There used to be one well-placed
second-hand bookstore in Bangkok which had a rather poor selection of books,
and pricey ones at that. But, one goes to second-hand bookstores for the sight
of the thousands of books and the unique musty smell which hangs in the air.
Before the store started to sell solely second-hand Japanese books, I poked my
head in and couldn’t resist buying at least one book. That purchase became
Thomas R. McDonough’s The Architects of Hyperspace. I must have been inebriated. Oh, dear.
McDonough has made two forays
into novel-length science fiction, with The Architects of Hyperspace
being his awkward first time. This was published once back in 1987 in
paperback. The end… almost, because it was “back in print” in 2000 by the
author’s fancy through some sort of self-publication website. Fast forward to
1992 and McDonough offers his sophomore novel, The Missing Matter, which
becomes book #3 of the quadrilogy of The Next Wave. Supposedly, these books saw
the light of day.
Rear cover synopsis:
“In a battered starship manned
by two rugged adventurers, Ariadne Zepos heads for the alien world where her
father perished twenty years before. Determined to unravel the mystery of his
last message, she charts a dangerous course, unaware of intergalactic pirates
bent on subverting her mission. To survive, she will have to conquer a world of
unfathomable complexity constructed by a long-vanished race around a neutron
star. Seductively beautiful, yet brimming with deadly traps, it holds the
secret Ariadne seeks—one that will lead her to a far greater mystery.”
------------
Having lost her father 20 years
prior, Ariadne Zepos maintains that he died on a space mission and never heard
from again. The pang of the early-childhood loss follows her through life until
the day when a message is received from deep space. The message, sent from 20
light-years out, is intended for Ariadne’s audience. The shock of learning of
her father’s true fate fills her with a hope for revisiting the circumstances
of his mysterious disappearance, but there are minions of repression behind
every move she makes.
Stefan is one man on Earth whom
she thinks she can rely on, what with his job in the Ministry of Culture. However,
he manipulates the amount of red tape needed to secure a starship and
suppresses Ariadne’s urgent need of discovery. Ariadne has know-how and
know-who limitations, but she still manages to find her way off of Earth, yet
Stefan’s crony Wolf is close on her tail.
Once in the asteroid belt, she
contacts the once person who her father said she could definitely rely on, the
roider named Sean O’Shaughnessy. Sean and his posh English partner in petty space
crime, Plum, are hesitant to equip themselves for a 20 light-year mission by a
simple whim of Ariadne. Like Ariadne, their resources are limited and the whole
idea of an adventure into the unknown unnerves them. Soon, the verbal recriminations
of Wolf urge them to leave the asteroids at all cost, a pressure backed by Wolf’s
booby traps on their spacecraft. With the physical booby trap disabled, the
trio—Ariadne, Sean, and Plum—engage their hyperdrive to the required distance,
only to return to normspace around a dangerous white dwarf. They realize Wolf
tampered with their computer and Sean must pull them out of certain death if Ariadne
is to further delve into her father’s disappearance.
Safe once again and away from
the star’s well of gravity, the ship re-enters the 65th dimension of
hyperspace to the exact coordinates of the message’s source point. There they
find a massive system of tubular rings which surround a neutron star, a
physical feat which the humans find impossible yet their very eyes stand
witness to the architectural wonder. With each successive ring spinning faster
and faster, the ship is only able to dock with the outermost ring. There, they
find her father’s ship with his insightful data, maps, and suggestions… but
Stefan’s ship also occupies the docking bay. The treacherous “friend” of Ariadne
has beat them to it. The trio are more concerned with the perils of the rings
rather than the intentions of their human rivals.
The thousand-year-old relic of
a vanished species is full of enticing mysteries, but these same obscure
functions within each ring also present unforeseen dangers to the explorers.
With the accurate data provided by her father, Ariadne leads the two men
further into the depths of the rings. There, they eventually meet Stefan and
his crew held captive behind an invisible field. The ingenuity of the Sean
reaps the reward of domination over the treacherous crew at the cost of their
freedom; the uneasiness which penetrates the new group is occasionally broken
by the illustrious words of the journobot, an entity which captures the moment
through an objective sense of duty, yet leaning in favor towards the brave yet disloyal
actions of Stefan.
Through mechanical
monstrosities and wily wildlife, the group get cut down by a number of unexpected
deaths by the rings’ many perils until they reach Ring 512, the terminal ring
which is closest to the neutron star. The floor of the ring orbits just above
the surface of the star and offers an amazing view though the starquakes upset
the stability of their foothold. Descending into the corridor, Ariadne discovers
her father’s final message, one which imbues her hesitant dread. Regardless,
the growing relationship between the stereotypical Irishman, Sean, and the
puritan goodie two-shoes, Ariadne, spur them to take the final step into solving
the mystery of her father, the mystery of the rings, and the mystery of the
vanished race which constructed them.
------------
A preposterous quote from
Charles Sheffield, on the very cover of the novel, states that Thomas R.
McDononough is the “Jules Verne of the ‘80s!” Poppycock. While both Verne and
McDonough may be adventure writers and proponents of science, Verne instills a
sense of naïve wonder, limitlessness, and a love for the journey rather than
the destination; McDonough, on the other hand, pushes and pushes for the
destination and loses himself along the way, forgetting to metaphorically smell
the roses. Any sort of originality which springs up is dulled by the ham-fisted
fits of so-called humor and a preoccupation to inject prefixes to make the
novel more sci-fi-ish.
I never understood the motivation of the
characters to stay put in the gigantic alien relic, home to unknown dangers and
organisms, rather than return to Earth to report their findings. They keep
sinking deeper into the structure without heed to a proper human exploration.
It’s frustrating to see Plum, the intelligent English gent, say, “There are too
many tantalizing mysteries here for us to just abandon it when everything’s
going so well” (146). I understand Ariadne’s desire to solve her father’s
disappearance, but the weighty significance of the relic to humankind’s
progress overshadows any selfish intention which they had as precursor to the
adventure.
McDonough must have had fun
writing this novel, throwing caution to the wind and chucking in everything he
thought that would make a good novel: cheesy humor, scientific lingo, guns and booze,
eccentric robot, and a computer which takes no responsible for its actions.
Some of the passages are so stereotypically geeky that they make me cringe: “Evidently
it is some microscopic or submicroscopic nonlinear ultrasonic vibration, as was
surmised” (124). Justifying a technology through scientific wordiness? Very,
very amateur.
Another amateurish stab at
making the novel more user-friendly (?) is McDonough’s prefix- and suffix-ophilia.
Nearly every page has some sort of word which has a lame, obvious prefix/suffix
attached to it. Whether tounge-in-cheek or born from ignorance, McDonough even
writes a line for Ariadne saying, “One can’t simply go around breaking English
words in two and sticking pieces together at random” (175). For ease of
annoyance, I have provided five categories for the prefixed/suffixed words
along with an additional miscellaneous category, and ask yourself, “Do these
words improve my reading experience?”:
Cryo: cryocat,
cryorock, cryosuit
Roid: roidbucks,
roidcycle, roidminer, roidscum
Quanta: quantarifle, quantagun, quantavision, quantabeam,
quantaray
Robot: janitrobot, doctrobot, journobot, forestrobot,
mechrobot
Vizi/View: viziphone, viziscope, viewcrystal,
viewscreen
Miscellaneous: microgun,episuit, kelparette, sleepill,
ultracutter, cryscamera, hypergenerator, hibergas, profuter, geobucks, textcrystals,
metastable superatoms
Two last eye-rolling inclusions
which McDonough must have thought important to the development of the novel are
the noxious mild oaths (reminiscent of Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia [1975] mild
oath of “Hot buttered moonbeam!”). McDonough likes to use “taxing” as one oath
which reflects the asteroid miners' dislike for Earth’s bureaucracy, “moon dust”
is also popular when describing something as worthless and plentiful, and there
is religiously affiliated homage to Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. All of these are odd eccentricities of
McDonough’s which do not enrich the narrative experience the least bit; if
anything, they are just silly and distracting rather than original and
substantial.
After 260 pages, the novel ends
in a predictive manner when opposites attract: the puritan Ariadne hooks up
with borderline-hedonistic Sean to explore what lies beyond the endpoint of the
system of rings around the neutron star. Within that door is the conclusion to
their search, and while the unlikely-yet-predictable duo is gag-worthy, what
they find is pretty interesting, ties up things nicely, and has larger
implications. Aside from the non-dynamic duo, the book ends on a high note
which McDonough suffocates with 5 pages of afterword. Damn.
------------
This is a great example of “How
Not to Write a Science Fiction Novel” and should be required-reading for anyone
wishing to write science fiction: your idiosyncratic additions to the pages are
just that—personal adornment—; don’t fall victim to stereotypes and do not,
please do not, make opposites attract; don’t make the story more scientific than
it needs to be, whether that includes real science or pseudoscience prefixes;
and don’t fluff yourself to be the stylistic heir of a great author when in
reality you’re a fledgling hack.
No comments:
Post a Comment