Anvil of Stars, by Greg Bear

  
     

Read
On BART, between school and home and back again.

Bottom Line
Hard core sci-fi at its best.  Read it.

Full Review
The brilliance of good sci-fi, of course, is that despite a setting in a galaxy far, far away it manages to be completely and utterly relevant to the here and now, often in a way that most contemporary novels are not.  This one is no exception.  Anvil is in one sense an adventure story - the last citizens of a destroyed earth on a quest to hunt down their planet's killers.  In another sense it is a story about the threads that hold society together, the ways in which we relate to each other, and the ultimately fragility of all human institutions.

The children of the ship have been given a single mission: to enact the Law, which requires that all civilizations which make self aware, planet killing machines be destroyed.  Children, to anyone familiar with Orson Scott Card's Ender series, will conjure up images of ten year olds in space suits.  Bear's children are older, in their early twenties, but no less childlike and unaware than Card's.  This, then, presents one of the central tensions in the novel: whether these children, with such a small experience of actually living, will be the ones to decide the fate of another alien race.

I suspect that I have done this rather backwards in reading Anvil of Stars before Forge of God, which lays out the story of the destruction of the earth and the salvation of humankind by an advanced civilization known as the Benefactors.  On the other hand, there was nothing missing in Anvil, no references to the past work that obscured the text or dropped me from my journey thousands of light years from the earth back into my seat at the BART station.

A brief note on post modernism.  In most situations, I wholeheartedly agree with whomever coined the phrase "No mo' po' mo'."  Quite often, authors use this as a crutch, frantically borrowing ideas and threads and even whole scenes from others in an attempt to disguise their complete inability to spin a world on their own.  Not so in this case.  Bear takes the best of the post-modernist movement - the ability to take allusion and turn it into something else.  The children of the ship become "Wendys" and "Lost Boys", their leader is the "Pan" and the second in command is the "Christopher Robin."  These fragments represent the children's grasping at the now lost culture of earth much in the way the novelist grasps for fragments of meaning in this age of instant and universal culture.

The Rolling Stones, by Robert Heinlein

 
Read
In Half-Price, over the course of several Mondays.

Bottom Line
Very definitely young Heinlein, but fun to read nevertheless.  While this one doesn't contain any of the great leaps of imagination found in his later books, it plants the seeds for later novels (think The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).  Furthermore, although it's billed as juvenalia, there's no reason why adults wouldn't enjoy sitting down with this one.

Full Review
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I'm somewhat of a rabid Heinlein fan. My introduction to his fiction came in the form of The Cat Who Walked through Walls. Despite the fact that I was miffed by the ending (ending? there's no ending to that darn book!), I kept reading.

Stones, unlike some of Heinlein's later work, stands fully on its own. It requires no familiarity with the "Future History" novels, although readers familiar with them will be pleased to find the indomitable Hazel Stone as well as those mischievous twins Castor and Pollux.

Heinlein described the novel as about a pair of entrepreneurial twins who are always getting into trouble and whose grandmother is always getting them out. This is accurate, so far as back cover descriptions go, but it fails to convey the core of the novel. This is, at heart, a book about frontiers, about civilization, and about the choices between the two. The Stones set off from Luna City - that once wild outpost, now safely tamed and therefore no fun at all - to Mars, intending to satisfy the familial wanderlust. Once at Mars, however, they discover that it, like Luna City, has been taken over by the bureaucrats. Off again, this time to the asteroid belt, where at last they find the wild frontier town they've been looking for. When we leave the Stones, they are setting off again, this time for Venus. The implication, of course, is that there will always be one more outpost of civilization in the wilderness, one more frontier to explore. The excitement, of course, lies in the adventures the family finds along the way - everything from a nasty outbreak of space measles to a run-in with the long arm of the law.

Structurally speaking, there's more going on here than a rip-roaring plot and a rambunctious bunch of characters. The plot, which has enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning pages as quickly as she can read them, flows naturally from the characters rather than attempting to push them around. This is intended for a middle grade audience, so there's nothing very heavy here - a far cry from the almost existential questioning of Stranger or the philosophical mutterings of Lazarus Long. Even so, it previews the question of when too much civilization becomes a bad thing.

Finally, keep an eye out for the technology. Heinlein's predictions, while a bit off the wall in terms of Mars and Venus, are surprisingly accurate on just about everything else.