"HMSS" and "Learning the World"
Feb. 8th, 2007 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlJanuary seems to have been my month for first-contact novels. I have been reading other books, but none I feel like reviewing.
His Majesty's Starship by Ben Jeapes (published in America as The Ark)
This book is marketed as young adult; I'm not sure why, as the only teenage character is the main character's son, who only appears near the end.
The set-up: Mid twenty-second century. Commander Mike Gilmore is on a dead-end posting in the Royal Navy, which itself belongs to a joke nation on a space station, the original UK having been subsumed into Greater Europe.
Then he's offered the chance to captain the UK delegation to the Roving, a planet belonging to the First Breed (aka Rusties), a non-human species who have been observing the solar system for some years and have recently made contact. The human nation or organisation who impresses the Rusties most during the delegation will be given the opportunity to co-colonise the Roving with the Rusties. Then there's the alien tech, including their FTL drive, known as stepthrough. It looks like an opportunity of a millennium for humanity, but what's in it for the First Breed?
The Rusties are real aliens, not just humans with an extra set of legs stuck on. Their psychology and society are what we would call claustrophobic; their conflict resolution is well, alien, and their communication takes place by fulltalk, which includes body language and released pheronomes in addition to verbal speech. So a conversation goes something like:
<<If you are like the others, you will be glad for the change>> [sincere, concern] the Senior added.
<<It drives me mad, Timbre Grey>> [feeling] said Arm Wild . <<I find the Ganglies fascinating and they could even be my friends, but ... oh>> [pure frustration, verging on madness; subtle hint of self-control to show semi-jest]. <<It is good to be back. Even the deckplates feel different under my feet>>
[Amusement] <<They are. The humans make their ships from a different material to us. But now you can put away your eye-surrounds and your pheromone bottles, Arm Wild. You are among friends>>
<<They are effective but they are not the real thing. This break was an excellent idea, Timbre Grey>> [sincerity]
[Pleasure] said Timbre Grey. [Polite concern] <<Incidentally, I hope you do not use the word 'Gangly' to the humans. Remember we may have to learn to treat them with respect>>
The villain (the delegate from the expansionist imperialist India) is nicely evil, and Prince James, the heir to the throne, is a great comic foil (and bears a certain resemblance to his--presumably--ancestor and present-day counterpart.) The choice of these characters' origins is no accident, as one of the great questions of the novel is: Will the-British-in-India be replayed on a new, larger colony? Which comes a close second to: Why did the First breed make contact in the first place?
Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact by Ken McLeod
This set in the far-ish future; humanity inhabits the Civil Worlds, which as far as I could make out are Dyson spheres made of super diamond; from a distance, these stars look green because of the vegetation in the habitats.
The humans who make the contact are the passengers and crew of a long-haul colonisation ship named But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!. There are only two generations, however, the founders and the ship kids, because longevity is greatly increased. The aliens are bipedal mammals like us, but with wings. Their world is called Ground.
The ship side of the story is told largely through the blog, sorry, biolog of Atomic Discourse Gale, a teenage girl of the ship generation; the Ground side from the point of view of Darvin, a young astronomer. The aliens (they call themselves humans, the humans, or Atomic at any rate, call them bat-people, which is making it hard to refer to them), are at a level of science and technology similar to Earth c 1900; they are investigating radioactivity and trying for heavier-than-air mechanical flight. Because of this, it has a certain steampunk-ish feel in the Ground sections. The fact that their society is much closer to ours on a technological level than the actual humans makes it deceptively easy to think of them as Homo sapiens with one modification: the old dream of natural flight is a reality for them.
So it's a jolt when they are seen from the perspective of Atomic; their homes and universities looking like dirty roosts, their not-so-far-from-ours technology as laughable (to Atomic and her friends, the twenty-first century is before the cavemen, the Lunar cavemen, that is). Even more disturbing is the fact that on Ground, the trudges, members of a closely related but unintelligent species, are used as slaves, their wings slashed so they can't escape.
Soon, the tensions caused by the contact have the humans on the ship fighting amongst themselves, unthinkable in a society where Atomic doesn't even know the word for war. The resolution of this, together with the slavery of the trudges of Ground, and the modus vivendi the two species reach, is where, IMO, the book could have done with a few more chapters. After the first face-to-face meeting, the remainder is an epilogue written by Atomic some years later.
She even offers an answer to the Fermi Paradox, but as I didn't really get it on the first time round, I can't comment properly.
I'm also reading Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, but I keep being interrupted and losing the thread of the story, so I have to backtrack a few scenes.
His Majesty's Starship by Ben Jeapes (published in America as The Ark)
This book is marketed as young adult; I'm not sure why, as the only teenage character is the main character's son, who only appears near the end.
The set-up: Mid twenty-second century. Commander Mike Gilmore is on a dead-end posting in the Royal Navy, which itself belongs to a joke nation on a space station, the original UK having been subsumed into Greater Europe.
Then he's offered the chance to captain the UK delegation to the Roving, a planet belonging to the First Breed (aka Rusties), a non-human species who have been observing the solar system for some years and have recently made contact. The human nation or organisation who impresses the Rusties most during the delegation will be given the opportunity to co-colonise the Roving with the Rusties. Then there's the alien tech, including their FTL drive, known as stepthrough. It looks like an opportunity of a millennium for humanity, but what's in it for the First Breed?
The Rusties are real aliens, not just humans with an extra set of legs stuck on. Their psychology and society are what we would call claustrophobic; their conflict resolution is well, alien, and their communication takes place by fulltalk, which includes body language and released pheronomes in addition to verbal speech. So a conversation goes something like:
<<If you are like the others, you will be glad for the change>> [sincere, concern] the Senior added.
<<It drives me mad, Timbre Grey>> [feeling] said Arm Wild . <<I find the Ganglies fascinating and they could even be my friends, but ... oh>> [pure frustration, verging on madness; subtle hint of self-control to show semi-jest]. <<It is good to be back. Even the deckplates feel different under my feet>>
[Amusement] <<They are. The humans make their ships from a different material to us. But now you can put away your eye-surrounds and your pheromone bottles, Arm Wild. You are among friends>>
<<They are effective but they are not the real thing. This break was an excellent idea, Timbre Grey>> [sincerity]
[Pleasure] said Timbre Grey. [Polite concern] <<Incidentally, I hope you do not use the word 'Gangly' to the humans. Remember we may have to learn to treat them with respect>>
The villain (the delegate from the expansionist imperialist India) is nicely evil, and Prince James, the heir to the throne, is a great comic foil (and bears a certain resemblance to his--presumably--ancestor and present-day counterpart.) The choice of these characters' origins is no accident, as one of the great questions of the novel is: Will the-British-in-India be replayed on a new, larger colony? Which comes a close second to: Why did the First breed make contact in the first place?
Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact by Ken McLeod
This set in the far-ish future; humanity inhabits the Civil Worlds, which as far as I could make out are Dyson spheres made of super diamond; from a distance, these stars look green because of the vegetation in the habitats.
The humans who make the contact are the passengers and crew of a long-haul colonisation ship named But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!. There are only two generations, however, the founders and the ship kids, because longevity is greatly increased. The aliens are bipedal mammals like us, but with wings. Their world is called Ground.
The ship side of the story is told largely through the blog, sorry, biolog of Atomic Discourse Gale, a teenage girl of the ship generation; the Ground side from the point of view of Darvin, a young astronomer. The aliens (they call themselves humans, the humans, or Atomic at any rate, call them bat-people, which is making it hard to refer to them), are at a level of science and technology similar to Earth c 1900; they are investigating radioactivity and trying for heavier-than-air mechanical flight. Because of this, it has a certain steampunk-ish feel in the Ground sections. The fact that their society is much closer to ours on a technological level than the actual humans makes it deceptively easy to think of them as Homo sapiens with one modification: the old dream of natural flight is a reality for them.
So it's a jolt when they are seen from the perspective of Atomic; their homes and universities looking like dirty roosts, their not-so-far-from-ours technology as laughable (to Atomic and her friends, the twenty-first century is before the cavemen, the Lunar cavemen, that is). Even more disturbing is the fact that on Ground, the trudges, members of a closely related but unintelligent species, are used as slaves, their wings slashed so they can't escape.
Soon, the tensions caused by the contact have the humans on the ship fighting amongst themselves, unthinkable in a society where Atomic doesn't even know the word for war. The resolution of this, together with the slavery of the trudges of Ground, and the modus vivendi the two species reach, is where, IMO, the book could have done with a few more chapters. After the first face-to-face meeting, the remainder is an epilogue written by Atomic some years later.
She even offers an answer to the Fermi Paradox, but as I didn't really get it on the first time round, I can't comment properly.
I'm also reading Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, but I keep being interrupted and losing the thread of the story, so I have to backtrack a few scenes.
