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7 September 2003

I've been busy with work in the last few months, working long hours and most weekends. Did not go to DragonCon, either; CoreCard had a major delivery to a customer Labor Day Weekend, and, though not one of those travelling to the customer site, I was on call to support those who were. I've read a number of books since my last weblog entry in June, but most of them already too long ago to review well. Anyway:

In Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor, 1999), a high-energy physics experiment at CERN's new Large Hadron Collider somehow causes everyone on Earth to experience about two minutes of their own life about twenty-one years hence. Two minutes of universal inattention to present concerns causes a huge number of deaths and injuries in automobile accidents, interrupted surgeries, and so forth; but long after the dead are buried and the survivors patched up, there's still a lot of work to do in figuring out what happened, why, and how. Some start a project to collect and correlate people's accounts of what they saw of the future, and figure out whether they're consistent. There's also much debate and uncertainty for a while about whether this consistent everyone (or rather those who will still be alive twenty-one years later) has seen is inevitable or whether it can be changed.

There are several interesting main characters, and the particular futures (2009 and 2030) sketched are not bad near-future speculation; but the main interest is the story of how the several main characters individually react to their visions or lack of same. Theodosios Procopides, one of the physicists who designed the experiment (attempting to isolate the Higgs Boson) which apparently caused the Flashforward had no vision of his own future experiences; and later, in hearing other people's experiences, learns that he is due to be murdered just a couple of days before the date the visions relate to. He sets out to find out all he can from the future visions of people who saw news reports about his murder and try to prevent it if possible. Lloyed Simcoe, the other of the pair who designed the experiment, sees himself apparently married to someone other than his current fiancée Michiko Komura. He believes the future is fixed, and so he's inclined to break off the engagement now rather than set himself and Michiko up for a divorce sometime in the next twenty years. The characters are deep enough to make these scenarios work, but not much more.

I won't say anything of the latter parts of the book, except that there are more surprises to come, consistent with and growing naturally out of the opening. I enjoyed Flashforward but probably won't read it again.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1961

In "Hybrid" by Keith Laumer, three explorers land on an unknown planet in the aftermath of a storm that has just blown down the last survivor of a sentient tree species. The tree, still barely alive, is trying to find a motile symbiont to carry its seeds, and realizes that there don't seem to be any more of the animals it used to depend on... but hm, here is a creature that might do in a pinch...
"The Other End of the Line" by Walter Tevis tells the story of George Bledsoe, who accidentally dials his own phone number - and somehow finds himself at home. This himself of two months hence, to whom he's somehow been connected, gives him some useful financial advice. Two months later, a good deal richer, he is waiting for his past self to call, when...
"The Interplanetary Cat" by Rick Rubin is a silly story of a ferocious kitten volunteered by its owners to ride a Mars probe, and how she fares after she leaves Earth.
In "Faq'" by George Elliott, an airman goes back to the Atlans Mountains after the War, exploring alone and on foot to find a populated valley he once saw from the air in an isolated region generally thought to be entirely uninhabited. He finds a curious cultural isolate, and, after some difficulties, is accepted as an immigrant and a convert to the local Pythagorean-Moslem sect. ...The setting is interesting, but the story doesn't seem to go anywhere.
The time-travelling hero of "Green Sunrise" by Doris Pitkin Buck wants to get away from the suffocating presence of his wife - for a while, anyway - but discovers (like Svetz in Larry Niven's The Flight of the Horse) that time travel is magic, and thus requires a feminine contribution to work.
"The Tunnel Ahead" by Alice Glaser follows a family in a densely populated future America returning home from a day at the beach, creeping along through nearly parked traffic toward home. Traffic stops completely while the tunnel ahead closes for a while. The family are nervous about passing through the tunnel; exactly why is hinted at gradually, only fully revealed at the end.
The titular wild horse of "Mustang" by Randall Garrett defies the best efforts of a rancher's men to break it, but quickly submits when his shy, nerdy son mounts. It becomes clear (to the reader, anyway) why that was so, only when the mustang and the Kid have a falling out.
Also "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLV" by Grendel Briarton, "Dethronement", a science essay by Isaac Asimov on the reduction of chemistry to physics and biology to chemistry; book reviews by Alfred Bester of Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein (he likes the strong opening, deplores the diffuse ending; my thoughts exactly) and "Music of the Spheres", a popular science book by Guy Murchie; and "About Something Truly Wonderful", an essay by Algis Budrys on the convergence or lack thereof between sf and mainstream fiction.

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