A Spy By Nature by Charles Cumming

First published in 2001

A young man, turned down for employment with the Secret Intelligence Service, is offered a contract position working for SIS as an industrial double agent. Alex Milius is given a position with a British oil company with the expectation that CIA agents posing as employees of an American oil company will recruit him to reveal secrets that will give the Americans a competitive advantage over the Brits in oil exploration. After his recruitment by the CIA, the SIS plans to provide Milius with disinformation to feed to the American agents.

A Spy By Nature is well crafted, offering insight into a type of espionage that is likely more relevant to today's world than traditional cloak-and-dagger stories about governments spying on each other. Cumming provides an interesting look at how industrial espionage (probably more common than most of us realize) might be carried out. Alex is a credible character, filled with the combination of self-importance, uncertainty, and naivete that often characterizes ambitious young men. The supporting characters, however, tend to be less interesting: stereotypical corporate types, spymaster types, and an unforgiving ex-girlfriend type.

While the story maintains interest throughout the novel (I disagree with the reviewers who condemn the book as dull -- this is a novel about the interactions of people, not a 007 story with shootouts or explosions, but that doesn't make it dull), I kept getting the feeling that Cumming was setting up a major plot twist, an unexpected ending that never came. As the story reaches its climax, it all seems a bit anti-climactic. Still, strong writing and a solid main character make this book worth reading, even if it never achieves greatness.

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Mockeymen by Ian Watson

Published by Golden Gryphon Press on October 1, 2003

A prolific writer in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, Ian Watson pushed the boundaries of science fiction while bringing literary style to the genre. Mockymen is his most recent novel not written with a collaborator (his first sf novel, The Embedding, was published in 1973). Mockeymen is a brilliantly written story that deserves a wider audience.

Mockeymen is divided into two parts, past and present (with a glimpse of the future at the end). In the story that takes place in the (recent) past, Chrissy Clarke and Steve Bryant manufacture custom jigsaw puzzles. Knut Alver commissions them to take nude photographs of themselves embracing sculptures in Oslo's Vinegard Park at midnight and to create puzzles from those pictures. Soon after accomplishing that task, they begin having nightmares. They become convinced that Alver had been involved in a Norwegian atrocity during World War II. Tormented by her nightmares, Chrissy returns to Oslo to discover the sinister purpose behind the photographs. This part of the novel works nicely as a stand-alone horror story with a really, really creepy ending.

What begins as a tale of the supernatural morphs into a science fiction story in the second (and longer) part of the novel. Set in the present (although the novel's present is our near future), the story involves aliens who arrived on Earth just in time to save the human race from famine and chaos. In exchange for food factories and fusion reactors, the aliens have provided a drug called Bliss to which humans seeking escape from reality flock. A small percentage of Bliss users enter into a permanent coma, and their bodies are provided to the aliens (known as Mockeymen) who use them to conduct trade or engage in sightseeing. Anne Sharman works for an intelligence agency that monitors the activities of the Mockeymen. When she begins to suspect that the aliens have an unspoken and unwelcome motive for occupying human bodies, she encounters a Bliss user who seems to have made an impossible recovery from his coma (sans alien). That character links the past and present stories. Sharman goes on to have an adventure of the sort that only Watson could conceive.

Mockeymen, while a bit more conventional than some of Watson's earlier efforts, is so beautifully written that it should appeal not just to sf fans but to all open minded readers who enjoy a well told tale. Apart from delivering an entertaining story, the novel considers some interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between mind and body. True, the questions aren't new -- as the novel points out, they've been posed since Descartes -- but science fiction has the power to illuminate difficult questions in ways that other forms of literature cannot. Science fiction fans who are bored with sagas of interstellar war and "world building" novels should find Mockeymen an enjoyable departure from the norm. The sharp writing, the skillfully-concocted characters, and the offbeat story combine to make Mockeymen a worthwhile read.

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The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor

Published by Feiwel & Friends on February 15, 2011

The prologue to The Girl Who Became a Beatle contains an apt warning: the novel is a fantasy that requires a willingness to suspend disbelief, to accept the possibility of magic in a fictional universe. If you only like stories that are reality-based, this isn't the novel for you.

Regina is the sixteen-year-old lead vocalist for a pop band called the Caverns. She's in love with Julian, the lead guitarist, but hasn't told him. She's worried that the band is about to break up. She misses her absent mother; she wants to run away. Then one night, after making a wish for fame, she wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed and the Caverns have soared to dizzying heights of popularity by recording Beatles songs (supposedly written by Regina). As she steps into this world, Regina discovers that fame has changed both her life (which now includes a Brad Pitt type boyfriend) and her personality (she's viewed as something of a diva). As she ponders her new life, she is forced to confront her feelings about her mother, Julian, and (most importantly) herself.

The Girl Who Became a Beatle is like comfort food: familiar, predictable, easy to devour, and maybe even a little nutritious. The novel purports to teach life lessons, all of them pretty obvious: Life is what you make it. True friends are better than adoring fans. Be careful what you wish for. Believe in yourself.

The novel is written in the first person, from Regina's perspective. Its use of punchy sentences and short chapters make it a quick read. Whether the novel will succeed with its young adult target audience is unclear to me. I think it depends upon whether readers accept the narrative voice as authentic; whether they believe it belongs to a sixteen-year-old girl. I'm not part of the target audience (being old enough to remember watching The Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan Show) and about the only teenage girls I see these days are at the mall during my infrequent shopping trips, but to my unschooled ear, the narrator's voice seemed to be that of an adult male pretending to be a sixteen-year-old girl. I can't say that made much of a difference to me after I settled into the story, but if teenagers and young adults don't accept the voice as genuine, they might be turned off by the novel. I'd be interested to learn the reactions of members of the target audience in that regard.

Speaking from the perspective of a mature (okay, old) male, I enjoyed the novel more than I thought I would. It will never be mistaken for great literature, but as much as I crave gourmet meals, I'm also a sucker for comfort food. The story delivers solid entertainment and the characters are easy to like.

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The Gentle Giants of Ganymede by James P. Hogan

First published in 1978

The Gentle Giants of Ganymede is the second in a series of related novels that began with Inherit the Stars. It isn't necessary to read the first novel to understand the second, but doing so would give the reader a fuller appreciation of the characters and setting in the second novel. The plots of the two novels, however, are only loosely connected; it would be easy to follow the story in Gentle Giants without reading Inherit the Stars. If you haven't read Inherit the Stars, however, I would recommend doing so. It is a better novel than Gentle Giants.

The "Gentle Giants" to which the title refers appear in Inherit the Stars only as a long dead (or at least long absent) race that once lived on a planet in our solar system (Minerva) that was destroyed in the distant past (the mystery surrounding Minerva's destruction is the force driving Inherit the Stars). A starship of the long-lost Giants returns to the solar system after an extended journey ... one that would take 25 million years if the effects of relativity were ignored. The Giants woefully discover that Minerva is gone and make reluctant contact with the new kids in the solar system: a species known as humans.

The first half of the novel generates some energy despite its tendency to turn into a series of science lectures, primarily focused on how the Giants manage to control gravity. An unfortunate tendency of some "hard" sf authors is to elevate Great Ideas above story or character development, and James Hogan succumbed to that temptation in this novel -- much more than he did in Inherit the Stars. The novel's second half, after First Contact is made, tends to fizzle out altogether. The story leads up to a plot twist that is probably supposed to leave the reader gasping with surprise, but it's not all that surprising and ultimately amounts to just another Great Idea. There is little human (or alien) drama in the story; it's interesting, in its own way, but not captivating.

Inherit the Stars maintained a strong sense of mystery that is absent from the sequel. While the two main characters from Inherit the Stars return in Giants, they play a relatively small role. A computer called ZORAC, responsible for translating communications between humans and the Giants, has more personality than any of the human characters. The Giants are more intriguing (they abhor conflict and value cooperation) but by the novel's second half, they are relegated to the status of tourists -- and who really wants to read about tourists? Ultimately, although the novel has its moments, it doesn't have enough of them to sustain a sense of wonder. Diehard fans of hard sf might enjoy it -- it isn't by any means a bad novel -- but it just isn't in the same league as Inherit the Stars.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan

First published in 1977

In the prologue to Inherit the Stars, two individuals (one in a red spacesuit, one in blue) are making a long journey on foot across desolate land. The one in red is exhausted. The one in blue has greater stamina; he helps the other along but finally leaves him in a cave, promising to return with help. The rest of the novel takes place fifty thousand years later. A body, clad in a red spacesuit, is found in a cave on the moon. A team of scientists is convened to investigate the body's origin (it appears to be human, with all the attributes of a life form that evolved on Earth), as well as the equipment and writings found on or alongside the body. The investigation expands as more specialists, from physicists to biologists to linguists, join the effort. Adding to the puzzle is the discovery of a spaceship buried on Ganymede twenty five million years earlier -- and a much larger body of much different physiology. Victor Hunt is brought in as a generalist to facilitate communication among the specialists and to synthesize the results. The novel follows Hunt in his quest to solve the mystery.

A common failing of "hard" science fiction is the tendency to emphasize the science while shortchanging the fiction. In other words, the writer waxes poetic about his ideas while neglecting character development, dramatic tension, and the other requirements of well-written fiction. Inherit the Stars contains a better balance of science and fiction than many hard sf novels, although the science clearly dominates the fiction. Only two characters have any personality at all: Hunt, about whom we know almost nothing meaningful until late in the novel, when we begin to learn what the man is all about; and a biologist named Danchekker, who fits the stereotype of a gruff, arrogant curmudgeon. The plot can be summarized as "scientists at work," and it's intellectually interesting but lacking in emotional resonance. Fans of action-oriented fiction probably won't find much to admire in Inherit the Stars after the prologue ends.

Inherit the Stars (the first of a series of related novels) is nonetheless a well-written sf mystery that grabs hold of big ideas and pieces them together to solve a fascinating puzzle. It avoids another common failing of hard sf: descriptions of science that are incomprehensible to a lay reader. Hogan clearly explains the science he invokes and makes the application of the scientific process understandable. While I might have hoped for more human drama -- some acknowledgment that hundreds of people working together for years on Earth and for months on a ship traveling to Ganymede might form positive or negative relationships -- the intellectual drama in Inherit the Stars is nearly strong enough to compensate for the absence of its human counterpart. Inherit the Stars is a novel that most sf fans should enjoy.

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