ecl@ahuta.UUCP (ecl) (02/01/85)
FRONTERA by Lewis Shiner
Baen Books, 1984, $2.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
This is a book has a lot of promise, but it just doesn't deliver. The
premise is good: the first permanent Mars settlement--Frontera--was cut off
from Earth when all the governments and social order in general fell apart
back on Earth. Now, several years later, the corporations have picked up
the pieces and send a "rescue mission" to Frontera.
The scenario for the transition from government to corporation rule on
Earth does not bear close inspection, particularly in the USSR, but little
time is spent on Earth, so this could be glossed over. And Shiner does have
a good writing style, capable of holding your interest with realistic
descriptions of life in the Martian colony. But unlike Occam, he multiplies
entities (in this case, premises) needlessly. The children born to the
colonists on Mars are mutants who have set up their own laboratory in a
cave, where they may or may not have developed faster-than-light
travel/matter transmission. None of the main characters is what could be
described as normal, and this soon starts to look like "funny-hat-ism,"
where everyone is identified by the funny hat they wear. In many ways it
reminded me of Frederik Pohl's STARBURST ("The Gold at Starbow's End"), with
its gratuitous (in my opinion) mysticism. I didn't like STARBURST either.
It's a pity. If Shiner had just stuck to the idea of the stranded
Martian colony and how they survived, without all this FTL mumbo-jumbo, he
could have had a great story.
Evelyn C. Leeper
...{ihnp4, houxm, hocsj}!ahuta!ecl