Charming little extraterrestrials

Science Fiction | Robert L Forward | Dragon's Egg

Robert L Forward had multiple degrees, some of them at doctorate levels. In engineering. And several patents. So, you can guess he was really, really smart. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle used to visit his lab so that they could cadge cool new ideas for their latest books--there's a Forward mass detector in Niven's Hole Man, for example (that's actually real technology).

So, wouldn't it be so much better to read the man's science-fictionish ideas direct? I actually approached the concept with some trepidation--not everyone can write a great story, even with mind-bending physics as a supporting character. So, I started off small, with Indistinguishable from Magic, which is mainly a collection of essays, with the occasional short story. Hmm, I said to myself, the stories are relentlessly upbeat. How much of that can I take? Can I really read a whole book with no villains, no evil human impulses? How will the story progress without the spice?

Turns out, I can take a good solid chunk of it! Which brings me to Dragon's Egg.

Dr Forward (the books are sold without the 'Dr', which seems disrespectful of his achievements to me) has written a book about extraterrestrials. Indeed, they don't live on a rocky planet. Heck, they don't live on a planet, they live on a star. A teeeeny little star. Really teeny, only 20 km across, and with a ferocious gravity gradient. Not to mention the magnetic field.

OK, backing up a bit. An astronomer graduate assistant discovers a neutron star doing a close sweep past the solar system. Her son grows up completely irritated that Mom's discovery was credited to her advisor, and becomes not only an expert on neutron star physics, but also a science writer of renown. Therefore, when it is decided to send a manned scientific mission to the star, the young Niven (hee hee, you spotted that, too, did you?) is the natural choice to lead the mission.

In parallel, we witness the rise of a new species on the neutron star. Dr Forward gives a hat-tip to Hal Clement in the appendix where he describes the species, saying that in all other respects than specifically mentioned, the species' reactions are like those of Clement's ETs in A Mission of Gravity. Except that here, we meet the females of the species, too, it being a more egalitarian society than the one on Mesklin. Clement just wrote boys books for a long time before expanding scope to include girls, too. Forward, whose wife is described in the 'About the Author' page as 'contumacious', clearly did not believe a woman's place is in the kitchen, and had succeeded once in driving a less sensible editor crazy with stories featuring a woman asteroid hunter.

By the time the humans reach the star, the aliens have progressed to mathematics, religion (for a short while) and temple building. The building is awesome enough for the humans to spot it from orbit. So they contact the aliens.

Thing is, the aliens' lives are much much faster than ours, since their reactions are nuclear, not chemical. By the time you say hello and a bit of chit-chat, the alien you are talking to is ready to die of old age. The humans beam down an encyclopedia. The aliens start to learn at a ferocious rate...

Noooo, that's not the charm of this book. The charm is in the physics and engineering. Think about it. How do you get humans within 400 km of a neutron star? The answer features antimatter, but in a literally throw-away fashion. Keep thinking.

Dr Forward called this book a 'textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel'. The publisher's blurbs include praise from scientists, science fiction writers, and one reviewer in a regular science-fiction-reviewer mode.

The problem is, the rest of his novels are not available in India, not even in second hand shops. Wail.

If you like Hal Clement books, you will love Dr Forward books and stories. If you like stories where good, decent people enjoy challenges thrown at them by the universe instead of evil people, this is your one-stop shop. If you like happy endings, yay-time! OK, you get it: I loved the book, and recommend it unreservedly. However, parents, don't let the kids in your house who are aged over 14 read this book first. Dang, they may understand it better than us adults. :D

Time travel with Duke Vimes

Fantasy | Terry Pratchett | Night Watch

What I forgot to mention in the last post was that Jingo featured one of the most immediately recognisable gadgets in all the Discworld books--the Disorganiser, which desperately and futilely attempts to remind Insert Name Here of his appointments throughout the book. In a twist that only the Discworld could come up with, Vimes tells the device in exasperation that it's no use reminding him of appointments he already knows about. How about telling him of appointments he doesn't know about. And that's what happens. Except that, at one point, Vimes in this world makes a decision he doesn't make in the parallel world (if this kind of stuff makes your head hurt, you should avoid science fiction and fantasy entirely), and picks up the wrong Disorganiser, with the result that as the two time paths diverge, he gets to know how narrowly he avoided disaster all around. Bingelly-bingelly-beep!

Now, here's the thing, Night Watch, too, has time travel. This time of the physical pick-up-the-person-and-dump-him-in-the-past type. Vimes, by now Duke, still hasn't learned to delegate chasing villains to his underlings. And the High Energy Magic building's roof is not the place to tempt fate, anyway. So Vimes and the villain end up back in Vimes' past, where he has to protect everyone he loves from the machinations of the 'who, me?' baby-faced and black-hearted villain.

In Night Watch, we meet the monks who manage time and have these large rotating cylinders that warp time. (Somehow, ever since Larry Niven's short story Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation {in turn, swiping the title from a physics paper which describes real-Universe physics, mind-boggling as it may be}, I've had the impression that the large cylinders should be planet-sized or larger LARGE, but on the Discworld, faux-Tibetan cylinders manage well enough.) I suspect that Pratchett realised these monks would mess up any other book of the Discworld, so we don't quite meet them again.

Instead, we also meet, and this is a delight, Vetinari as a student assassin. And the early Sam Vimes, the early Fred Colon, and Nobby Nobbs as an urchin. We also meet the surprise of the citizens and watchmen at the idea of trolls or dwarves in the Watch, which is Pratchett's way of pointing out how the world changes in just half a lifetime. Things which were normal then are unacceptable today, and vice versa. Hey, just look around.

Pratchett has invented many villains, most of whom are plain bigots or ignoramuses with power, but this book has his first frisson-up-the-spine pure psychopath, the type James Patterson or Jeffery Deaver would scare us with, or Stephen King would use to mess with our heads. And, yet, you don't quite think he's the very worst villain in this book.

This is one of Pratchett's best Discworld books. Thud!, which came later, is not as good. But I'm not going to get to Thud! again for a nice long time. You can, instead, consider how singing the national anthem proves that you are a rebel in need of putting down. Go on, read it and realise how many assumptions you live with.

Let me close here, and move on to David Baldacci's Hell's Corner.

[Oh, in closing, the book cover doesn't have the hourglass or weird ring on it. That's just me trying to be artistic, rather unsuccessfully.]

The zombie virus meme

Fantasy | ZA Recht

Some days, you just need a good zombie story to curl up with. The first zombie story I remember as being satisfying was Larry Niven's Night on Mispec Moor. I think that was the first zombie story which was based on a natural cause for zombies. Prior to that, mysterious spells and juices caused zombiehood. In Mispec Moor, it was a pathogen which walked the dead, yes yes, impossible I know, and... ok, no spoilers. I still love the very clear development of the story and don't want to spoil it for those who have not yet read this one.

So, coming to Plague of the Dead, we again have a pathogen, here, a virus, which causes people to become zombies. Biting healthy people to spread it, and needing a shot to the head to kill the zombies.

The zombie virus is called the Morningstar strain, and we first encounter it in ... emails from a US Army doctor. We next see it in action in Africa. Pretty soon, the entire continent is abandoned to the disease and quarantined off. Too bad for the people there. I assume market research does not show many readers of US zombie books on the continent, so they can all be fictionally knocked off conveniently.

Anyway, as you would expect, the virus escapes. But before that, you get army guys doing their thing, doctors and journos doing their thing, and the zombies doing their, ugh, thing. A complication ensues when the Army doc leaks the truth about there really being zombies to the press. She and the journo are arrested by a secret agency and tortured as traitors. In the meantime, the virus gets loose in the USA.

You've seen zombies in many movies and TV serials, most of them caused by viruses. This book builds on the very same memes. A fast read, but not conclusive. It's written as book one of a series, and it's clear this is not a completed story yet. Since I haven't read the next book, it's not really a spoiler to guess that it will turn out to have been a manufactured virus.

The only thing that all the virus-zombie stories ignore is that, once dead, the body cannot be reanimated that easily, though biting people to spread it would make perfect sense for the pathogen. Don't think it doesn't happen--pathogens do change the behaviour of the host to make it do stupidly fatal things to get itself to spread faster. But a zombie virus would have to run a brain to run the body, which is much too complex for a virus to run. Most humans cannot manage it despite all the right DNA and practice. Unless the virus is intelligent. Hah. I'm not going down that equally dopey slope unless I decide to write a zombie book myself.

Still, as I said, once in a while you want to read a zombie book, for which this is plenty good enough. 3 and a half stars. If the next book falls into my lap, I will certainly read it, but I'm not going to stand in lines to get it.

***

For an intelligent pathogen, try Harry Harrison's The Jupiter Plague. Surprise ending, there. There's also another book I remember reading about an engineered virus that cycled through different forms based on an algorithm (I bet both mathematicians and biologists who read it died laughing though it's good enough for us laypeople), but alas, I forget both the name of the book and the author.

Still November, still re-reading

Science fiction | Larry Niven

Recently re-read Larry Niven's A Hole in Space, a collection of short stories. My last post on the topic covered the first three stories.

All the Bridges Rusting is a space story based on the instant-elsewhere booths manufactured by JumpShift. Some have been put on drop-ships, whose only purpose is to absorb the enormous potential energy differences between the spacecraft here and the spacecraft out there. Some are self-transmitting ships. In the meantime, thirty years before, a slowship had set out to explore planets around Centaurus. The transfer booth ships reach first, and find the old ship is in trouble, not having made its slowdown maneuvres. Now, it's zipping along at 7% of the speed of light. Dr Robyn Whyte, ex-head of JumpShift, is faced with the impossible rescue, and how to explain it to a public no longer interested in space. Prophetic, that last. This is Larry Niven in ideas mode.

There is a Tide is the earliest Louis Wu story. Louis Wu stars in Ringworld, and in a few earlier stories. In this one, he is out alone, looking for stasis boxes left behind by the extinct rulers of space, the Slavers. He finds what seems to be the biggest one ever found, but things are not simple. Another, new alien species, has found it at the same time. Fight, flight, or gamble? This one is in way-out problems mode. Larry Niven loves tides. Read Neutron Star if you don't believe me.

Bigger than Worlds is a madcap essay, covering all kinds of giant spacecraft, why we will need them, and how they will get inevitably bigger with our overcrowding problems. Not fiction, but a tremendous display of science writing at the edge of fiction.

$16940.00 is not a science fiction story. It's about a blackmailer, and the blackmailed, and how they are tied together, and ... just read it, ok.

The Hole Man was written when the first quantum black holes were postulated. As Niven's friend Jerry Pournelle gleefully cackled later, Niven got into print about quantum black holes before Pournelle, but the science is wrong. Quantum black holes are black body emitters. Ah, dang it, it's a murder mystery. Of sorts. You realise only later that there are two murders, not one. This was an award winner.

The Fourth Profession is one of the eeriest Larry Niven stories I've read. The Monks, space aliens, visit Earth. One of them walks into a bar... OK, I should stop laughing. The bartender discovers more than he finds comfortable. Now only he can save the Earth... If you ever get a chance to read this one, do. It's Niven at his maddest inventiveness. It's also a story that showcases why Niven stories age so slowly in many ways. He was ahead of the times.

Anybody interested in more thoughts about instant-elsewhere transport? Try Harry Harrison's One Step From Earth.

Next up: Re-reading Hal Clement's Needle

If it was November, we must have been re-reading

Science Fiction | Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Recently re-read: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

 

In 1975, Larry Niven, the guy who populates short stories with more ideas than many another author feels overcrowds a trilogy, teamed up with his long-time friend Jerry Pournelle, who writes military SF and the Chaos Manor chronicles, to come up with a story of first contact with an intelligent alien species. They wrote a follow-up in 1993, which I'm currently reading, called The Gripping Hand.

Mote is placed in Jerry's universe of the CoDominium, where the Space Navy protects the Second Empire, and is busy reabsorbing, sometimes by force, planets that descended to chaos during the Secession Wars. Having lost much of the advanced tech of the revered First Empire, the humans have tech which we readers can relate to (mostly; I'll come to that later). They then detect an alien craft decelerating into one of the Trans-Coalsack worlds. From that world, the Coalsack nebula looks like a hooded man, with a red eye (giant star) with a yellow mote (companion star). It's a light sail.

Rod Blaine, the new Captain of the MacArthur meets this probe, and is then appointed on the expedition to the Moties' planet. The Moties turn out to have idiot savant Engineer sub-species, and a whole set of other species, including almost-mind-reading Mediators. There is a mystery involved, but I'll not give you any more spoilers. :)

I've never quite understood the penchant of SF writers to imagine Emperors and Dukes and stuff way into the future. Surely, even if we lost a lot of tech for assorted unexplained reasons, including interstellar wars (!), we wouldn't regress to feudalism? It's surely easier to retain social advances than high tech, which, by definition, needs a pyramid of tech to sit atop. THis book also has The Church, which does not help me understand the USA either (all SF more reflects the life and times of the authors than the future they imagine and, if they are bestsellers, the life and times of the target demographic). Anyway, the future society also has a very 1960s attitude to women, of which we have just one, the Lady Sally Fowler. We have a sinister trader, Sir Horace Hussain Bury, predictably (this was written at the time of the first Oil price Shocks) Muslim (Moslem, in the book) and cunning. We have the sailing master, Kevin Renner, a very Larry Niven character, full of irreverence and ideas. And we have the Moties, who have three arms, two on the right, most of whom are female, most of the time.

The tech of the space drive is still futuristic. It is based on the Alderson Drive, 'invented' in real life by the JPL scientist Dan Alderson, and a bit of a wormhole process. There is also the (ahem!) Langston Field, which protects the ships from laser and missile attacks. The tech, predictably, falls short when it comes to computers, but surprisingly, not very short. The book has pocket computers, linked to the ship's mainframe, which has all the data stored in it. In the 1990s, this was laughable, but in these days of cloud computing, it's very close to high tech today. The machines are voice activated as well as taking stylus inputs (we've moved beyond, heh heh). The culture that takes wine and whisky is contrasted with the one that takes coffee, which in turn is contrasted with one that takes tea. And once, it is pointed out that most of these cultures are based on what the people then imagine as the authentic version of 20th century Earth. Again, why anyone should aspire to 20th century cultures is mysterious in reality, but not if you want to sell your books. Along the way, we find the Moties have superconductors of heat (not as much of an oxymoron today, very much so in the 1970s), a frictionless toilet, and a superior coffee-processing surface, though they can't stand coffee themselves.

Quote from when the humans land on the Motie planet:

"Blasted show offs," Renner muttered to Bury. When the Trader looked at him quizzically, Renner pointed. "There's city all around, and the airport's got not one meter of extra space."

Bury nodded. Around the tiny field were skyscrapers, tall and square-built, jammed close together, with only a single belt of green running out of the city to the east. If there were a plane crash it would be a disaster--but the Moties didn't build planes to crash.

You'll love and fear the Moties, like the humans in the book do. A very tightly written story, with suspense all the way up to the last few pages. The mystery is solved, and so is the moral dilemma: do you look at an alien species from what benefits they can offer or from what peril they can result in. I don't like sad endings, they prevent me from rating a book high. This book gets a high rating. It still remains one of Niven and Pournelle's best books. Read it.