence of both natural organisms and artificial organisms like computers. So the interior of the galaxy is the unthinking depths, old earth is in what's called the slowness, were faster than light travel is impossible, above the slowness is the beyond, divided into three syllable airs and above the beyond is the transcend, which is really outside the galaxy entirely. If you move up into the transcend and are not soon destroyed, you become a power and may ultimately evolve into something like a god, although those are not usually interested in mundane things like galaxies. Some of these powers or even greater entities are perverted and instead of doing what ever they are supposed to do they decide to control and destroy a helpless little creatures inside galaxies. Like us. It's one of these that is creating the blight. So while the blight is systematically subverting and destroying the vastly powerful civilizations of the high beyond, subsisting on computers more intelligent than Einstein, faster than light travel, and technology based mainly on force fields and things even weirder, when human spaceship escaped the initial attack and headed for the bottom of the beyond where something mysterious might be able to defeat the blight. I'm not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens with that plot line. But the world where much of the rest of the story plays out is inhabited by arrays of intelligent doglike creatures. Each individual member of that race consists of three to six doglike beings, which are individually about as intelligent as dogs. But a pack communicates within itself telepathically. Keith Laumer explored something a little bit like this in one of his amusing Retief stories. Retief was stationed on a planet where the natives consisted of isolated organs, like spleens, eyes, feet, and so on. A bunch of organs got together to make a more powerful being. Just like with Vinge's story, in Laumer's older story the intelligence rose with the complexity of the organism. That book was written with firmly in cheek, but "a fire upon the deep" makes a serious attempt to portray the colonial doglike organisms realistically I think the attempt is pretty successful. This is just one example of the care that Vinge used in putting this story together. You need to read it.

We lost Bruce a few days ago. Folks who knew him better than I have written about him elsewhere. I wrote this review of his second novel quite a few years ago.

Boston, Bruce, 2007, The Guardener's Tale, Sam's Dot publishing, cover by Jan Lillehei, trade paperback, ISBN 1-933556-78-1 and 978-1-933556-78-9, 273 p., $19.95, signed and numbered edition of 200 copies.

Bruce Boston's second novel is a dystopia á la 1984. That's the comparison the advertising copy makes at the Genre Mall. Of course 1984, like many dystopian novels, was told from the viewpoint of one of the victims, whereas Boston has tackled the same problem from the point of view of an enforcer. The book has the form of a detailed report of how one citizen, Richard Thorne, strayed from the path of righteousness. He lives a good life but is dissatisfied, and begins to do the sorts of things that just are not done. He visits squatters in unreconstructed slums, has sex with illegal prostitutes, and reads banned books. Soon he is infected with the ideas of rebellion.

He is observed by Sol Thatcher, Guardener. The Guardeners protect society by gardening the populace and their interactions. The story, in part, is the tale of Thorne's descent into what remains of the underworld in a tightly controlled high-tech society, but one that has not yet exerted its hegemony over the entire populated world. Behind and interwoven with Thorne's story is that of the Guardener who observes and ultimately has the job of apprehending him and his shady associates. The form of the book resembles that of the society it describes. Just as the society consists of two linked elements, the tightly controlled dominant society and the undocumented world on its fringes, the book consists of two interwoven parts: the story of Richard Thorne's disintegration wrapped in the story of the watcher who became involved.

We are meant to be sympathetic with the outlaws. They live in what's left of our society, a society in which one can consort with anyone, read any book, and think any thought. At the same time, their existence is squalid and they aren't going anywhere. They are still thinking about fighting a war that they have already lost. The Guardener has the job of protecting society by making sure its members conform to established norms. Although personal freedoms are limited, Thatcher's world is safe and the citizens are healthy and well taken care of. But this is not just the story of the destruction of the old world by the new. It is the story of their mutual interaction, and when all is said and done we may become sympathetic with the Guardener too.

The book can be seen as social commentary, but this is not its strength. The comparison between freedom and autocracy is far from new. The gardened world, especially the sanitized picture presented in the novel, is more literary construct than representation of anything that could actually be created by humans anyway. The Guardener's Tale is a story of people, people who live beside each other but not with each other, despite the complexity and intensity of their interactions. In this way The Guardener's Tale is much stronger than Boston's earlier novel, "Stained Glass Rain." Boston has been working on his craft during the many years since publication of that book, and Sam's Dot got lucky when he submitted The Guardener's Tale to them.

The Guardener's Tale is a Prometheus Award nominee and is on the Stoker preliminary ballot.

This is the first I have seen of Sam's Dot's ventures into trade paperback publishing, although it's not the only trade paperback they have produced. It looks nice, and I hope they do more substantial books like this one in the future.