Midworld by Alan Dean Foster

First published in 1975

Long before the concept of world building gained currency among science fiction fans, Alan Dean Foster built one of the most imaginative worlds in the genre.  Midworld takes place on an unnamed planet covered with dense vegetation, rising from the surface (Lower Hell) to the sky (Upper Hell) in seven layers.  Although it is filled with predatory plants and animals, humans -- the descendants of a crashed spacecraft -- have carved out a niche in the middle levels.  They have adapted to the world to such an extent that they seem to communicate in an almost worshipful way with the trees and vegetation that make their survival possible.  They “emfol” with plant life, an empathic form of communication that assures the plant’s willingness to be used for their purposes.  A science station, illegally established on the world by a corporate entity, is unaware of the world’s human population until a skimmer flown by two scientists is swatted from the air by a flying nightmare.  The scientists -- Logan and Cohoma -- are saved by Born, who eventually leads them on a dangerous journey back to their station.  When Born learns what the science station is doing, conflict ensues.

Midworld combines a nifty story of corporate greed with a lost world adventure.  Most of the novel -- the best part of the novel -- pits humans against the many dangers that Foster imagines on a world that is both treacherous and (for those who understand it) welcoming.  In the final quarter of the novel, the humans who have adapted to the world and the newcomers who want to exploit it are not playing well together.  In that regard, Midworld develops a less-than-subtle pro-environmentalist message, one that cleverly transplants the Gaia theory to an alien world.  The human inhabitants of the world take only what they need, and only after they emfol with the plant life to determine whether the plant is ready to be taken.  The corporate outsiders are, of course, taking whatever they want, without regard to the world’s needs, and are thus (at least in Born’s opinion) set on a path that will lead to the world’s destruction.  The heavy-handedness of the “good versus evil” storyline is offset in the final pages, which challenge the reader to reconsider the nature of good and evil in the circumstances that Foster imagines.

Foster’s writing style is lively; it occasionally has a literary feel that is uncommon in genre fiction.  For that reason, and for the brilliantly conceived world that Foster envisions, this largely forgotten novel comes close to meriting the status of a science fiction classic.

RECOMMENDED

The Detour by Andromeda Romano-Lax

Published by Soho Press on February 14, 2012

Ten years after leaving Italy, Ernst Vogler returns to the country where he spent five eventful days. To tell the story of those days, The Detour returns to 1938. Vogler is on the curatorial staff for the Sonderprojekt, acquiring art for the Reich, particularly art that is pleasing to the Führer. His mentor, Gerhard, has been seized and taken to Dachau, imprisoned for the crime of having opinions. It is unwise, in this era, to ask the wrong questions, particularly if one questions the wisdom of concentrating all of Europe's most valued art in Germany and Austria, and so Vogler keeps that question to himself. In Gerhard's absence, Vogler is next in line for an important assignment: travel to Rome to transport a priceless sculpture, Myron's Discus Thrower, back to Germany.

Vogler begins a cross-country trip to the German border, accompanied by the sculpture and the brothers Cosimo and Enzo. As the miles fly past, we learn more about Vogler's life: his difficult relationship with the father he continually disappointed; the "strange variation" that set him apart from other children; the source of the scar that makes him so self-conscious; his loss of passion for anything but art, "itself a substitution for other losses." As the trip continues, Vogler learns that the route has been planned so that Enzo can make a romantic detour. One detour leads to another until Vogler meets the brothers' family, including their sister Rosina.

The Detour tells a story that fascinates in multiple ways. On its simplest level, the novel builds thriller-like tension as the reader wonders about the fate of Discus Thrower and the men who are bringing it to the border. The tension builds to a dramatic climax that I didn't anticipate. The Detour also works as an unusual love story in a time of war: "War takes away nearly everything, but perhaps not that final illogical tendency [the possibility of romance] that allows us to continue living." Actually, there are two love stories: one, involving the brothers, is told obliquely; the other, involving Vogler, is eventful but a bit predictable.

From a more intellectual perspective, The Detour looks at pre-war Europe through the lens of art as Vogler and Rosina argue about whether Discus Thrower represents an ideal: the German loves the sculpture's physical perfection while the Italian despises its failure to represent emotion and individuality. Vogler admires the perfection of the human form -- a notion of the Übermensch that the Nazis recast in racial terms -- and seeks it out in art, yet he was raised with an acute understanding of his own physical imperfection and has carried the shame of that defect throughout his life. Rosina, of course, sees things quite differently.

At its best, The Detour is a character study that illustrates the conflict many German citizens experienced during and after Hitler's rise to power. Vogler sees things (like Gerhard's arrest) that he knows are wrong but does nothing to prevent them. He signs onto "the pact of silent paralysis that is to blame for everything." He maintains a sincere sense of duty and loyalty but resents "unity-building drivel." Ultimately the reader wonders whether Vogler can overcome his sense of obedience and order, whether he can make a decision -- the correct decision -- based solely on an emotional understanding of right and wrong.

The Detour is a sophisticated, sobering novel told in a compelling voice. There's a bit too much exposition at the end as the story circles back to the present. The final scene is too obvious; it detracts from the story that precedes it. The novel is well worth reading for the events that occur in 1938, not so much for the much shorter passages devoted to 1948.

RECOMMENDED

Oath of Office by Michael Palmer

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 14, 2012

The doctors in Oath of Office aren’t Marcus Welby.  They have problems.  Serious problems.  Dr. John Meacham, fearful of losing his license after yelling at yet another patient, kills seven people in his office before trying to kill himself -- a fairly clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath, to which the title refers.  Dr. Lou Welcome’s license was once suspended for self-prescribing amphetamines.  Having been helped through recovery by a physician’s wellness program, Welcome took a part-time job with the program in addition to his part-time position in an ER.  Meacham was one of Welcome’s clients.  Welcome is now in trouble with his boss, who blames Welcome for failing to demand more aggressive treatment of Meacham’s mental instability.  When the doctors treating Meacham all behave negligently, when Meacham’s widow endangers Welcome with her bizarrely fixated behavior, and when a chef at a local eatery sticks his thumb on a chopping block, Welcome begins to wonder whether the whole town has gone batty.

Developing alongside Welcome’s story is one involving the president, his wife, and a disgraced Secretary of Agriculture who resigned after being photographed with a naked teenage girl inside a motel room.  The First Lady rather bizarrely agrees to assist an unknown Mystery Man in an effort to clear the SecAg’s name and obtain his reinstatement to his former position.  To reveal how these two storylines converge would risk spoiling a clever plot; suffice it to say that you might learn more about agriculture than you knew before you began reading.

Oath of Office pairs a medical mystery with a story of political intrigue.  The plot is intellectually engaging and sufficiently fast moving to keep thriller fans happy.   The story seems plausible (an increasing rarity in the world of thrillers) although I’m not a scientist and might be easily fooled.  The source of the bizarre behavior isn’t much of a mystery; it’s fairly obvious by the novel’s midway point.  There are times when the villains do remarkably stupid things for the sake of moving the plot along, but those lapses of logic are forgivable.  An improbable romantic subplot neither adds nor detracts from the story.  A couple of plot twists toward the end are nifty if not entirely unexpected.  One of the final scenes will appeal to fans of gruesome.

Michael Palmer’s characters are adequate if not particularly memorable.  Characters who attend AA and reverently recite the serenity prayer are standard fixtures in thrillers.  Like many of those characters, Welcome is a bit too self-righteous about his day-to-day sobriety.  However justified it might be in the real world, pride is a deadly sin when exhibited in fiction.

The dialog Palmer gives to members of the medical community is convincing.  Dialog spoken by streetwise characters suggests that Palmer has spent more time in an office than hanging out on the streets.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Palmer’s best scenes showcase Welcome’s skillful response to medical emergencies.  Those passages are captivating, filled with tension and urgency.  The rest of the novel is written in a capable if unremarkable prose style.  One of the primary action scenes is unoriginal:  any thriller set in the heartland seems to feature characters running through a cornfield while being chased by a thresher.  A couple of times the narrative gets bogged down in discussions about the efficacy of AA versus psychotherapy as a treatment for substance abuse.  Recovery wonks might find the discussions fascinating but I thought they were distracting.  Fortunately those shortcomings are more than offset by Palmer’s creative story.  On the strength of its plot and its fast-moving action, Oath of Office is a novel that most thriller fans (not just medical thriller fans) should enjoy.

RECOMMENDED

Pure by Julianna Baggott

Published by Grand Central Publishing on February 8, 2012

Nine years after the Detonations, Pressia (who has a doll's head where her hand should be) is about to turn sixteen and is worried that she'll be picked up by the revolutionary group OSR and turned into a killer ... or perhaps a target. Her story initially alternates with that of Partridge, a boy who, though fortunate to live inside the Dome, resents his powerful father and wonders about his mother's fate. Inhabitants of the Dome think of those who live outside the dome as "wretches." The wretches disparagingly refer to those who live inside the Dome as "Pures." The wretches improbably experienced "mutations" during the Detonations; things they were carrying are now bonded with their bodies. Some less fortunate wretches fused with the earth, some fused with buildings, some with animals, some with machinery, some with other people (collections of people all fused together are called "Groupies"). All this fusing is supposedly the result of bombs that "disrupted cellular structures" combined with "nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules." I'm not a scientist but his sounds more like doubletalk than science to me. If you can swallow the premise -- and it's difficult to take seriously a novel that gives new meaning to My Mother the Car -- Pure tells a surprisingly entertaining story.

Believing that his mother might still be alive, Partridge does the unthinkable: he leaves the Dome to search for her. It is of course inevitable that Pressia, fleeing from the OSR, will encounter Partridge, fleeing from the Dome. Although it seems that the story depends upon this fortuitous (and formulaic) coincidence, the plot is more complex than it first appears.

Pure is difficult to pigeonhole. It combines elements of a horror story (a wolfman carries off a child, a Dust creature reaches up from the ground to snatch Partridge) with a fantasy (the fused people strike me as more fantasy than science fiction), blends in a family drama, adds action scenes that echo The Hunger Games with a twist of Escape from New York, incorporates some Soviet-style darkness balanced with stirring heroism, and even sneaks in romantic subplots.

What to make of the resulting mashup? Labels aside, Pure is an appealing, smart, quirky addition to the ever-growing field of post-apocalyptic fiction. Although the plot is often derivative, the novel's strength lies in its characters. Except for a fused character who is very much like a two-headed character Harlan Ellison created for a short story and reprised in an episode of Masters of Science Fiction, Julianna Baggott's leading characters are unique individuals with surprisingly well developed personalities (something that is far too rare in fantasy and science fiction).

Dystopian fiction often offers a political point of view but it's rather subdued in Pure. In that regard, Baggott's best thought is that the prisons and "rehabilitation centers" of the future are built tall so that people know "that you live under their roof or in their shadow." Some of the wretches have developed odd religious beliefs -- they consider the Detonations to be punishment for their sins -- that cleverly reflect the oddness of some contemporary religious dogma. A group of (for lack of a better term) feminist wretches blame the mess that has been made of the world on men (a gender whose members are known to the women as "Deaths"); they prefer to live in a heavily armed collective. The mess came about, in part, because of the convolution of church and state. While all of this is interesting if not entirely original, the novel's larger message, I think, is that "when you live in a place of safety and comfort," it's easy to ignore the less fortunate who are hidden from your view. That's always worth remembering.

Still, Pure is more a well told story about troubled people than a novel of ideas. Neat plot twists require the characters to rethink their lives. Pressia's descriptions of her "heart-pounding" feelings for Bradwell occasionally come a bit too close to chick lit for my taste, but in most respects the writing is solid. Despite her deceptively ordinary prose, there's a poignancy in Baggott's writing that's rare in science fiction. Pure is a fine novel, one that makes me look forward to the remaining installments of Baggott's trilogy.

RECOMMENDED

The Eden Prophecy by Graham Brown

Published by Bantam on January 31, 2012

Stop me if you've heard this before: terrorists are about to unleash a dangerous new virus on an unsuspecting world. Yes, you've heard it before. You're also familiar with the chase scenes (this book features a car and motorcycle chasing a boat and dune buggies chasing ATVs), gunfights, explosions, hot women, studly men, and exotic locales, all standard ingredients in the recipe for a movie-style thriller. There's even a villain named Draco and some international finance intrigue involving stolen artwork. So why bother to open this book when it sounds like bad imitation of a Bond movie? A few reasons come to mind.

First, the virus is designed to infect cells but leave them intact, rather than destroying them as would a typical virus. The purpose of the infection isn't immediately clear, but once it was revealed I had to give Graham Brown credit for avoiding the obvious. His virus isn't unique -- I've seen the concept before -- but it isn't trite. Second, the terrorist group isn't one of the usual suspects (hint: it isn't Islamic!). Third, before it turns into a Bond film, the novel sounds like a Dan Brown story, complete with archeologists and a lost scroll written in a lost language that holds the key to .... something. The intersection of the two thriller subgenres produces an intriguing result, even if it's not quite new. Fourth, the novel has important things to say about overpopulation and torture and the inequities that result from making medical research largely dependent upon a market economy. There's also a useful theological message: Question authority, even (or especially) if the authority is biblical, but don't invite Armageddon to prove the falsity of divinity.

But enough of messages and plot points. The real reason to read The Eden Prophecy, despite its familiarity, is simple: it's a good book. In addition to the standard story about good guys saving humanity from bad guys, there is a more personal story about saving a child from a fast-approaching death, although it fades into the background until the final chapters. The good guys, National Research Institute operative Danielle Laidlaw and an ex-mercenary named Hawker, have been road tested in Brown's earlier novels, Black Rain and Black Sun. (Reading the prior novels isn't necessary to understand this one, but doing so would enhance a reader's appreciation of the secret revealed at the novel's climax.) Laidlaw and Hawker aren't complex characters but Brown gives them good chemistry. The story races along faster than a turbo-charged dune buggy. Brown's writing style is clean and direct, well-suited to an action-driven story. The "race against the clock" ending might be too predictable, too movie-like despite the insertion of a final plot twist, but it's consistent with the novel's slightly outrageous, cocky attitude.

The Eden Prophecy is well researched: in addition to the Old Testament (as suggested by the title), we hear about ancient languages and Gilgamesh and telomeres and Middle Eastern geography and the 5.9K event (a geological event, not a race). A surprising amount of information is packed into this novel. Still, I don't recommend The Eden Prophecy for its history or science lessons. I recommend it because it's fun.

RECOMMENDED