(Post by River Patterson)

Why did I choose this book?

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to read about before entering the bookstore. I asked the store owner for a recommendation of a book that corresponded with some of my personal interests and was given: Starship & Haiku. I decided to stick with it partly because the cover was purple and featured a grey whale.

What’s it about?

After global strife causes the moon to shatters into pieces, America falls into civil war.  Hawaii is ruled by three kings who command “gangs of wild people” (45) to kill the island’s inhabitants. The Japanese government, with polluted waters and no fish, enables mass suicide. The world is falling apart. Ryoko Ishida, the daughter of a Japanese government official, travels to Hawaii with her father and discovers she can speak to whales. On her trip, Ryoko meets Josh Nakamura, a Japanese-American boy who cares for “stranges” (36), mutants stricken by plague. Ryoko’s visit prompts Josh to leave war-torn Hawaii for Japan. Contemporaneously, Ryoko’s father works on a spaceships meant to rescue humans from the dying earth. On her voyage home, human Ryoko is impregnated by a whale. (70) Her offspring may have the potential to save the world…

What kind of SF?

The story is somewhere between apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. Could fall into underwater SF category, or whale SF. Additionally, pre-cogs.

What’s good?

There are a lot of cryptic haikus. In part set in 2022, is serendipitously and scarily  pertinent. The writing ambience is beautiful, dark and poetic.

Do I recommend it?

If you like 80s trippy whale melodrama, but not really. While I have developed a small love for this book, it is pretty intense and complicated. The plot line is too layered. The main characters are not that interesting and their relationship is a little awkward. The whale pregnancy thing is also odd.

Sucharitkul, Somtow. Starship & Haiku. Timescape Books, 1981. 

(RIver Patterson)

(post by Liam Jacetta)

Most, if not all, of my book buying, has been done with a preconceived idea of what I’m buying. Whether that be an author I’m specifically looking for or an exact book, I have never gone in blind. Upon going into the store I was somewhat trying to avoid authors I had heard of before. I wanted to expand the variety of authors I have read and was looking for something different. I was mostly going off of the title and cover art. The Day the Machines Stopped had very interesting and retro cover art and the title alone drew me into the story.

The book is about a laboratory worker battling with the struggles and conflicts that come with a complete blackout. When the world falls into total electrical power outage there will soon be total anarchy. Their journey to find alternative power sources and navigate the disintegrating societal framework is unlike stories I have read before. All this happening while the story also follows a familiar plot line of protagonists fighting over a love interest: a coworker.

In comparison to some of the stories I have read to date, this is a pretty tame science fiction novel. There are no previous scientific anomalies or advancements that the characters have dealt with. Unlike stories that take place totally in the future or a more advanced time, the characters of this story have never dealt with anything unexplainable by their modern science. This leads to a great story in which you discover all of the supernatural problems along with the characters.

This book is great because it highlights an uncommon but very plausible kind of apocalypse. Most plagues and apocalypses are survived but the rich. Those who are prepared, or have enough money to become prepared quickly are usually the ones rising to the top. In such a crisis as is outlined in this book, there is no way to easily pay your way out of this issue. The solution to the problem does not lay in waiting out the apocalypse, but in finding a solution to restoring the power. This unites scientists, much like the two this story most closely follows, even if there is such a divide between them like a love interest.

I would recommend this book to those who are not looking for a hard-core science fiction or supernatural story. I quite enjoyed this book and I am looking forward to reading more by the author.

Anvil, Christopher. The Day the Machines Stopped. Derby, Connecticut: Monarch Books, Inc, 1944.

(Liam Jacetta)

Asimov’s 1966 Novel “Fantastic Voyage” tells the story of a mission to inner space: the intrepid crew of The Proteus are shrunk to molecular size and injected into the body of a comatose scientist in an effort to remove an inoperable blood clot from his brain. I found this copy as part of an Asimov section removed from the other science fiction on an endcap of a Green Hand bookshelf, it lacked a dust jacket and was an unassuming gray hardcover with small pink lettering. Also among it’s kin was “The Gods Themselves” which was a close second-place.

Interestingly enough, although Asimov was tasked with writing the novelization, the idea for “Fantastic Voyage” was actually cooked up in a short story by Otto Klement and Jay Lewis Bixby, who then sold the rights to Fox Studios who proceeded to make the 1966 movie of the same name. Fox Studios approached Asimov for a novelization, who apparently initially objected to the screenplay, suggesting that it was full of “plotholes.” However, Asimov ultimately followed through, and the novelization was published before the film had finished shooting, which lead many (myself included) to believe that the film was based on the book, not vice-versa as is reality.

While much of the science fiction of the late sixties doubtlessly focuses on outer space: the final frontier, telling stories of bold astronaughts and rocket heroes (vis. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and others) Fantastic voyage instead looks inward at the vastness and complexity of our own bodies. Thematically, the story leans heavily on the symmetries of the very large and very small. while on the cosmic scale humanity is utterly insignificant, from the point of view of a microbe each individual is a galaxy of interacting biology. The book wrestles with ideas surrounding the existence of a divine consciousness and intelligent designer of life as well as the idea that all life is sacred no matter how small. In my opinion the greatness of this story stems from this unique notion that even the smallest systems are immense and well, Fantastic.

I would highly recommend Fantastic Voyage, although i would not call it Asimov’s best work. overall i’d give it a rating of 3×10^27 neurotransmitters and one raygun. The film is also definitely worth a watch, especially if you enjoy creative and cheesy 60’s special effects and truly fantastic set design.

and here is a still from the movie:

Asimov, Isaac, Harry Kleiner, and Otto Klement. Fantastic Voyage. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a Hugo Award winning author born in 1960. She also worked as the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction for a few years and writes in a variety of genres under several pseudonyms. For the Green Hand book project, I read her novel “The Disappeared”, published in 2002, which is part of a 15-book series called the Retrieval Artist series.

I was recommended this book because I was interested in worldbuilding and the idea of how different species might imagine coexisting together, which this book accomplishes in a futuristic setting where humans interact with multiple alien races as part of an “Earth Alliance”. Between the different species, there is an agreement to respect each others’ laws, although breaking these alien laws can bring unjust punishments, including giving away your first-born or being abducted to a hard labor camp.

There are a variety of fun technological novums in this book, some not too unlike the ones we have encountered with other texts, such as Shakespeare holofilms, an almost personified house security system (“House” referred to with a capital H), portals, spaceships, building materials like “moon adobe” and the like. What I found most intriguing how Earth seemed to be presented as a haven of antiquity. For example, flying cars being banned in certain settlements because they would obstruct the view. I was also intrigued by how outer space earthling settlements were named after historical figures of space travel (Gagarin Dome, Armstrong Dome, etc.)

The plot of the novel could well be described as an outer-space cop drama. It follows Miles Finch, whose job it is to retrieve folks who are on the run. Much of the novel is involved in Miles tackling dichotomies between Law and Justice, reminding me a lot of Javert from Les Miserables. There is quite a bit of intrigue and mystery in the text, which, coupled with an exploration of how humans might interact with aliens on a political level makes “The Disappeared” a very compelling read. If you liked Blade Runner, chances are you will really love this book too.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/372000.The_Disappeared

The book I decided to read was The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells. I knew that this book is considered to be a classic by many, and has some funny stories surrounding it, most notably Orson Welles reading it aloud in a radio program in 1938 and causing a panic amongst listeners who did not know it was fictional. I was also very intrigued by the premise, being a martian invasion of the earth, as reading the blurb I was led to believe that it would not be a war of the worlds, but a massacre, as the martians seemed to be much more advanced than the humans.

My prediction ended up being correct, and my sentiments were echoed perfectly in a quote that stood out to me quite a bit: “This isn’t a war… It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants” (Wells 146).

It is remarkable that such a book was published in the 19th century and continues to be so influential and prevalent in the SF space, as well as beyond. One cool fact that I learned is that Robert H. Goddard, the man credited with developing the first liquid-fuelled rocket, was inspired by the book.

My main issue with the book is a lack of character development, but this is generally a problem I have with most of the harder-SF I encounter. I sometimes hard it find to read through books when I am not personally invested in the characters that I am supposed to be rooting for. Despite this, there is plenty of action, and H.G. Wells’ style of writing is amazing. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for some classic SF action and adventure, but if you are looking for a literal war between worlds, you might be a bit disappointed in how pitiful the humans are.

Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds (1898). London: William Heinemann.

I read Red Flame Burning, by Ward Hawkins. I chose it because the cover art was wild. The story was wild as well, but also quite bad. It felt fake in a way that none of the literature we’ve been reading so far has. I’ll get into this later, though.

This book is about Harry Bork, a 65-year old alcoholic who has a doorway between dimensions opened up in his room when Gus Rassan, a lizard man – is putting up a cabinet in his own room in his own world and knocks a hole in both his wall and the fabric of reality. Gus’s surgeon friend cures Harry of his alcoholism and rehabilitates his ruined body. Harry then visits Gus’s world and finds that humans are used as cattle. The lizard people – called the Jassans – are very timid, and need Harry’s help to avert war. This is as far as I got before I stopped reading and skimmed the rest.

I don’t know exactly what style of SF this book is, but it seems to fall into a few catagories. Ward Hawkins has a pretty poor grasp of evolution, which also happens to be a central concept in this book. The manner in which Jassans and the humans of their planet – which they call “bassoes” have evolved is not particularly feasible, and is explained with a simple “who knows how these things work”. I guess it isn’t outside the realm of theoretical possibility, but having the only explanation be “I don’t know, evolution, I guess” brings this outside the realm of hard science fiction and into the realm of soft sci-fi. The only thing that occasionally pulled this novel out of the category of sociological science fiction this is that Harry is an engineer, and the mechanical descriptions of the Jassans’s technology are somewhat detailed. Despite this, the science was always secondary to the sociological elements of examining Jassan and Human society, which puts this book decidedly in the camp of soft science fiction.

As I said above, this book was not good. The writing was decidedly mediocre. The characters talked like they were from an old western serial, which made perfect sense after doing some research into Ward Hawkins, who was primarily an author of pulp westerns. Red Flame Burning and the rest of the books in the Harry Borg and Gus Rassan series are comedic sci-fi novels. This comedy does sometimes come through. However, it is often racist, sexist, or homophobic in concept, which certainly ruins it. I liked the character of Gus, who was endearing and who’s humor seemed to be largely un-bigoted in nature. However, he didn’t make up for the rest of the book.

I would not recommend Red Flame Burning, except as a not-too-horrible way to experience a pulp science fiction novel. The fact that it always stayed one step above being horribly bad (barring the bigotry, which was always just around the corner) and stayed in the realm of mediocre-to-bad makes it all the more skippable. However, if one is interested in pulp, this is a quick read and may be a good way to understand the genre.

Citation:

Hawkins, Ward. Red Flame Burning: A Novel. Ballantine Books, August, 1985.

Originally I was attracted to the book because as a polar bear myself, the word ‘polar’ caught my eye. After I picked the book up and read the first couple pages, I knew that the book was going to be a good choice. The opening pages lead with a mysterious murder, not of a human but of an alien ambassador. As someone who thoroughly enjoys the murder mystery type story I decided to choose Polar City Blues. One of the first characters we read about also has the name Ward, and even though he does not play a huge role in the story, seeing the name made me believe that I had picked the right book.

The book takes place in what seems to be the future with the advanced technology and interstellar mixing. The human race has been mixed with two different alien species. As mentioned before, the book is centered around a murder by an unknown being. While a murder is never a good thing, this is terrible timing. The tension between the two alien species have been raising over the past year and they are on the brink of war. The lead detective put on the case is Bobbie Lacey. Lacey seems to be an upstanding detective and the best option they have to solve it. Lacey chooses her partner to be her less than wonderful wannabe professional baseball played, Mulligan. While he is not a cop or detective, he is able to help with the case by going into situations that a cop, who has to be law abiding, could never go. Mulligan, pretty early on in the story finds that he has a telepathic connection to some alien species that is not one of the ones living among humans. The murder of the first alien ambassador it turns out was due to a new type of bacteria. This bacteria eats away at its target. (If you choose to read any further in this paragraph there will be some spoilers, although I will try to summarize without giving everything away. You can also choose to go to the next paragraph to avoid them). The team is able to trace the bacteria to an assassin and while this does solve the surface level of who murdered the ambassador, it brings about the question of who hired this assassin. We eventually learn that the same alien species that is having telepathic communication with Mulligan hired the assassin to raise tension between the other alien species so that they would be able to swoop in and take over their systems. The end deals with a rather large chase that ends with Lacey finding the evidence needed to show that it was indeed a foreign party that caused the murder and diffusing the tensions between the two ruling species.

This is cyberpunk sci-fi. The opening scenes of Polar City shows that it is pretty dumpy. There are a lot of street worker and general filth. There are also a lot of new technologies that help solve the crimes, including some AI’s.

One of the things that I noticed in this book compared to other sci fi stories or books is that the female is the hero. Lacey and Mulligan make quite the pair, and while they are equally important, Lacey is clearly the stronger more put together character. She is a strong smart well respected detective and Mulligan is seen as an alcoholic who wants to play baseball. It feels like a Disney story where the princess needs saving, except the princess is Mulligan and along with needing to save his life she also helps him with daily interactions and helps him become respected by people who thought he was just an alcoholic.

The story was entertaining. It was not exactly what I was hoping for, but overall entertaining. It became more a thriller than a mystery. I would recommend this book to friends. Even though at times I did have trouble following exactly what was happening, especially early on with the telepathic communication, the story was engaging. I would give it a 6.5/10.

Kerr, Katharine. Polar City Blues. Bantam, 1990.

For my book, I chose The Beyonders (1977) by Manly Wade Wellman, an American author born in Portuguese West Africa, who spent most of his adult life in North Carolina. The novel describes the attempted invasion/arrival of an alien race known as the “Beyonders” and the humans that fight against them. The Beyonders have a clan of allies on Earth, the Kimber family, who reminded me of the Cullen family in Twilight because of their reclusive habits and their comfort with the esoteric. At its heart, this novel is an alien invasion story, but there is the added layer of “invasion” by a slick out-of-towner (also an ally of the Beyonders) who wants to transform the poor, sleepy town of Sky Notch, North Carolina, into a wealthy hub for science and technology.

Wellman did a good job subtly discussing class in the apt dual invasion by both true aliens and the city-slicker who tries to turn the townspeople against each other for his own selfish gain. The author’s faith in humanity was an unexpected treat. On the other hand, he does glorify a stereotypical, tough, stoic masculinity that defends itself with guns; if you’re looking for a feminist story, this is not it. There is a female character with an important role, but they continually call her kind of a nickname that stems from not wanting to say her real name (“Slowly” instead of “Celola” because it’s “easier” to say); I’m not sure what to make of this.

I chose this story because I wanted to read a piece that had strong ties to its setting. Southern Gothic is one of my favorite genres of literature, and from the synopsis, The Beyonders appeared to borrow from that tradition. Michelle also helped me solidify my choice by recognizing him primarily as a horror writer—another indication that this might inherit from the genre. In general, the text matches those expectations. I would recommend this book, then, if you’re looking for a quick, fun read about defeating some aliens who want to exterminate an Appalachian town.

Wellman, Manly Wade. The Beyonders. Warner Books, 1977.

I chose Saturn’s Race because I was intrigued by how the author would tie together science fiction, love, and conflict. I also thought the cover of the book was intriguing. Saturn’s Race is set in the near future when humanity has created artificial islands which are home to some of the wealthiest, smartest, and most powerful men and women in the world as well as revolutionary technological innovations. The islands are practically nations in the way they operate with countries around the world: selling goods and technology, providing aid, protecting their assets and interests.

The story revolves around Lenore Myles, a brilliant recently graduated college student invited to Xanadu(one of the main islands) for a recruitment event. At the event she becomes entangled with Chaz Kato, a scientist and citizen of Xanadu, who gives her unrestricted access to Xanadu’s systems to gain her trust and convince her to work on the island. While exploring the island, Lenore discovers a paramount secret about Xanadu that could change the world. Unsure of what to do next, Lenore flees the island but is pursued by Saturn, a powerful mysterious entity that protects Xanadu’s secrets. In this thriller, Lenore seeks to survive as Saturn races to protect Xanadu’s secret and Chaz Kato decides where his allegiance lies.

The main themes within the book are cybernetics, utopias, and advanced computer technology. My favorite parts of the book are the depiction of sci-fi technology and the pace at which the story is told which keeps me on the edge of my seat. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a thrilling adventure novel with themes of advanced technology, a utopian society, and computer systems.

Authors: Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, Publication year: 2000