Comets! by David J. Eicher

Published by Cambridge University Press on November 27, 2013

David J. Eicher is a lifelong fan of comets. His enthusiasm is reflected in the exclamation point in the book's title and in his discussion of the subject matter. Eicher isn't the most scintillating science writer I've encountered -- Comets! is disorganized and too often redundant -- but his prose is reasonably lively and he packs a good bit of interesting information into a fairly short book without becoming too "sciency." In other words, this is a book the casual reader can appreciate.

Eicher gives the reader a short history of comet observers, featuring familiar names like Thomas Aquinas, Edmond Halley, and Carl Sagan, as well as many that (to me, at least) are less well known. He devotes a later chapter to the hobby (or passion) of comet hunting. He catalogs comets that have coincided with historic events (Halley's Comet, in particular, has often been regarded as a good or bad omen, depending on what side of history the observer was rooting for). He discusses comets as a component of cultural history, from Aristotle and Seneca to Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were among the early astronomers who pondered and debated the nature of comets, as did Chinese sky watchers and Louis XIV. He also describes more recent observations of comets, some more interesting than others (Hale-Bopp, which was linked to the Heaven's Gate suicides, and Kohoutek, which turned out to be a dud as compared to predictions of the awe it would inspire, are the best of these). Eicher writes intriguing descriptions of "flybys" by spacecraft that have flown near (and sometimes into) comets and their tails, taking pictures and gathering samples. Several of the resulting photographs (which tend to reveal comets as rocks shaped like cosmic potatoes) are reproduced in the book.

A chapter that explains the composition of comets is a bit dry (although I appreciate Eicher's candor in admitting how much of that explanation is educated guesswork). It's interesting, in fact, to learn how little is known about comet formation and disintegration, about the differences between different comets, and about the unclear distinction between asteroids and comets. Did comets deliver the water and amino acids to Earth that made human life possible? Did comets, in fact, bring life to Earth? Are comets seeding life throughout the universe? Maybe, but many unanswered questions would need to be resolved before any of those possibilities could move from speculation to well-supported theory.

A chapter on where comets live and how they die is informative but, like other parts of the book, seems a bit padded with historical theories that have been supplanted by better information. A final chapter filled with technical tips for imaging comets will be of greater interest to night sky photographers than it was to me.

Of course, what we really want to know is whether a comet is likely to blast into the Earth's atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet (or maybe just Canada). A comet might have exploded over Siberia in 1908 but the jury is still out. Maybe it was an asteroid, not that it matters much to the Siberian tigers who were unlucky enough to be caught in the explosion. In any event, Eicher tells us that space debris pummels the Earth all the time and that Jupiter was smacked by a comet in 1994, so it's not inconceivable that a comet has Earth's number. With so many more imminent threats to human existence looming, I'm not going to lose sleep over that one.

RECOMMENDED

Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova

Published by Baen Books on November 15, 2013

Mars, Inc. is a book about an aging man written by an aging man. It has the feel of 1950s science fiction. Sometimes that's a good thing. I like the "sense of wonder" that pervades a lot of 1950s sf and Bova captures a little of that here. But in style and content, Mars, Inc. seems like a novel written by a science fiction writer who is stuck in the past.

A billionaire named Art Thrasher persuades other billionaires to invest in a manned mission to Mars because ... it's the right thing to do? Bova's optimistic view of capitalism, and of the willingness of billionaires to spend billions on a project that is unlikely to return their investment, seems naïve, but that's the premise. Thrasher spends half his time complaining that politicians have devoted their lives to spending his wealth and the other half complaining that politicians aren't giving more funding to NASA. He doesn't have much insight into his own hypocrisy but most people don't, so in that sense Thrasher is a realistic character. The fact that he's an old horndog is the most interesting aspect of his personality. In most other respects, Thrasher is a pretty boring guy, despite Bova's effort to give him the feistiness of a Ross Perot.

Bova generally skips over the details of rocket design and manufacture, focusing instead (in a fairly simplistic way) on politics and finance. He does give us a tour of the spacecraft, a conventional vehicle that has been described by sf writers hundreds of times. Eventually the plot incorporates a mystery theme as Thrasher suspects the Mars project is being sabotaged and that someone is trying to take over his company. Bova invites the reader to select from the several suspects he puts on display. The method of detection that uncovers the culprit has more to do with wishful thinking than forensic science, and the reveal is less than surprising.

While sex gives Thrasher something to do in his free time (and something to think about the rest of the time), a subplot of romance that emerges in the novel's second half would be at home in an old, black-and-white television sitcom. It contributes to the story's dated feel. Apart from being stale, the story as a whole just isn't as interesting as science fiction should be.

Mars, Inc. certainly isn't an awful novel. It moves quickly and it's easy reading. Bova is a capable writer who knows how to keep readers turning the pages. The story lends itself to a sequel and I might even read it. This time out, however, Bova didn't write anything that hasn't been written before, and long ago.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss

Published by Delacorte Press/Random House on November 26, 2013

A bursting blood vessel in Howard Morgan's head and his wife's fall from a ladder set the stage in Our Picnics in the Sun, Morag Joss' story of an aging couple in South West England. The action resumes three years later. Point of view shifts between Howard, who struggles with speech and mobility, and Deborah, who is neglecting their sheep and barely tending to Stoneyridge, their decaying bed-and-breakfast. We also see Howard and Deborah from the point of view of Adam, their 28-year-old son working abroad, who is determined to avoid them as much as he can. An unexpected guest named Theo seeks accommodation at Stoneyridge on Adam's birthday and eventually insinuates himself into the Morgan family drama, sparking changes in the attitudes and interactions of the Morgan clan while forcing Deborah (and, indirectly, Howard) to confront the feelings they have kept hidden from each other, and possibly from themselves, since Adam's birth.

Our Picnics in the Sun is about the essential role that kind treatment of our children and parents and spouses plays in a healthy existence. But the novel also helps us understand why kindness so easily disappears, why we sometimes struggle to bestow it upon the people we love. Neither Howard nor Deborah are ideal parents or spouses, and Adam is less than an ideal son, but it is easy to feel sympathy for all of them. Howard, a controlling twit who has devoted much of his self-absorbed spiritualistic life to bearing a well-deserved sense of guilt, is now a mind trapped in a dysfunctional body, incapable of articulating his thoughts, often experiencing inexpressible hunger and cold, regretting all the years that he refused to notice Deborah "fading and slipping away from him." While it is tempting to judge Deborah for the uncaring care she gives (or withholds from) Howard, she has limitations of her own -- she can only "breathe freely" when she's away from Howard -- and it isn't her fault that her anger and frustration is not alleviated by Howard's helplessness. Adam, impoverished and home-schooled to the point of ignorance as a child, deprived of everything he wanted (including a feeling of normalcy), can't abide a return to the source of so many unwelcome memories. Deborah lives in denial of Adam's detachment from the family, convincing herself each year that Adam will appear for his birthday picnic on the moor, a ritual he dreaded as a boy.

Flashbacks to Adam's significant birthdays furnish the links that allow the reader to see the chain of the Morgan family history, including the oddly obsessive birthday picnics. Late in the novel we learn some things that force a reinterpretation of Howard and Deborah and that shed light upon the annual pilgrimages to the moor. A jolt in the last pages helps make new sense of much of what came before.

Is it too late for the Morgans to recapture the sense of kindness that has been missing from their lives for so long? The answer is moving and surprising and insightful. This is a deft piece of storytelling by a writer with a compassionate understanding of human nature who is in firm control of her compelling characters.

RECOMMENDED

Happy Thanksgiving!

The River and Enoch O'Reilly by Peter Murphy

Published by Mariner Books on September 10, 2013

Every voice that ever made a sound still lingers, waiting to be heard if only you know how to listen. The patterns of flowing river waters make a sound that can unlock the mysteries of the universe. These, at least, are the insights and beliefs of certain characters in The River and Enoch O'Reilly, characters who may be gifted with special insights or cursed with mental illness. The blurry distinctions between truth and myth and madness are central to Peter Murphy's remarkable novel.

Murphy tells us that "a man is not defined by his death. Every man has his story, and his life is in the telling." This is the story of Enoch O'Reilly, and while it is also the story of other boys and men and women and the torments of life in southeastern Ireland, it is more fundamentally the story of Ireland's myths.

Over a period of two weeks in November 1984, with no logical explanation, nine people drown as the Rua overflows its banks, apparent victims of suicide although nobody will speak the word. The night before the flooding starts, Enoch O'Reilly fits the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. The novel then resets, beginning Enoch's story at the beginning, as a boy who is shaped by Elvis Presley and Holy Ghost Radio, each imparting a lifelong sense of existential peril. He later attends a Christian Brothers school where he learns this: "Ambition does not always know its end, but its beginnings are palpably manifest in the guts of those who nurture it, and whom it nurtures." Feeling a calling to preach, Enoch enters a seminary because he understands that "mass is the opiate of the religious," but his atheism does not go over well with the Dean. What happens to Enoch next is, like much of the novel, open to interpretation. Suffice it to say that his life continues to be informed by Elvis and the Holy Ghost.

From time to time, Murphy shifts his attention to other characters, some momentarily, a few in greater depth. Among the latter are Enoch's father Frank, who spent much of his life trying to recover words lingering in the ether, spoken by people long dead, and Professor Charles Stafford, a psychiatrist who may have mental health issues of his own. We also glimpse some of those who drowned, people ill-treated by life who were drawn to the river, who heard its call.

Language is power, Enoch learns in seminary, and power is evident in the language that Murphy wields. There is a surrealistic quality to The River and Enoch O'Reilly that makes it difficult to separate the story from its symbols. The river is a connection to the past and future, a symbol of life but also of death and madness, a place for people who are "speaking in riverish, knowing only riverality, the sound of the river the sound of thought itself, the babble of water that ... erodes the stuff of sanity." Other oddities include preaching voices emanating from a radio tuned to the dead, the unlikely interruption of a brawl by protective herons, a machine that ticks off the countdown to a flood. According to one of Murphy's characters, the Irish prefer myths and legends to philosophy -- it is the Irish way to order the universe -- and that mythical ordering is reflected in this sometimes baffling but always beautifully told story.

RECOMMENDED