A week or so back I finished _Hidden Empire_, the first book in Kevin
J. Anderson's "Saga of Seven Suns":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Seven_Suns
I discovered this one late -- the series is out now in pulp, and I was
unaware of it prior to that. I have some things I just need to vent.
[spoilers -- ha, as if]
What an unbelievable turd. While it's not unusual for a novelist to
foreshadow, Anderson basically forecudgeled. His aliens are
disinteresting in the extreme; the only marginally noteworthy society
was the Green Priests and their symbiosis with their worldforest, and
they were human.
The obtuseness of his characters and societies is unforgivable. When
you compress the core of a gas giant and turn it into a star, notice
what appear to be diamondlike nodules shooting out from the new sun,
and then see diamondlike ships attacking cloud-harvesters on other gas
giants, you have to be a cretin of genuinely universal proportions to
not understand what happened. Yet that's exactly what occurs: No one
knows why the "hydrogues" are attacking cloud harvesters!
The alien "allies" of Earth are anthropomorphic and capable of
interbreeding with humans -- oh come on -- and have a history
recitation that's millennia deep. Their leader even knows about the
hydrogues, though it's a buried secret, yet he still manages somehow
to be stunned and ignorant of their attacks, sources, reasoning, etc.
Anderson has a husband/wife team of xenoarchaeologists who've
uncovered both the wormhole tech used to create suns of gas giants,
and teleportation tech used by a long-dead race called the Klikiss.
Yup, just the two of them. Not a team, no student support, just a
couple of kooks digging up fossil civilizations. And they reactivate a
teleport panel using, essentially, camp-light batteries. Those must be
some damn impressive batteries. One can only assume they're radically
unlike the Li-ion cells in iPhones.
And as for the cloud harvesters -- well, early in the narrative we
have a captain of one of these things STEPPING OUTSIDE ONTO AN
OBSERVATION DECK without breathing apparatus as his "skymine" sucks up
free hydrogen. They even keep doves. Outside. In the atmosphere of the
gas giant. While harvesting hydrogen.
Almost every page contains a slap to the face of science and SF; it's
not even fantasy. It's just a childish notion of magical settings
placed for the convenience of plot and story, without any effort made
to actually consider what's feasible and what is not.
But what tweaked me most was the "interview" section at the end of the
book, where Anderson says he wanted to write a "saga" that included
everything he claims to love about SF. He mentions _Dune_ particularly
-- no surprise since he worked with Brian Herbert on continuing Frank
Herbert's exploration of that storyline.
The only thing I can conclude is that Anderson never understood what
Herbert accomplished with _Dune_, and more generally, he doesn't
understand SF at all -- least of all what makes a good SF story. Any
decent editor in the genre would have suggested two things to him:
"Rethink. Redact."
If this is the state SF is sliding into, particularly in the wake of
the _Trek_ and _Transformers_ noise-machines, what the hell do we have
left?
--
Warren Ockrassa | @waxis
Blog | http://indigestible.nightwares.com/
Books | http://books.nightwares.com/
Web | http://www.nightwares.com/
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