Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

Published by Tor Books on October 16, 2012

Larry Niven has often worked in collaboration, and it's good to see him working at all, given his age. Not many writers born in 1938 are still kicking out science fiction. Gregory Benford might have manned the laboring oar but, having been born in 1941, he's not much younger. Ignoring the trendiness of modern sf, Benford and Niven have crafted an old-fashioned story of space exploration and first contact. Unfortunately, while I have enjoyed much of Niven's writing and at least some of Benford's over the years, Bowl of Heaven does not match the best work of either author.

The story begins as a promising (albeit conventional) "scientists journey to a new world" story. In the prolog, they are preparing to leave on their newly tested starship. As the novel begins, Cliff Kammash is awakened from an eight decade sleep, well before the ship is scheduled to reach the planet they have named Glory. Cliff, a biologist, thinks it odd that he has been awakened to opine about an unusual star the duty crew have observed -- odd until he realizes that the star is partially surrounded by a hemisphere, an object that was clearly manufactured. For reasons they can't explain, their ship has been losing velocity, and the knowledge that they aren't going to make it to Glory alive prompts them to investigate the bowl-covered star. The bowl is actually a vast (and literal) starship, using the star as its source of propulsion. Once they are inside the bowl, Cliff and his buddies discover an ecosystem the size of the inner solar system.

The plot then follows two branches as half the landing crew is captured by feathered aliens while the other half escapes. Both branches morph into wilderness survival tales as the two groups investigate the planet. For the most part, the story is bland and uninspired. Slightly more interesting are the underlying questions that the humans must confront: what is the origin of the bowl, where did it find its star, where is it going and why? One of the groups improbably stumbles upon a museum that provides helpful clues, furthering my impression that life inside the bowl is just a little too easy for our friends from Earth, a flaw that hurts the story's credibility. Eventually the humans discover what the reader learns much earlier: other aliens from other worlds are trapped in the bowl, in much the same predicament. The question then becomes: Why are the Big Birds who seem to be in charge rounding up and "assimilating" intelligent life forms from other planets?

The human characters lack distinctive personalities -- or any personalities. They are as bland as the story. They engage in random quarrels about points of science that have precious little to do with their survival, and a couple of them engage in hanky-panky, but for the most part the characters are interchangeably dull.

Bowl of Heaven works best when the focus shifts from the humans to the aliens. The Big Bird we encounter most often is Memor, who is charged first with understanding the humans and then with destroying them. The most interesting Bird chapters concern the aliens' attempt to understand the humans -- their speculation, for instance, about the evolutionary significance of facial gestures and human anatomy -- and the political consequences of Memor's repeated failures to bring them under control. The payoff comes when the reader meets a not-so-assimilated species that actually seems alien -- the politics of revolution comes into play -- but that doesn't happen until the novel's final chapters: too little and too late to redeem an uninspired plot.

The story hearkens back to an earlier, simpler era of science fiction in its conviction that humans, while not as technologically advanced as aliens, are clever and scrappy and so have the capacity to outwit their superior foes. Of course, it helps that the Big Birds are shockingly inept in their confrontations with humans.

Most disappointing is that the story ends abruptly -- not really a cliffhanger but leaving everything unresolved -- as the reader is encouraged to pick up volume two (Shipstar) to see what happens next. I'm sufficiently indifferent that I might not, but mildly curious about the unanswered questions noted above so maybe I will.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Stonemouth by Iain Banks

Published by Pegasus on October 10, 2012

With the addition of a middle initial to his name, Iain Banks writes immensely entertaining science fiction novels, with fast-moving action and tongue-in-cheek attitude. Without the middle initial, Banks writes novels that have the heft, characters, and prose of serious literature. Stonemouth is one of the latter, and it is a small gem.

Stewart Gilmour returns on a Friday to Stonemouth, his hometown in northeast Scotland, for the funeral of Joe Murston, an elderly man he befriended in his teen years. Stewart had been run out of town five years earlier by the Murston family for reasons that are only hinted at until the story is two-thirds done. His safe readmission to Stonemouth requires him to make nice with Joe's son Donnie, one of Stonemouth's two resident crime lords, who warns Stewart to leave no later than Tuesday and to stay away from Donnie's daughter Ellie. Stewart, of course, harbors the distant hope that it isn't quite over with Ellie and can think of nothing except seeing her again.

Stonemouth is a weekend journey of discovery. Stewart reviews the past and rethinks the present as he visits old friends and lovers. He learns the full truth (or as near to it as he will likely ever come) about the incident that caused his banishment from Stonemouth. The novel's early chapters alternate sly and amusing and tragic observations about the perils of being young with moments of unexpected tenderness. The later chapters give Stewart the chance to come to terms with his mistakes as he decides whether to let go of his past or to make it the foundation of his future.

The principle characters, and Stonemouth itself, are skillfully developed. Stewart and Ellie are particularly nuanced, but even the minor characters have personalities that transcend the stereotypes they could easily have become. Stewart has changed since leaving Stonemouth (not always in ways that suit him); Ellie is changing; the male Murstons, like the town of Stonemouth itself, resist change with the force of ... well, stone. It is the conflict between the inevitability of change and the intractability of family tradition that animates the story.

An atmosphere of danger hangs over the novel as Stewart goes about his business: a chance encounter with Ellie's flirtatious sister; a brutal encounter with Ellie's brothers; a tense encounter with a thug in a pool hall; an obligatory visit with the town's other crime boss, Mike MacAvett, and with Mike's daughter Jel, who represents a different sort of danger. Banks deftly juggles the gentleness of a love story with sudden bouts of violence, letting tension build intermittently until the story reaches a thundering climax.

Banks' strength as a science fiction author is his ability to tell an engrossing story. His strength in Stonemouth is his ability to tell an engrossing story with literary flair.

RECOMMENDED

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

Published by Orbit on October 9, 2012 

The Gzilt are about to transition from the Real to the Sublime, where they will live a blissful existence in dimensions seven through eleven. In most instances, an entire civilization must enter the Sublime at the same time to retain individual identities, and this is what the Gzilt are preparing to do in 24 days. When a ship from the Zihdren-Remnanter attempts to deliver a message to the Gzilt -- a message that could undercut the very foundation of Gzilt society and possibly affect the civilization's readiness to join the Sublime -- a Gzilt ship blows it to bits. Ever watchful, the Culture dispatches Caconym, one of its Mind ships, to join an advisory group that is responding to the incident. Caconym is a logical choice since it shares its structure with another Mind that has actually been to, and returned from, the Sublime.

Other than various Minds, the central character in Iain Banks' latest Culture novel is a Gzilt named Vyr Cossant, who added two arms to her body so she could play The Hydrogen Sonata on the elevenstring. Because she once met an entity (sometimes humanoid, sometimes not) named Ngaroe QuRia who has lived for thousands of years, Cossant is recommissioned as a lieutenant commander and ordered to find QuRia. QuRia is thought to possess the information that the Zihdren-Remnanter were attempting to deliver to the Gzilt. Also making an attempt to find QuRia is his former lover, Scolliera Tefwe, whose consciousness has been stored on a Culture ship for the last four hundred years. As the Gzilt countdown to the Sublime continues, Cossant and Tefwe and a number of Culture Minds race to uncover the truth about the Gzilt before the civilization makes its collective journey, a task that is impeded by some Gzilt political/military folk who would prefer that the information remain buried.

There is, of course, quite a bit more going on: political scheming to determine which race will become the rightful heir to the worlds and possessions the Gzilt leave behind; political quarrels among the Culture Minds; military maneuverings leading to explosive confrontations between the Gzilt, the Culture, and others. All of this adds up to a fun, intelligent, fast-moving story.

If this abbreviated plot summary is confusing, you probably haven't read any of Banks' Culture novels and are therefore unfamiliar with the ancient, droll, sarcastic, pedantic, and sometimes mentally ill Artificial Intelligences known as the Minds.  Don't worry.  You can read The Hydrogen Sonata as a stand-alone novel and it will all make sense to you before too many chaters have gone by.

The best thing about The Hydrogen Sonata is that it is wildly imaginative without becoming too silly. From the descriptions of alien beings to the wonders offered by other planets, Banks creates a fully realized environment. He effectively conveys a sense of the age and vastness of the universe, plays with theories about other universes/dimensions that might exist, and peppers the story with a wonderful array of gadgetry. Not all of this is original, of course, but Banks often uses technology and theory in original ways.

I particularly like Banks' playfulness: the amusing names the Culture gives its ships; the banter between ships' Minds; the quirky personalities the Minds develop; the nettlesome nature of inter-species politics; a dirigible that hosts a five-year-long going-away party prior to the Sublime; an avatar whose head is made of alphabet soup; the fact that audiences other than academics and Culture Minds regard The Hydrogen Sonata (which may or may not be a musical representation of the periodic table) as unlistenable; the snarky pet Cossant wears around her neck; an android that mistakenly believes it's in a simulation as mayhem surrounds it; some truly bizarre sexual escapades ... and more.

The novel concludes with an intriguing moral equation. Members of the Culture learn that a shared belief critical to Gzilt civilization is false. Should the Culture reveal the truth on the ground that it is always best for the truth to be known? Or should the Culture keep quiet to protect the Gzilt from the social disruption that the truth might cause? An interesting quandary, but this isn't the kind of science fiction that lends itself to deep thought. It's meant to be fun and exciting, and it achieves that goal admirably.

RECOMMENDED

Noughties by Ben Masters

Published by Hogarth on October 9, 2012

Eliot, the narrator of Noughties, is a soon-to-graduate English lit student at Oxford. Noughties reads as if it were written by an English lit student, one whose knowledge of the world is confined to classrooms and college bars. The story, to the extent one can be found, is common: boy meets girl, boy goes to college while girl stays home, boy tries to change girl, boy loses girl, boy wants girl back. While Eliot has mastered the young person's art of creating unnecessary drama on the way to maturity, he hasn't hit upon any insights more worthwhile than "Ah, mate": the standard greeting for a fellow student who is clueless about relationships.

The noughties are Jack, Scott, Sanjay, and Eliot, four pub mates in their final year as Oxford students, "quotidian calamities" who, according to Eliot, are "lugging twentieth-century regret on our backs." If you are turned off by phrases like those I've just quoted, you probably won't like this book -- it's loaded with them.

"The noughties" is also a name given to the first decade of the twenty-first century (the one following "the nineties"). While the title suggests that Ben Masters wishes to use the novel to give the decade an identity, Eliot makes clear early on that the task is impossible: "We have no foreseeable narrative, untaggable as we are. Ours is a lost period ... spiraling off in referential chaos." Eliot sees life in the noughties as a performance; the play's the thing. Eliot exhibits the hubris of youth when, recognizing that "the performance of self is nothing new," he claims it has never before been "so vital, so fundamental." Maybe he means that no generation has been so fully self-absorbed as his own, but I doubt that's true. The MTV-driven Eighties wasn't about self-absorbed performance?

The story unfolds during a pub crawl -- more particularly, a pub to bar to club crawl, each drinking establishment representing a section of the narrative. As Eliot moves through the last drinking night of his university career, he mopes about Lucy (the girl he met, tried to change, and lost) and recalls the significant landmarks in their relationship, of which there are few. He also mopes about Ella, a fellow Oxford student who (unlike Lucy) reads the right books, listens to the right music, and is conveniently available when she's not with Jack. Frequently he indulges in "referential chaos" as he quotes, alludes to, or mimics the authors and poets he has studied (or those that Masters admires).

There are bits of Noughties I liked. Not the constant drinking and vomiting (dull). Not the quasi-love triangle (trite). Not the attempts at profound philosophical observation (shallow). I enjoyed Eliot's amusing description of his Oxford interview, some of the bar chat, and the way Eliot's mind wanders during tutorials, causing him to miss the questions he's asked. I liked Lucy's spot-on analysis of Eliot's faults as a boyfriend. Eliot's insecurity with regard to Lucy during his first year at Oxford, his worry that she doesn't fit in with the crowd, is convincing. His jealous behavior, while obnoxious, seems genuine. A riff on men who are still zipping their flies as they exit the men's room is funny. Sadly, those bright moments are overshadowed by all the empty rhetoric.

Eliot thinks Dickens is "all about the primacy of style," an apt description of Masters' writing. Whatever merit is to be found in Noughties lies chiefly in the cleverness of its prose. The blurb for Noughties compares Masters to Martin Amis, a writer I regard with indifference, and I think the comparison is apt. Like Martin Amis, Masters has nothing much to say, but he says it very well. Sometimes he's quite funny -- describing a drunken encounter with a girl in a bathroom, Eliot recalls his hand wedged inside her tight jeans, fumbling about like "a man rummaging for loose change." Had Masters kept to the humor and not worked so hard (and with so little success) to produce something serious, this might have been a better novel. 

NOT RECOMMENDED

Janus by John Park

Published by ChiZine Publications on October 9, 2012

Most of us have a hidden side, a part of our personality or past that we choose (sometimes unsuccessfully) to bury. Janus plays with that reality (sometimes unsuccessfully) by introducing characters with a hidden past, albeit not hidden by choice.

Traveling through the Knot (which, though unexplained, is presumably something like a wormhole or a stargate) to the planet Janus seems to provoke amnesia in about 30 percent of the people who make the journey, a condition that technicians on Janus are trying to correct. Attempts to restore Elinda Michaels' memory have been unsuccessful; why she emigrated from Earth to Janus remains a mystery to her. Her lover Barbara suffers from the same impairment. New arrival John Grebbel is troubled by the scars on his hands and arms but does not remember their cause. He just knows that something feels wrong.

Shortly after leaflets appear suggesting that immigrants have come to Janus from asylums and prisons, Barbara disappears. Suspecting a connection between those events, Elinda tries to track down the origin of the leaflets. At that point, Janus takes on the flavor of a detective story. The elements of a thriller or a spy story are added when a bomb explodes, an apparent act of sabotage. Yet the novel isn't really a detective story or a thriller, and it has only the trappings of a science fiction novel. Fans of world-building won't find much here. Except for its longer nights and some unusual animal life, Janus is awfully Earth-like.  Maybe that's why the two planets are linked by the Knot, but we'll never know since none of the characters know what the Knot is all about.

Two aspects of Janus are moderately interesting. One, of course, is the mystery of the missing memories, the characters chasing their hidden pasts. The other is the colony's response to the bombing -- interesting because of its deeper political ramifications. The head of security behaves in a way that is typical of those who value security over civil liberties, invoking "emergency powers" that permit security forces to detain and question people on a whim. Other colonists worry that by sowing the seeds of distrust, the security hawks will destroy the colonists' sense of society. Had that theme been developed more fully, Janus would have been a better novel.

The mystery, unfortunately, is more interesting in its development than in its resolution. A troubling surrealism creeps into the story that left me asking, "Why is any of this happening?" When the novel's big moment finally arrives, the revelation that explains it all, it seemed so contrived and improbable that I was left scratching my head and asking, "But why is any of this really happening?"

John Park's prose style blends power with grace. At times, the writing is too fractured -- a paragraph about this character, a paragraph about that one, then on to someone else -- but it is the story, rather than the way the story is told, that left me vaguely dissatisfied. I can't say that I disliked Janus, but neither can I say that I'm enthused about the novel.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS