1987: Benefactors 1 - The Forge of God (Bear, Greg)

Wonderfully complex and utterly absorbing (5/5)

The Forge of God was the first science fiction novel I read back in 2006. It was the beginning of a beautiful marriage! I continued with Bear's The Way series, Niven & Pournelle's Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer, Strieber & Kunetka's Warday, and the Hitchhikers Guide series. I started off my sci-fi marriage with 1980s science fiction and I constantly look back on that year with longing nostalgia. Thereafter, until April 2012, I started to only read novels I've never read before... so after five years, I return to The Forge of God to splash in the warm tide pools of sci-fi nostalgia. It's just as good as I remember!

Rear cover synopsis:
"June 26, 1996: One of Jupiter's moons disappears.

September 28, 1996: A geologist near Death Valley finds a mysterious new cinder cone in a very-well mapped area.

October 1, 1996: The government of Australia announces the discovery of an enormous granite mountain. Like the cinder cone, it wasn't there six months ago..."

Jupiter's moon Europa has disappeared and, frankly, all the scientists are baffled, especially family man Arthur Gordon. But with time, the news dies down and another story springs onto the channels: in Australia, the discovery of a giant granite mountain and its robot envoys has swept the world. Meanwhile in America, geologists come across a cinder cone and nearby lies a is dying dinosaur like alien with a message of dire warning. This message contrast the benevolent greetings and exchange of information the Australian robots are involved in. Arthur is wrangled into the US government project by his leukemia-stricken friend Harry. The two assist the government in interrogating the oddly-composed alien and the geologists who found it.

All is not well when the alien dies and robots blunder. Huge spikes of ice are heading straight for Mars and Venus, a passing gravity anomaly has scientists confused, and the sudden presence of covert metallic spiders has some people acting funny. Reuben is one such person, who becomes under the influence of the spiders and follows its commands, but to what end Reuben and the others do not know.

The Forge of God has a seemingly endless line of discoveries and it's nearly impossible to write a synopsis in only a few paragraphs. The mystery of the missing moon is compounded, but not explained until the end, with more and more mysteries which taken on different forms. The scientists are confused, the country is confused, the world is confused--this leaves the reader with a massive connect-the-dot puzzle with which to draw your own picture. Even reading this book six years later, I couldn't piece it all together and eventually found myself way off tangent... the plethora of possibilities Bear has constructed in this book is massive.

But it's just not about the end of the world or the alien invasion. These topics have been nearly run into the ground prior to 1987 (with a welcome resurgence of apocalyptic novels of recent), so Bear does three things which I found very clever:

(1) ...the endless amount of reader speculation brought upon by alien subterfuge. Most novels would simply take a linear shot at the plot, involving the a handful of twists and a half dozen characters with a predictable trope and call it a novel. Bear has the reader backtracking time and time again to remember how all the pieces fall into place; each new discovery has the reader fitting the new piece into their mental construction of what Bear is trying to accomplish.

(2) ...the inclusion of a rather mundane, unimportant cast. The geologists who discover the cinder cone and the alien become under government quarantine. Their personal struggles with isolation is captured, as is their coping with life after their release. But the best part of this inclusion is their salt-of-the-earth demeanor, their bond of friendship, and how they each react to the news of the end of the world and the actual end itself.

(3) ...the abundance of characters used. Blessedly, I read this book in less than three days so I wasn't overwhelmed with the resurfacing of the random cast throughout... but a "dramatic personae" would have been helpful with science fiction authors (tipping the hat to Niven), scientists, government bureaucrats, children, townspeople, cultists, and average Joes. It's a dynamic presentation with the leading cast highlighting Bear's ability to characterize human being on the pages.

Lastly, there are 74 chapters plus in intro and an outro, which are headed under nine headings. These headings are in Latin and, being no Latin scholar, I had to search for the translation, but the form seems to be a requiem for the dying earth. A nice addition but totally lost on me until I Googled each heading. The conclusion sent shivers up my spine when I first read it and the same sensation was felt when I read it again. It's a haunting read when you know there's a sequel: Anvil of Stars.  

2010: Guardians of the Phoenix (Brown, Eric)

Requires some humanistic reflection (5/5)
From October 4, 2011

Ever since stumbling upon Eric Brown's The Fall of Tartarus, I was wowed by his humanistic writing and ability to draw the reader into the characters' lives. It was a very engaging read, as was his other novel that I've read, Engineman. Again, powerful humanistic writing with a liberal dashing of technology and futurism. In Guardians, the reader isn't met with technological wonders, rather the world is besought by advancing desertification, extreme temperatures and a shortage of water, sustenance and habitation.

The year 2011: economic collapse
The year 2060: environmental and social collapse
The year 2120: cannibalism

Young Paul of Paris (one of only two inhabitants to remain from the failed colony) survives on lizard stew and water from an old pump station. When he spies a young woman running through the streets, he is instantly weary of the bandits who follow. Tracking their location, Paul later sees the girl missing and a torso being roasted upon the fire, bellies being stuffed. Paul's suspicions were correct; these are heartless cannibals. When the posse discuss a secret underground cache of goods in Paris, Paul attempts to snatch the plans but is captured. Another colony from Copenhagen descend upon Paris to find and bring justice to the kidnapper Hans, one of the posse. They save Paul from certain death... and there begins our story.

The explorers from Copenhagen are on a trek to the northern Spanish coast to drill for water in the dried-up ocean bed. At the same time, Hans meets up with his former colony in Aubenas, France. With detailed plans of a old space port with bountiful provision in hand, the colony creates a team officially head by the powerful female Samara, but unofficially, Hans plays a strong hand in the dealing with the other males in the group.

The descriptions of the deserted European landmass doesn't tire nor do the descriptions of what life before the collapse was like. The passages are full of post-apocalyptic discovery, old-world rediscovery and, as with other Eric Brown novels, human discovery: the heartless matriarch witness an even more heartless man, changing her outlook... the loss of patriarch family spurns his trust in others and spurs his taste for revenge. Death certainly plays a prominent role in the characterization of the small cast, who are all but a portion of the estimated thousands of humans remaining alive on the face of the planet earth.

Beyond the bleak landscape and dour mood of the withering cast, Eric Brown doesn't disappoint with elegant passages and a vocabulary to keep you smiling: sybaritic and scintilla are two words you don't come across very often in fiction. Granted, some of the dialogue is a bit far-fetched and the scenario for the ending is a long-shot but if you massage the history of the years between 2060 and 2120 enough, some far-fetched things could certainly spring up. It may also be a bit too lusty as times, but it fits in the frame of characterization and plays an important role in the plot twists.

If reflective reading and human challenges are your forte in science fiction, rather than the blunt force trauma of hard science fiction, then Eric Brown is definitely your author to read. But... humanistic science fiction isn't for some.

1973: Testament XXI (Snyder, Guy)

Snyder's one-off: unique is good and bad ways (3/5)
From October 15, 2011

Guy Snyder's Testament XXI: The Book of the Twice Damned (DAW #64) is a total one-off; this author never wrote another novel, novelette or even short story, according to ISFDB. The rear cover also adds, "...a novel quite unlike any you have ever read in modern science fiction." This is true. It's... unique. Hmph.


Rear cover synopsis:
"When Astronaut Williamson returned after the longest flight ever made he found that the great civilization that had launched him was gone... destroyed in a chaos of its own creation. But somewheres in what had once been Michigan the Republic welcomed him back. The Republic that was a kingdom, the Republic that consisted of one underground city ruled by a weakling monarch and a power-hungry priesthood."

Returning from a mission to Bernard's Star, our lone astronaut, James, has left his crewmates in the mothership in a decaying orbit around earth. Crashing his craft, James is accepted into the underground colony of Detroit. With a military background, he is quickly trained to rise to the ranks of defense commander. His novelty has him in close proximity to the ailing king who uses him to spy on his nearly-psychotic prince son, Richard. The relationship between James and Richard matures as the king passes away and Richard assumes responsibility for the livelihood of the colony. At the same time, the powerful Archbishop makes a powerplay against the rising star, James. A secret stash of 2011 bibles contrasts the current 2111 bible, which James says is a crook. Branded for treason, the Archbishop puts him on trail but is saved by the heir apparent. Add to this conundrum the recent deflection of an 80-megaton nuclear bomb and a successful scouting mission to the colony of Chicago, and circumstances begin to align themselves.

Pretty decent synopsis, which is much easier to read than the actual novel. The chapter passages are oddly separated one-line sentences beginning and ending with notational ellipses. Sometimes this spacing fills nearly an entire page. Some of the dialogue, too, is spaced in this fashion, as if the editor is trying to bulk up an otherwise rather thin novel (which could be easily read in 2-3 hours). Four of the seventeen chapters begins with a perspective from an animal living on the surface above the colony: a lizard, a buzzard, a kangaroo rat and a rat. These four passages last for 2-3 pages and add a certain charm to the book. It's unique, but has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot.

Snyder's writing style, besides the repetitive notational ellipses, is bipolar. Most of the time the writing is very straight forward but there are also glimpses of wonderful insight:
"What causes men to become no more than celestial chess players?"
"War's a game, my lord."
"That's a trite, lousy explanation of the phenomenon."
"That's because the phenomenon itself it trite." (93)

And other times he is tirelessly wordy with obscure descriptions: "The fuel was called, noncommercially, Grade #3H. It was, of course, the right kind of fuel for this type of VL-VTO craft, series R12-56." (100)

It's not an easy read because you have to understand the constantly shifting viewpoints from pilots, animals, James and the Archbishop. There is even shifting viewpoints of characters who have an entire chapter dedicated to them but play no role in the plot, such as "this particular man" in Chapter 9 who is described while going to work, doing nothing and finally witnessing the war production line begin, much to his dismay.

Unique, it is- the synopsis was right for a change! It think I'll keep this book on my shelves for sheer novelty. It's a little fun, actually. She's a keeper.

1964: Greybeard (Aldiss, Brian)

The elderly reluctantly inherit the earth (5/5)

Brian Aldiss seems to have a limited following with the wider science fiction community only recognizing Non-Stop (excellent!), Long Afternoon Of Earth (great!), and Helliconia Spring (haven't read it yet) as his landmark novels. I've read five of his novels and each one has been a 4- or 5-star rating, among them Starswarm, Cryptozoic, and Earthworks. Each one of these books highlights Brian Aldiss's masterful gift for creating a setting which is detailed and absorbing. Greybeard is no different - it opens your eyes and keeps them glued to the pages.

Rear cover synopsis:
"After the Accident, the Dark Ages return to Earth. By the year 2029 A.D. few survivors remain. Those who are left huddle in isolated villages, prisoners of fear, superstition, and old age. The rare man who still wants to shape his own destiny must strike out into the unknown. Greybeard is the story of such a man and his wife - of their perilous journey through a landscape weirdly familiar, eerily changed. And of their quest for something they dare not name..."

Algy Timberlane and his wife Martha met during childhood, in the the early years after the Accident in 1981. Both aged seven years old and both recovering from radiation-related illnesses, they will discover that their lives will be intermeshed through the world war in 2001, through the cholera outbreak in 2018, and through the reclusive years after the sequential disasters in 2029. The Big Accident having wiped out most large mammals and rendering nearly all of humanity sterile, only weasels, reindeer, beavers, otters, and coypu are left to either eat or provide some sort of utility to the remaining humans dotting the English countryside... while "the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities." (71) With an average age of seventy and where 50 years of age is considered to be young, the hope for the future is dim: "Mortal flesh now wore only the Gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims." (39)

Algy Timberlane (aka Greybeard), now aged 54 in the year 2029, started to work for DOUCH(E) during the war in 2001. DOUCH(E) stands for Documentation of Universal Contemporary History (England) and Algy's job is to simply place himself where history is being made and make recordings of history unfolding: "...someone should leave behind a summary of earth's decline, if only for visiting archeologists from other possible worlds." (83) His wife Martha is at his side when they decide to escape their community as it experiences a surge of unrest. Fleeing the hermetic village with the couple is the chaplain, Charley, five years Algy's senior, who provides optimistic countenance to Algy's own spiral of negativity. Also, the trapper and somewhat dim-witted Jeff Pitt is along for the perilous journey, who has been Algy's peripheral sidekick since the days of training with DOUCH when Jeff was ordered to assassinate Algy.

The seven chapters of Greybeard alternate between the escape from the village and downstream journey to the shore in the years 2029-2031 with that of historical background of the (1) year 1982 when the year after the "fatal bombs in space") and we reader witnesses a key event in Algy's life: his chance encounter with the hairless girl next door and the suicide of his father. (2) In the years 2000-2001 Algy receives training with DOUCH and experiences a unfortunate event which solidifies the bond between the Algy and his fiancé. (3) In the year 2018, cholera began to take it toll and escape from the dictatorial urban center was the only choice in order to survive.

Like all the other Aldiss novels I've read, the author pens a richly detailed novel interspersed with cavernous emotion, inspiring allegories, and romantic prose: "Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive that no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps." (129) The reader will certainly get a feel for the desolation of the bucolic English countryside in contrast to the effervescent hope which bubbles from unknown emotional depths. Aldiss peppers Greybeard with fun little words like "sedgey" and "cavil" and "pundit" with some interesting formal words like "metoposcopy" and "katabatic winds" and "catenary" and then there's always the rare long words you come across once a year like "peregrination" and "tatterdemalion".

Greybeard may not be the best place to start when tackling the Aldiss bibliography, but it's certainly a prized mantelpiece for post-apocalyptic fiction, once which infuses barrenness with hope, self-destruction with mollification, and fatalism with transcendence.

2008: Wastelands (Adams, John Joseph [editor])

How social creatures deal with the loss of society... and gasoline (3/5)
From March 7, 2011

A collection of apocalyptic stories this is not, rather it is a collection of post-apocalyptic stories during a time when this is all the rage among readers of fiction, (thank you very much Cormac McCarthy). As a science fiction reader, I have read a number of post-apocalyptic novels in my time (Ballard's The Drought, Stewart's Earth Abides, Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, Frank's Alas Babylon and hearty handful of others). So, the material is nothing new to me but I haven't been exposed to the short story side of the sub-genre. Much like all other collections about plot specific stories, the stories are hit and miss.

If the reader is looking for entertaining ways in which humans will perish from the planet, this really isn't it. If the reader is looking for ways in which humans cope with the aftermath of mass tragedy, this book really isn't all that either. But like a good collection of stories, it DOES have the entertaining bits, the humanistic bits and also the humor of human folly.

The End of the Whole Mess (Stephen King-1986) - 5/5 - Elder brother to a genius writes his parting words before he succumbs to the disease unknowingly beset by his brother with only the best intention at heart: to save the world. 19 pages

Salvage (Orson Scott Card-1986) - 3/5 - Mormons assist a salvager in probing the temple for the legendary promise of golden riches, as the salvager was told by other reliable truckers along the highway stretch. 15 pages

The People of Sand and Slag (Paola Bacigalupi-2004)- 5/5 - Heavily modified truly omnivorous humans in an animal-less world discover a dog amidst their chemical wasteland and adopt it as their own after debating on whether or not to just eat the nuisance. 15 pages

Bread and Bombs (M. Rickert-2003) - 3/5 - Neurotic post-trauma small town is leery of the immigrant neighbors with their goat cart with bells but the local children see an invitation for learning the truth, albeit at the expense of their parents' worrisome hearts and conniving minds. 11 pages

How He Got in Town and Out Again (Jonathan Lethern-1996) - 3/5 - A transient and his galfriend stumble upon and agree to enter in the trader's dealing, whose only service for sale is a city-wide tournament of will and endurance for thirty-two contestants who experience cyberspace, with its promises of fulfillment and its lure of alternate realities. 19 pages

Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels (George R.R. Martin-1973) - 4/5 - A mutant subterranean human scouts the upper levels of the earth for secret passages while a excavation crew from Luna open a cave and find intriguing hints of an underground civilization, but when the two groups meet each others physical limitations, words have no meaning. 13 pages

Waiting for the Zephyr (Tobias L. Buckell-1999) - 2/5 - Girl wants to leave the family wind farm for the hope for a better life aboard the ship of the traveling traders... the end. 5 pages

Never Despair (Jack McDevitt-1997) - 4/5 - A duo of explorers traversing eastern America lose a fellow traveler and debate as to whether to return home or trek on when one of them is approached by a historic apparition in a derelict amphitheater, but to each of the dialoguers is a history of incomprehensibility. 9 pages

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (Cory Doctorow-2006) - 4/5 - The keepers of internet equipment outside of Toronto are hermetically sealed when bio-terror strikes the globe and the group strive to keep the net alive, form a cyber-government and come to terms with having to breach the seal and meet their fate on the earth. 31 pages

The Last of the O-Forms (James Van Pelt-2002) - 3/5 - A post-global-bio-agent attack freak show conductor and his babyish 12-year old financer daughter stop in a town where the Mississippi holds a troublesome brew of its own. 11 pages

Still Life with Apocalypse (Richard Kadrey-2002) - 4/5 - Menagerie of images from the dreamscape of the author: `The sky is mostly a swirling soup of ash... the government wants us to help gather up the remaining body parts... a dissatisfied citizen had gutted an auditor... they're dragging another horse from the canal.'3 pages

Artie's Angels (Catherine Wells-2001) - 4/5 - Teen-aged academic achiever is the leader and hero of a ghetto in a secluded bubble in Kansas, where the rich lead their lives to escape the Earth and the poor merely hope to live through the day. 11 pages

Judgment Passed (Jerry Oltion-2008) - 4/5 - After twelve years on a space mission to visit another planet, the crew arrive back on Earth to read in the newspapers that second coming of Jesus and the great Judgement was held four years ago, with no one left on the face of the planet, which is mixed bag of blessings for the crew. 19 pages

Mute (Gene Wolfe-2002) - 3/5 - Siblings take a bus to their father's house, only to find his TV on mute and his corpse in the basement... and kind of find themselves in a closed universe. 9 pages

Inertia (Nancy Kress-1990) - 3/5 - Communicable disease colony houses three generations of victims, the oldest of which is being interviewed by a doctor from Outside who is untouchable to the disease and also needs a promise from the younger victims to help the rest of the world bent of destruction. 21 pages

And the Deep Blue Sea (Elizabeth Bear-2005) - 3/5 - Very reminiscent of Damnation Alley, a messenger must across a radioactively hot zone to deliver a medical parcel but is met midway by her debtor who tempts her to forget her mission in order to cancel her debt. 15 pages

Speech Sounds (Octavia Butler-1983) - 3/5 - The mental center for language formation and language understanding have been destroyed by a plague, but some aspects of everyday life still manage albeit with difficulty, frustration and confusion. 11 pages

Killers - (Carol Emshwiller-2006) - 2/5 - America is at war at her home turf and one village is only left with four men and where the women get on with getting' on except for someone, possibly the protagonists brother or perhaps not, is on a murder spree. 9 pages

Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus (Neal Barrett, Jr.-1988) - 3/5 - An attempt at a humorous post-apocalyptic situation but really just a silly mix of silliness along the lines of `a taco and sex circus troupe take their wares to a village, keep their profit of gasoline and get a repair at the next town over but fail to adhere to the repairman's advice and find themselves at the mercy of underwriters. 15 pages

The End of the World as We Know It (Dale Bailey-2004) - 5/5 - The one-in-the-same narrator and character has a knowledge of all the apocalyptic novels and avoids setting himself in-line with the cliché, misses his wife, likes a good gin and tonic, enjoys the country home he's squatting in and reflects upon all of our personal apocalypses. 13 pages

A Song Before Sunset (David Grigg-1976) - 4/5 - Ex-pianist and now scavenger rediscovers his love for music as he searches out his old grand piano in the abandoned theater and later hears about an attack on houses of art by vandals but remains diligent as he tunes his piano for a grand return to the art. 9 pages

Episode Seven (John Langan-2007) - 4/5 - A detailed account of two survivors of a pollen invasion/monster attack/deadly virus who, by night lead a normal life and sleeping and standing guard and by day they battle against the baddies in an epic struggle between good and evil. 21 pages