Science Fiction for October 1997  by Henry Leon Lazarus  Maybe it's the chill of winter or the oncoming rush of Halloween, but I've got some really weird books to report this month. Some people will say that all science fiction and fantasy is weird. Most of the time, however, sf novels fall into recognizable themes and backgrounds. Sometimes an author goes off the beaten track and, if he (or she) can get it to work the reader is presented with something truly different and wonderful.  Felicity Savage envisions a whole society based on the work of captured daemons, caught like hamsters in a wheeled cage and used to drive the technology. In Ever she introduces us to Crispin, her black, circus bred daemon handler who in the first part of the trilogy meets his true love and then finds himself separated from her and fighting in The War in the Waste (trade from HarperPrism) as a pilot in a daemon propelled plane. Two empires are fighting for the right to capture the daemons who grow in this waste. This is an absorbing tale with a unique technology of magic. I really loved it. I also found Vonda N McIntyre's The Moon and The Sun (hard from Pocket) romantic tale of a captured mermaid (drawn naturally rather than mythically) brought to the court of Louis VI (the Sun King) fascinating in its mixture of historical fiction and minor fantasy. The aging king is more interested in an organ of immortality than in the reality of the strange beasts the Jesuit naturalist has found.  I also loved Eric Flint's Mother of Demons (paper from Baen) which manages the difficult trick of making the alien squids sympathetic. Human survivors from an expedition are the demons to these intelligent beings. Even without the technology that was lost in the crash, the knowledge of warfare humans bring is worth their small numbers. I wasn't as happy with Sean Russell's Beneath the Vaulted Hills (hard from DAW) which returns to Farland during the time of the last mage. Mr. Russell has a way of making things more confused as the tale continues, in this case a crawl through a mysterious cave to a tomb created by the first mages. I hope the second half will provide more sense than the second half of his last duology.  Consider two very long series. The seventh Chung Kuo novel by David Wingrove takes the fallen Chinese society that had once covered the world with its monstrous continent-large cities, living through Days of Bitter Strength (trade from Dell) as plagues and other evils afflict the ten percent that remain and the future struggles to be born. In this penultimate book, Mr. Wingrove is showing the sociology of change in his usual absorbing fashion, but I'm glad we are finally near the end of the series. Fred Saberhagen has one of his better tales about Berserker Fury (hard from Tor) which details a major conflict between a human multi-star civilization much like ours and the death dealing machines. It's really a tale of odd heroics and cowardice and quite moving.  Patricia Kenneally-Morrison has been writing about Kelts in space for a while. This odd series assumes that the Celts left Ireland in starships and that the irish myths took place in space. Blackmantle (hard from HarperPrism) is one of the early queens who fights (with spears and swords) to drive off the Firvoligans who have captured her planets. Then she has to use her magic to go to hell (the real thing) and bring back her love who was murdered. Mercades Lackey and her husband Larry Dixon return to her long series of Valdemar for a light, juvenile, side tale of a boy who joins the hawk brothers after his village is captured by a rogue mage and his army in OwlFlight (hard from DAW). I zoomed through it.  David Sherman and Dan Cragg start a series about space marines, Starfist, that captured me from the get go. In First to Fight (paper from Del Rey) the marines have to deal with a desert planet being ransacked by revolting tribesmen settled from the worst of Earth's hard areas. Of course there's a bad ensign and technology that goes wrong so to place the platoon in the heart of the desert under attack by the horse warriors. I can't wait for their next assignment. I'm going to be more cautious about Time Station Berlin (paper from Ace). David Evens does a great job telling about how JFK's famous berlin speech ("Ich bin ein Berliner") could go wrong through only slight manipulations and is a lot of fun. Others in this series haven't been readable, so watch out. To top of next column QuickLooks Archives	C. Dale Brittain and her husband Robert A. Bouchard have a nice tale of a count (nicknamed Count Scar (paper from Baen) because of a childhood injury) new to his castle and a monk-mage who have to deal with religious fanatics after magical artifacts left hidden in the castle. It was fun as was the second book of Marjorie B. Kellog's Dragon Quartet, The Book of Water (paper from DAW) which takes the young girl, Erde and her dragon Earth from cold Germany in 913 to 2013 on the hot African coast where she meets N'Doch who finds himself partner to the Dragon Water. Ms. Kellog handles the odd contrast between a believable, starving near future and the fantasy of the dragons very well and I hope the rest of the series will be on equally high level.  In Kings of Infinite Space (hard from HarperPrism), Alan Steele takes a resurrected kid from our time and sends him on a quest to rescue his lost and unrevived love in the twenty-first century. This is one of those things in which everything turns out to be a conspiracy, which spoiled it for me. If you have a pre-teen age girl with a love of light romances, Vivian Vande Velde's The Conjurer Princess (paper from HarperPrism) should be a nice introduction to real fantasy. It's about a girl trying to rescue her sister by becoming a sorcerer. It's too simplistic for an adult.  Two books that I missed in hard cover are now out in paper. Marion Zimmer Bradley and Holly Lisle have a very pleasant tale of two middle aged women with personal dilemmas who find a guide book and book a tour in the magic kingdom of Glenraven (Baen). The kingdom, it seems, is in need of two hero's and has selected them. William Gibson takes us on an trip of next generation Japan where an Idoru (Berkley), a computer generated singer, wants to marry a real singer. I couldn't make more sense of the plot than that, and I don't know why the book got so much acclaim.  Star Trek people will want to pick up Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (trade from Pocket) by Marc Okrand before they visit. And The Illustrated Star Wars Universe (trade from Bantam Spectra) is rather pretty. Ralph McQuarrie is responsible for the drawings and Kevin J. Anderson has created a nice tour guide for the text.  Martin H. Greenberg (by himself) has collected some Elf Magic (paper from DAW) tales, and with A. R. Morlan has Zodiac Fantastic (paper from DAW). Spider and Jeanne Robinson's hugo winning Star Dance and Star Seed are together as The Star Dancers (paper from Baen).  Now out in paper is J. V. Jones conclusion to her trilogy Master and Fool (Aspect), C. J. Cherryh's second tale of telepathic horses, Cloud's Rider, and Mercedes Lackey's conclusion to her mage storm series Storm Breaking (DAW). There's also Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Mantle of Kendis-Dai (which used to be Starshield Sentinels and is from Del Rey). This takes place in a galaxy where the rules change as you travel. I still remember the dragon pulled starship. Then there is the tale of the lawless robot Calaban (Ace) which Roger McBride Allen did a good job of imitating the master, Isaac Asimov with a robot mystery. Finally there's David Copperfield's collection Beyond Imagination (HarperPrism).  Trade paperback reprints include Alan Dean Foster's Dinotopia Lost (Ace) about a shipwreck on a land of talking dinosaurs and Walter M. Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz (Bantam Spectra) in preparation for the sequel due out in a few months. Terry Bisson actually finished the sequel after Mr. Miller's death but he told us at a Philadelphia Science Fiction meeting earlier this year that he tried to match the style of Miller and that Miller had been trying for thirty years to finish the novel.  The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society will have its August meeting on the 8th at 8:00 p.m. at International House. Guests are welcome to attend this, the second oldest science fiction club in the country.  Return to the SF Literature Forum Page