DAMN ALIEN REVIEWS
as relayed to Steve Sawicki
DAMN ALIEN REVIEWS
Salations and may all your blue dresses remain stainless. While we have you may we also wish you all a most happy living moon/sun transfer. You are indeed a strange species. We wonder at all of the units of time you seem to want to set aside to do nothing. This is not the sign of a species on its way to the stars. In any case we can certainly understand the clammy tenstacle feeling one gets when thinking of one’s home planet so we more or less understand your wanting to have a whole day set aside for your own teary eyed ruminations. Again, let us be one of the first to wish you all a joyous Residents Day. The seasonal changes your planet goes through has not agreed with us. Sawicki also refuses to let us nudge the planet into a more circular orbit and straighten that odd axial tilt as well. He can’t last forever though and when he’s not looking, zoom, instant climatic moderation. We have spent many hours this past lunar cycle trying to maintain our internal temperature. If we had known it was this cold here we would not have left our jackets on the home world. Still, we have been enjoying the quaint custom of fireplacing and we like it. While we don’t believe this has colored our view towards your fictional transgressions, we have to admit to at least needing to mention it since we seem to be tossing many more books into the flames than we set aside for comment. Still, we have managed to save one or two tomes which we mention below. And as always we feel the need to admonish you to fantasize safely
The response to our archived states has been beyond comprehension and so we shall continue to see that our work exists for your constant edification. Grow a pseudopod, grab your mouse, shout SPOOZE! and click here.
order Smoke And MirrorsSmoke And Mirrors, Avon Books Hardcover, ISBN 0-380-97364-2, $24.00 ($31.00 Canada), 339 pgs.
We danced around before reading this book. Gaiman, after all, is one of those comic people and while we do so love the Batman and the Superman and the Fantastic Four we do not raise them up to high literature. Good writing is always good writing but Dr. Seuss is not Hemingway. Thus we let this book slide around the mothership for nearly a month before finally picking it up. Short stories we noticed, and a few poems. Surely we’d know right off if the thing was worth diving into.
33 pages later we had finished what has to be one of the longest introductions ever written. This introduction is longer than many of the stories in the book. Makes one wonder. It is interesting though and actually sort of includes a story itself. Odd structure for an anthology but we remind you once more that this is a comic guy.
29 pieces later, most of them short stories, we find ourselves captivated by this odd person of vision. The stories are difficult to describe as a whole. Some are absolutely excellent. Some are just okay. Most are pretty good. All of them show a writer who tends to look at things a bit off most of the time. This makes all of them very interesting. There are all kinds of stories here; fantasies, horror tales, misplaced folktales, misplaced people tales, quirky entries of love, lust and illusion. All are quite captivating and intriguing in the depth of mystery that each embraces.
We note here (and we spank later) that Gaiman does not fare so well with the long form. Short form though he shines. Whether this is due to his comic influences or his poetic licenses we can not tell. We are convinced that writers come in many shapes and sizes and differing abilities and that not all can do all. Perhaps Gaiman is best in the short form. If this book is any indication it is a place he certainly shines. Read and enjoy. This is an eclectic mix of wonders and tales to make you wish there were no ending.
Wildly waving tenstacles and pseudopods in all directions. This is one you should be getting.
Mission Child, Maureen F. McHugh, Avon Eos Hardcover, ISBN 0-380-97456-8, $20.00 ($26.00 Canada), 385 pgs.
Aiiee, we wail in mixed blessinged ecstasy. This is a wonderful book. But is it science fiction? Sure there are aliens, but the aliens are you. Sure the novel is set on a far and distant planet but it is much like Earth. Sure some odd things happen in socially different ways, but we could be looking at China as well.
McHugh has created an intriguing story about a young woman who must survive a number of travails, some of them huge and all encompassing like war and disease and others more personal like choosing what to eat and how, while still others are spiritual in nature. This is pretty good stuff and McHugh’s character is intriguing and interesting. She also meets interesting people and seems to be in interesting places at interesting times. Some of this might be coincidental but McHugh is such a good wordsmith that we don’t care. But, but, but..........where is the science fiction hook that this story demands in order to be truly considered part of the genre. It is not there, alas.
And so, we have a book about a lass, a young woman who is a mission child and who goes on to journey the world in exploration and discovery and survival. At times just more or less wandering for the sake of moving.
We really did like this book. We read it from cover to cover. We eagerly turned pages, wanting and not wanting to reach the end. And still, the question nagged us in the lower right front of our second hindbrain--was this science fiction? Our conclusion is that this is borderline stuff. If you want a good read then by all means look here. If you want taut fiction you should look here too. If you want science fiction of the whole hog variety then you might want to look elsewhere.
All tenstacles up and flailing in sheer but conditional enjoyment.
Stardust, Neil Gaiman, Spike Hardcover, ISBN 0-380-97728-1, $22.00 ($29.00 Canada), 238 pgs.
Okay, above we forewarned you that we would be here. We argued among ourselves about whether or not this should be a clang bang. Half of us said yes, half of us said no and the rest of us said we should just explain our position and let it go at that.
This is a fairy tale and it is an interesting one at that, at least for the first ten pages or so. Then everything starts to slow down as Gaiman begins describing things we probably don’t need to know. The whole tale is predicated on a gap in a wall and while it is not really this gap which holds the tale there is much ado about the gap for the first bunches of pages. The tale is really about a lad who goes through the gap in order to get something which will allow him the heart of his sweetie. This is the tale and we don’t get there until pages and pages from the start.
Besides this rather slow pacing, Gaiman seems lost in space, not knowing what to do with all these pages which need filling and so he fills them with what he has--words.
Frankly, we liked his short stories so much that perhaps it was a mistake to try to do both books in the same month since one would have to be compared against the other. Well, we did and we did and this one suffers from it.
Tenstacles shaking, mostly in fear that you’ll buy it and get so lost we won’t see you again.
Playing God, Sarah Zettel, Warner Books Hardcover, ISBN 0-446-52322-4, $22.00 ($27.00 Canada), 417 pgs.
This book has aliens so we were immediately drawn to it. Once again though, while they seemed vaguely familiar we could not place them in our cosmology. They do seem like nice aliens though, if a bit passive.
This book is about aliens helping aliens; earth beings coming to the assistance of an alien race which has pretty much devestated its home planet though armed inter-clan conflict. Not only have they almost killed each other through conventional means but a plague is wiping them out indescriminately as well. Into all this come the earthers who have big plans to renew the planet from the microbes up. This involves, however, constructing huge orbital habitats, lifting the entire alien race from the surface, then beginning the work of conversion from wasteland to pure land. As you can imagine this rather big undertaking is fraught with complications--both technical and social.
We found this concept intriguing and fascinating. We liked the idea, we liked the format, we liked the aliens. We weren’t so fond of the humans though and we thought the pacing was a bit slow. There are characters galore here and we struggled in learnding all of them as well as having to understand a future social earther structure as well as a totally alien one as well. While some of you may have the patience for this we find we have way too many other books to read to spend the time needed to read and re-read chapters so we are appropriately understandful. Some of us voted for the disintegrator and some thought that would be too cruel. We fall somewhere in the middle here and reconcile by so noting that.
Tenstacles uplifted, more or less, in a confused but affirmative way.
BIG IMPRESSIONS!!!
Dinosaur Summer, Greg Bear, Warner Paperback, ISBN 0-446-60666-9, $6.99, ($8.99 Canada) , 389 pgs.
We like dinosaurs. In fact, we were somewhat sorry that the accidental landing of one of our motherships at full velocity destroyed so many of them. Still, if it had not been for that you would not be here. We take no small amount of guilt for playing a part in potentially unleashing such a hostile species on the universe.
But the book, yes, the book. This is a book which should have been wonderful--It’s got a great cover, it’s got fantastic interior illustrations, it’s got color plates by Tony DiTerlizzi, it’s a fabulous idea, and it’s done by a talented writer. Instead, Dinosaur Summer is almost a tribute to what could have been. We wish this book had seen a good editor who would have returned it to Bear with some comment such as, “Great start, send it back when you’ve finished,” instead of accepting it whole cloth.
This is an adventure story set on an alternate earth. The main character is Peter Belzoni, a fifteen year old boy who travels with his journalist father during the summer of 1947. The basic premise of the book is that Challenger’s lost continent really existed and dinosaurs were subsequently harvested and used to create dinosaur circuses. The public’s fickle interest, coupled with a few rather nasty accidents, have left the circuses bankrupt. Thus it is that Circus Lothar gears up for one last travel--that of returning their beasts to the lost continent. Along for the ride, Bear includes Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien, two real life individuals involved in monster Hollywood.
This would seem to be pretty exciting stuff, yet Bear never manages to pass the excitement along to the reader. The main character, Peter, is rather undeveloped. Peter’s father is so wishy washy as to be near invisible. The dinosaurs, which one would expect to be the focus of attention, are caged for the first half and, once released, gone into the jungle.
At times Bear has it all exactly right and the book moves with an excitement and adventure that is reminiscent of Bradbury. These times seemed all too infrequent to me however. Perhaps it was that I expected so much from this book, perhaps more than was ever there to begin with. Bear also chooses a rather odd direction in terms of story development when he begins to bring in notions of evolution to the mix. Sure, if dinosaurs existed to present day there would be wonderful mutations and genetic differences. That was not the story I expected though. I wanted the story of returning T-Rex to the jungle.
This book will appeal to a small segment of readers but will ultimately disappoint most. Do pick up the book, if only to look at the pretty pictures and marvel at the basic idea. Then put the book down and walk away. You’ll end up having a much better experience that way.
For us, well, yes, it’s tenstacles back and with a full heave----Clang, bang, into the chute, nothing but vacuum.
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