The Alien Years
Robert Silverberg
HarperPrism, 1998
428 Pages

Aliens come to earth, make life miserable for humanity, and leave.

What the story is about is the lives of the humans dealing with the aliens, who appear completely indifferent to humanity. Except they're not. Therein lies the problem with a book written by a publishing icon. No mere editor dares to mess with the copy, so it's pretty much published as submitted. No continuity checking required.

The glitches really are minor though. In the beginning, the aliens capture a bunch of humans in nets, take them aboard their spaceships, and have them stand around in awe-inspiring rooms. Then they let them go. One person, wife of one of our lead characters, is a believer in an aliens-are-gods cult, and she naturally projects her beliefs on the aliens. Somehow, she contacts the "authorities" who are watching the space ship, broadcasting a television image and her explanation of their arrival. In spite of this obvious technological collusion, the aliens are referred throughout the book as having no contact and making no response to any sort of transmissions from humans.

The Draco Tavern
Larry Niven
Tor Books, 2006
304 Pages

27 stories collected from various publications, ranging from 1977 through 2006. The original publications aren't cited.

The Draco Tavern is Niven's version of Callahan's Cross-time Saloon, Spider Robinson's off-track dive where aliens come to hobnob with humans. Niven's establishment is deliberately built to accommodate visitors from outer space who show up as tourists.

In typical Niven fashion the stories technology hangs together well and the world behind them is consistent and coherent. The stories have a clean, neatly finished feel that Niven's so good at, but they perhaps lack some of the humor and humanity that Robinson delivers so well. He does have a nice turn though, especially with "Assimilating our culture...".

Del Rey/Ballantine/Random House, 2004, 642pp

This is a second volume, the first having been published in 1998

This is a nice collection, offering a sampling of several authors' works as well as an overview of where Fantasy is going today.

On the latter subject, the tend toward floridly wordy fantasy that seems more like a bodice ripper is pretty easy to see in these eleven stories.

Most of the stories are supplements, interpolations or extensions of the characters from a fantasy series.

Robin Hobb adds another story to the Realm of the Elderlings. It's hard to remember whether this story fits on at the end of the saga, with Chaldeans settling the Rain Wild River for a second time, or if this is the tale of the original settlement. I suspect the latter. Mostly it's the emotional evolution of a pampered housewife becoming a community leader through hardship.

328 pp.
Del Rey Books, 2005

This is a sequel to the earlier collaboration, "Time's Eye", in which Soldier Bisea Dutt is transported to a patchwork world assembled from different periods of human history. They induce from the cut-off date that some catastrophe must destroy mankind soon.

In "Sunstorm", Bisea has returned to London and her proper time, just as scientists discover a flaw in the sun that will destroy the earth in a few years. The Astronomer Royal works out a plan to build a giant solar shield, and humanity is saved.

The plot moves right along, but it's a little disappointing. Some of it feels like it comes right out of "how to write a disaster movie". We are told that the sunstorm will have terrific consequences even with the shield in place. Domes are built over big cities, of course, but we spend no time on the puzzle of how to light and cool these domes. Oh, well, big fans, but other than that.

Burning Tower
Larry Niven &
Jerry Pournelle
Pocket Books, 2005, 430 pp.

Niven and Pournelle return to the world of the Burning City, set in California fourteen thousand years ago, when magic was still active and gods were real. Giant birds are attacking the new caravan trade with Tep's Town (the Burning City), and Lord Sandry sets out with his beloved Burning Tower of the Feathersnake Caravan to find out why. Originally they merely plan to go as far as the next trade town, but when they find that beseiged as well, they set out across the desert to find the source of the scourge.

Although the journey is also a pursuit of magic, nothing much is made of this except as an economic force. Magic comes from Starfall Crater, and is controlled by a mysterious Emperor.

Building Harlequin's Moon
Larry Niven and Breanda Cooper
Tom Doherty Associates, 2005, 400pp.

A ramship fleeing the corruption of Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology on Earth is crippled. To make repairs, they must build a temporary colony on a moon they construct and terraform at a handy solar system. The commanding council must struggle with the ethics of the technology they fear but must use, and with the fact that there will not be room to take the lunar colonists on toward the final destination. They must be left behind on an unstable moon.

The status of the temporary colonists is the big conflict. Are they temporary people without rights, a mere means to an end?

Sorcery Rising
Fool's Gold Book 1
Jude Fisher
Daw Books, 2002, 469 pp

The jacket copy touts FIsher as the "best-selling author of "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Visual Companion" after having worked with Peter Jackson on the film trilogy. I guess credentials like that are enough to intimidate the modern Fantasy editor. This series could have benefited from a heavy hand in the editing department.

The storey's good though - or rather, stories. This is the first problem: there are too many story tracks.

The saga is set in a strange magical world, where a vaguely Norse culture, a vaguely Middle-Eastern culture, and a Nomadic/Gypsy culture all come together at an "Allfair". At least one set of characters from each culture join a legendary wizard's servant/apprentice who has escaped by putting the wizard into a trance and fleeing with the magical cat and the wizard's mistress.

The Pickup Artist
Terry Bisson,
Tor Books, 240pp, 2001

An odd twist on the world of Farenheit 451, the story follows a Federal agent charged with gathering creative works that have been banned by an agency purging the public cannon in order to inspire new creativity. Intrigued by a Hank Williams record scheduled for removal which brings back childhood memory, he soon finds himself on the run and in pursuit of the mysterious "Alexandrians" who smuggle illegal copies of banned works. A parallel story follows the global plot to implement this system, with ties to terrorism and thinly veiled references to Howard Hughes and Bill Gates.

The Knight, 432 pp, Tor Books, January 2004
The Wizard, 489 pp, Tor, November 2004

It's a refreshing change of format to see a story in two volumes, not three, and to see them come out close enough to each other that you can actually remember the plot of the first by the time you start the second.

A vague backstory leads a young man into a very Norse seeming world of fantasy, magic, and heroism. He is transformed into Sir Able of the High Heart, and we're off on a quest.

Wolf builds a fascinating world in layers, suggestive but not identical to the ideas of the levels of hell or the Norse underworld and overworld. Our hero's journey takes him above and below, but never fully explores all of the levels. In fact, that incompletion is characteristic of the story all the way through.

This conclusion of "The Tawny Man" trilogy also serves as a sort of conclusion to Hobb's other series, the "Farseer Trilogy" as well as the Live Ship" trilogy. The world she built in the "Live Ships" is the setting for both "Farseer" and "Tawny Man". "Farseer" deals with the youth and struggles of royal bastard Fitz Chivalry, taken in by his family's entourage as Royal Assassin. "Tawny Man" follows his career as an adult and explores his relationship with the King's Fool, a prophetic and other-ly being.

While the "Live Ships" at times strayed pretty far into the "Boddice Ripper" romance genre, the latter two trilogies have not done so as badly. They do make heavy use of that genre's technique of artificial conflict. Fitz has many secrets that he will not share, many conflicts caused by a sense of honor that makes no sense to the reader. We are tempted to pick him up, shake him, and say "talk to them!" about any number of deep misunderstandings.