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Books to Look For
Fantasy & Science Fiction October 1987
By Orson Scott Card
Memory Wire, Robert Charles Wilson (Bantam, paper, 256 pp, $3.50)
Robert Charles Wilson's first novel, A Hidden Place, was an intense,
beautiful novel of aliens trapped in America during the Great Depression. There
Wilson (whose excellent short stories have appeared in this magazine) proved that
at novel length, he is even better, as writer and storyteller, than he is at shorter
lengths.
Memory Wire, set in the near future, starts out colder than A Hidden Place,
primarily because the main characters, Keller, Byron, and Teresa, are not wholly
connected with the people around them; they are at a distance from other human
beings, including the reader. (Isolation and the search for connection has been a
major theme in all of Wilson's work.) As they journey to Brazil to make an illegal
purchase of an oneirolith, an alien "dreaming stone," they are plunged into a dark
and terrifying world of exploitation, torture, murder; a world full of people who
have lost their memories -- some struggling to regain them, and therefore their
identities; others running to escape them, so they can hold on to some semblance
of sanity.
All this sounds very literary, doesn't it? Of course it does, because Memory
Wise is a profound and beautiful work of art. But it's also a tense thriller, as the
characters are stalked by a terrifyingly believable villain, and, in the end, it is
completely satisfying -- no, it is exalting -- as the main characters struggle to save
their lives and their humanity.
Read this book for sheer entertainment, and you'll be delighted. You will
also, perhaps without realizing it, be changed. With this story in your memory,
you can't help but be more alert to your own past and to the people around you.
Wilson has a healing touch. Using the bitter medicine of pity and fear, he makes
his readers whole.
Pennterra, Judith Moffett (Congdon & Weed, "Isaac Asimov Presents," cloth, 304
pp)
The first humans to land on Pennterra are a group of Quaker scientists; they
quickly learn, to their dismay, that Pennterra is inhabited by the Hrossa, sentient
creatures who have clear ideas about where and how humans must live -- if they
are to live at all. Being Quakers, committed to peace and harmony, the first
humans accept the severe restrictions, and even learn to get along with the
empathic Hrossa -- until the coming of the second colony ship, whose people
have no intention of accepting any limitations.
I would be disingenuous if I did not notice some obvious similarities
between Pennterra and the most recent novel to win the Nebula award. In both, a
small, religiously uniform colony lives on an alien world with sentient life. The
humans are severely restricted in the area where they live and in their contact
with alien lifeforms, and there is the threat of human destruction. The ecosystem
is surprisingly uniform, and the aliens' life cycle, as it is discovered, causes
profound differences between human and alien thought. Above all, both books
are thematically involved with empathy, community, bonding, species identity,
and religion.
The clear similarity of these two novels has nothing to do with the quality
of either -- both books bring together elements that have long traditions in the
field -- but to my mind, the close coincidence of theme and motif between writers
who had never met or read each other's work suggests that these are issues and
stories whose time has come in the field of science fiction. I read Moffett's novel
with wonderment and delight, but at the familiar and the new: she has brought
many startling insights, a voice never before heard in this place.
Moffett is an accomplished mainstream poet, critic, and translator, whose
first science fiction story, "Surviving," won a well-deserved spot on the 1986
Nebula ballot. Moffett is not "dabbling" in sf, however; she handles all the genre
techniques with skill, and with great respect for her material and her audience; she
deals with ideas with intelligence and passion. Nor does she suffer from literary
pretentiousness; she tells a powerful tale with clarity, simplicity, and an
unconcealable love for her fellow-being. Far from being an "outsider" to science
fiction. Moffett is plainly one of those rare souls whose empathy and compassion
transcend all human boundaries; neither she nor her best-loved characters are
truly alien anywhere.
Moffett deals explicitly with human and alien sexual mores -- but does it so
tastefully that I believe adult readers will find, as I do, that this is one of the best
aspects of the book. No coyness or prurience or exaggeratedly clinical distance for
her.
The book is not perfect; the pace is slow, and so little happens at first, while
she is setting the stage, that I grew somewhat impatient. But the details she offers
are all necessary, and I can assure you that the pace becomes anything but slow by
the end.
Her notion of a sentient planet is never fully explained, yet perhaps it
should not be, since the planet actually seems to stand for the deepest theme in
the book: the kind of God worth worshipping. Without ever getting into
religious mysticism or tedious theology, Pennterra is nevertheless about the nature
of God in relation to humankind. Moffett and I don't always see eye to eye but I
learned much from her about an issue I think science fiction is uniquely suited to
deal with.
This is storytelling of the best sort. The people and events of Pennterra will
be part of me forever. Precious few writers have the vision and skill Moffett has,
to write a story so ennobling and unforgettable. Welcome to science fiction,
Judith Moffett: we are all enriched by your coming.
The Illyrian Adventure, Lloyd Alexander (Dell, paper, 132 pp, $2.50)
Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, based on the Welsh Mabinogion,
are already classics of young adult fantasy. In recent years, he has turned his
talents to writing "imaginary kingdom" stories -- historical novels that take place
in kingdoms that never existed, like the classic Graustark.
I loved Alexander's recent 18th-century trilogy, Westmark, The Beggar
Queen, and The Kestrel (also available from Dell), a grand romantic romp through
a nation in the process of democratic revolution.
Now, with The Illyrian Adventure, Alexander begins an open-ended series of
adventure books with a delightful pair of characters: the narrator, Brinton
Garrett, a staid, unadventurous researcher; and the orphaned daughter of a friend
of his, a cocky, intuitive, and domineering teenager names Miss Vesper Holly,
who has an astonishing capacity of getting her own way.
In search of evidence to vindicate her late father's theories about the
nations of Illyria, Vesper leads Uncle Brinton to an adventure involving ancient
rituals, lost giant chess pieces, political intrigues, underground tombs, and
revolutionaries in disguise. It is the stuff that dreams are made of. I wish I had
had this book when I was twelve. I was delighted to read it even now when I'm
old.
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