2008 science fiction, second of the two books of Lords of Creation.
The first Mars and Venus landers found breathable air and human life.
Forty years later, Jeremy Wainman is on an archaeological expedition
looking for a lost Martian city.
The first volume, The Sky People, was spoiled for me by fitting
some really interesting ideas into a boringly generic Stirling plot
and characters. This one certainly isn't perfect, but it does a rather
better job, particularly once we get past the self-indulgent
introduction (in which a bunch of science fiction writers, referred to
only by their first names which of course the True Fan will know, do
things by which they can be recognised, in the context of watching the
live feed from the first probe to land on Mars). If this:
"Lookatthat!" Larry cried joyfully.
causes you joy too, well, great. To me, I'm afraid, it smells of a
cash-in, of a too-easy triggering of positive associations that this
book hasn't earned.
All right, there are still standard Stirling problems, such as that
there are only two real people here, our hero and the Martian
princess, and I'm not at all sure about the hero for all he has most
of the viewpoint time. But the good stuff starts almost at once:
unlike the Venusians, these Martians aren't just generic "primitives",
they're part of a tradition of continuous civilisation longer than
Earth's (as we're often reminded), and they think differently from
humans, reflected in everything from the shape of the civilisation
(everyone trying to get things done employs Professional Practitioners
of Coercive Violence, but those Coercives will change sides readily,
if and only if their cause seems hopeless) to their uncompromisingly
straightforward language.
"We might already be reveling in our seizure of a valuable ship and
cargo, celebrating by absorbing costly essences and engaging in
brutally nonconsensual erotic entertainments of a type I find deeply
gratifying but which are difficult to arrange on a commercial
basis."
There's also a thoroughly biological technology base, lower-energy
than Earth's but more able to sustain itself in the absence of a
manufacturing and support chain.
All right, the writing is also sloppy, with "nicating membranes" and
The hard and supernally strong stringers of the hull couldn't burn.
They /had/ melted and slumped in grayish dribbles and pools against
the black of the cabin armor as the blazing hydrogen overcame the
fireproofing anticatalyst and blazed like a blast furnace; there had
been better than twelve million square feet of it, after all. It
must have been like a blast furnace.
(What was it like, then? Was it like a blast furnace? And would't that
usually be cubic feet?)
and there are no particular answers to the big questions about what
the Ancients (who seeded Mars and Venus with Earth-compatible life in
the first place) were like. But the Martian princess actually gets to
do things, to the point where it's the hero's job to sit and wait to
be rescued for a while. (OK, this is pointed out explicitly for the
hard of thinking, but it's still a good thing to have in the book.)
Definitely an improvement on the first book; and I think one could
read it without having read The Sky People, since there's plenty of
recapping of the important points.
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