Fantasy & Science Fiction Index Index of Titles Index of Authors About This Area 1987 May | Jun | Jul | Aug Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec 1988 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr May | Jun | Jul | Aug Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec 1989 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr May | Jun | Jul | Aug Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec 1990 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr May | Jun | Jul | Aug Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec 1991 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr May | Jun | Jul | Aug Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec 1992 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr May | Jun | Jul | Aug Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec 1993 Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr May | Summer

Books to Look For
Fantasy & Science Fiction March 1992

By Orson Scott Card

Good old-fashioned idea-oriented hard sf never needed characterization -- characters only existed in order to discover ideas or figure out solutions to problems. The outcome of the story never depended on a character trait more complicated than wit and pluck, and so time spent developing character subtleties would have been wasted. This was not a flaw in hard science fiction -- it was simply the nature of the beast.

But ever since the New Wave in the sixties, hard science fiction writers have been criticized for precisely that non-flaw. This is because so many new writers and critics, having been indoctrinated by the academic-literary establishment with the tenet that there is only one kind of good writing, were ardent proponents of the idea that no story that lacked characterization could be good. (Never mind that so many stories that have characterization are wretched; never mind that our whole genre is founded on stories utterly lacking in characterization, and yet nevertheless this literature created an audience and a community and has endured rather well for sixty years.)

The result was that many hard sf writers -- like Adam and Eve, who never knew they were naked until somebody pointed it out to them -- became convinced that if they were ever to be "good" writers they must "characterize." Unfortunately, neither they nor their busybody critics understood what characterization was and what it was for. The result was a tedious array of hard sf stories that were interrupted for meaningless sex scenes or explorations of the character's feelings, which would have been fine except that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the flow of events in the story.

I won't list the hard-sf writers whose works have been marred by this tendency, first because the list consists of pretty much all of them, and second because they are more sinned against than sinning. Let us simply say that these perfunctory attempts at characterization, far from improving hard science fiction, made it an embarrassment.

Yet, having said this, I must also point out that when characterization is used properly -- that is, when the exploration of character is necessary in order to understand why things happen the way they do in the story -- the entire process is greatly enriched. It doesn't become better "hard sf," but it becomes a fuller experience for the reader and brings more readers into the audience for the story. (The same enrichment process works in reverse, too. Whatever his intention, Bruce Sterling's Harder SF Movement of the mid-80s had the effect of inducing the writerly types to invest some effort in developing decent, intelligent ideas for their character- or style-oriented science fiction.) In other words, while characterization is not necessary for a hard-sf story and can be detrimental when it is not meaningfully connected to the events of the tale, a hard-sf story that is also a good character story can bring the values of both kinds of fiction to a wider audience. That, I think, is a Good Thing.

So, with that long preamble, let me tell you now about a Good Thing. In fact, one of the best things we've ever seen from the hard-sf ghetto.

Ben Bova has written a mars novel. Indeed, I may even go out on a limb and say that Ben Bova has written the Mars novel. By hard-sf standards, one would expect the novel to be excellent no matter what -- no one knows the current space program and what is likely to take place in the first Mars visit better than Bova. If that were all this novel was, then I could recommend it to the hard-sf audience and leave it at that.

But Mars is a lot more than just the definitive hard-sf extrapolation of the first human visit to Mars.

It is also -- it is primarily -- a wonderful character story about the people who form the tiny community that first explores the surface of Mars, and the people back on Earth whose decisions will decide what and how much they accomplish.

So if, like me, you're one of those readers whose eyes glaze over when you hear a book praised for its "technical accuracy" and "thorough exploration of state-of-the-art science," let me assure you: You won't even notice the science stuff except as essential and clearly-explained aspects of the people's lives.

And such people! Joanna Brumado, who is along on the voyage partly as a biologist, but mostly (or so people assume) because she is the daughter of the deft Brazilian politician who has maneuvered for forty years to bring the Mars expedition to pass; Edith Elgin, an utterly believable on-air reporter for a cable news network, who is passionately in love with one of the astronauts -- and quite willing to exploit her relationship with him to get the scoop of her career; the nasty, self-serving Austrian geologist who manages to provoke the rest of the crew-in-training to such a degree that they would rather be dropped from the voyage themselves than have to be confined in a spacecraft with him for a year-and-a-half round trip; the British medical officer whose cynical wit is only one of the lubricants he uses to help him get through an experience that terrifies him; the Russian pilot who is in command of the landing team and is determined that it will succeed by strictly following all the rules to the letter; the American vice-president who would gladly scuttle the whole expedition if that would give her some advantage in her maneuvering for her party's presidential nomination; the Chinese expedition commander, who will never set foot on Mars himself, and yet must take responsibility for sorting out the prickly and difficult personalities on the surface of Mars; the Israeli scientist who decided that one of her roles on the mission is to ease the sexual tension of all the males -- except the Russians, whom she loathes beyond reason.

Above all, this is the story of Jamie Waterman, a half-Navaho geologist who gets on the expedition as a last-minute replacement and then manages to antagonize just about everybody, even as he turns the whole expedition toward meeting his own agenda. He never means to cause trouble. He just gets enthusiastic sometimes . . .

Of course there are the standard sci-fi story questions: Do they find life? Will they live through the physically dangerous events? And I promise you that your sensawunda will be will be well and thoroughly tickled without ever sacrificing plausibility. Mars succeeds as scientific exploration, as an adventure story, as a mythic tale. But at every turn in the story, it absolutely depends on who these people are and how they function together as a community -- and that, folks, is sufficiently rare in our little genre that it makes this book extraordinary.

I guess what I'm saying is -- this is what hard-sf can be at its best. Not just a fiction of ideas or milieu, but also a fiction of character and of grand events. There is no standard by which Mars is not an excellent book -- except, perhaps, to those who insist on a flamboyant style before fiction is considered "art." By that standard, Bova's prose is too liquid, too clear; its asimovian purity never calls attention to itself. Of course, I think that's the highest praise one can give to a writer's style, but then I'm reviewing for F&SF, not the New York Times.

For many years Ben Bova was the dominant editor in the science fiction field, first with Analog and then with Omni. I'm far from being the only writer he discovered, and his impact as an editor is still being felt many years later. In the minds of many in the field he remains an editor first, a writer second -- this despite his many dozens of novels and short stories, and despite the fact that it has been more years since he left editing than the whole careers of several award-winning young writers.

Mars is the novel that will establish Bova once and for all as a writer of premier science fiction. It is possible that Mars makes Bova the best of the hard-science-fiction writers. It is certain that Mars makes Bova one of the best science fiction writers of any kind. And you who nominate for awards -- you cannot make an intelligent judgment of the science fiction of 1992 without having read this book.

As for the rest of us, we won't read Mars because it's a pivotal book in Bova's career or because it's one of the important novels of the year. We'll read this honking big book because this kind of story is the reason science fiction exists in the first place.

Martin Harry Greenberg is the quintessential science fiction anthologist -- embodying the tradition of service to the field that has marked the best members of our community from the start. You never see him promoting himself, and he willingly effaces his own role behind the names of more famous fiction writers. But working steadily behind the scenes, he has caused dozens and dozens of original and reprint anthologies to come into existence, providing avenues for short fiction to reach a wider audience -- and, along the way, getting many a writer to produce a wonderful short story or novelet or novella that would never otherwise have existed. (I know from experience -- I've collaborated with him on several anthologies, and for other anthologies he has squeezed two stories out of me that are among those I'm most proud of in my career.)

In recent years, Greenberg has put together three festschrift anthologies. The first two, Foundation's Friends and October's Friends were in honor of, respectively, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. For both of these previous anthologies, other authors were permitted to set stories in the honored author's private universes. With After the King, there was not quite the same freedom, in large part, I suspect, because the author was not alive to give his permission, and Tolkien's family is (quite properly, I think) very protective of his works and worlds. Thus you won't be reading stories about Aragorn or Samwise after the end of Lord of the Rings. But what you can read are excellent fantasy stories by some of the finest writers in the field, written in honor of the man whose work created the audience for today's commercial genre of fantasy.

And, in case you haven't noticed it, let me point out that excellent high fantasy short fiction is rare as dragon's teeth these days. There are a few good outlets for blood-and-thunder sword-and-sorcery, and lots of places where you can find urban fantasy and contemporary horror. But in between fairy tales by Jane Yolen you can go a long time without seeing high fantasy in the Tolkien tradition in the magazines and original anthologies. Instead, high fantasy seems to have become almost exclusively a novel-centered genre. There are good reasons for that, of course -- for one thing, it can take a lot of pages to create a convincing society.

But After the King will remind you of something Tolkien himself proved with Smith of Wooten Major, Leaf by Niggle, and Farmer Giles of Ham -- you can sometimes say as much in a few pages of fantasy as in a thousand.

So it is you can revel in Charles de Lint's wistful "Conjure Man," in which a young woman of our time gets caught up in the projects of a street person who was once one of the giants in the earth, the tale affirming the importance of Tolkien's work in our world in a way that no mere essay ever could.

Or try John Brenner's "In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells," a powerful story of a young Englishman recovering from the injuries, both physical and spiritual, that he suffered in World War I; he finds his salvation in helping his local village do proper homage to the ancient gods of the island, despite the interference of his vindictively Christian aunt.

Or journey along with four women who have been sent forth by their queen in search of the harper whom she loves. In Patricia McKillip's "The Fellowship of the Dragon," the women are sent because the queen can't trust the jealous men of the court not to kill the harper themselves when they find him. But the women, too, can have agendas of their own in a tale as surprising and wryly truthful as we have come to expect from McKillip.

Or look at "The Naga," by Peter S. Beagle, than whom there is no better fantasist alive. The layered structure of a tale within a tale within a tale harks back to an earlier era of storytelling, but the story is a timeless myth of true love and true marriage -- it is possible to write operatic stories even in our cynical age.

And, of course, there is (there must be) a story by Jane Yolen, one of the best of her darkish fairy tales, in which a boy is born to be "Winter's King" and spends his childhood searching for the place where he belongs, even as the normal world of men and women thinks it knows exactly who and what he is.

Yolen also wrote the introduction to the anthology; you'll find other fine tales by Donaldson, Pratchett, Silverberg, Scarborough, and Andersons (not Hans, but Poul and Karen), Turtledove, McKiernan, Bull, Haber, Resnick, Malzberg, Benford, and Tarr. And when you're through with these tales, you may just decide to pull out your old copy of Lord of the Rings and read again the work that started it all for this generation of fantasists.

Susan Palwick has been, till now, a short story writer of surpassing excellence -- it seems that the shorter her tale, the better it is. I first came to know her with her poem "The Neighbor's Wife," which packed into a few lines more story, more character, more myth than most writers can fit into a novella.

But that's no guarantee that Palwick can handle herself at novel length, and in fact at the start of Flying in Place there is cause for concern, as the story focuses with relentless single-mindedness on a single aspect of the teenage narrator's life: her father's continuing sexual abuse and her flight-of-fancy escape from it in an imaginary ability to leave her body and fly. While it is true that sexual abuse is so terrible an experience that all the rest of the victim's life seems to take shape around it, that very singularity can make reading a story about it quite unpleasant without adding any illumination. A good novelist can balance the central core of the story with many digressions that enrich the world of the tale and provide the reader with balance and insight and perspective beyond the essay-like central theme. For the first chapter or so, however, it seemed that Palwick was writing, not as a novelist, but as a short story writer, and therefore there would be no remission: we would be pounded with the theme until we were driven entirely out of the tale.

To my relief, however, it is not terribly far into the book before Palwick thenovelist claws her way to the surface and elbows Palwick the short story writer aside. The result is that the narrator finally leads us into a wider world in which not everything is the servant of a single motif. Thus we are able to receive Plying in Place as a bittersweet novel of a dead sister who returns to give our narrator the tools she need to break her family out of the poisonous pattern that is consuming them all. Along the way we meet a wonderful neighbor family whose chaotic happiness is a refuge for the narrator; an aunt whose existence the narrator never knew of, and yet who holds a secret that might help to save her; and, above all, we meet the dead sister, whose flights with the narrator through time and space are far more than mere escape.

If, by the end, there is any flaw remaining, it is in the character of the abusive father. Monsters are very hard to write plausibly -- for every Arslan there are a thousand Simon Legrees, and the father in Palwick's tale, while he is believable enough along the way, suddenly becomes a tool of the plot near the climax, when, after spending years manipulating people brilliantly through lies and guilt, he suddenly turns stupid and violent. Perhaps it happens that way in real life, but we had little preparation for the idea that this was possible in his character, and so it felt like the ending of so many almost-good movies, when powerful character relationships are suddenly reduced to violent confrontations.

Never mind my nit-picking. I wish my first novel had had no more serious flaws than these; the rest of the story is so beautifully handled that I doubt many readers will be troubled by these minor issues. Instead Flying in Place is a wonderful debut for a writer who has proved she can write well in long forms as well as short ones -- may it be the first of many novels from Palwick, each one better than the ones before.