Science Fiction
BOOK REVIEWS MAY 1996-AGENDA-9
SCIENCE FICTION
Harvest The Fire By Poul Anderson TOR, $19.95 hardcover
Reviewed by Eric Jackson AGENDA Associate Editor
Poul Anderson writes "hard" science fiction- that aspect of the genre that plays up the science, as contrasted with other works in which the science is merely the literary setting. However, Anderson also spins good yarns with interesting plots that can hold the attention of more than the computer-nerd-fringe. Moreover in "Harvest the Fire," a far future cybernetic and space travel tale, he plays out themes from the cutting edges of contemporary American social divides.
The book's lead character, Jesse Nicol, is a space pilot by trade and a frustrated poet deep within. Over the centuries earth and its colonies have become increasingly dependent upon-and subject to-the cybercosm, an electronic network that puts the Internet to shame. People don't have to work for a living (robots do that) and human political institutions have become a democratic window dressing for the real, automated, administration. Culture has atrophied in a human race grown lazy. If you care to recognize allegories, it's a stultifying bureaucracy writ large.
Then as now, there are people who are totally institutionalized, loyal to and dependent upon the system without much thinking about. call it welfare, call it the prison system, or, in this case, call it the cybercosm-it's all the same mentality. In Anderson's not-so-brave new world, the most clever and loyal of the cybercosm's human subjects culminate their long years of service to the machine by having their minds downloaded and incorporated into the network. If the need arises, those minds can be retrieved and loaded into robots or other machines. Thus we have Venerator, the hunter, a once-human download retrieved to investigate and disrupt a murky conspiracy against the network.
who other than the odd malcontent, would want to harm the network that keeps humanity at peace and well-fed? The Lunarians. This offshoot of humanity has its roots in genetic engineering. ordinary humans can't give birth in the moon's low gravity, and the microsurgery that bypassed this limitation also created a race with a somewhat different personality. Lunarians are a little taller, less able to resist high G-forces, and anarchistic by nature. They don't appreciate the cybercosm or much of any other government. When unengineered humans and the cybercosm that rules them move to include the moon in their empire, many of them flee to the solar system's far reaches.
Get into the contemporary implication of that, and you touch the rawest nerve in U.S. society. Do culture and personality have much to do with genes? To say this is likely to get one branded a racist and identified with certain stands on issues like immigration, official language and educational canons. "Harvest the Fire" isn't about these issues even indirectly, but it's clearly the work of a member of a society preoccupied by such matters.
The love story aspect of "Harvest the Fire" features a Lunarian woman who attracts a reluctant and fearful Nicol into the conspiracy. Both the male and female protagonists are complicated, believable people who really love each other. This is not a shallow ideological tome. Yet one salient aspect of his personality is the brutish oaf, given to returning insults with punches or worse. An important part of her character is the manipulative opportunist, given to getting her way through deceptive plots that play on her targets' emotions.
That gets us to the war between the sexes now raging in American society. The male as heavy-hadned animal is a staple of feminist stereotypes. The female as charming trapper with a sharp eye on the bottom line is a concept that looms large in the minds of men who are wary of the relationship game.
Poul Anderson weaves all this together into a tale of terror, freedom, deception and discovery. "Harvest the Fire" is a compelling story about personalities at once jaded and naive, caught up in a fast-moving adventures.
(Bottom Left Portion for Review of "Dark Room")
mate way-by sledgehammer. Walters draws the respective family circles better than she does the several policeman involved, and the denouncement could have more drama and less analysis, but no one is writing a better mystery these days. jinx may be an assertive modern woman, but she's still just as imprisoned and threatened by societal structures as any "had-I-but-Known" heroine and "The Dark Room" is as powerful an indictment of her plight as any of her predecessors'.