A Little Lighter Reading Material This Time

Just two sci-fi stories I managed to polish off in the last couple days.

Clarke County, Space - A reporter is told the story of what really happened on man's first self-sustaining orbiting satellite that nearly brought it to ruin. It involves gangsters and their molls, sentient computers, time travel, and the Church of Elvis. And that sums up the problem with the book, I think. Allen Steele throws a few too many things at the wall, and so they don't have any real resonance. The revelation that the station's central computer has developed sentience is just sort of thrown out there, with the time traveler figuring it out, but no time is really spent delving into the ramifications, and no one who learns about it shows any real surprise. We spend more time learning the story of the man who founded the Church of Elvis and what his reasons were. Steele could be making a point that artificial intelligences gaining sentience is old hat in science fiction by now, to the point even the people in a story that have never seen it happen aren't fazed by it. Still, I can't really fault a book for having too many ideas in it, even if I think they could have used more fleshing out.

The Stars Must Wait - NASA plans to send ship to Callisto to form permanent stable colony. The crew (and the backup crew) are placed in cryogenic suspension in preparation, on the day the Air Force One just happened to get shot down, with a Russian fighter seen in the area. Yeah, you guessed it, astronaut wakes up decades later, finds world in ruins.

Couple of problems with this book, one sort of piddling, one I think more critical. The piddling detail is that I can't get a handle on the whens of stuff. The main character, Torrance Jackson, finds some preserved newspaper articles that suggest things fell apart around 2008-2011, and that there was no war, just internal unrest (people refusing to vote, to pay taxes, military just up and coming home, people rushing into banks and burning all the money, etc.). When he finds the remains of his home, he notes how messed up his car looks (this is before he recognizes the amount of time that's gone by), even though it's an '01. Yet he finds a headstone in the backyard suggesting his wife died in '92, except he was heading back home to see her and his pre-adolescent son, so clearly she wasn't dead when he left. Like I said, little thing, kind of irritating.

The more critical issue is Jackson himself, because he seems shift from having a goal, to drifting aimlessly rather quickly. He wants to get home, then he wants to get to this "Palace" he hears about, then he resolves to overthrow the other crew member he finds running things there, then he spends a considerable amount of time wandering through a squalid nearby settlement, or meeting a random couple and teaching them all sorts of things that have apparently been completely forgotten in 80 years (or less, and we'll get to those things in a minute, because I'd like your input on whether it seems feasible). Then he abruptly remembers he needed to stop his old crewmate, and rescue a nice girl he met at the palace, and so off he goes again. It's all herky-jerky and inconsistent, along with his physical condition. He's rather dazed when he gets out of the tube, but he's strong enough to walk several miles to his home, except then he conveniently gets too weak to even stand. He can beat up two guys in a fight with limited issue, but the next thing you know some guy slams him against the wall and he's remembering how weak he is. Oh, and sometimes he has a sprained arm that he can't even lift apparently, but he can still use a bow sometimes. There's mention of a flying thing that swoops around and kills, and can even go inside homes, but you never see it, or even hear it, just hear mention of it. It's as though there are pieces of the story missing. Jackson tends to black out, fall asleep, get knocked unconscious a lot, and at times the book makes me think the same thing happened to me while I was reading. Or maybe it was the editor that kept nodding off.

OK, the issue of everything that's been lost. Not surprisingly, electricity is out the window, except at the Palace, since the crewman running things was an engineer type, so he can keep a generator going. Everywhere else, forget it. People don't know that you can use coal for fuel. They only eat some tinned goods referred to as "prime", and think the idea of killing a pig or chicken is disgusting, or ridiculous. Agriculture is pretty much unknown, 'cause who would eat weeds that grow out of the dirt, right? They don't know about nails, or what wheelbarrows, or hoes are for, or that you could domesticate dogs, and they would guard your home. Most people can't read, they think tanks and cars are magic, and one character looks at a bottle of Aunt Jemina and thinks it must be made out of people.

Oh, and any concept of altruism has gone flying out the freaking window. There's an extended sequence where Jackson comes across a guy complaining he's hurt his leg, when jackson goes to help, the "injured" party has a friend who tries to rob him, except Jackson has a gun and they don't. He only wounds the guy, and then the partner kills him and tries to act like Jackson did it, even though there's nobody else around. And this repeats itself, with people trying to attack Jackson, him only wounding them, then they ask for help, and try and whack him with a pipe or something when he starts to try and assist them. And even if they failed the first two times, they keep trying the same crap over and over. Everyone interprets his willingness to help others as a sign he's stupid (when they seem to be the ones whose brains barely function well enough to keep them breathing). I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker, but I find it hard to believe humanity would slide that far, that fast.