Month: August 2011

Break Out

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews

Vampires in space. And not some genetically engineered aliens, but at least one earthly (or unearthly), honest-to-Lucifer bloodsucker, born on earth of human parents circa 1452. Piloting a spaceship circa 3050.

Break Out, by Nina Croft may be the first paranormal science fiction romance I’ve ever even seen, let alone read. It’s also the first book in the series Blood Hunter. Why Blood Hunter? The space vampire again. He is Ricardo “my friends call me Rico” Sanchez, and he became a vampire in the days of the Spanish Inquisition. He doesn’t just pilot that spaceship, he owns it. And that gives him the right to name it. So even though Spanish is a dead language by 3050, his ship is El Cazador de la Sangre, in other words, Blood Hunter, just as he is.

But what about the story? The premise is fairly simple. A woman named Skylar Rossario hires Rico and his ship to rescue her boyfriend from a maximum security prison before “Jonny” is transferred to a death-sentence planet. Both Rico and his ship’s captain Tannis know that the woman is scamming them, the only question in their minds is why. Tannis wants the payday. Rico wants the entertainment, and the woman.

In this universe, immortality can be had, for a price. Treatment with the drug Meridian is expensive. Mining and processing of the drug kills everyone who comes in contact with the unrefined product in two years or less. Membership in the “Collective” of those who have taken the drug requires a loss of self that sounds like a halfway trip to being a Borg.

So when Rico convinces Skylar to tell them that the man she wants to rescue murdered a high-ranking member of the immortal “Collective”, and that he is her brother, and not her boyfriend–he and Tannis decide to go through with the plan. The money is too good, as is the lure of pulling off a supposedly impossible job.

Rico is in this for the excitement. Not just the rescue, but the thrill of discovering all of Skylar’s secrets. What he doesn’t count on discovering is that he might still have a heart and not just a raging libido and a thirst for blood.

Escape Rating C+: My verdict on Break Out is somewhat mixed. The romance part of the story works. As odd as the idea was of a vampire surviving until the year 3000, it actually was part of the plot for a lot of reasons. Rico needed to be who and what he was. At the same time, I kept wondering if there were any others like him. It’s a big galaxy.

But the science fiction parts, well, that was different. The world building about the Collective, and the rebels against the Collective, and how all of that came about, needed some development for it all to make sense for me. I recognize there simply wasn’t time or space in a 99 page book, but still, if this is science fiction, the world needs to get built. I hope that happens in later books in the series. I’d like to see more.

Theirs not to reason why: a soldier’s duty

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

A Soldier’s Duty is the opening title in the new military science fiction series, Theirs Not to Reason Why, by Jean Johnson.

We first meet Ia as a 15-year-old on the Terran colony of Sanctuary as she navigates the time-streams after a horrifying vision of the future annihilation of human civilization. Through her frantic search of the possible futures for one tiny glimmer of hope, we catch a glimpse of our heroine as well. Her precognition is a recognized fact, and this future accepts psi-powers, at least to some extent. She is a determined, even driven individual, who will sacrifice her dreams, even her very definition of her self, to salvage everyone who can be saved.

Three years later, the moment she reaches legal majority, Ia joins the military. She gets herself a berth as a recruit of the Terran Space Force Marines. It is here that the story truly begins.

The future she has seen tells her that she must be a “boots on the ground” Marine. Not an officer, and not the member of Special Forces her precognitive powers entitle her to be. Also, she must walk a fine line between displaying exactly how much she knows of future events, and being promoted too quickly, and knowing just enough to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. She can never get too close to anyone, because she knows the fate of each person she meets–she has already seen it in the time-streams.

Spock said, but Ia lives it, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or of the one.” Everyone Ia meets must be nudged in the direction that will save the most people at the best time, even if the individual must be sacrificed in Ia’s here and now.

Escape Rating A: This book could easily have been titled Young Woman’s War, as it bears many parallels to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. In both stories, a person without military experience but a lot of knowledge is thrust into the military at the entry level and applies their full intellect to the problem at hand to provide a new solution to old problems. All the while providing interesting observations in a unique voice to their superiors and to the audience.

Ia also reminds me a lot of Sgt. Torin Kerr in Tanya Huff’s Valor Confederation series. Kerr is also a woman in the Space Marines, although Kerr remains a noncom and proudly so.

A Soldier’s Duty ends, appropriately, with Ia being promoted to Lieutenant. The next book in the series is An Officer’s Duty, and it unfortunately will not be out until sometime in 2012.

The series title is very apt in some ways, but not in others. It is a quote from The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

“Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.”

Ia knows why. That is the point of the story. She will do and do and do, and will die before her task is done. Some of her tools also know, but some don’t. Those have served the future, and done, and died. But unlike the poor sods in the Light Brigade, their commander seems to know what she is doing. It is well worth reading her story to find out what she will do next.

NPR wants your vote

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | reading

NPR is back with their continuing search for the top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books of all time. Or, at least the list as NPR listeners see it from the vantage point of the summer of 2011.

NPR provided listeners the opportunity to nominate titles and complete series for the top 100 earlier this summer. Yours truly provided the results of her agonized selection in this post.

After what appears to have been much deliberation, and the considered input of the expert panel of John Clute (coauthor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy), Farah Mendlesohn (coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction) and Gary K. Wolfe (science fiction critic and longtime reviewer for the science fiction and fantasy magazine Locus), NPR collated several thousand inputs into a list of approximately 200 titles.

Now, NPR wants your vote. Really, they want 10 of your votes. Each time you input, you can vote for your 10 favorites that have made the list. (I almost said it was a Chicago election, but you can’t vote for the same book 10 times on the same pass. You’d have to come back 10 times for that. But you could…)

The list is eclectic. And it shows that we science fiction and fantasy readers are a diverse bunch of folks. But one thing it does not show is that we have forgotten that the current writers stand on the shoulders of giants. The classics are there, and in amazing variety and number. Conan the Barbarian and Frankenstein coexist with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. There is a certain irony to seeing Lev Grossman’s The Magicians on the list, when the work it is derived from, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, was ruled ineligible as children’s literature.

I recognize everything, and I’ve read almost half. I’m not sure whether to be proud or appalled. Whether I agree with things being on the list is an entirely different question. And some, well, I think they’re marvelous books, I’m just not sure they fit the definition of either science fiction or fantasy. What is Outlander doing on this list? I loved it, but there was way more romance than there was time-travel.

So I had to vote on which 10 were my absolute favorites. That was a lot harder than one might think. For one thing, the creators of the list did not include Terry Pratchett’s Discworld as a single entity. Whose idea was that, anyway? The series as a whole is fantastic, but trying to decide which one of the few nominated is one of the 10 best, I couldn’t do it. AAARRRGGGHHH!

All my other favorites made the list, so that was easy. And voting for The Lord of the Rings was probably a no-brainer for a lot of people. Me, I lost count of how many times I re-read it after the first 25.

The list is in alphabetical order, so American Gods was in the first screen. So was its sequel, Anansi Boys, but I didn’t take the two-fer. Anansi Boys was fun, but didn’t tie me up in knots the way Gods did.

I am proud to say that I now have a friend hooked on the Old Man’s War series, proving to me that this one is as good as I remember. Meeting John Scalzi at the American Library Conference in June and getting a signed copy of Zoe’s War was just a bonus.

Recently, I thumbed my copy of Tigana again. The ending still wrings me out. But I love Kay’s writing so much that I not only voted for Tigana, when I saw the Fionavar Tapestry on the list, I voted for it, too. That was when I first discovered his writing, and that I have re-read, at least three times. There are parts that are almost as gut-wrenching, but not quite.

Seeing the entire list of titles makes things both easier, and more difficult. On the one hand, it’s a tremendous nostalgia trip. I wanted to read, or re-read, every single book I saw. Let’s just say there were a lot of old friends on that list. Of all the ones I knew, it was incredibly difficult to pick just 10.

NPR needs your vote, too.  So now it’s your turn. Try it and see how hard it is to pick just 10. I dare you.

Not just the giants

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books> digital libraries

What parts of the human record will be preserved from the last 50, and the next 50 years? What books did we read? How did we live? What will history say about us?

One of the reasons that we know so much about the Victorian era is that they wrote so damn much. They were all inveterate letter writers. Literature, not just improving literature, but also poetry, novels, essays, proliferated to an incredible degree. And newspapers, oh the newspapers and magazines that survive. Newsprint may be a horrible preservation medium, but it is just good enough.

The same thing is true of the U.S. Civil War. Nothing has the immediacy of Mathew Brady’s photographs, particularly those of young soldiers.

We know a lot about the ancient Romans, too. And for the same reason. They wrote so much that a fair amount of it survived the Dark Ages. (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe is NOT a new idea!) And why do we call them “the Dark Ages” you ask? Because knowledge was destroyed instead of created.

The Internet Archive, in addition to its mission to scan books into its Open Library Project, has also begun collecting physical books as a preservation project.  Brewster Kahle goes into some detail about his reasons in an interview with the Associated Press in an article on August 1.

I confess I really like his idea. Why? Because technology can fail, or can itself become obsolete. Technology is a wonderful access method, but what happens if the technology required to read the storage media becomes unavailable? Human eyeballs still work. Most of us remember a lot of different types of computer disk storage that are no longer viable.

I love ebooks and buy fewer and fewer printed books. But as the publishing industry switches gears from print to electronic, what happens to the human record?  For example, we know a lot about the Victorians from their literature. Sherlock Holmes is as emblematic of the period as Charles Dickens. We may even know more about Holmes!

But what about us? Who will we be remembered by if everything becomes electronic? People don’t write letters, and haven’t for decades. Even business correspondence is all electronic.

In Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home, there is a scrap of dialog between Kirk and Spock on the bus, where Kirk refers to Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins as the “giants” of late 20th century literature.

If four or six centuries from now, contemporary literature is only remembered by the few writers that have become so overwhelming that some copies must survive in print, who would they be? And are they the ones that we would want to be remembered by?