leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (08/08/85)
LIFE PROBE by Michael McCollum
Del Rey, 1984, $2.95.
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: LIFE PROBE is a leisurely "first contact" story with
most of its ideas in the prologue. It sets up its premise and then works it
out. The working out is enjoyable reading but weak on content.
I read a science fiction book for ideas and entertainment and LIFE
PROBE has both. LIFE PROBE is a slick, enjoyable novel by a relatively new
author, Michael McCollum. The odd thing about LIFE PROBE is that the ideas
are all, or nearly all, in the first three pages and the rest of the book is
the entertainment. In the prologue, we learn that the Makers are scouring
the galaxy looking for races that might have FTL (faster-than-light) travel.
Why do they need FTL travel so desperately? Pretty much for the same
reasons (in my opinion) that Earth currently space travel. The implication
is that when you start outgrowing your planet you need space, but without
FTL travel, space only postpones problems--it does not eliminate them.
Eventually the same species that outgrew its planet will outgrow its
neighborhood of the galaxy. Of course, it will take a long time by our
standards to do that.
Those first three pages over, McCollum sets out to tell us the story of
what happened in 2065 when the probe came to our solar system looking for
FTL travel or help in developing it. And, as has become traditional in this
sort of story, the aliens are willing to trade their technical knowledge for
ours. The rest of the novel is a pleasant enough story of how Earth reacts
to the coming of the probe and to its offer of technical exchange. There is
a girl-meets-boy subplot with characters fleshed out just enough so that the
reader wants to know that they get together, or at least wants to see how it
will happen. And the whole story is set against the background of a new
Cold War in which it is the Americans and Europeans on one side and a
unified Africa on the other. That part is not well-handled since if we went
in with a text editor and replaced all the African names with Russian ones,
the story would work just as well. We never see how a Cold War with an
African bloc is any different from one with the Soviet bloc.
I have to give LIFE PROBE my most common criticism of novels of the
1980's: there is enough idea and story here for a really good, really
tightly written short story. There is occasionally something to be said for
stretching a good short story's material out into a leisurely novel, but it
is done too often these days. If publishers somehow paid by content rather
than by word count, we would be getting a lot of good short stories and a
lot fewer novels. LIFE PROBE is a +1 book on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper