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reviewAlso in this
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Do real scientists acquire racial
stereotypes?
Survival: Species Imperative #1
Migration: Species Imperative #2 Dr. McKenzie Connor was a workaholic biologist and scientific institute administrator, in a time when humanity had made contact with many other sentient races, colonized other worlds and joined the Interspecies Union. But she paid little attention to aliens, preferring to concentrate her attention on the study of salmon. That is, until other worldly forces intervened to give her a non-elective crash course in xenobiology. This left her with an attitude: Aliens should come with labels, she grumbled to herself. “Friend / Useless / Planning to Eat You” would cover the current possibilities nicely. What could be worse than being eaten by a space alien? Well, being turned into a green fizzie and drunk might be a more awful way to go than to merely be scarfed down. Especially when your planet, your entire species, and almost all other life forms are on the menu. And what’s a human race to do in the face of such a challenge? Is genocide the only sure defense? Or, if cards are played right, might there be lucrative opportunities to be exploited in the real estate that the hostile creatures leave cleared and depopulated in their wake? Author Julie E. Czerneda, a Canadian and a biologist by training, is a bright new light in hard science fiction. “Hard” as in the science playing a central role in the story. There is a great ongoing revival in that part of the genre, but that doesn’t mean a return to wooden space operas revolving mainly around physics. For starters, that’s because in the 50s standards of good writing were imposed by science fiction’s great editors, and then in the 60s there was a revolt led by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. LeGuin in which tales of timeless social and literary import were set against speculative futuristic backgrounds. As the cyberpunks came in on the leading edge of a new wave of hard science fiction a few years back, fans who had seen the great stuff imposed their by then customary standards. Moreover, in the last epoch when hard science fiction was ascendant, space exploration was the new thing, upon which popular attention and public funding was focused. But since that time the space race became politicized, then militarized, then cut back in favor of other priorities. These days the cutting edges of scientific inquiry are more in the fields of biology and nanotechnology than in physics and astronomy, and that reality is increasingly reflected in today’s science fiction. So here we have two books in a series --- with room for more --- in which biology is the main thing, set against the backdrop of a spacefaring civilization. But that could be a pretty boring recipe, were it not that Czerneda is also a fine writer who spins mysteries within mysteries that touch upon eternal themes like friendship, loyalty, enmity and betrayal. “Mysteries within mysteries?” In hard science fiction? Doesn’t that literary device entail an inherent blunting of Occam’s Razor? Ah, but if you look at the history of science, many processes that are not so simple as they would intuitively appear have ultimately been explained by the wielding of William of Ockham’s 14th century principle on more sophisticated and intricate levels. (After all, that English nobleman and his contemporary followers never figured out that bacilli living in rats that were transmitted to humans by fleas were what brought their medieval world crashing down about them.) In the two books reviewed here, one never gets the sense of needlessly convoluted or far-fetched plots that destroy a science fiction fan’s suspension of disbelief. Czerneda is also outstanding in her celebrations of the Canadian Pacific and the Ontario north woods, and most credible in her depictions of the eternal vices and virtues of bureaucracy and academia. The folks at STRI might get a chuckle or two out of the latter. So move over, Gordon Dickson. You have some more company in the pantheon of brilliant Canadian science fiction writers. If you are a fan of English-language science fiction here in Panama, you may have to place an order abroad to get these books. It will be a worthy investment.
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