_{I was going to ask readers to do the reviewing in this issue, on the principle that they might be able to do a better job of reviewing than I have been doing, but I came to find out that I had few if any readers, and thus there weren't people of the kind I had in mind to take over the job.  Besides, the ones that didn't slough off the assignment attempted to do it in Arabic Typesetting, the very kind I am using now, and somehow the font didn't seem to work out for them, don't ask me why, but it became so jumbled for them that it looked like Dadaism, and then even that fell apart for them on their screens as they wrote, and furthermore when they tried to send it the reviews they had written changed into a sort of operating code of some kind.  Perhaps they should not try their hand at reviewing, but look for something else that would make use of their talents.}

     _{So, instead, I think I will go over a cross-section of the sf that I regard as the most important and singular sf presently being published.}

     The science fiction I regard as the most singular work of the present time comes from the net, and the first I wish to call general attention to (perhaps a small amount of general attention, but it has the essence of general attention since I am calling it that) is a book by Robert J. Sawyer called www: wake, published by Berkley, distributed by the Science Fiction Book Club, and copyrighted 2009 by SFWRITER dot com, Incorporated, Sawyer's own site.  The use of small lettering in the title of the book may give you the idea that you're about to read Joyce's finnegans wake, which is not a fact although there is a certain stream-of-consciousness about the style of the book.  In fact Joyce's work has a sleeper in it named H.C. Earlyfowler who comes to consciousness at the end of the novel, so there is that comparison between the two books, but, although I would recommend Joyce's book to the curious, it's not one of the current books I was talking about, and Sawyer's is, possessing an electrical current.  It's about the net, and it has in it a slowly evolving consciousness taking place in the Internet, the definitive work on the subject, I would think.  The work was serialized in Analog, then rushed into a print edition and over to the SFBC, which was offering it to members less than half a year after it was presented in Analog. What else can one say?  That's a description of the novel; the rest of it is the novel itself.

     How many science fiction stories have had the word “ego” in the title?  I can think of several:  Norman A. Daniels' “The Great Ego”, Theodore Sturgeon's THE ULTIMATE EGOIST, and Jerry Sohl's THE ALTERED EGO.  But, to the best of my knowledge, these are the only sf stories with that word in their titles.  Perhaps readers of this column could think of other sf titles with “ego” in them, but they'd be more likely to be thinking UP titles than thinking OF titles.

     THE CONSCIOUSNESS PLAGUE by Paul Levinson, Tor books, copyright 2002 by the author, pits a detective against a steadily-growing epidemic of memory-loss.  Doing computer traces and adding other methodology, he isolates the bacteria responsible for consciousness and finds that an antibiotic is wiping it out, and what are you going to do about that paradox?  Here hard science becomes hard-to-take science.  The reader might have guessed this before the author brings it into play, but will find a more detailed interpretation of this possibility in the book.  Another paradox which may or may not be seen as one is present in the book, the process must be stopped before it gets to the point where people are forgetting that they have forgotten things, because then they will no longer realize that they have a problem.  You've seen STARGATE and STAR TREK deal with this form of menace, but now you can have a look at such a problem in the more careful interpretive mode of a novel.  The detective is the protagonist of a number of stories published in Analog, and the author is a presence on the Analog Forum.  Do you like your novels harrowing?  The Consciousness Plague is that.

     Some time back the SFBC advertised a book called SHADOW, by K.T. Parker, thusly:  “A God With AMNESIA? A man wakes in the wilderness alone…and he has no memories at all…”.  “A really good fantasy novel creates a world you can sink into, one that makes you forget your regular life. This book will make your forget your name as you read it.” The man described becomes a god. The book's a fantasy.  How many books can you think of, all told, that concern or contain memory loss?  Science fiction, that is, not something like “The Lost Weekend”. Quasi-sf like THE BOURNE IDENTITY doesn't count.

       J. Gregory Keyes' NEWTON'S CANNON, Book One of The Age of Unreason, has plenty of the qualities of a jape, describing Newton as an alchemist and developing a parallel world where science starts running amok out of the time period where it was, in fact, achieving its stability. It's a Ballentine Del Rey book, a division of Random House publishers, copyright 1998 by Keyes.  The book's important in that its central scientist is one of the most respected of scientists from the science fiction viewpoint. The age of unreason is, of course, put up against the age of reason, theoretically the Twentieth Century. It may be considered something on the order of fantasy overcoming science fiction, and of course magic overcoming science.  Why does the author have the impulse to show something like that?

     By the way, where I live a “cannon” means the female escort of a well-to-do man.  Perhaps the title would be better spelled “Canon” even if it interferes with the meaning of the book a bit, because you don't want to ask a man about his cannon or discuss it.  Just a linguistic occurrence, basically.

     Again, the book is significant because it's timely in working with a conflict between science and magic.  It could make a good reference work for establishing the existence of that topic, or present-day conflict.  A lot of people don't know it's going on who should know, as they are involved in it.  It's not absent, anyway, from the text of this novel.  Does anybody disagree with my evaluation of this book?  I'm not expecting to hear from them.

     Greg Bear's DARWIN'S CHILDREN would seem to be a book to beware of (a word containing the word “bear”) because its author has what might be described as an evolutionary last name, and he is only one of many relatively recent writers who have ecologically significant names.  It was in the 60s that Analog was involved in nature and ecological disputes.  This work contains the concept of a retrovirus, which, if it is a legitimate medical term, has not received prominent attention in the past.  Looking at the words “retrograde” and “retroactive”, familiar to science in the first case and legalistic in the second, we find that “retro” means “referring back to the first instance”, so a “retrovirus” would refer back to a latent tendency toward the virus, and I think that is the usage the term has when one sees it in televised sf.  To the best of my knowledge no one has ever defined the term in a work of fiction or a television script, yet it is assumed that the reader or viewer will be fully aware of what a retrovirus is.  The writers of the notes on this book's jacket do assume this.  But it is magic rather than science to introduce the word undefined, and that goes for other words that are being slung around in sf and the press.  At any rate, retrovirus is seen as a factor in evolution, meaning they're not quite sure about such a thing yet, whether it is a plus or minus, which isn't standard medical talk about a virus.  The balance of the book is hysteria regarding “mutated” or “evolutionary” children, who, like Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom, have evolved out of an adverse condition, meaning a factor of dissonance could step up evolution, compensatorialy if no other way.  For some reason science fiction today believes that atomic radiation could produce not only giant insects but superior qualities in humans, just as the insects have achieved a superior size.  There is no reason to believe that this isn't true, except that there aren't actual cases of it and it would seem to be a work of the imagination.  In all sf cases, as if they were test or control factors, there are monsters too; sometimes a mutant is both.  Why is that such an interesting theme?  Greg Bear has best-seller material here; apparently the general public is interested as well.  Will mutants come along that will change everything?  Well, the Age of Aquarius hasn't done so as yet, but there is still a lot of speculation, and this book is, again, timely.  Those who enjoyed public pandemonium scenes in DARK ANGEL will like this book better.

     Pohl and Clarke's THE LAST THEOREM was the subject of my column last issue, wherein I explained all the effect it was already having, a sort of fulfillment of de Camp's concept in his novelette “Judgment Day” from Astounding (which is the earlier name of Analog).  I'd like to explain that it evolves Clarke's concept of this being the end of things, shown in so many of his stories, to its apex, and beyond that Clarke isn't sure whether it's The End or The Beginning, but he does think that it's something.  Pohl, who backs him, is a sort of doom-laden writer—so if you want to see a consideration that this might be the end of things or a new beginning laid out before you, with reference to the fact that “this” means the current world distress, here's a book to have, Del Rey Books, copyright 2008 by the Estate of Arthur C. Clarke.

     I'd call attention also to VERSE & UNIVERSE, Poems About Science and Mathematics, edited by Kurt Brown and published by Milkweed Editions, a non-profit paperback publisher which nevertheless charges $15.95 for the edition, since readers are not non-payers; copyright 1998, printed on acid-free paper and doubtless findable with a search engine. I don't know that the Universe is a matter of either science or mathematics, but I think it is in fact science that created the term “universe” to describe the cohesion of heavenly bodies, and aside from that there is the term “universal” used to mean in general use all around.  But the term is also in great use in the humanities and they tend to confiscate it if it had a scientific origin.  Theoretically poetry which is about the universe would bear reference to this other usage.  Actually this is not so much the case in this particular anthology, but it does, of course, occur, poetry being a thing of the humanities.  But I think they are rather hard and militant about science.  A lot of the poets represented come from the mundane culture (No? One of them is John Updike—but then there's beatniks like Howard Nemerov) and the poetry does not typically rhyme—how can you both rhyme and speak of the Universe?  I recommend the book, however, for its confluence of these three things—science, the humanities, and material reality.  And I think it is a matter of public interest how these three outlooks are getting along presently.  As for whether the reader will enjoy this anthology, he might—but you want to have a liking for the avant-garde approach, and somewhat of an interest in nihilism to find this anthology really to your liking as a reader of poetry. (The back cover notes say “Science and art come together in Verse & Universe, a comprehensive selection of poetic voices revealing the beauty, the precision, the triumphs and the destructive power inherent in science and technology.”)  The reader of reviews here might be interested to know that that quotation expresses a school of thought which is also present in “Children of the Atom” and in other outlets of thought.

     And for sheer, out-and-out end-of-the-world there's James F. David's JUDGMENT DAY,  Tor Books, 2005, described by Booklist as “An apocalyptic novel that Left Behind readers will like.”  Booklist is pretty familiar with the Left Behind?  I think they mean not having front seat views of the apocalypse, which are apparently obtainable where there are hippies, who seem to have the term “left behind” in their vocabularies.   On the back cover it says “The reign of Lucifer—prophesied as a thousand years of darkness—is about to begin.”  Well, take a look at the book for yourselves, and you will find it to be as near to the classical view of the Apocalypse as science fiction can get, with a strong stress on Armaggedon, which might be seen by others as an aspect of the apocalypse they discuss.  The reading is much more even than in other books of its type, and it might be just exactly what a whole lot of people would want.  For some reason the book seems to have been somewhat left behind itself, but that can be solved here on the net, I'd think.  It's as good as any other attempt, and closer to the actual topic.

     Kevin Ahearn's novel THE MILKY WAY MAN, Strategic Book Publishing, an imprint of AEG Publishing Group, copyright 2009 by the author, has an attitude or outlook you might have seen expressed in stories Ahearn has had in Surprising; he was also a frequent letter writer at Sci-Fi Weekly at the SciFi dot com site and is other than that often seen at one place or another on the net where the interest is in science fiction.  The book has a kind of antihero superhero whose purpose is to kill everyone in America and he's created, developed and bred to this purpose.  If you like Ahearn's approach to things, you will like this book. 

     WHO SHAPED SCIENCE FICTION, by Robert Sabella, Kroshka Books, a division of Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, copyright 2000 by its author, is the best available introduction to science fiction via studies of its authors that can be found.  The author is a good interpreter of science fiction and his skills are applied in this volume.  He has fanzines of his own, which can be found at www.efanzines.com and is well known in science fiction fandom.  He doesn't stick to writers in this book, he does Rodenberry and Kubrick as well, and goes into some historical writers, having in mind exactly what his title suggests.  The book could get him arguments, but there's no argument that these names are among the shapers of science fiction and it's interesting to see the look he takes at them.

     His publishers seem to have a writing establishment of some kind, going by the data on the publishing history page.

     You may have noted that I have been bearing no particular reference to Star Trek or Star Wars in my evaluation of what's most of current interest and significance.  However, I am not unaware of their present importance within the science fiction field, and will mention one book of this sort—STAR TREK, called on its cover “A novel by Alan Dean Foster written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based upon 'Star Trek' created by Gene Roddenberry.”  It makes one wonder in advance just who wrote it.  It's often been a fault of movie-to-book editions that the author is somewhat uncertain; I recall this was true of RIDERS TO THE STARS and THIS ISLAND EARTH, authored by Curt Siodmak but both based on movies rather than the movies being based on books.  At any rate, this book sums up Star Trek pretty well and is a Pocket Book/Simon & Schuster edition copyright 2009 by Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios.  The book's dedicated to John and Bjo Trimble.  Bjo, at one time a member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, was a major influence in the making of Star Trek and this is dearly remembered in the dedication.  The writing of the book is good—perhaps the best Star Trek volume ever written.  It's made in conjunction with the latest Star Trek movie.

     Lastly, a FANTASY BEST OF THE YEAR edition for 2007, edited by Rich Horton, Cosmos Books/Dorchester Publishing/Wildside Press 2007, if representative of Horton's anthologies, might make the whole series well worth purchasing, because as he stresses in his introduction to this year's collection, the stories are indeed fantasies, possessing as they do the proper magical qualities to qualify them as such. It seems to me if you buy a Horton edition you will have bought the goods.  The fantasies are uncomplicated by the mundane or the formal and come across as works of magic, “lyrical”, as Horton describes them.  The anthology doesn't seem to be up there in terms of success as much as it should be—but more buyers might solve that problem.

     Do you agree with my evaluations of what is of present science fiction and fantasy significance?  Surprising Stories has a letter column, if you are wanting to make your own evaluations.

Contents