1958: VOR (Blish, James)

Long slow start, great cruise, quick landing (4/5)

VOR was written, as a novel, during the same years as Blish's much more famous Cities in Flight series (1955-1962). Oddly enough, VOR doesn't carry the same characteristics as Cities in Flight does: the lengthy sentences, abundant commas and semicolons, and the dry dialogue. VOR is a drastic departure from the starchy, iron-pressed pockets of Cities (don't forget your slide-rule!); VOR is a grittier, more down-to-earth romp through first alien contact. I wish, wish, wish I could compare this first contact novel to Blish's other first contact novel, A Case of Conscience (1958), but I, sadly, haven't been able to procure a copy yet.

Rear cover synopsis:

"The first 'alien' from outer space arrives on earth:

How 'it' comes and what 'it' wants.

How we greet 'it,' nourish 'it,' communicate with 'it.'

What we learn from 'it' of interstellar worlds, galactic powers, and void beyond.

And how--in the terrifying moment of Earth's ultimate crisis--we defend the complex civilization of tomorrow from 'it!'

This could happen tomorrow, or the next day--but the awesome moment is certainly within the realm of possibility--and may be close at hand!"

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Marty Petrucelli has led a complicated life. He's been a WWII fighter pilot, a US senator, and married to a lithe pin-up girl. He's largely given up the glamorous life to volunteer in the Civil Air Patrol of Merger County, Michigan. His simply duty in the squadron is to identify aircraft, a hobby or Marty's since he was a young boy. However, some other volunteers in the squadron are frustrated with Marty's new-found fear for flying. He may be the most experienced flyer among them, but the flying to left to the other flyboys.

Compounding this fear of flying is Marty's inability to "maintain" his wife, a pulchritudinous woman who draws the eyes of men like vultures to a carcass. The other volunteers are aware of this discomfort and one man, the head-headed pilot Al Strickland, is even openly friendly with his missus. The defeated Marty keeps to his job. When a forest fire breaks, the crew are issued orders to fly over the area and spot the cause of the outbreak. With photographs taken, Marty examines the proofs and identifies the mirrored craft at the center of the fire to be an atomic missile. Only later, when the air force come to examine the radioactive craft, is the tubular craft assumed to be a alien spacecraft.

With radiation spilling forth and heat in excess of 2,000 degrees Celsius, the cooling craft opens to reveal a 15-foot black-sheathed monstrosity standing silent, standing tall, and not communicating in any way. A crane is hoisted to mobilize the metallic hunk, but when the crane tips and the alien uprights it, the black-clad behemoth follows the crane. With radiation still being emitted through the entire spectrum, the only likely place to contain the walking star is the disused fusion plant in Grand Rapids. Once behind the massive lead-impregnated concrete walls, scientific examination of the alien can begin.

Marty is chosen for the elite team because of his knowledge of the event since its onset. The politicking among the military and the advisors drives some of the team from inclusive plans on how to deal with the enigmatic alien. Eventually, the shifting colors on its skin reveals the pattern violent-orange-red, which reveals the aliens name: VOR. Patching a computer to the color analyzer, the linguists are able to build a vocabulary with the alien. Very limited to physical representations, the linguists find it difficult to express abstract ideas and gain meaningful answers from the ebony-clad alien, whose interior temperature climbs up to 6 million degrees Fahrenheit.

The linguists eventually asks the question, "What do you want?" The alien ambles towards the viewing platform, frightening the scientists, and says, "I want death." The hull of the alien is impenetrable by diamond drill, cutting torch, or cyclotron bombardment. Still, the alien passively sits in its cradle endlessly reciting its name--VOR. The same linguist who has cracked the alien's language and has been able to communicate with also poses theories as to why the alien needs a temperature so high, that consumes so much energy, and why it wants death in the first place. The train of logic proves to be true when the once stagnant alien ambles forward and announces, "Why will you not kill me... you have not tried... there is no more time."

------------

The first forty-six pages (of 159 pages) are a slog to get through. With the initial observation of he object amid the forest fire and the levels of bureaucracy to commit an action plan, the pages are studded with decent attempts at creating a sympathetic, downbeat man--Marty Petrucelli. It feels like the novel is going nowhere, likes its one big hoax in the plot or one big hoax on the reader, until, "The nose was a circular door or airlock. It opened. It came out" (46-47). This is the fulcrum where the entire book tips from mundane bureaucratic red-tape to full throttle alien communication mystery!

The investigation of the radioactive alien and its gradually cooling craft proves to be some of the most enticing mysteries served up in any science fiction book, on par with Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. The entire situation of the alien's arrival and the alien's condition spawns so many questions and ignites the fire of possibility within the reader. It's a short read, so the momentum through the remaining pages is difficult to carry the reader through. For the most part, Blish is successful.

However, Blish is not immune to abrupt awkward plot transitions. At a crucial scene of action, Blish takes six full pages to detail the starting sequence for an old propeller plane and its ascent to the sky above Grand Rapids. This wholly kills all the momentum Blish had written prior to the transition. What follows feels like a hastily written, though fairly convincing, conclusion in the remaining nine pages. It may be a tad too simple, but I had a feeling that the course taken would be the same course I had plotted in my mind.

Marty as a sympathetic character is hard to like. He seems to rely on his fear of flight on basis alone, without having to tell anyone WHY he's taken an oath not to fly after his  service in WWII. Eventually, the truth is revealed and any respect the reader has for Marty is evaporated. Given that his wife is running around behind his back at the same time, Blish wrote the tale of a hero who is as unlikable as the situation he finds himself in.

VOR may be a tad boring at the onset and a tad predictable near the end, but sandwiched in between the two is an excellent, excellent mystery which will have the reader's blood a-boil with anticipation. In the last chapter, Chapter 10, the escalation of excitement is over and Blish pens a short epilogue of Marty's ranting about heroism, victory, and a possible Oedipus complex.

If Cities in Flight was written with the same fervor of mystery and enjoyment as Blish did in VOR, the four novels of the collection may have felt like a carnival more than a chore. Where Blish lacks in sophistication here he makes up for in enticement and excitement.

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.  

1971: Abyss (Wilhelm, Kate)

In the abyss of dichotomy lies a reality (3/5)

Having read Wilhelm's flagship post-apocalyptic novel about cloning, Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang (1976), her three-part story was captivating but a special something was missing--her writing didn't set her apart from other writers. Her much lesser known work, Let the Fire Fall (1969) combined religious fanaticism with an alien contact novel, but once again her writing style was no where to be seen and unfortunately her plot line wasn't very lively. Besides her work in science fiction, Wilhelm also used to write a good deal of mystery. In Abyss, both lines of her fiction writing are merged into two separate novellas where the mundane circumstances transmogrify into the creepy realm of testing your own reality while at the lip of the metaphorical abyss.

----------

The Plastic Abyss (1971) - 3/5 - Perry Davenport is the president of a plastics company who is eager to secure government funds for the research into a nearly all- absorbing material, rending it impossibly dark and suitable as a platform for image projection or energy generation. The director of research, Gary Hazlett, is against any government collaboration in the invention because he fears the government monopolization and militarization of their discovery. Meanwhile, Gary's wife Dorothy is experiencing conflicting memories of time and place. Her continuing dichotomous memory spurs her into confused fits of what reality: is there more than one reality or is everything she projects a non-reality compared to her corporeality? When the research group and the couple come together to pan out what experiences can be corroborated, the slow collective realization is as unsettling as it is illusionary. 71 pages

Dorothy's fractal experiences are difficult to follow at first, where her version of reality differs from the corroborated experiences recounted by her husband or neighbor. In each circumstance Dorothy has a presence, but which presence is her own is not known from that of her proposed doppelgänger. Her flighty behavior is seen as a female neurosis in the eyes of the predominantly male cast--she's skittish, uncertain, overly emotional, and needy. The stereotypical female-in-need is compounded by the stereotypical male-problem-fixer, where I would typically feign interest in such a superficially characterized cast, this character symbiosis is as interesting as the juxtaposition of knowledge-based scientists and surreal-experiences of Dorothy. Something works very well here, but the displacement of Dorothy and her perceived reality is hard to pin down into words... the story might have been handled by Brian Aldiss or John Brunner.

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Stranger in the House (1968) - 4/5 - Robert and Mandy have made the move from the city to the country, where they have bought a huge house for a very affordable price. A series of odd events involving physical sickness, fainting spells, and spasms of agony have Robert unperturbed. Mandy and her 29-year old daughter share unsettling experiences of being mentally invaded and inherently distrust the house. Below the basement of the seemingly haunted house lies an alien being, the Groth. On a mission to monitor the scientific developments of humankind since 1896, the male Groth has become withdrawn, distressed, and depressed after the untimely death of his mate. Unacclimated to earth's atmosphere, the Groth finds it difficult to return to its ship located in upstate New York. All his needs taken care in his subterranean lair, the Groth doesn't need to venture out often but he also needs to complete another one of his missions on earth--to make contact. However, his telepathic powers and state of distress prove to be too powerful for productive reception in the human mind. 64 pages

The male-female struggle for whose idea of reality is more well-founded is just as prevalent as it is in the previous novella. Robert is a bullheaded realist with both feet planted to the earth while his wife Mandy suggests supernatural sources for the odd events in the house; between the two lie an abyss of the realization of the event in their lives. I guess you can take the metaphor as far as you like: the abyss between human and alien existence, the abyss between the continuation of life vs. the pull of self-death, the abyss between avoiding the truth and confronting the truth. The focus on the plight of the alien is the highlight of the story. The Groth is steeped in lonely misery as he can't conveniently move about, can't retrieve his spacecraft, can't effectively communicate, and can't complete his mission.

----------

I criticized Wilhelm for not having her own voice in her writing, but in this two novella collection, Wilhelm does do one thing quite well: offering unique insight into the human experience. It's not with every author that tidbits of pertinent insight gets slipped into the story. Wilhelm has a knack for this, she includes some facets of insight which I thought only I have experienced.

Her mother ... her father ... All of them pretending so hard, all of them so phony, always playing roles, being so nice and polite, and all the time just waiting for her to be out of the way so they could let down the masks, be themselves. She tried to imagine that her mother was like apart from her ... and she couldn't. Another person, a stranger to her. (13)

 and

We never see what we think we do. It's a matter of training. We see lines, and we join them. We see partial figures, and we complete them. We see randomness and we make it orderly. Our minds refuse chaos, so we train our eyes and our brain to create order. (64)

Her perception and human insights unique to this collection now has me more interested in her stories. I may steer away from her novels and venture towards her short story collection. There's still hope for her yet!

1969: Let the Fire Fall (Wilhelm, Kate)

Xenophobic fanatics - all too real (3/5)
From September 14, 2011

Kate Wilhelm's Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang was the first novel I've read by the author. While considered science fiction, it didn't use the science as a a focus or as a crutch, but more as a tool for the plot. The same could be said for Let the Fire Fall. The inclusion of an alien in the plot isn't for the sake of using it for science fiction, but merely for the use of a tool in the plot, as a way to incite a drastic change in society.

Rear cover synopsis:
"The alien starship landed in a cornfield. Its crew died rapidly, leaving only one survivor - a baby, conceived on an unknown world, carried in its mothers womb across space and delivered even as the mother died on a hostile Earth. But the alien woman had given birth to more than a child. With her last act she bequeathed to the Earth that hated her and her kind decades of turmoil and strife that would come close to tearing the whole planet apart..."

After the spaceship lands and the crew begin to die, one particularly immoral young man, Obie, decides to base a religion on the hatred of the strangers. This same young man is the illegitimate father of a child to be born the same day in the same house as the alien baby (the mother jettisons away from the virulent craft to the doctor's house, where he tends to both mothers' needs). With society's fear of the plagued aliens rampant, Obie finds a toehold for his ersatz faith and declares himself a prophet of God.

The chapter passages tend to shift time periods and character POV in abutting paragraphs, making it jarring to follow coherently. And as Obie's religion spreads across the country over two decades, the span of time becomes important as to the development of the human child and the development of the Star Child, of whom Obie seeks to proselytize his farcical faith for him. The span of characters is manageable but the initial chapters are a tad confusing with the inclusion of nearly all the key players.

The plot was fairly predictable and many of the twists of plot were a tad absurd (the Star Child's private submarine and private helicopter). Wilhelm even effectively kills off a major character (the obstetrician of the same-day babies) by putting him into cryo-sleep and metaphorically dusts off her hands for that snag in the plot. Those two instances are just samples of some of the things Wilhelm tosses into the mix in order to create an artificial change in the plot. It doesn't flow naturally.

Besides the irksome plot flow and paragraph flow, the premise is interesting at least and the books remains fairly readable though I wouldn't want to reread it. The fanatical xenophobic change in society when the aliens arrive is probably all too real. When the same xenophobes begin to turn against the human non-believers... again, it feels all too real. So, Wilhelm gets points for what I feel could be an accurate portrayal of first alien contact on earth. Definitely read Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, but skip Let the Fire Fall.

2003: Omega (McDevitt, Jack)

Monotony and senselessness synergize (2/5)

Do you remember eating your first great Mexican meal at a new restaurant and thinking, "Wow, this is great food!" Do you also remember going back and trying something different but then thinking, "Hey, all the ingredients are the same!" But you get through the meal and return months later to decide upon something else from the menu, when you realize, "Dammit, does this ever change?"

*cue escalating violins, flashing white light*
Bam. Jack McDevitt.
*staccatissimo violin note, red streak on screen*

Omega is the fourth novel in the six-book series following Priscilla Hutchins (known to her friends as Hutch) in her "Academy" career. Starting as a lowly pilot cum archaeologist in Book 1: The Engines of God. A great start to the series which is unfortunately followed by the , eye-rolling, diatribe-infused dud Book 2: Deepsix, where Hutch is still a pilot but finds herself stranded on a doomed planet leading a hopeless group to rescue. The sense of adventure and discovery returned in Book 3: Chindi where Captain Hutch leads her crew on a quest following stealth satellites scattered across space, but the story has an abrupt ending instead of a conclusion. Welcome to Book 4: Omega.

*cue thundering drums, dusk approaches*

Rear cover synopsis:
"For a quarter of a century, humanity has watched as the malignant omega clouds have destroyed every civilization they have come across. Now, it's Earth's turn--but not for another nine hundred years. A cloud has switched direction, heading straight for the previously unexplored planetary system--and its living pre-technological alien society. Suddenly, the need to find a method for the omegas' destruction becomes urgent, as a handful of brave humans, scientists and military alike, try to save an entire world--without revealing their existence..."

*cymbal crash, door creaks open*

Hutch makes a mere guest appearance in Omega. The reader discovers that she has been promoted to Director of Operations and temporarily in place as Acting Director. Herein the reader is bombarded with meeting synopses of endless variety and endless irrelevance. When the discovery of an omega cloud careening toward a newly-found civilization, Hutch acts quickly dispatching a crack team of linguists and scientists to the planet. Hutch largely disappears from this scene, only being referred to in FTL messages. The emphasis is put on the landing team, who gather as much data as possible to send it to the crack team in 9-month transit, whose date of arrival is just short of the date of destruction by the Omega.

The most interesting thread of this novel is the three-person contact team's attempts at understanding a new alien culture, not a dead civilization like in other McDevitt novels. However, the alien culture portrayed is anything but "alien." McDevitt has transposed too many anthropomorphic traits onto the aliens, colloquially known as Goomphas as they resemble the Earth cartoon of the same name. The aliens are erect four-limbed two-sex bipeds with two eyes (in the visible light spectrum), two ears, mammary glands for the females, and similar facial expressions. Their material possessions of metallic coins, wooden furniture, beasts of burden, libraries with scrolls of papers, and the equivalent of tea and beer. There is hardly anything "alien" about the aliens at all, except for their green skin tint, awkward stature, duck-like waddle, and sexual behavior.

*sympathetic woodwinds, country scene*

With one or two alien facets to hypothesize on but only to be disappointed by the in-your-face explanation in the worst epilogue ever, the readers disappointment will settle in and their focus can shift to the mystery surrounding the origin and function of the Omega Clouds. The lead scientist in understanding the omega clouds dies early on in the novel, so only vague guesses by Hutch and her team are put forth. Only at the end does Hutch come back onto the scene to sprinkle fairy dust on the conclusion to make origin the omega clouds somewhat sensible... somewhat. Sadly, it reads like a dull knife stab into the thick carapace of a well-rounded novel--it bounces right off and the stabber stabs himself. Leave the novel with a knife wound and loss of pride.

I've been critical of McDevitt before for his sloppy characterization. In Deepsix, McDevitt maniaclly describes EVERYONE'S height. Why, I haven't the faintest clue. McDevitt does this again in Omega--I keep track. He describes about 5-6 people as being short, one person as being of average height, and seventeen (SEVENTEEN!!!) as being "tall". He doesn't have enough creativity to use a synonym, but only uses "tall" a total of 17 times (pages 36, 52, 57, 60, 78, 91, 101, 118, 120, 159, 163, 289, 326, 343, 352 (twice), and 459). It's these senseless additions that makes me wonder who in the hell proofread this crap.

*symphony of clowns with slide-whistles and noise-makers*

Additional senselessness amid the pages of a McDevitt novel are found quite frequently, though not to the degree of filler as in Chindi. Some additions are just stupid: "Her first afternoon call went to Rheal Fabrics. Rheal specialized in producing a range of plastics, films, and textiles for industry. (They also had a division that operated a chain of ice-cream outlets.)" (52) But the coup de tête of senselessness comes from a seven paragraph reaction (159-160) to a character's viewing of a stereotypical horror movie (ala abandoned mansion, story weather, creaking doors and other strange noises). It are times like this that make me gently place the book down and collect myself.

I don't like McDevitt's novels. They are a utter chore to get through when the reader has to slog through diatribes (like in Deepsix), song lyrics (like in Chindi), and petty nuances (like in Omega). I have Book 5: Odyssey on my bookshelves but I think to myself, "How much more fractional senselessness can one man heap upon a novel to make the greater whole a failure?" With my head shaking, my hand trembling, my eyes screwed shut... I reach for Odyssey.

*cue ominous carnival music and lurking shadows of clowns*