Issue Number 54
  (February 2000)

Book reviews

by Ellie Miller

Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio, Ballantine, 1999, ISBN 034542333X

Ray Bradbury once defined Science Fiction as a "logical extension of reality." In Darwin's Radio, Hugo and Nebula Award winner Greg Bear has chosen to explore the possibility of extending our biological parameters one step beyond where we are now in order to consider a logically plausible what-if? in the evolutionary process. That he was able to make his extraordinary concept believably acceptable to this ordinary layperson is a tribute to his brilliance both as a writer and as a scientist.

One of the problems that I've always had with so-called "hard core" science fiction is trying to compre-hend the amount of highly technical information which an author needs to incorporate into his text in order to justify his fictional premises. I can't honestly say that Darwin's Radio is an easy read, but it is most certainly a fascinating one. One of Mr. Bear's gifts as a writer, I believe, is his ability to create characters and situ-ations which are so utterly realistic that they make his readers want to understand...want to become involved ...because what he has to say about them swiftly becomes immediately and personally meaningful to us. By the time I was only a few chapters into Darwin's Radio, I was exper-iencing this kind of involvement. Once I had done so, I literally could not put the book down.

What if? there were a kind of eons-old trigger implanted in our genetic structure that might be activated involuntarily if/when the world humankind has shaped for itself becomes too stressful and difficult to endure? A trigger which might possibly initiate a more evolved form of the species that could? Three highly diverse discoveries... Neander-thal corpses with a "difference," perfectly preserved in the ice of the Austrian Alps, discovered by failed archeologist Mitch Rafelson; the corpses of murdered, pregnant women, buried in a mass grave in Georgia, examined by virologist Kaye Lang; a weird strain of flu affecting pregnant females and causing them to miscarry, tracked down by disease hunter Christopher Dicken... put together, add up to this frighteningly logical conclusion, and once the connection has been made, this gripping novel concerns itself with its terrifying consequences.

(To me, one of the more frightening aspects of the book is Mr. Bear's dystopic approach to our government's attempts to deal with the crisis. The kind of brutal cyni-cism and political manoevering that he predicates cuts entirely to close to the bone given some of the realities to be found in today's headlines.)

And yet the ultimate results of such a transition do not leave us utterly devoid of hope. I don't think I could have handled it had they done so. Rather, as Mr. Bear concludes in his introduction: "We may be leaping into darkness...but the light at the end of that darkness could be very bright indeed!" I found it to be so...for Kaye and Mitch and Stella and, above all, for humankind.

Order Darwin's Radio from Amazon.com
Order Darwin's Radio from Amazon.co.uk (paperback edition due May 2000)

Diane Duane, The Book of Night With Moon, Warner, 1999, ISBN 0446606332 and To Visit the Queen, Warner, 1999, TPB, ISBN 0446673188

Actually, it's been almost two years now since Diane Duane first published The Book of Night With Moon. Recently, I reread it preparatory to reading its sequel, To Visit the Queen, and once I'd gulped that down, I thought, damn! time and past time to spread the word!

By me, there are very few really well-done novels which are entirely focused around animal protagonists: Paul Gallico's The Abandoned, Richard Adams' Watership Down and Gabriel King's The Wild Road are the only ones that I can immediately bring to mind. However, Diane Duane's two intricately-conceived, superbly-readable cat fantasies are easily good enough to stand with any or all of those classics and, given half a chance, should enthrall even hardcore ailurophobes. Needless to say, I'd call them must reading for cat-lovers.

They are essentially premised around a mythos... a language... and enough cat-oriented sensitivity to nuances to make you want to move bag and baggage into the alternate New York City wherein Ms. Duane has placed her action. Here, wizardry is real and there are people and there are People: People, of course, being cats. Further, these cats are Wizards, charged under oath by the Powers of Light to stand against Darkness and the evil Lone One. The first novel introduces Rhiow, a pampered house-cat; alley tom, Urruah; the neurotic tortoiseshell, Saash and the feral kitten, Arhu. They are the appointed Guardians of the World Gates... webs of magical threads... that exist just below Grand Central Station and permit instantaneous travel among the multiverse of worlds by those wizards having the Light's business in other times and places.

When The Book of Night With Moon opens, there has been a strange warpage in the fabric of these Gates (not unlike "a disturbance in the Force") which our cat friends eventually have to trace back to its subterranean source and contain before an ancient Evil can break through into modern day New York, destroying everything in its path.

To Visit the Queen continues their adventures, this time taking them to present-day London where a deliberately-set, malfunctioning Gate has become a time slide, dragging innocent humans carrying potentially deadly technological knowledge into the past and thus threatening to unleash nuclear devastation upon the world of today. If our cats can't rewrite that history in time to stop the Lone One before his plan for world devastation is effected, there will be no this history to record.

Lots of real nail-biting suspense here and, again, Ms. Duane's sure hand with characterization makes this a powerful and equally engrossing follow-up to what I can only hope will be an extended series of adventures featuring Rhiow and Company.

Order Book of Night from Amazon.com
Order Book of Night from Amazon.co.uk

Order Visit Queen from Amazon.com
Order Visit Queen from Amazon.co.uk

Suzy McKee Charnas, The Kingdom of Kevin Malone, Harcourt Brace, 1997, ISBN 0152011919

I know that I'm probably in the minority, but, for some reason, I've always enjoyed and preferred Ms. Charnas' so-called YA novels to her darker, more dystopic, adult SF and vampire novels. The Kingdom of Kevin Malone seems deceptively simple on the surface... lots of standard what Kirkus Reviews calls "mole and troll fantasy" elements... but its real-life characters and their equally real concerns stayed with me long after I'd put the book down.

When the story begins, streetwise, New York-teenager Amy's life is in turmoil. Her work-obsessed father has accepted a new job which will mean relocating the family to California; her best friend Rachel seems to be pushing her away in favor of "creepy" Claudia, and her closest adult friend, her cousin Shelly, has just died from a simple hospital procedure gone tragically amiss. While the family is still sitting shiva, she slips out of that emotionally-charged atmosphere to go roller-skating with Rachel in Central Park where she encounters Kevin Malone, a juvenile delinquent and bully from her childhood, who suddenly sticks a jeweled pin... a gift from her cousin that he had stolen from her years before... into her sleeve and takes off. Like Alice after the White Rabbit, she pursues him into one of the Park's pedestrian tunnels only to suddenly find herself in another world which exists parallel to and just below it. Out of his own anger and misery at his brutally-abusive father's mistreat-ment of him as a child, Kevin has created a magical kingdom there based on bits and pieces of fantasy novels that he's read and his own dark imaginings.

Now he is trapped by his own creation. A la Forbidden Planet, the "monsters of the id" have risen against him, and, by the rules of fantasy, he must now become a hero, cleanse his world of the evil which he has unwittingly created and restore order to Fayre Farre. But he needs Amy's help. This trip was his last opportunity to visit the real world, so she is now his only link to a seemingly trivial souvenir from his childhood... still hidden there... that will transform itself into a magical sword in this alternate universe. As the jacket blurb puts it: "Amy agrees to help Kevin save Fayre Farre (but) before she can save his world, she must first save Kevin - a person she doesn't even like."

Frankly, I'm a sucker for coming-of-age novels, and this one really worked for me. Amy and her friends ...especially maladjusted, arrogant Kevin... are beautifully-conceived and thoroughly believable, and I found myself caring intensely about what happened to all of them. Ms. Char-nas uses her fantasy world adroitly as a device to address real-life problems of loss, alienation and abuse, and becoming an active part of their successful resolution gave me a great deal of pleasure.

Order Kevin Malone from Amazon.com
Order Kevin Malone from Amazon.co.uk

Nicola Griffith, The Blue Place, Avon, 1999, TPB, ISBN 0380790882

Beautifully-crafted with a fast-moving plot, erotically-evocative characters and a vivid sense of locale, Lambda Award-winning SF writer Nicola Griffith has temporarily abandoned SF for the thriller noir genre and written a real nail-biter of a suspense novel. In many ways, it reminds me of Peter Hoeg's inter-national best-seller, Smilla's Sense of Snow, though, in some respects, I think that this a much stronger/better book. Ms. Griffith is in rare form here, and I got so involved with her characters and plot premise that I pretty much gulped this beautifully-crafted novel down in one sitting.

The "blue place" of its title refers to the arctic mindset that engulfs its heroine, Aud Torvingen... former police lieutenant, recently retired and taking occasional cases as a private investigator... whenever she's forced to kill. An intensely complex woman, child of a failed marriage between a Scandinavian diplomat and an American businessman, Aud is death-obsessed and trying to find some meaning in her life when the novel opens.

Although she's the product of a European childhood... Norway and the UK, her father's recent death has left her independently wealthy, and she has chosen Atlanta as her home. One stormy April night while she's out walking, she literally runs head-on into a beautiful woman at a street corner. After they have disentangled themselves and parted, a house behind Aud bursts into flames, and she sees the woman running frantically towards the source of the blaze. Immediately thereafter, she vanishes in the confusion of the fire only to reappear a day or so later seeking Aud's help in discovering the cause of the explosion which has destroyed a valuable painting and killed an old friend.

Julia Lyons-Bennet is an international consultant and dealer in fine art, and the man who died in the arson-generated destruction of his home was an art historian whom she had asked to authenticate the canvas which she had sold some years before as genuine but... on the eve of its resale..now believes to be a fraud. Aud reluctantly agrees to take the case, and, during the course of their investigation, the two women first become friends and then, eventually, lovers and soul-mates. Together they uncover a massive conspiracy of art fraud, drug smuggling and money laundering on an international level which puts them directly at risk from ruthless, professional killers as the stakes escalate in a terrifying game of cat and mouse that ultimately forces Aud back into her "blue place" from high atop a Norwegian glacier in a desperate race-against-time to save both of their lives. Great book! Great read... don't miss it!

Order Blue Place from Amazon.com
Order Blue Place from Amazon.co.uk

You can read more of Ellie's book reviews at http://www.jeanweber.com/bookshop/booksf.htm