ecl@hocsj.UUCP (10/24/84)
Ace Science Fiction Specials
Five book reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper
Terry Carr and Ace Books have started yet another series of "Ace
Science Fiction Specials." The first series gave us such books as LeGuin's
LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and Panshin's RITE OF PASSAGE. Then Ace terminated
the series, only to revive it later with such "classics" as Chapman's RED
TIDE. Now it's back, and the five books scheduled for the first year have
been issued. Here then is my summary of this beginning.
THE WILD SHORE by Kim Stanley Robinson
This was the first Ace Special, and the best so far. A post-holocaust
story, it describes the life of one fairly average teenager (though the term
"teenager" has connotations which do not apply in a post-holocaust, low-tech
society) and his passage into adulthood. I said at the time that this book
could be Hugo material this year, and I still think that's true. It made me
expect a lot for the Ace series.
GREEN EYES by Lucius Shepard
This was somewhat of a let-down after THE WILD SHORE. I was really
looking forward to this one, both because of THE WILD SHORE and because it
was described as doing for zombies what Martin's FEVRE DREAM did for
vampires. However the result was neither fish nor fowl and never captured
my full interest; I found the point-of-view changes were disconcerting, and
the "scientific explanation" not very convincing. On the other hand, many
people liked it.
NEUROMANCER by William Gibson
Again, not my style of book, though the characters were more memorable
than those of GREEN EYES, and the action more interesting. A high-tech
story, it goes well with such other stories as Vinge's TRUE NAMES and
Gibson's own "Burning Chrome." Though the West Indian dialect of one of the
characters was somewhat difficult to follow, the story as a whole moved
well. A step up for the Ace series.
PALIMPSESTS by Carter Scholz and Glenn Harcourt
A palimpsest is a parchment that has been scraped clean and re-written.
The idea behind PALIMPSESTS is that history is not straightforward but
consists of palimpsests: artifacts that have many different layers of
concealed or destroyed truth on them. The main character, Camus (yes, he's
related), is an archaeologist who finds an impossibly dense cube in a dig in
Germany. The cube, when tested, gives all sorts of conflicting evidence as
to its real age. There is a lot of spy thriller action as various interests
chase Camus and his girlfriend around to get the cube, and then some
"Andromeda Strain" action at a multi-leveled, underground research
establishment. There is a lot of pseudo-science about "What is time?" and
"What is causality?" and how souls are being reincarnated backwards in time.
I've read a fair amount of time-travel/time-paradox novels and this was
*still* incoherent. The writing style shows occasional flashes of insight,
but the plot doesn't carry it, and Camus spends too much of his time feeling
sorry for himself for the reader to really get involved with him.
THEM BONES by Howard Waldrop
This is the least unusual of the Ace Specials so far. It is a fairly
straightforward time travel/alternate history novel with a heavy bent toward
adventure. There are three narratives, labeled "Bessie," "Leake," and "The
Box." "Bessie" is Bessie Level, an archaeologist working in 1929 Louisiana
who discovers horses and rifle cartridges in a burial mound dating between
700 A.D. and 1500 A.D. "Leake" is Madison Yazoo Leake, a post-World War III
draftee sent back to pre-World War III to try to prevent its occurrence.
Somewhere along the line, however, he jumps the track and lands in the right
time (circa 1930), the right place (Louisiana), but the wrong universe (no
Roman Empire, no Christianity, and the Arabs have explored the New World).
He discovers the Huastecas (Aztecs) are still going strong, human sacrifices
and all. "The Box" is a box full of reports written by the rest of Leake's
party, who were supposed to follow him into Louisiana. Somehow they've
gotten the right place but they've been sidetracked to the wrong time (1100
A.D. give or take a few hundred years).
The three threads are "alternated" (or whatever the word is when
talking about more than two). Not surprisingly, the most interesting is
"Leake" and the rest seem to act as commentary on his rather than
independent themes. The portrayal of Huasteca civilization is accurate at
first glance, but one glaring error makes me question how accurate the rest
is. (Waldrop has Leake ride his horse up the steps of a Huasteca pyramid
and down again. Huasteca pyramids have an inclination of between 45 and 60
degrees, and steps only six to eight inches front-to-back. I'd like to see
a horse ride up a pyramid like that!) On the plus side, none of the
characters ever really knows what is going on. Leake never finds out more
than a minimum of what his new world is like. He learns bits and pieces
from Arab traders, but there is none of the usual "discussion with the
historian" that one often finds in novels of this type. His companions
never quite figure out where they are or what's happened to them. They know
something's gone wrong, they suspect they're in the wrong time, but they're
too busy trying to avoid getting picked off by the natives to spend a lot of
time intellectualizing about their situation. Bessie has perhaps the best
notion of what's going on, but even she is confused and misled by what she
sees. As Connie Willis pointed out at L.A.con II, no one ever sees history,
they just see their part of it. By using three threads, Waldrop manages to
convey this limitation, while allowing the reader to have more idea of
what's going on than any one of the characters. Not a great book, but an
enjoyable one, and worth the time.
Summary
Ace has a good idea here--promoting unusual science fiction books.
They are to be commended for publishing the unusual. Del Rey and DAW
publish more science fiction than Ace, but there's a certain sameness to it
all. I mean, when DAW publishes the twentieth novel by John Norman or C. J.
Cherryh (and I'm *not* claiming they're at all similar to each other!), you
know what to expect. With the Ace Specials, you don't. You know you'll get
something with good points and bad points, maybe an innovative style, maybe
a new idea, maybe interesting characters. You don't get something stamped
out a cookie cutter. They're not all great, but I'll keep buying them.
They're...special.
Evelyn C. Leeper
...ihnp4!hocsj!ecl