Cottonwood by Scott Phillips

Published by Ballantine Books on March 29, 2005

Scott Phillips' first two novels -- quirky, darkly funny crime stories set roughly in the present -- proved that he can write. In Cottonwood, Phillips departed from the conventions of crime fiction to write a quirky, darkly funny western. Crime works its way into the story, but the crime plot is secondary to Phillips' strong characterization.

Cottonwood takes place between 1872 and 1890. Essentially a mixture of a western and a thriller/mystery, Cottonwood tells the story of Bill Ogden, a photographer who comes to the frontier town of Cottonwood, Kansas to homestead a farm with his new Dutch wife and their son. Ogden doesn't take to farming, so he hires a hand to do most of the work while he establishes a saloon and photography studio in the town. The handyman catches the attention of Ogden's wife, a circumstance that would probably be more upsetting to Ogden but for his uncontrolled gift for charming women, married and unmarried alike.  Eventually he becomes entangled in a dangerous affair, starts wondering about the mysterious disappearance of visitors to Cottonwood, gets involved in an old fashioned shootout, and begins a journey that years later brings him back to a very different Cottonwood.

The story works because Ogden is such a strong character. As he struggles to build a life, struggles with romance, struggles with family, and struggles with moral decisions, the novel's fascination comes from watching him confront (or dodge) those challenges. Phillips tells a lively, imaginative story that is enhanced by his incorporation of a family of Kansas killers into the plot that actually existed. As he did in his first two novels, Phillips proved that he can write. This fine effort deserves a wider audience.

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Second Genesis by Donald Moffitt

First published in 1986

In Donald Moffitt's sequel to The Genesis Quest, Bram and his fellow humans are on their way to the home of Original Man, some thirty-seven million light years from the homeworld of the Nar. The humans were created by the Nar from the genetic code provided in a transmission that originated from the Milky Way. That story is told in The Genesis Quest and is summarized in chapter two of Second Genesis, a longish chapter you don't need to read if you've read and can recall the first novel. By the same token, the second chapter is so detailed that it's possible to read Second Genesis without reading The Genesis Quest first.

As they travel, the humans encounter an astronomical event that threatens the Nar worlds and the humans who remained with them. Much later, nearing the home of original man, they encounter a huge disc-shaped world, prompting an extended discussion of the engineering involved in its construction. A good chunk of the novel describes the archeological digs that enlighten the travelers about the lifestyles of Original Man. Additional adventures include contact with well-imagined insect-like aliens and confrontation of a crisis that threatens to doom the second incarnation of humankind. The novel ends with a nice symmetry that should please those who have read both novels.

The most serious problem with The Genesis Quest is its wordiness. Moffitt could have eliminated about 40 percent of the text, leaving a tightly spun story of mankind's search for its roots. Moffitt tends to get carried away with science lectures. For that reason, the narrative sometimes tends to drag, although a welcome dose of action in the last third of the novel brings the story back to life. Moffitt isn't particularly skilled at crafting sentences -- the novel has an unpolished feel -- but the writing style is an improvement over his first novel, The Jupiter Theft. As always, his human characters lack individual personalities. The novel's strength is the powerful imagination Moffitt brings to his epic view of the future, particularly with regard to evolutionary responses to extinction events. Most fans of future histories and space opera should enjoy Second Genesis.

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The Genesis Quest by Donald Moffitt

First published in 1986

Astronomers on a Nar moon receive a transmission that has traveled thirty-seven million light years. The transmission contains the genetic code for human life as well as a repository of human knowledge and culture. Using the genetic information, the Nar brew a batch of humans -- something they probably wouldn't have done had they known what a troublesome species the human race can be. A human culture has been in existence for some time as the main story begins. The novel follows the human Bram from his youth (when he dreams of traveling to Earth, the home of Original Man, an impossibility unless he can overcome the limiting speed of light or achieve immortality) through his young adulthood, when he discovers shocking information in the transmission from Earth that humans have never before seen. Other humans, convinced that the Nar are "keeping them down," plot insurrection.

The Genesis Quest is Donald Moffitt's second novel. Its story is continued in his third novel, Second Genesis. The Genesis Quest avoids many of the flaws in his first novel, The Jupiter Theft: wooden dialog, lengthy science lectures, and unnecessary politics. The political dimension in The Genesis Quest, while rather obviously drawn from isolationist strands of American politics, works well -- and is, in fact, a vital part of the plot. Moffitt's writing style is strong; his dialog is natural. There's plenty of hard science in The Genesis Quest, but it is carefully integrated into the plot and doesn't slow the novel's pace.

Plot dominates over character development. The characters have undistinguished personalities except for those (like the rebel leader) who are stereotypes. Sometimes the characters behave inexplicably -- why Bram doesn't leave the woman who consistently treats him like garbage was a mystery to me -- but that's forgivable, given that real people are also prone to inexplicable behavior. Moffitt's strength, however, lies not in the development of human characters but in the creation of aliens, and in that regard, The Genesis Quest excels. The Nar (who are sort of floral in nature) are indeed alien -- not humans with funny hair like typical television aliens or overgrown lizards like typical movie aliens. Moffitt put some serious thought into Nar physiology and culture.

Moffitt also worked at developing a credible plot, another of the novel's strengths. Although the story might be a bit longer than necessary, it moves at an appropriate pace, picking up speed in the second half as Moffitt delivers some fast action. The ending is satisfying, and sets the scene nicely for the sequel. Ultimately, while The Genesis Quest isn't a perfect novel, it's a fun one that should appeal to fans of hard sf.

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The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

First published in 1986

At some point in The Sportswriter, the title character talks about feeling "a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel." That, I think, is what Richard Ford's novel tries to do. The Sportswriter is a snapshot of a man's undramatic life in middle age, an attempt to make it knowable.

There are those who become bored by novels that lack a conventional plot -- a murder mystery to solve, an alien invasion to defeat -- but it isn't fair to complain (as have many Amazon reviewers) that "nothing happens" during the course of The Sportswriter. Plenty of things happen during the short time span the novel covers: Frank Bascombe visits his son's grave, takes a trip to Detroit with his girlfriend, interviews a mentally shaky former athlete, has Easter dinner with his girlfriend's family, gets punched in the mouth, has significant conversations with his ex-wife and an old girlfriend, endures a male friend's unwelcome advance, chats with a teenage girl after a car knocks a shopping cart into the phone booth he occupies, flirts with an office intern ... nothing terribly exciting, no bombs to disarm or terrorists to defeat, just the random events of a life. But as Frank muses about those events, and as he recalls other events that shaped his life in ways large and small, we come to know him, to understand him ... and, with luck, we may understand ourselves or our friends and family a bit better for the effort of examining Frank's life.

It's unusual and oddly comforting to read a novel about a man who is coming to terms with the tragedy in his life (his son's death and his subsequent divorce), who is neither cynical nor self-loathing, who is trying to live decently and who admits his mistakes. What The Sportswriter lacks in dramatic tension it makes up for with insightful examination: of attitudes, emotions, lifestyles, relationships. It is filled with lessons: happiness comes from living in the moment without the distracted wondering about other, better moments that might exist; an attempt to know everything about another person during a one night stand becomes a miserable substitute for self-knowledge; the future is a mystery to be embraced; the "world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being." Yet for all the lessons Frank has learned, he's living a deliberately isolated life; he professes to like people but most often stands apart from them, perhaps afraid of new attachments in the wake of losing his son and wife. Frank claims that to be a sportswriter "is to live your life mostly with your thoughts, and only the edge of others'." Frank refuses to admit that his superficial relationships are not caused by his chosen profession. As a defense mechanism against pain, he lives his life largely within his own mind (a state he describes as "dreaminess"), yet he desperately wants to feel close to (and even marry) a girlfriend who he knows isn't right for him. Frank clearly has more to learn, and that too, I think, is one of the book's lessons.  Frank continues to try; he's holding his life together and slowly reopening himself to the world around him.

Finally, the novel is beautifully written. Ford has a pitch-perfect ear for dialog and regional speech patterns. I think The Sportswriter is a remarkable achievement. Although it isn't the right novel for readers who crave fast action or a plot-driven story, I admired it immensely.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Finding Hoseyn by Colin MacKinnon

First published in 1986

Jim Morgan, the main character in Finding Hoseyn, is a war correspondent. He loves war, loves writing about it. In 1977 he's assigned to cover the Mideast from Tehran. While snooping through stories filed by other reporters on a slow news day, Morgan comes across an account of a man (Shlomo Givon) who was gunned down in the street. The reporter who wrote the story is immediately deported. In an off-the-record conversation with an American intelligence officer, Morgan learns that Hoseyn Jandaqi, a member of Shohada (an operational branch of the Mojahedin), is one of the suspected assassins, and that Hoseyn has been spirited out of the country. Morgan suspects the assassination is tied into recent killings of American military personnel, and wonders if Givon was targeted because he was on a strategic mission for the Israelis. Unable to obtain information from official sources about the reasons for Givon's presence in Iran, Morgan travels to Paris, Munich, and Beirut to interview sources in an attempt to puzzle out the reason for the killing and to track down Hoseyn. Meanwhile, an Israeli agent named Ari Netzer is trying to learn what Givon discovered that got him killed, a quest that soon has him searching for two Hoseyns--the man who killed Givon and Hoseyn Kiani, manager of a mysterious project, code named EAGLE, that Givon had been investigating before his death.

The name Hoseyn in the title potentially has a triple meaning. It could refer to either of the shadowy characters in the novel named Hoseyn or to Hoseyn ibn Ali, Muhammed's grandson, who led the Battle of Karbala against Yazid I in 680 AD, and whose memory is invoked by a mullah in the novel as he exhorts a crowd to "become Hoseyn" in a modern battle against the shah. In that and in other respects, Finding Hoseyn is an impressive and knowledgeable portrayal of a tension-filled Iran in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini, shortly before the 1979 revolution which overthrew the shah. Colin MacKinnon's knowledge of the area, derived from six years of living in Iran and working as the Tehran director of the American Institute of Iranian Studies before pursuing a career in journalism, is evident in his rich descriptions of the land and its peoples.

Every now and then, MacKinnon tosses in an awkward, disjointed, run-on sentence; not the sort of writing one expects from a journalist. This was MacKinnon's first novel; perhaps he overcompensated a bit in making the transition from journalist to novelist. For the most part, however, MacKinnon writes fluidly, with a good sense of pace. The plot, while a bit convoluted, is filled with intrigue. The sense that one hand never knows what the other is doing -- within the American, Iranian, and Israeli governments -- has the feeling of reality. In short, this is an enjoyable novel, more an intellectual guessing game than an action packed thriller, although McKinnon flavors the novel with enough action scenes to keep the plot moving.

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