Damn, but Remnant Population was a good book. It’s a book about colonization of other planets crossed with a first contact novel. The speculative elements aren’t groundbreaking, but the story is engrossing and the main character is particularly first-rate. Ofelia Falfurrias is one of the few women of a certain age who star in science fiction, and Moon proves that such characters can be done well in such a setting.

Older, somewhere in her 70s or 80s, and a little bit dotty and cranky, Ofelia lives on a colony planet about the be evacuated after only 40 or 50 years of existence. Her son and daughter-in-law are her last remaining relatives. The rest have died along with many other colonists in the not exactly thriving outpost. The holder of the colony franchise is pulling out, and all the settlers must go. Ofelia is old and tired. She doesn’t like her son. She’s not particularly fond of having people around in general; they dismiss her as old and less than useful. So when her time comes to board the evacuation ship, she hides out in the forest figuring that the authorities won’t bother tracking down one old woman who they think will probably die anyway. And she’s correct in that assumption.

And so Ofelia begins a solitary existence. Tending her garden. Keeping up the equipment in the town. While the colony was slowly failing, there’s plenty of stores and supplies for her to keep going by herself until her death. She doesn’t get looked down on. She doesn’t have to listen to what anyone else thinks of her. She can sleep in any house that she wants. She finds it pretty freeing, although it’s pretty clear her existence is fairly mind-numbing. She mostly lives by loose routine, just enjoying her own not so grand thoughts.

The wrench that gets thrown into the works happens when the next set of colonists attempt to land. Their company decides to land in a different location on the planet, thinking the tropical location where the previous company situated Ofelia’s town was the cause of the failure. Ofelia listens to them over the radio as they land and are promptly attacked by heretofore unknown natives who slaughter the landing party. Ofelia expects both that the humans will return and that the indigenous people will find her before long. She won’t get to live out her time in blissful seclusion. And she’s irritated by that.

Psychologically speaking, I think Ofelia is rather well done. The novel rides on how interesting her character is. She moves from being slightly dotty and resentful, to happily exploring her freedom, to fear (of a sort) of the unknown aliens, to irritation with them, to some understanding. She also moves from selfishness to selflessness.

The aliens are somewhat enigmatic as characters. Some of that’s acceptable since they are, after all, alien to us. But once Moon went down the road of giving individuals personalities, I think it would have been nice to complete them a little more.

The humans who appear epitomize the Ugly American archetype, but even there they get to be condescending in different ways. I have one quibble with the scripting of the officious team leader. He goes suddenly goes beyond throwing his weight around to something beyond the pale, and it rings false. A fair amount of the focus at the end on the interaction between the planetary residents and the humans who arrive is pretty heavy-handed.

What Remnant Population does so well is combine just a little bit of old school sensawunda with an exploration of how people might actually behave in new and strange circumstances.

A few other blogged reviews:

• feklar
• Zubon Book Reviews
• Speculative Book Review
• Strategist’s Personal Library

Title: Remnant Population
Author: Elizabeth Moon
Cover creator: David Stevenson (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 325 p.
Publication date: September 2003 (originally 1996)
ISBN-10: 0-345-46219-X

Usurper of the Sun is a solid, but unspectacular, novel of first contact. I’d say it’s good reading but won’t win any awards, but I’d be wrong. It won Japan’s Seiun Award, so maybe my perception is a bit off.

Aki Shiraishi is a high school student in the astronomy club when she points the club’s telescope toward Mercury and the sun. But instead of a normal, rapidly moving across the face of the sun Mercury, she sees what appears to be a tower three times the height of the planet stretching up from its surface. And thus begins her lifelong relationship with the Builders, an alien race that is proposed to be the creators of the nanotechnology based structures being created out of Mercury’s substance. The tower is actually a stream of material being fed to a thin ring around the sun designed to absorb massive amounts of solar radiation, but which also blocks sunlight from Earth.

The main strength of the book is its science grounding. This is hard science fiction, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke, if Arthur C. Clarke’s characters were Japanese and female. (Maybe Clarke did write such a book…) Space travel to Mercury takes months. Faster than light space travel is not possible. Aki takes years to become an expert in astronomy. Obviously, the presence of extra-terrestrial intelligence isn’t exactly heavily based in science. It doesn’t detract too much though.

Science fiction I read often has characters who can do no wrong. If a character messes up, they do something wrong but learn from it for the future. Usurper of the Sun has a couple of plot branches that just don’t pan out whatsoever. Or they succeed but are wholly irrelevant to everything that comes afterward. Just like real life. Some company comes out with breakthrough technology that no one cares about, stuff like that. There’s some of that going on here, and it makes everything seem all that much more realistic.

However, there’s a lot of drawbacks to the book. Like Arthur C. Clarke, Nojiri’s characters are stiff and wooden. The only one with any depth whatsoever is Aki, but even her character doesn’t have any hidden depths. Nojiri exposes all of her motivations in successive infodumps. In fact, the whole book could be characterized as one long speculative infodump with a little dialog thrown in. What’s more, some of the plot pieces are so clichéd I just had to groan. For instance, an Illuminati-like cabal of the world’s most powerful men meet to discuss the direction of the world’s policy… in a darkened room where no one can see anyone else for no discernible reason.

In addition, the pacing leaves a lot to be desired. The last 70 pages or so are great in moving the story along. The 80 pages leading up to that are snoozeville. The same thing with part 1. There’s an initial rush of discovery, and a speedy exploration of the ring that blocks the sun at the end. But the middle is filled with philosophical discourse that no one wants to hear at a cocktail party.

If this had been written 40 or 50 years ago when this style of science fiction writing was predominant, Nojiri’s work would be considered a classic. What we’ve come to expect from science fiction has changed quite a bit, so it feels quite dated. Not in technology, just in style. The technology described is still interesting, even a decade after its original publication as short stories in Japan.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Cosmopoetica
• Bibliophile Stalker
• Genji Press
• Spoils
• From a Sci-Fi Standpoint

Title: Usurper of the Sun
Author: Housuke Nojiri (野尻 抱介)
Translator: John Wunderley
Cover creator: Katsuya Terada (artist) (寺田克也)
Imprint / publisher: Haikasoru
Format: Paperback
Length: 276 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-4215-2771-0

First contact with aliens comes in the form of a web page. In Steal Across the Sky, alien Atoners set up a moon base and hook into the Internet looking for Witnesses via a Craigslist style job posting ad. Thousands of years ago, the Atoners visited Earth and somehow wronged humanity. They want to show the witnesses what they did. Presumably they will then atone for their crime.

I’m usually a sucker for lost colony stories, and this is no exception. Though in this book’s case, they aren’t so much human established colonies as worlds where the Atoners dumped proto-humans without knowledge of their ancestry. Each of the twelve worlds gets one witness. Each has to just sit there and watch until he or she figures out what it is the Atoners did. The Atoners did not hint as to what it was.

I think the genius of the story is just how alien both the Atoners and our lost human civilizations are. One of the faults with lots of science fiction is that it often contains thinly anthropomorphized aliens. Think Star Trek and Star Wars for a moment. Even beings as strange looking as Jabba the Hutt, Chewbacca, or the Ewoks have very human motivations. Greed, loyalty, or mischief. In Star Trek, Q has very human motivations. Contrast Q with Doctor Manhattan of the Watchmen. Formerly human, this (nearly) all powerful being very often behaves incomprehensibly. While he still has some human like qualities, he’s far less connected with motivation as we understand it than the Q.

The two human colonies that appear in Steal Across the Sky are very odd. Not completely alien though. One group does seem to be very concerned about power and status, but what confers status makes no sense to the witness present. The other group is nearly completely incurious. While both have very human like qualities, both have social characteristics that would require years of study by anthropologists to understand. There’s no 5 minute dilettante epiphany here. And that’s a plus.

The Atoners are even more inscrutable. Skip ahead for there are minor spoilers here. It’s very obvious they conducted classic double blind type experiments on humanity. Beyond that, why they’ve done it is a mystery. Why are they atoning? Why do they want an elaborate witnessing rather than just telling humans, or showing them a video? When they rectify the crime, why do they keep the atonement a secret? Why do they prevent several of the humans from implementing the fix themselves? No one knows! Kress doesn’t explain. And I think that’s awesome! Not only are there no pat answers, there’s really no answers at all. In real life, god does not appear in a vision to reveal life, the universe and everything.

I’m a little torn by how much the book explores its big revelation among the population as a whole. Perhaps because the idea has been explored so many times before, Kress didn’t want to delve into it that much. Worldwide one group embraces the idea and its members begin committing suicide. Another loathes the idea and foments violence against the witnesses and Atoners. What exactly they hope to accomplish isn’t really explored. Neither group really gets much in-depth treatment.

What does get in-depth treatment are a few of the returning witnesses. One refuses to believe the evidence he saw himself, preferring an alternate explanation that doesn’t satisfy the test of Occam’s Razor. Another understands the revelation only superficially, but seeks out the spotlight to spread the message on her return. One is a working class Catholic who has both his religious views vindicated but also feels cheated out of his religious birthright. This is one of the better character studies in science fiction that I’ve read. It’s a genre that often neglects its characters. Kress hasn’t.

Between the excellent characters and the inscrutable aliens and lost colonies, I found much to like about the book.

Some blogged reviews:

• King of the Nerds!!!
• Brenda Cooper

Title: Steal Across the Sky
Author: Nancy Kress
Cover creator: John Jude Palencar
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Hardcover
Length: 317 p.
Publication date: February 2009
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1986-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1986-9
Subject: Human-alien encounters — Fiction
Subject: Life on other planets — Fiction
LC classification: PS3561.R46 S67 2009

What a truly awful book! Awful enough that I gave up at page 97, at the end of part 3 (though there was no part 1). Don’t read this book.

The premise in the part I read is standard science fiction. Science group searches the skies for signs of extra-terrestrial life, and they find it. Later, an expedition travels to Wolf 359 to investigate the radio signals and finds primitive humans on one of the four planets. Humans who obviously do not possess the level of civilization necessary to build or maintain a high powered radio transmitter. They don’t even have fire.

Why is this book bad? Let me tell you.

In part two (remember, there isn’t a part one), the head scientist apparently is the only person in the group who knows how to interpret the data, and he decides to give it to the military. His logic is that a stellar race between all the militaries of the world will subject the inhabitants of Wolf 359 to much more danger than subjecting them to the depredations of just the U.S. military. As if there wasn’t such a thing as public opinion. Also, the text is dreary. Endless talk of punch cards and JCL and printouts of numbers that have to be looked over by humans. Page after page of straight numbers. Meanwhile head scientist courts a subordinate whose job it is to verify his data. As in asks her out all the time, insisting on things being informal after hours and that no one will question it because he’s the boss. And then turns around and admonishes her when she doesn’t use the Doctor honorific back in the office because it’s too informal there. And then he tells her he’s verified the work and she doesn’t need to. And has her lock up the office as if she’s security staff.

As revealed in part three, this is all part of his shocking plan to get the discovery of intelligent life out there around the U.S. military. He’s annoying his subordinate so but also giving her the opportunity in locking up to copy all the data and distribute it despite the military’s request to keep it secret. Sure it’ll ruin his reputation for everyone to know he was ready to keep it secret, but that’s a burden he’ll bear.

Even though the logic fail is epic, I’ll spell it all out anyway. Rather than sneak the information out himself, being a hero in the scientific community for both the discovery and bucking the military when he has exclusive control of the information, he enacts a subtle plan to trick a subordinate into ruining his own reputation to accomplish the same end. Not to mention ruining his chances of getting with the woman who seems amenable to his extremely lame courting.

Then we get to part three. Through careful psychological profiling, six crew members for the trip to Wolf 359 are chosen. By 2022 of course, computers can do everything, so the people are supposedly superfluous. However, they carefully pick six people. The biggest question the choosers have is whether to gender balance the crew, which they decide isn’t necessary, going with four men and two women. Cause they are all professionals and will have no problem leaving two men out of pairing off if it comes down to that, though they will all be too busy to have time to pair off.

Logically speaking, mostly okay up to that point. Then we discover who they’ve picked. A Doogie Howser doctor prodigy who’s graduated medical school but has never examined a single patient. A veteran commander who was one of two survivors of a dust storm on Mars but where the person he saved won’t talk to him again because of the unspeakable things he did to her while saving her. A marine without command experience for security. Another young prodigy as an anthropologist. And two others I’ve already forgotten.

As soon as they wake up from cold sleep or whatever Effinger called it (I can’t be bothered to re-read to figure it out), they all have nothing to do. In fact, the commander woke the rest of them up because he was bored and wanted company. The computers do everything supposedly, though the astrogator seems to have to determine if they made it to the right star. And never mind that the previous logic was that they would have so much stuff to do that pairing off really wouldn’t have a chance to happen.

Okay, skip ahead to the landing. Shortly thereafter they run into a naked human who stumbles in to their camp. A primitive camp. He stumbles in because the commander can’t be bothered to stay awake during his whole watch. Some commander. Some excellent selections. Insert sarcasm emoticon here. Now the naked primitive human is there, and the first thing the group does is tie him up so they can sleep the rest of the night.

Supposedly later in the book the commander guy decides to become a god to the primitives, and the book is a look at the dangers of being a god. Or something. If Effinger wrote that with the same level of skill that he wrote the beginning, then I can’t see how it would be worthwhile.

Title: Those Gentle Voices: A Promethean Romance of the Spaceways
Author: George Alec Effinger
Cover creator: Lou Feck
Series: God I sure hope not
Imprint / publisher: Warner
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 190 p. (I stopped at 97)
Publication date: January 1979 (originally March 1976)
ISBN-10: 0-446-940178

This is a classic of science fiction??!? Wow our standards used to be low! This is pretty bad.

Because of the age of the novel and my disdain for its contents I am going to liberally spoil this book, so skip reading now if you don’t want that.

The premise is a common one in science fiction. Aliens come to Earth and take over, in the process solving every one of man’s problems, turning Earth into a Utopia. That would all be fine if any bit of it were interesting. But it’s not.

Problem: The aliens never tell the humans why they are doing anything. But never does the reason turn out to make any sense whatsoever. They hide themselves for the first 50 years because they resemble devils?

Problem: The aliens control earth by passing messages to the U.N. Supposedly the big gains come from them removing man’s need to war with each other. All that extra productivity turns into a classless society. All the aliens do besides rendering weapons inoperative is to send teletypes to the U.N. for them to implement. And somehow from this we’re supposed to get nirvana? Puh-lease.

The first third of the book is all about the U.N. Secretary-General. Some sort of plot to kidnap him which will bring everything down, except the Overlords save him. And then he hatches his own elaborate plot to find out what the aliens look like, and succeeds. But Clarke doesn’t tell us what he finds. Nope. Clarke just jumps into the next section, where 50 years later the aliens reveal themselves. So what exactly was the point of the plot for that first part?

Part two is all about a seance. We’re in the era of unlimited science, and paranormal phenomena are considered scientific? One of the participants in the seance uses the information there to learn where the Overlords home world is. Why it’s a secret is never explained satisfactorily. Now our intrepid astronomer Jan decides to stow away in cargo back to the home world. Not quite as pointless as that first part (it ties in at the end) but nearly as pointless.

Then humanity turns into one magnificent hive-mind blob. Supposedly the Overlord’s rule is designed to prepare for this so we’re ready. The explanation of the reasoning for this is incomprehensible. We’d make a bad hive mind if they didn’t drag us by our ears into the hive mind age, or some such hooey. And we follow the first family to have hive mind children, for what reason I don’t know. Because right after they are revealed to be hive minds, Clarke drops the characters.

Speaking of characters, none of them are. They are all bland suburban types of the card-board cutout of the worst variety sort. They could be robots for all they seemed to care about anything and their dialog was certainly stilted enough.

Highly unrecommended.

Title: Childhood’s end
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 222 p.
Publication date: October 1975
ISBN-10: 0-345-24344-7
LC classification: PZ3.C551205 Ch

Most of the books I have listed as media tie-in on this site are books that have been adapted to the big screen. However, Starman is a novelization of the Starman screenplay by the king of novelizations, Alan Dean Foster. Well, at least the king of science fiction movie novelizations. In other words, he writes a novel version of the screenplay. Unlike when they make a movie from a book, when it’s done in reverse the novel is very true to the screenplay. Most of these novelizations are pretty bad. This one isn’t.

It isn’t great literature, but it is good brain candy.

The story is the definition of the standard first contact trope. Aliens find evidence of humanity. Aliens travel to earth. Aliens send investigator to earth to explore. Alien travels for a time as a human, along the way coming to appreciate humanity’s features. Usually there are complications along the lines of militaristic or hostile people, frequently government agents as in this story, who view the alien as a threat and attempt to capture or neutralize what they don’t know. Alien returns recognizing homo sapiens possibility for good as well as destruction.

Foster does a pretty good job of making all the pieces fit together, covering for plot holes in the movie. I don’t remember the dialogue well enough to determine if it’s straight from the movie or Foster’s creation. Starman’s alien clones the body of a recently dead person (Scott Hayden) for travel on earth’s surface, as earth isn’t conducive to his natural form. At first he kidnaps Jenny Hayden to take him to his rendezvous point for pick-up, but in a classic case of Stockholm syndrome Jenny comes to love the new Scott along the way and helps him avoid capture.

Read it as a palate cleanser. It’s really not that bad.

Title: Starman
Alternate title: John Carpenter’s Starman
Writer: Alan Dean Foster
Screenplay: Bruce A. Evans, Raynold Gideon, Dean Riesner
Imprint / publisher: Warner Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 280 p.
Publication date: December 1984
ISBN-10: 0-446-32598-8