The Reference Library
The Reference Library
by Rosemary Claire Smith
This being my tenth stint at reviewing books for Analog, I find myself wondering about the wisdom of evaluating books representing the midpoint of a series, or even the final work. I’ve done so several times. If I did not, I fear readers might be deprived of the opportunity to read some wondrous novels for years, or miss out entirely if the works become unavailable. That said, I nevertheless question the wisdom of reviewing mid-series books. Those who have read the previous ones are likely to have formed firm opinions as to whether they wish to press on to the next one. Those who decide to bail out mid-series certainly have their reasons. Sadly, one reason is the well-founded frustration that a series may never wrap up. Sometimes the writer doesn’t finish it. Sometimes the publisher doesn’t think it financially advisable to publish more books when the first one or two rack up disappointing sales figures. Dear readers, this is where you ride to the rescue. Yes, you! If you enjoyed the author’s previous works, please please buy the first and second ones in their new series. Doing so makes it more likely that more will be forthcoming. If these turn out not to be to your taste, nothing forces you to slog through to the bitter end. The writer won’t even know. Besides, books are not like the food on your plate that a parent insisted you finish.
With this in mind, let us have a look at several recently published novels and other books. Analog readers will likely recognize several familiar names in this batch. Marie Vibbert has a new novel, Andre and the Hellcats. The astonishingly prolific Rich Larson has produced a collection of his recent short fiction. Alec Nevala-Lee brings us an incisive biography of an oft-overlooked experimental physicist of the twentieth century. To them, I have added novels by Yume Kitasei, Ken Liu, and Joelle Presby.
Analog readers know they can count on Alec Nevala-Lee to tell an engaging story. As engrossing as his fiction is, Nevala-Lee’s nonfiction is arguably stronger. He specializes in chronicling the lives of certain difficult public figures of the twentieth century, such as Buckminster Fuller in Inventor of the Future, as well as Golden Age SF writers, including Analog’s own John W. Campbell, in Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. This time around, Nevala-Lee scrutinizes the life and many accomplishments of noted experimental physicist Luis W. Alvarez in Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs.
Rather than beginning with Alvarez’s contributions to the Manhattan Project or his much later work on the demise of the dinosaurs, Nevala-Lee starts by detailing Luis Alvarez’s experiments to show that the Kennedy assassination may well have been the work of a single shooter. We haven’t even gotten beyond the book’s preface. What a way to start!
Collisions then backtracks to Alvarez’s formative years. Embarking on a career in physics could not have easy in the 1930s. Luis W. Alvarez was raised in a family headed by Walter C. Alvarez, a nationally known physician who set the highest of standards for his son. Luis Alvarez married twice, experienced his share of serious medical events, and knew heartbreak when his second child died at birth.
In physics, where theoreticians get most of the public acclaim, Alvarez stands out as an experimental physicist. For many people, Alvarez is the least known of the great physicists of the twentieth century such as Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. In Collisions, Nevala-Lee deftly balances lucid explanations of the scientific principles and hypotheses at play with accounts of Alvarez’s interactions with Oppenheimer, and other notables with whom he worked on the Manhattan Project. Collisions is sprinkled with photographs and accounts of events and people who played vital roles. Nevala-Lee approaches each physicist respectfully and comes away with interesting insights. In his penetrating portrait, Alvarez emerges as a brilliant, driven, demanding workaholic who spent most of his professional career at institutions filled with other brilliant physicists. During his time at the University of California, Berkeley after the war, Alvarez worked among multiple Nobel Prize winners and engaged in uneasy collaborations and competitions with some of them. Later, Alvarez came to realize how close he had come to making several major discoveries but missed doing so. He was passed over for the Nobel prize for his early work but received that honor and recognition in 1968 for “his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonant states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chambers and data analysis.”
Fear not, gentle readers: Nevala-Lee can be counted on for lucid explanations of advances in particle physics. His prose moves along at a compelling, but not breakneck, pace. Consequently, Collisions is simultaneously accessible to readers possessing a rudimentary understanding of physics and those with more in-depth knowledge. It is apt to leave one with a deeper appreciation for scientists like Alvarez who were capable of devising experiments and constructing the equipment needed to test the hypotheses propounded by the theoreticians.
Alvarez first came to my attention when I was in grad school studying archaeology, which resembles paleontology in various ways. I well remember the initial publication of his asteroid impact hypothesis, which postulated a heretofore new and cataclysmic demise for most species of dinosaurs (excepting birds). The idea that a meteorite smacked into the Earth nearly sixty-six million years ago and caused the extinction of many dinosaurs around the world was subject to widespread ridicule. Before the discovery of the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan coast, most scientists were wedded to the then-fashionable thesis of gradual evolutionary change. These days, I’m reminded of evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s observation that the four stages of acceptance of scientific theories are:
- This is worthless nonsense.
- This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
- This is true, but quite unimportant.
- I always said so.
Nevala-Lee engages our sympathies for Alvarez as he examines the reasons why both losing and winning the Nobel prize could not have been easy, given the publicity and distractions that accompany the award. His scholarship in researching and drafting Collisions is on full display in every chapter. The biography includes a comprehensive bibliography, hundreds of detailed notes as to sources, and an extensive index.
One sub-genre of apocalyptic near-future SF postulates that big corporations will maintain rigid control over vast swaths of agricultural land by controlling the seeds farmers must have to prevent their crops from succumbing to widespread blight. Yume Kitasei’s latest novel, Saltcrop, employs this trope to great effect. In her dystopian near-future tale, a pair of sisters grow concerned that their brilliant and erratic oldest sister is unaccountably missing. They set out to sail across a frigid northern ocean in search of her, not knowing if she could embody Earth’s environmental salvation—that is, if she still lives.
Kitasei leans hard into portraying realistic characters and the complexity of family relationships that necessarily evolve over the years. When you think about it, by the time we reach adulthood, for many of us, our relationships with our siblings are, and will continue to be, the longest enduring relationships of our lives. Nobody but our brothers and sisters can truly understand what it was like growing up in the household we shared. It is fascinating how our recollections of what we experienced can look so very different when described by that other person who was there and lived through the same events we did, yet came away with different impressions of what happened and why.
Saltcrop presents Skipper, the youngest sister, and Carmen, the middle sister, who try together and separately to cope with the fact that their older sister Nora left her lab job in the big city some months ago. Living in an impoverished and isolated oceanside village, Skipper and Carmen must decide what to do when they hear from Nora’s co-worker that she has not been seen in months. First Skipper and then Carmen decide they must go off to find Nora. The fact that their parents are not in the picture renders these decisions more difficult, not easier. Their grandmother needs someone to look after her; their uncle is not especially reliable; money is tight. Also, Skipper and Carmen envy one another for several well-founded reasons, while at the same time being completely irritated by each other for other reasons. Together with Nora, these three sisters have long formed a triumvirate, which is inherently unstable. For years, they have formed shifting alliances as they grew up and their lives changed slowly or abruptly. Their abilities to combine their individual strengths and overcome their individual weaknesses were ever shifting. An ocean voyage in a small craft exacerbates these stresses, for there can be no place to escape from the person who seems the most annoying in the world.
Half way through Saltcrop, Kitasei switches viewpoint from youngest sister Skipper to middle sister Carmen. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this transition would be annoying and risk throwing readers out of the story. Kitasei handles it skillfully, having already done a fine job in laying the foundation as to how each sister perceives herself, her sisters, and other family members. Readers can sympathize with them both. Also, it occurs at a point in the plot where one is quite invested in discovering what had happened to Nora.
After finishing Saltcrop, I found myself thinking that sister relationships seem to be fairly frequent in contemporary science fiction. Such is also the case with mother-daughter relationships and sister-brother interactions. Where are the complex, fully developed brother-brother relationships in 21st century SF? I don’t mean a band-of-brothers or found families, which are common enough. But why are there not more nuanced examinations of the state of relationships between biological brothers who grew up together and on reaching adulthood find themselves reassessing their relationship with each other and rethinking pivotal events of their childhood?
For anyone craving a cozy romp to far-away planets and space stations courtesy of a self-styled space biker gang via their souped-up spaceships, Marie Vibbert has got you covered. Andrei and the Hellcats features a curly blond sex-positive android named Andrei who proclaims himself to be in the “hospitality business.” In this satire, Andrei must turn to the Hellcats to help save his sister robot who is held captive by an evil queen. Come for the one—and two-seater space ships zipping between solar systems, stay for fashion-forward snark, android-style.
In this follow-on to Galactic Hellcats, Vibbert deftly rotates viewpoints between Andrei, each of the three Hellcats, and several other characters. The Hellcats consist of Margot the fighter, Zuleikah the tech wiz, and Ki who never saw a gorgeous one—or two-person spaceship that she did not want to steal. The Hellcats are out to keep the hunky Prince Thane out of the clutches of his mother, the evil queen of the planet Ratana, and her minions. The Hellcats’ misadventures, including absconding with a flying police scooter, alternate chapters with Andrei’s as he seeks Autumn, his sister robot whom the queen might sell off any day now. Andrei’s task is made more difficult by his internal programming restricting his actions vis-a-vis humans. There is no hacking his own governor, like Murderbot, for this robot.
In addition to the sibling relationship between Andrei and Autumn, Marie Vibbert layers in a second sibling relationship. Zuleikah has long experienced a fraught relationship with her younger brother. She is not happy when he insists on accompanying her and the Hellcats to escape an arranged marriage with his sister’s former love interest.
In the three years he’s been operational, Andrei has adopted a standard modus operandi consisting of flirting his way out of every dire situation he’s ever encountered. No, it’s definitely not the most effective approach for any number of situations, but Andrei works with the tools at hand. Through it all, he provides trenchant observations about humans worthy of Murderbot—that is, if Murderbot were a sexbot. Meanwhile, the hellcat gang bickers their way into and out of various scrapes. It’s all run, flirt, fight villains, comment on others’ fashion sense, such as it is, get out of scrapes, test the possibility of forming a found family, rinse, repeat. Andrei and the Hellcats is chock full of frivolity and great fun. The novel easily stands alone, but be warned that you may find yourself seeking out Vibbert’s previous novel, Galactic Hellcats, for more of the gang’s misadventures. Better yet, rumor has it that a third novel is in progress featuring the further adventures of the Hellcats.
Hugo—and Nebula award-winning writer Ken Liu launches the first of what is billed as several novels set in a high-tech future in the northeastern United States and elsewhere around the world. All That We See or Seem begins like a conventional thriller in which Julie Z, a young hacker genius who scrupulously maintains an ultra-low-profile on the Internet, initially refuses to locate or rescue Elli, who is a “dream artist.” Elli’s husband comes to Julie Z unaware of key aspects his missing wife’s life. Elli is a semi-famous “oneirofex,” which is someone who practices a new art form. She holds concerts in which she guides the member of the audience to use their personal AIs to create “vivid dreams” that seem highly tailored and deeply personal to each concertgoer. Unfortunately, Elli has attracted the unseemly and obsessive attention of a shadowy underworld figure known as “the Prince.”
All That We See or Seem is a page-turner as the viewpoint hops between the hacker, the Prince, his henchmen, and the desperate husband who fears his wife was kidnapped and is held hostage. Both the husband and Julie Z know precious little about oneirofex artists, thereby rendering them suitable viewpoint characters to lead the readers into a dive into the future-tech aspects of vivid dreaming. The plot moves along, at times predictably, but with at least one shocking jolt midway through.
However, Liu has more in mind than simply entertaining readers with a page-turner thriller. In its quieter passages, All That We See or Seem serves as a meditation on what it means to be an artist, the joys and frustrations of creating marvelous works, coping with artistic success and the lack thereof, the frustrations when many fans refuse to appreciate a creator’s later works, and the role of sheer luck in achieving fame as an artist. The novel’s title is a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s lines, “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” While Liu’s observations about life and art are fascinating, layering this material into a thriller is a daring artistic decision in its own right. Some readers will impatiently page through these portions in their eagerness to get to the next action scene. Other will forgive the juxtaposition and welcome the breaks in the thriller plot from the pell-mell pacing.
The biggest jolt for some readers will be the absurdly easy ways in which a supremely talented computer hacker like Julie Z can mine and assemble all the personal data people place online to assemble a detailed portrait of our present and past whereabouts, the large and small details of our finances, our lives, our health, and our family members, and much more information that we would dearly love to keep out of the prying clutches of data-miners. Analogizing data to pollution, Liu’s protagonist recognizes the value of generating as little public data as possible. Perhaps Liu will jolt some readers out of the complacency with which we treat the sheer quantity of personal data that we send out to social media and place online all the time, what with his shocking descriptions of how it will soon be analyzed and pieced together to amass an alarmingly detailed profile of our finances, living arrangements, local and long-distance travel, health, business dealings, friends, family, social contacts, political and religious proclivities.
In The Dabare Snake Launcher, Joelle Presby introduced readers to an ambitious project to construct a space elevator. Yet more intriguing were the family dynamics of the rich and powerful West African Sadou clan as they bickered among themselves and jockeyed for control of the project. In Ringer, Presby’s newest novel, the Sadous have helped humanity reach half way out the Solar System. Set several decades after her first book, Ringer postulates well-established space stations on the Moon and Mars, as well as and other far-flung settlements. The Sadou clan remains front and center as they control Chawla, the first space station to orbit Saturn.
The central conceit driving Ringer is that the foundational document establishing the governance and operation of Chawla prevents control by wealthy absentee owners; only adults who live on the habitat can vote on its governance and policies. Furthermore, those who were born and grew up on the station must demonstrate their worth by engaging in a task that is dangerous but necessary for the good of the community, which is rewarded with respect and authority. They must perform this feat to be admitted to “formal adulthood.”
What would it be like to live in a social structure in which teenagers were expected to pull their weight as adult members of society from age fifteen or fourteen or even thirteen? Joel Presby imagines future space stations situated near Saturn ‘s rings where this is the norm. She makes it convincing in Ringer, where communities simply do not have the luxury of delaying full responsibilities until later teenage years. If it’s hard to raise a child in space, Presby shows that it is possibly even more difficult to be that twelve-year-old, going on thirteen, who must grow up fast to protect herself and her aging grandparents experiencing “sunsetters,” a dementia-like condition, when the rest of the family is away.
As one would expect, in space every stupid risk undertaken to prove oneself can have serious or downright deadly consequences. Thus, the story opens with plucky Calypso, the almost teenager, attempting to show off her piloting skills to her buddies, her professor, and her family as she goes skimming one of Saturn’s granite-hard icy rings in the family’s pod. With her ship badly damaged, she barely survives.
After this engaging beginning, Ringer falls into uneven pacing. Presby displays her impressive skills in constructing spaceships and a habitat in Saturn’s rings. It’s all well thought out, so much so that the details of the engineering and technology dominate the novel at the expense of characterization and plot.
Nonetheless, at its core, Ringer provides a thought-provoking examination of family relationships in the future. Presby asks what it means to be adopted into a wealthy and influential family with which one has no biological connections. Not only must family members grapple with this, but others in the community are apt to form their own opinions. Many SF novels proceed from the premise that small settlements will achieve adequate genetic diversity by relying on long-term storage of frozen sperm and eggs or entire embryos. Usually, the conceit is that everyone will be biologically unrelated to their parents and siblings. In Ringer, Presby provides a more complex—and realistic—situation in which families may be composed of some individuals who have a shared genetic heritage and others who do not. Thus, Calypso has heard all her life that she is “not a real Sadou,” meaning her every action is judged and she must prove herself again and again. Presby has created a compelling teenage protagonist to serve as a lens for considering questions of belonging in the only family one has ever known, notwithstanding stark physical differences in appearance.
The astonishingly prolific Rich Larson investigates a plethora of biopunk futures—many of them laser-sharp—in Changelog: Collected Fiction. These twenty-six stories range from drabbles of a few sentences to short stories, and up to complex novelettes in which sentences are press-ganged to do double and triple duty. A preeminent heir to the cyberpunk movement, Larson explores how those inhabiting sand-choked byways of the Sahara, seedy back alleys around the globe, and gritty corners of the universe find their own uses for bio-ware. With inquisitive-eyed drones dancing overhead, his down-and-out bio-tech practitioners labor over gene-riggers even as lyricism lurks among the chromatophores. Larson’s settings are replete with implacable diseases and populated by con artists and ordinary, or downright insignificant, protagonists who struggle against intolerable constraints and combat setbacks and hardships with resolve.
Two of these stories may be familiar to Analog readers. “Smear Job” appeared in the November-December 2018 issue. “The Old Man” (November 2017) supplies an unflinching portrait of a manhunt through an inundated Louisiana bayou in the aftermath of the climate-apocalypse. Sister magazine Asimov’s Science Fiction published “Cupido,” with its winning protagonist (March-April 2017). Perhaps my favorite in this collection is the powerful “In Event of Moon Disaster.” Appearing in Asimov’s March-April 2018 issue, this story won the annual readers award. Other standouts include “Like Any Other Star,” for a different take on the relationships between crewmembers on a generation ship. “Meat and Salt and Sparks” is a murder mystery in which the jovial human detective’s sidekick is an uplifted ape. They are so nicely depicted that I hope they make repeat appearances in Larson’s future works. Titles such as “You Are Born Exploding,” and “Brainwhales Are Stoners, Too,” live up to their promise of a wild journey to futures few can imagine. A few stories, such as the gore-filled “Our Lady of Perpetual Disdain,” do not flinch from body horror. That one should not be read in or anywhere near a hospital.
Sam Miller’s effusive introduction to Changelog initially struck me as over the top—until I fell for Larson’s vivid prose and rooted hard for every one of his pain-filled protagonists. Hence, it took me a solid month to read all these stories. Do not be surprised if, like me, you can only read two or three of them at a time. They deliver emotional gut punches in small packages. Fair warning: you might well find yourself muttering, “What did I just read?” as you collect yourself before forging ahead to the next one.
Many single-author collections place the writer’s strongest works—usually those drawing the most critical acclaim—at the beginning and/or the end. It is also a common practice to include a brand new story to entice fans who have devoured all the others. Changelog does neither. But fear not; Larson is so prolific that most readers will likely find a bunch of stories that are new to them. Attempting to anoint one or a few stories as “the best” would be a fool’s errand.
For those who enjoy learning how writers cobble together seemingly disparate elements into cohesive stories, Larson caps off Changelog with story notes consisting of brief excerpts from a log of his initial ideas, followed by a paragraph or so as to where he took the story. In sum, I am reminded of what Analog’s former Reference Librarian Don Sakers said in reviewing Rich Larson’s previous collection Tomorrow Factory: “In olden days, oral storytellers would spin yarns in the village market; Tomorrow Factory is the modern equivalent.” To which I add, we are indeed fortunate to inhabit a village enriched by Rich Larson’s tales.
Rosemary Claire Smith’s novelette “Apollo in Retrograde” (Analog November/December 2023) won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Over the years, Analog has published her time-travel tales, alternate histories, and other science fiction stories, as well as several editorials. Rosemary’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories also appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, and other periodicals and anthologies. Her interactive adventure game is T-Rex Time Machine. Rosemary has worked as a field archaeologist and a lawyer. Follow her on-line at www.rcwordsmith.com and across social media at RCWordsmith to find out what else she is up to.