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Ice Cold on Mars Author Stephen Baxter puts his hard science rep. on the line and goes a little Disney on us in his latest novel. Why? Also, Alan Dean Foster gets back on track.
There are many things you could say about ADF's latest return to his Humanx universe - featuring hero Flinx, his dewadly telepathic minidrag companion, and a taste for falling into adventures - but prime amongst them must be pheeeeew. For a while us chaps and chapesses at the 'Nest though Alan Dean Foster has totally lost it. The last few novels we picked up were his Founding of the Commonwealth series, and, let's face it, they had the full suck power of a wormhole on genetically modified steroids. As an attempt (however worthy) to construct a fully fleshed out proto-history of his Commonwealth universe, they read like just that. A history. A rather dry and tedious history book written by a bored science fiction academic doing his duty to maintain his flagging tenure in SF-U. There weren't any characters, just walk-on parts for shallow docu-reinactments, interspersed by essays and info-dumps. Reunion reunites ADF with his lost muse, however, and a partial return to the form of earlier works (almost classics, now), like The Tar-Aiym-Krang. For those of you new to the series, a little detail. Flinx is an orphan, raised as a thief, whose telepathic talents are the results of tampering by a sect of renegade eugenicists. It's a coming of age saga set against a SF backdrop, rather than the sword and sorcery-fest provided by the likes of David Eddings and co. In this book, Flinx is still tooling around the universe in a souped-up high-tech star ship, provided by a bunch of cuddly highly evolved wookie-like types. It's the hyperspace equivalent of one of Bond's Q-modified Aston Martins, and has more than a few tricks up its ion-fed exhaust pipe. Flinx is on a quest to find out more about the detail of his birth, and the mystery of who his father & mother was; a hunt which will lead him from the comfort of Earth to deep into AAnn space (the lizard-like orcs of the series). One interesting twist is that the Commonwealth, which started out being portrayed a benevolent Federation-like civilization, has more recently been slowly having its dark side painted for us. Certain portions of the Humanx Church and Commonwealth government now seem to be pursuing Flinx with the aim of wiping out his aberrant DNA from the face of the gene pool. Reunion showcases many of Alan Dean Foster's strengths, including the ability to weave believable alien societies, speech mannerism, and eco-systems into the plot (Midworld, anyone?); this includes a large portion of desert world, with an insert that shoots compressed sand with the intensity of a short-range water knife. The novel does get slightly Deus Ex Machina at the end - always a danger when you introduce big dumb objects into the mix - but this is mitigated by the welcome return of a surprise adversary. The tension drops slightly loose towards the middle of the work, and this tends to lend a feel that you're dipping into an episode of Farscape, complete with story threads that are due to be picked up in later episodes down the story arc. This aside, the Commonwealth is still one of the few SF universes that can hold a candle to Niven's Known Space. A few more like this, and we may even forgive ADF for the Founding of the Commonwealth books. One last point. Reunion's cover art (courtesy of Robert Hunt: no relation) is truly terrible. Flinx has been drawn like the hero of a Mills and Boon novel, striking a manly pose with his arms crossed, Pip rendered as Hissing Sid with wings added as an afterthought. Stephen Hunt Check out website: www.delreydigital.com
One of the nice things (sometimes) about getting review copies, is that it forces you to read books you might not pick off the shelf and buy yourself. Not that I've got anything against Stephen Baxter mind, some of his earlier works were mighty fine. But here's the thing. There's something about anthropomorphic fantasy, which for me always dredges up bad associations with Disney and kiddie-fiction; you know the kind of things: 101 Dalmations, The Pussycat From Outer Space; Watership Down. SFF rarely does this thing well for adults - with the odd exception like Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series, or Riverwall. So imagine my surprise when I saw that Stephen Baxter, the high-science Hawking of the hard SF world, brought out a series of books featuring a … woolly mammoth. This is the fourth books in the series, the first being the imaginatively entitled 'Mammoth'. Why did he do it? Library sales to the school's fifth form? It does kind of come across that way, with lots of worthy elements; like environmentalism, extinction, animal societies etc. We've moved on from the ice-age, and moved forward to 3000AD, when a terraformed Mars is collapsing back to nature, or rather a cold, airless, red-dust desert. Mankind has recently abandoned the planet en masse. There's no explanation of why this should be the case. War? Ecosystem failure? Icebones, the mammoth heroine of the title, comes out of suspended animation, only to find herself in a zoo, where fellow woolly types are mourning the passing of the 'lost' (their name for humanity), who have done a collective species-type bunk from the planet. No more free meals. No more medical care. No more oxygen. Luckily, the mammoths are telepaths, and can communicate with each other around the world using the stones of the world as a kind of mystical e-mail. Of course, one of the problems with an all-animal cast is that you are kind of limited in what they can do, plot-wise … the old favourites being eating, sleeping, mating, fighting and ... the favourite of many a Disney film ... a bit of incredible journeying, otherwise known as migrating. So hey, ho, it's off our mammoths go for a journey around the world, in search of a promised land, where human life forms can still flourish in the dying world. They walk about a bit, marveling at human wonders left behind, meeting odd 'old mars' life forms coming back to life, as well as a bunch of genetically engineered Terran life brought in during the original terraforming. On the way, they have to learn to hang together and become a true caring family-clan of elephants, one for all and all for one. Within the limited constraints of the anthropomorphic playing field, Icebones is fairly engaging. There's an eerie haunted feeling in the abandoned marscapes he paints, echoes of Bradbury, and as much as you could be expected to bring hairy elephants to literary life, Baxter does it. They've got their own religion (shades of Watership Down and the great canny sky bunny), the bulls count coup like true apaches, and you can see echoes of Olaf Stapledon in the whole affair. Surprisingly interesting. Stephen Hunt
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OTHER CONTENT - March 2002
Fortunate
Son (Trek) Illegal
Aliens & a Dream Thief Cold
Front (Trek)
The
Ares Express & the Tomorrow People
Silent
Enemy (Trek) Ice
Cold on Mars
Dear
Doctor (Trek) Sleeping
Dogs (Trek) Shadows
of P'Jem (Trek) 
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Reunion.
Alan Dean Foster.
Icebones.
Stephen Baxter.
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