Date: Fri 11-Aug-1995

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Illustration: C

Quick Words:

sci-fi-books-review

Full Text:

GOOD ADVENTURE SCI-FI IS HARD TO FIND

(with photo)

The face of Kobryn, Minister of Security, appeared on the big viewscreen.

"The government has decided that all research in genetic engineering must be

stopped," he said. "You and your colleagues - some two thousand scientists in

all - are to be permanently exiled, together with your immediate families,

aboard an orbital satellite that has been set aside especially for you."

Kobryn's face hardened.

"The decision has been made," he said. "It is final. There is no appeal. We

will begin transporting you to the orbital station tomorrow."

The viewscreen went blank, leaving them all sitting there stunned into

silence.

The Exiles Trilogy

By Ben Bova

By Kim J. Harmon

I have a whole shelf of Robert Heinlein books at home. Some of them - like

Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - are dog-eared to the

point that they should be thrown away.

But I can't do that. Science-fiction, to me, was Heinlein. The adventure, the

wonder... that's what science-fiction was all about and that's what I grew up

on. Now, though, when I get through my cycle of reading mystery and horror and

espionage and find myself back at science fiction, I also find myself looking

for the type of novel that Heinlein would have written.

But this is a world peopled by cyberpunks in near-future worlds that scarcely

resemble ours; of hard-science concepts that stretch the limits of our own

basic knowledge and suck out the wonder and excitement that is hidden

somewhere behind the formulas and mathematical equations; of military sci-fi

that virtually beats the original concepts of Star Wars into a bloody pulp; of

marriages between science-fiction and marketing (like the Predator series by

Steve Perry or the novelizations of The X-Files by Charles L. Grant).

Good, solid adventure sci-fi is hard to find.

Which usually leads me back to Ben Bova, a West Hartford author who has

written some of the best science-fiction there is and who never seems to

forget what exploring space is all about. His books - The Winds of Altair, The

Exiles Trilogy and As On A Darkling Plain - are three of my all-time

favorites. There are other books that are pretty good, too, all of them brand

new, and if you would like to explore new worlds or meet an alien species,

then perhaps you'd might like to take a look at one of these:

Life Form (ACE, 1995, by Alan Dean Foster) - First contact with an alien race

is still the most exciting premise in science fiction and Alan Dean Foster -

who has touched every corner of the field in his years, from adventure (

Cachalot ) to hard science ( Greenthieves ) to comedy ( Codgerpace ) - does it

as well as anyone.

Nine scientists travel to a distant planet and come into contact with a

humanoid race. But the discovery soon turns horrifying as the scientists

discover that nature's rules don't apply everywhere in the universe.

Woman With A Shadow (DAW Books, 1995, by Karen Haber) - The premise is simple

and well-trodden, that of a young woman who, in the wake of the death of her

mother and father, has to flee her home planet after committing a terrible,

yet unintentional, crime.

Haber writes, with an economical style, a Heinlein-esque story of a young

woman finding her way in an unknown galaxy, fighting her own battles and

becoming a part of others, discovering things about herself and the people she

befriends. The book moves along quite well and has no pretentions. It is

simply nice, enjoyable entertainment.

The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues (Bantam Spectra, 1994, by Harry

Harrison) - Slippery Jim DiGriz is one of the most endearing characters of

science fiction and he is back for yet another adventure in Harry Harrison's

long-running series.

This time, though, Slippery Jim seems as if he has run out of luck. After

being nabbed trying to steal 500,000-credit coins from the new Galactic Mint,

he is sent on a mission to a prison planet to recover an alien artifact.

Trouble is, if he doesn't find it in 30 standard days, the slow-acting poison

the government injected into his bloodstream would put the dead on his

deadline. Another typical, fun interstellar adventure.

Aggressor Six (ROC, 1994, by Wil McCarthy) - It smelled a little too much like

military science fiction and tasted a little too much like Orson Scott Card's

Ender's Game and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, but once I started

reading Aggressor Six I knew I was in for something completely different.

The Waisters are an alien race traveling at light speed from the waists of

Orion's Belt, destroying whole star systems in their path. The Aggressor Six

is a half-dozen humans gathered together to determine a way, by simulating a

Waister family unit, to think like, and later defeat, the armada.

It is a riveting story that comes to an unexpected and shocking ending.

Pick it up.

Flies From The Amber (ROC, 1995, by Wil McCarthy) - The trouble with writing a

novel around a complex hard-science problem is that you are in danger of

losing too many people.

McCarthy comes close, with his Flies From The Amber , but somehow manages not

to. An Earth ship has been summoned to a distant star system to investigate

what could be an alien artifact, but stumbles across something else -

something which can't possibly exist - at the event horizon of a yawning black

hole. Another story might collapse under the weight of an idea unfathomable to

most, but Flies From The Amber moves along quite nicely as an adventure story

as the Earth ship meets up - ever so briefly - with an ancient alien race.

Dr Dimension: Masters of Spacetime (ROC, 1995, by John DeChancie and David

Bischoff) - One of the most recent - and most overdone - subgenres of science

fiction is the comic novel.

With The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy really starting everything and Harry

Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero fueling it even more, this subgenre has

exploded to the point where a lot of science fiction is turning just plain

silly. But DeChancie and Bischoff, two of the best when it comes to humor and

science fiction, stay cool in their Dr Dimension series and give us some

solid, laugh-out-loud entertainment with Masters of Spacetime.

With this stuff proliferating like weeds in the tomato garden, stick with

those who know what they are doing.