Where No Dog Has Gone Before

The excitement stirred up by the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik last year occasioned quite a few new books on the dawn of the Space Age. But perhaps none was more unique and touching, detailed, rich and evocative than Nick Abad-zis’s Laika (First Second, trade paperback, $17.95, 205 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-101-0).

This accomplished graphic novel is the definitively researched story—with some artistic interpolations—of the poor little critter inside Sputnik II, a test animal sacrificed to politics, science, and “man’s ambitions.” In assessing the accomplishments of Abadzis, we’ll naturally have to kowtow to the medium itself and talk separately about both story and artwork, always acknowledging that they work hand in hand.

The narrative is divided into a mere four chapters, with the last one being a full eighty pages. In the first division, we meet Korolev, ex-prisoner of the gulag and now Chief Designer of the Sputnik program. He and his crew celebrate the milestone launch of Sputnik I, and shortly thereafter receive orders from Khrushchev himself mandating another launch as soon as possible—a launch with some kind of special upgrade to command the world’s attention. The scientists hit upon the notion of lofting an animal into orbit. But unfortunately the trip will be one-way.

Chapter 2 flashes back to the birth of Laika—originally named Kudryavka for her curly tail—and follows her rough-and-tumble life before she is purchased by the government labs.

In Chapter 3 we’re introduced to Laika’s human handlers, most notably Yelena Dubrovsky, and to the training regimen the dogs undergo. Chapter 4 finally hooks up again with the realtime narrative. Laika is chosen as the first living organism to attain orbit, transported to the launch facility, and rockets to her sad fate.

Throughout this tale we spend equal time among the human sphere as we do with Laika’s POV. Emotional and intellectual themes, both small and subtle and large and bold, are explored. The domestic life of Laika’s original family; Korolev’s desire to triumph over past adversity; Yelena’s love for the animals in her charge; her co-worker Dr. Gazenko’s unrequited love for Yelena—all these quintessential human concerns are conveyed with insight and drama by the artist/author. For instance, when Laika was a wild dog of the streets, she was fed by a merchant. Taken away, she leaves a hole in the merchant’s heart, depicted eloquently in a single wordless panel that has the man gazing down bereft at the place in the street where Laika used to rest.

In telling any naturalistic story involving an animal “protagonist,” the two main things to avoid are anthropomorphism and sentimentality. Abadzis is scrupulous in steering clear of these twin shoals. True, we get to hear Laika “talk” and “think” and “dream,” but we are never sure if these are not just the interpretations of her actions put upon her by humans. As for undue bathos, Abad-zis earns any heart-tugs with his clear-eyed portrayals of both human and canine behavior.

As for his art, I find it to be alluring without being show-offy, almost a “clear line” style. His page compositions are inventive yet easy to follow. I believe I encountered only two full-page spreads in the whole book. One is of Laika flying, and it’s a brilliant tribute to Russian painter Marc Chagall. The other is of Laika’s enormous rocket on the launch pad, and it looks like a Soviet Realist poster. Very clever, both times.

Non-ideological, objective yet empathetic, this book shows how fiction holds all the trump cards over mere journalism when it comes to penetrating to the essence of historical moments and the human heart. It deserves to stand next to Clifford Simak’s classic story “Desertion,” which features its own noble canine.

I Like Ike

 We often hear a writer touted as working in a Heinleinian mode. And again, the name of Clarke is frequently trotted out for purposes of literary comparison and influence attribution. But much less often do we encounter plaudits invoking the name of Isaac Asimov. I’m not quite certain why this is, given Asimov’s stature as one of the seminal SF writers of the Golden Age and onward, one of the Big Three as compiled above. Perhaps it’s because Asimov’s style of SF was the least dramatic, most ratiocinative, least garish of the three. The emphasis today and forever has always been on zippy style and big concepts: flash, in other words. And Asimov was the opposite of flashy.

Still, he mined a certain definable and admirable vein of intellectually thrilling, somewhat demure story-telling, a branch of SF with its own tactics and accomplishments. And it’s a vein that’s on display even yet, notably in James P. Hogan’s Echoes of an Alien Sky (Baen, hardcover, $24.00, 317 pages, ISBN 978-1-4165-2108-2). This is as close to a new novel by the Asimov of Pebble in the Sky (1950) as anyone is going to get.

Hogan starts with a classic premise that writers such as Clarke and van Vogt and scores of others have employed before. Visitors arrive at an Earth that is devoid of human life, filled with the ruins of our civilization. This time, there’s a bizarre twist. The explorers are from a habitable Venus—not a terraformed world, but one seemingly in its naturally evolved state: the apparent birthplace of their species. They are outwardly human, yet regard themselves as having no connection with the extinct humans of Earth. Moreover, they possess fundamentally different concepts of physics and biology and geology than the ones familiar to us—concepts that work!

Our protagonist is one Kyal Reen, an expert in “electrogravitics.” His stolid, dogged investigations, both on Earth and Luna, will eventually unravel enigmas both cosmic and mortal.

From the naming conventions of the Venusians through the social satire (the Venusians find our civilization totally “psychotic”) to the emphasis on scientific reasoning, Hogan hews to an absolutely Asimovian path. He builds up a good portrait at a distant remove of the Venusian society, creates believable social interactions among the Venusians on Earth, and charts out the steps of the solution of his mystery in a tidy manner. The low-key romance between Kyal and biologist Lorili Hilivar is chaste yet affecting (although Hogan has them separated plotwise too much for my taste). The only villain of the piece, Jenyn Thorgan, is hardly a megalomaniac, but rather someone with deluded beliefs. And the one moment of physical violence he triggers is over with quickly, leaving the characters free to return to their rational ways.

Hogan adds a few flashback chapters to the human-dominated Earth that I found superfluous. He tries for some John Campbell-style contrarian wisdom that’s a tad clunky: “Trapped in deductive logic. . . . It can’t tell you what’s true, only what has to follow from your assumptions.” But then again, Campbell and Asimov were inseparable for a long time, so it’s all of a piece.

A book like this one will never garner wild praise or awards, but it lies at the core of our genre like neutrons adding weight to an atom.

Yesterday’s Tomorrows—Not So Much

David Pringle, founder and ex-editor of Interzone, has an interesting theory about the ongoing series of anthologies edited by Martin H. Greenberg and company, and published by DAW. Messr. Pringle calls them “the new pulps.” After all, they appear monthly or even more often; draw from a certain constrained stable of writers (many of them DAW authors), with some interlopers to flesh out the TOCs; and tend to favor commercialism over high art. (Exceptions abound, such as any title edited by Pete Crowther.)

I tend to buy into this theory. Just like the pulps, these volumes generally offer robust, professional storytelling of an entertaining variety that never descends to lousiness or aspires to greatness. Their thematic centeredness offers easy-to-grasp hooks and lures for the audience. And they are mass-market originals, inexpensive like pulps.

These factors are all on display in The Future We Wish We Had (DAW, mass-market, $7.99, 306 pages, ISBN 978-0-7564-0441-3), edited by Greenberg and Rebecca Lickiss. But while the stories herein are pretty solid, for the most part they fail to address the core conceit, throwing away the chance for a really wonderful book that would have dug into the foundations of SF and futurism in general.

The hook here is the notion of examining “yesterday’s tomorrows,” all those glittering futures that SF presented at a certain crest of its consensus solidarity. Personal jetpacks, rolling roads, a colonized solar system, robots, etc. These classic yet never-now-to-be scenarios, whose nostalgic and somewhat spooky allure was best crystallized in William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” could have provided a brilliant launch pad for writers to dig deep into the roots of SF’s vision and assumptions. But hardly any of the writers do so. There’s practically zero pastiche or attempt to recapture or revise the tonality or style of this era of SF. Most of the writers toss in a token or two from that era and tell a tale that could have happened anytime. Let’s look at what we have.

Esther Friesner in “A Rosé for Emily” deals with a balky automatic kitchen. “Waiting for Juliette” by Sarah A. Hoyt concerns cryogenic sleep. Dave Freer’s “Boys” examines a sentient house stymied by a mathematically inspired trick. Brenda Cooper portrays undersea settlements with “Trainer of Whales.” The cartoon series The Jetsons gets a new revisionist episode in Kevin J. Anderson’s “Good Old Days.”

Alan L. Lickiss evokes android members of a wedding party in “Kicking and Screaming Her Way to the Altar.” “Alien Voices” by P.R. Frost tells of an injured dancer cured by nanotech. Loren L. Coleman’s “Inside Job” is about a cop whose beat is virtual reality. James Patrick Kelly and Mike Resnick produce “A Small Skirmish in the Culture War” about the cynical future of television shows. Lisanne Norman’s “Dark Wings” is the only story to venture out of our solar system, dealing with mysterious aborigines. “My Father, The Popsicle” by Annie Reed is another look at cryonic hibernation.

Julie Hyzy’s “Destiny” finds an elderly woman building a cross-dimensional “shuttle” in her home. “Cold Comfort” by Dean Wesley Smith tells of a secret organization that will conquer space with borrowed tech. Irene Radford brings up the old notion of smellovision in “The Stink of Reality.” More undersea colonization occurs in “Yellow Submarine” by Rebecca Moesta. And Kristine Kathryn Rush closes out the volume with “Good Genes,” about the ethics of genetic profiling.

As I mentioned above, none of the authors tries to sound like Heinlein or van Vogt or Simak. And out of all these stories, only the Anderson and Smith really capture any sense of interplay with the key ideological and cultural paradigms of Golden Age SF. As for stories featuring nanotech and virtual reality and genetic testing—well, however satisfying they might be on their own merits, they don’t really belong in a volume whose ostensible purpose is to deal with futures conceived before such technology was even imagined or widely disseminated in the literature.

In the quest to keep the Greenberg anthology pipeline filled, I fear that the assembly of these volumes often slights or ignores the potential wonders inherent in their own ingenious premises.

Not Fade Away

SF has had a long history of positing empires underground, whether in actual “hollow earth” scenarios (Edgar Rice Burroughs and Pellucidar [1923]) or just hidden away in deep caverns (John Uri Lloyd and Etidorhpa [1895]). In fact, the life of whole races and species and isolated dwellers below the surface might very well constitute one of Rudy Rucker’s definitive “power chords.” (And note that Rucker himself dealt with the theme in his The Hollow Earth [1990].) The trope is rich with atmospheric strangeness, from Tolkien’s Mines of Moria to Jeff VanderMeer’s crypts below Ambergris.

In The Fade (Gollancz, trade paper, £10.99, 312 pages, ISBN 978-0-575-07699-0), Chris Wooding amps up the weirdness angle considerably by his choice of exotic venue, tacks on some Richard Morgan tough-guy action, adds in a bit of Judith Merrill maternal pathos, and comes up with a winning volume.

In a solar system of two harsh suns, Orale and Mochla, there is a planet named Beyl. Beyl has a moon named Callespa. It is this satellite that hosts the human (?) and other characters of our story. A handful of humans, the SunChildren, have managed to stay alive on the surface by various tactics and adaptations. But the majority of the Callespans have long ago migrated underground, into the deep caverns of their moon. Under bioluminescent light, amidst strange fungal growths, by the shores of nighted oceans, and across tumbled plains, they live their cloistered yet full lives, mainly in affiliation with one or another of two perpetually warring empires: Eskara or Gurta.

Our protagonist is Orna, a trained warrior and assassin from Eskara. Taken from her general role as enforcer for some of the shadier elements of her native city, she has been plunged into the front lines of the latest battles. Captured by the Gurta, she is imprisoned in the horrible fortress known as Farakza, separated from her husband and son. The first half of the book will chronicle her life as a prisoner of war and her ingenious escape plan. The second half finds her back home and forced to take a hand in the machinations of the elites.

Right away I think you’ll see that we’re in a kind of Leigh-Brackett, planetary romance mode. In fact, the technology of this world is so primitive that parts of the story almost read like a Conan escapade. And Orna’s hard-bitten skills and attitude jibe with the Cimmerian’s. As for the fungi-based lifeforms, I’m reminded of Piers Anthony’s overlooked novel Omnivore (1968).

Told in the first person, Orna’s story has a striking immediacy and believability. Wooding exhibits a well-developed, almost tactile ability to deliver descriptions of physical events, such as crossing a river of lava (think primo Keith Laumer), a skill that plunges the reader into the sometimes Clark-Ashton-Smithian milieu. Combined with his portrayal of Orna’s emotional life, this adds up to a satisfying whole. When you toss in a trace of allegory (the Gurta resemble more than a little our Mos-lems, whereas the Eskara are heartless capitalists such as we know in the West), the action-oriented plot develops further interest.

The title refers to a slang term among these people: a “fade” is both a kind of deadly ghost, and also a bit player, someone to be duped and disposed of cavalierly. Orna becomes both at times, and yet manages to transcend the destinies others try to place on her. Even amidst the fantastical setting, that’s a realistic hero and storyline to me.

Big Fish

The project known as The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon was originally projected to fill ten volumes. Yet here comes Volume XI, The Nail and the Oracle (North Atlantic Books, hardcover, $35.00, 256 pages, ISBN 978-1-55643-661-1), and we are only up to 1971 in Sturgeon’s career. (Death overtook him in 1985.) But of course, Sturgeon’s output famously tailed off in his later life, and it’s probable that editor Paul Williams (who provides his usual fine endnotes again) will need only one or two more books to round out this splendid monument to one of the best writers of the twentieth century. And who are we to complain about such unexpected largesse anyhow?

This offering does not contain as high a percentage of masterpieces as some of the earlier books. But that’s like saying that an exhibition of “average” Picassos is less than stellar. There’s still much to admire and enjoy here, starting with the long and intimate introduction by Harlan Ellison. (These intros have been an excellent feature of the series, and Ellison’s might very well be the best.) We get a baseball story, mysteries, a mimetic piece, and a western among the SF, illustrating Sturgeon’s range and ambition. (And of course also serving as a testament to the freelancer’s desperate attempt to serve whatever market will pay him.)

From the SF entries we find Sturgeon’s famous contribution to the first Dangerous Visions anthology (1967)—”If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”—as well as two utopian, world-changing pieces: “Brownshoes” and “It Was Nothing—Really!” These all hold up well, although the latter two, in their focus on social issues more than eternal verities of the human heart, do seem a bit dated.

Every volume of this series allows me to see something new about Sturgeon. Here are my latest semi-random conclusions.

Although he could do immediate action brilliantly, he could also be talky and non-dramatic as hell. This comes up in “. . . All Men . . .” which is told mainly in a flashback monologue full of theorizing and explaining! Hardly a good example of the famous writerly dictum of “show, don’t tell.” But Sturgeon, a master, could violate rules he understood so well and still produce compelling tales.

I note also that a story like “When You Care, When You Love,” where a rich woman loves and needs a man so much that she concocts an enormous social engine to recreate him after death, has a creepy, controlling, paranoid underbelly. I want to assume Sturgeon was conscious enough about his art to have done this intentionally. But multiple readings of this story leave me in some doubt. Did Sturgeon realize that one could love too much, or was love for him the paramount measure of goodness, even when bordering on greed and fanaticism?

Several stories highlight for me an important technique and theme of Sturgeon’s: the observation and depiction of certain events that are later reversed or understood differently. It’s a methodology that embodies powerful conclusions about the deceptive nature of reality.

Finally, I note in “Take Care of Joey” that Sturgeon must’ve been a fan of Damon Runyon’s writing: first-person narrative as delivered by a palooka.

Some of Sturgeon’s analysis and reportage of sexual mores and hang-ups have not aged well. “Assault and Little Sister,” for instance, relies on mid-century “Old Maid” stereotypes. But you’re guaranteed to emerge from this compilation with the sense that were he alive and writing today, he’d be thoroughly au courant and keenly insightful regarding whatever new hypocrisies and neuroses have come to dominate our society, and full of needful stories asking the next question about human nature.