Imagine if someone took Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero and then rewrote it as a painfully serious novel, and threw in a whole lot of sex and violence. That’s basically what David Gunn’s Death’s Head is. Death’s Head is far enough over the top to be ridiculous with a main character who can kill his way out of any situation, is both amoral and noble, and has sex with virtually every female character in the book that he doesn’t kill. On the other hand, Gunn doesn’t allow Death’s Head to be blatantly over the top fun in the way that William C. Dietz’s McCade novels are. Instead Gunn repeatedly signals that he wants Death’s Head to be taken seriously.

The first problem with that desire is that Sven Tveskoeg, the main character of Death’s Head is serving the futuristic space SS, which leads you to wonder why anyone would want him to succeed. Then there’s the sheer ridiculousness of the structure of Death’s Head, most of which involves Sven Tveskoeg being thrust into a conflict and then finding a way through his usual “Ruthless Killing is the Only Approach” to destroy the opposition. Not only is this sort of thing repetitive, but it doesn’t exactly jibe with a man who at the beginning of the novel was locked in a box and whipped every day.

Naturally Sven Tveskoeg has superpowers, which only increase once he eats some sort of psychic slug. And to his credit, Gunn does keep ranking out the ridiculous gadgets, complete with an intelligent talking gun. But like virtually all military SciFi, Death’s Head features a type of warfare rooted in Vietnam, that depends on grunts, landing craft and rockets aimed at aircraft. It’s a form of warfare that isn’t even all that relevant in the 21st century with men sitting in air conditioned offices controlling drones thousands of miles away. And Gunn fails to provide a good reason why this sort of backward technology is the default mode.

But Death’s Head’s real problem is that it’s a novel of cliches that doesn’t seem to know it. Gunn polishes them and the narrative up just enough to make the contrast obvious. Gunn could do better than this, but he hasn’t chosen to. And instead what we get is a novel that isn’t good enough to be Science Fiction but takes itself too seriously to be McCade Works for the Space Nazis. And as a result ends up lost amidst the genres.

Reading the stories in Driving Blind you can view it as the intersection, the late 1990’s stories by Ray Bradbury that mark his transition to the purely nostalgia based fiction he writes today. There is one Science Fiction story in Driving Blind, though it is a high concept but particularly weak entry in terms of execution, and one genuinely great horror short story Thunder in the Morning that should have been reprinted endlessly in horror anthologies, but hasn’t.

But Driving Blind is for the most part more concerned with nostalgia, with old school classmates and ex-girlfriends, with looking into the other end of the telescope at adulthood and with growing old and seeing that all disappear, and while such ideas have always been present in Ray Bradbury’s work, in Driving Blind they seem to predominate and dominate the old Bradbury who looked at far horizons that were beyond himself, rather than only looking inward.

When you drive blind, you go to the destination you know best, like a horse with blinders on, because in the dark we can really only see ourselves. And Driving Blind is that one single destination arrived at over and over again, sometimes with talent, sometimes aimlessly, always with depth of emotion, but having read Driving Blind, I can admire Bradbury as a stylist, while finding little there to draw from beyond the shallow wading pool of memoir fiction. The Bradbury whose work I loved looked at the world and the world beyond with fresh eyes. The Ray Bradbury of Driving Blind is more comfortable with the romance of nostalgia and memory than with anything larger or vaster and while he still writes with love, it is a love so narrow as to be self-love.

For about two thirds of its length, The Accord by Keith Brooke seems as if it might be one of the best books written about virtual reality this decade. Why? Because The Accord avoids all the usual troops so many virtual reality stories fall into, of trying to write about the abstract, and instead gives us the story of Noah Barakh, “The Architect of Heaven”, trying to create a virtual afterlife. The nuts and bolts of the Accord, the virtual reality world he is creating is light on the details, but Keith Brooke paints it as a plausible programming project of trying to recreate the world we live in, for those who have already died.

But in the middle of the process, Noah Barakh tries to have an affair with a powerful politician’s wife which ends in her murder and his suicide. Both of them are reborn in the Accord itself, only the version of Priscilla reborn in the Accord is one whose scan predates their love affair, resulting in Barakh going to greater extremes to try and recreate their relationship, while being pursued by her husband, Jack Burnham, a very determined and sociopathic politician. All of this sounds a bit soap operatish and it is, but Brooke’s writing manages to make it work.

The problem is that The Accord, like a lot of larger novels, is about 200 pages too long. And when Brooke runs out of ideas, he turns the formerly realistic nuts and bolts Accord into the Matrix. Yes, literally the Matrix. Jack Burnham takes on parts of the memories of others, and gains the power to turn into anyone in the Matrix he wants, basically turning him into Agent Smith. He seemingly kills Noah, but Noah returns to be worshiped by everyone in the Accord as a godlike figure. And by the time he grows wings and begins to fly around, The Accord hasn’t just gone off the rails, but off the cliff into the worst VR cliches you can think of. And it doesn’t help that Keith Brooke tries to pad out the space by tying in one of his stories as an ending chapter. What follows next makes no sense, and after a few thousand years in which Jack+ has gone around molesting half the girls in the universe and turned earth into a backward stone age planet constantly at war… ending the novel by having Barakh and Priscilla kiss and say the equivalent of, “Awww I loved you too”, just doesn’t fly.

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have brought you such fascinating backstory prequel tales of Dune, before you cared about Dune, with novels such as “Paul of Dune”, “The Road to Dune”, “The Sandworms of Dune”, and “The Winds of Dune”. Now finally comes the Dune novel you have all been waiting for that explores Dune at its most elemental element, its dunes. Its dunes of sand. Its sand dunes. Coming in 2010, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson bring you the Dune prequel novel to end all Dune prequel novels, “The Sand Dunes of Dune.”

You’ve all noticed the sand dunes of Dune. Dune is nothing is not filled with sand dunes. But what is the story of these sand dunes. What fierce passions shaped them? What mortal struggles shook them to the core? And what terrible secrets still lurk deep beneath the feverishly hot sand dunes of Dune?

Award winning writers Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson continue their quest to solve the world’s energy problems by making Frank Herbert turn a full quarter mile inside his grave, with “The Sand Dunes of Dune”. Go back in time to a time before Dune was full of sand dunes. Where did all the sand in the dunes of Dune come from? What is its history and what hopeless destiny lies in its future? What are its thoughts on all the cheap tie in novels that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have written about Dune?

Find out the answers to these questions and more in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s “The Sand Dunes of Dune” coming in 2010. And hold your breath for 2011, when Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson will release Dune 9, tentative title, “The Microscopic Microbes of Dune.”

Coming soon.

The Dancer from Atlantis isn’t one of Poul Anderson’s better known books and there’s a good reason for that. For one thing its premise is the same old, “People go back in time and want to change history by averting a tragedy, only to discover that their attempts to change history are what cause history to happen the way it did in the first place”. Anderson tops off this premise with a good deal of historical speculation, which I suspect was the meat of the story for him, placing Atlantis as a volcanic island next to Crete, and coming up with some interesting historical speculation about ancient Greek history, the nature of the Minotaur and the Greek alphabet. But the Science Fiction tends to take a back seat to the historical speculation.

The premise of The Dancer from Atlantis is that a time traveler’s vehicle goes awry sucking away in its wake four different people from different eras, Reid, a disenchanted American architect, Oleg, a Russian ship’s trader, Ulin, a Hun patriarch, and Erissa, the dancer from Atlantis of the title. Anderson spends the better part of a page on exposition that tries to make some kind of sense of the idea that a time traveling vehicle would for some reason suck up four random people and deposit them safely in another era without taking anything else along, and doesn’t come close to succeeding. But that isn’t The Dancer from Atlantis’ problem.

The real problem is that we know where the story is going, and it’s nowhere good. Reid’s passivity makes the narrative additionally frustrating. Even when the Acheans have repeatedly told him that they’re on friendly terms with Lydia, the high priestess of Minos, and after Erissa has told him that in the wake of Atlantis sinking, Lydia affirmed Prince Theseus’s rule over Minos, Reid can’t seem to put two and two together, or do anything useful until the spear point is actually at his throat. And what he does, is to act out the same series of events that got Erissa raped and enslaved in the first place. When at the end everyone is sent home, having learned to be better people, it’s a weak and unconvincing climax to a story that had little reason for existing except in order to play some creative revisionism with Greek myth.

My own opinion has always been that the SciFi mystery or the SciFi noir is overdone, a lazy shortcut to creating an original Science Fiction novel or story by patterning its plot along a detective’s investigation. KOP by Warren Hammond isn’t entirely out of that category but it tells the story well enough that you wind up ignoring the lack of the Science Fiction in KOP.

KOP is set on a kind of Latin American planet formerly run by plantation owners and now economically depressed and reduced to 20th century technology and a dependency on Offworlders and their tourist trade and economic promise. Essentially KOP is a story set in Latin America with some science fictional elements in the background that kick in a little more toward the end. This hasn’t however prevented TOR from slapping a cover on featuring two Caucasian characters standing in front of a dystopian skyscraper ity, despite the fact that the main characters are Black\Hispanic and the city is basically a collection of shacks with a few more prosperous buildings in a shantytown.

The story begins with the usual murder investigation that of course leads to more and winds up unraveling a terrible secret and a conspiracy. There’s even the veteran cop nearing retirement forced to break in a new rookie partner. But what sets up KOP apart is that it does less posing and its commitment to telling a dark story of corruption and abuse of power that kills all idealism remains intact right down to the grim yet somewhat redemptive ending that asks questions about the price people are willing to pay for the greater good.

KOP isn’t a great Science Fiction novel mainly because it really isn’t a Science Fiction novel and doesn’t spend that much time pretending to be. It’s a Latin American crime novel dressed up as Science Fiction, but it still works. And in a marketplace crowded with SciFi Noir, KOP is one of the best of the bunch.

Not only does Omega Sol by Scott Mackay seem to have virtually the same premise as his previous book, Phytosphere, with inscrutable aliens threatening earth with mysterious technology unless some scientists can figure out how to communicate with the aliens, but it’s an uninspiring premise at best. Remember those alien invasion movies in which the stereotypical egghead insists that the aliens must be benevolent because they have advanced technology, even as they’re wreaking havoc everywhere. That’s Omega Sol in a nutshell, told from the scientist point of view. Except that there isn’t much actual science in Omega Sol.

Though Omega Sol supposedly takes place in the 22nd century, it seems to be more like the 1950’s with a militaristic administration and a Cold War with a very stereotypical Communist China that reads like the author had stopped paying attention to what was going on in Asia at around 1955. The government goons of the 22nd century use such advanced interrogation techniques as LSD and their big final threat to the aliens is a nuclear bomb. There are bits and pieces of more advanced technology, but they’re more like magic than technology because the author never gets around to explaining how they’re supposed to work.

The main character of Omega Sol, a fellow named Dr. Cameron Conrad, has been chosen by the aliens as the most brilliant mathematician on earth to receive their contact information. Unfortunately the military and other scientists keep refusing to see how wonderful the aliens are. When the aliens begin taking over the moon, kill hundreds of thousands of people on earth and start draining hydrogen from the sun turning it into a Red Giant, the militarists naturally have even more trouble seeing their amazing benevolence, the way Dr. Cameron Conrad does.

The good news is that Dr. Cameron Conrad turns out to be right about everything. The military turns out to be completely wrong. Millions of people die, but it’s all right in the end because there’s a “fecund egg of an idea” somewhere in Dr. Conrad’s brain. Yes that’s a quote from the book. Also he finally gets together with his hot blond “beach girl” co-worker Lesha, who is naturally so deeply in love with a middle aged scientist that she goes to the moon to be with him. A plot idea that’s not at all a middle aged man’s fantasy. Perish the thought.

Scott Mackay’s writing in Omega Sol isn’t bad, but it varies wildly, going from a great opening to chapters that suffer from tense confusion and just plain rambling. Dr. Conrad or Cam, spends a lot of the novel having strokes, and there are something like a dozen chapters dedicated to his evil militaristic nemesis Colonel Pittman wandering around and dying of radiation poisoning, just in time to realize the error of his ways in not having listened to Dr. Conrad and finally shooting himself. A capable editor might have decided that the novel could do without all that, and might actually dedicate some of that time to explaining some of the amazing new physics that the aliens give Dr. Conrad, or write an ending that doesn’t involve the entire galaxy but earth, become effectively uninhabitable to the human race.

If you’re interested in characters that don’t read like cliches from the 1950’s and situations that are a little more well thought out than The Day the Earth Stood Still taking place on the moon, Omega Sol is not the book for you. On the other hand if you’re in the market for a book about a saintly Scientist who experiences religious visions of science from aliens who have come to test mankind, and his hot blonde beach girl love interest, Omega Sol is the book for you.

When J.K. Rowling penned the Harry Potter books, she did not create an original work of children’s literature, what she created was a massive publicity machine based around highly derivative but heavily marketed children literature that at their peak created the kind of mass hype that all but suppresses criticism and common sense. With the last Harry Potter book shoveled out on a dim reading public that actually believes that a weak fusion of The Books of Magic and a hundred British boarding school novels along with possible chunks of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is some kind of literary achievement and Harry Potter devolving to the backlist and to a bunch of amusement park rides, even as Warner Brothers works to milk the last book of the series for as many movies as possible, the cult of Harry Potter is in trouble.

From the Brothers Grim to Walt Disney it seems that almost every fantasy kingdom has a dark and ugly underside to it. The Brothers Grim were refreshingly open about that dark side, Walt Disney just threw cute and cuddly at the screen, while robbing and abusing his animators, supporting fascism and lying compulsively about everything. That really isn’t anything new. Look at an adult who successfully creates a magical fantasy kingdom and half the time you wind up with a hack who takes credit for other people’s work, maximizes his own profits and wages war on anyone who gets in his way. Or you could just call him Georgie Lucas.

J.K. Rowling has become notorious for her lawsuits, for the ruthless way her marketing behemoth has gone after readers who bought the book a day early or authors who wrote something she considered derivative, this coming from a woman whose own work is rather derivative to say the least. But for too long claims like that could not get a hearing for the Cult of Harry Potter, the use of Muggles a typical cult positioning of outsiders and true believers is a dead giveaway, but the JK Rowling lawsuit that shut down Steven Van der Ark’s lexicon may mark a turning point.

As Orson Scott Card put it in his ultimate takedown of Rowling

People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.

Anyone got any water?

There’s no denying George R.R. Martin’s abilities to create a fictional and mythological world quickly and easily, he does it time and time again throughout these stories. But there is also an undeniable grimness and sense of futility that pervades these worlds. From the first story, The Way of Cross and Dragon in which an Inquisitioner serving an interstellar Catholic Church of the distant future who believes in Truth above all else discovers himself to be a liar , to the last eponymous and most famous of the stories, a Hugo winner badly botched by the revived Outer Limits, Sandkings, which can be seen as A Portrait of Dorian Gray with carnivorous alien lifeforms, human effort is usually destructive and at best a meaningless blink in the vastness of eternity.

In the House of the Worm takes a look at a Time Machine like future in which the sun is a dim cinder, the surface of the Earth is uninhabitable and humanity is divided between the last remnants who hold lavish grotesque balls and have faith in the inevitability of decay, and the Grouns, altered versions of men who have come up from the deeper bunkers. As the story unfolds, the decadent nobleman who stumbles into the dark discovers their nature, the error of his own people’s belief system, a new source of technology, and the lairs of the Changemasters who genetically engineered great White Worms who are working their own way up through the bunkers. However when he returns home, his stories are nothing more than a diversion that no one believes and he barely survives execution.

This is typical enough of George R.R. Martin’s stories in Sandkings. Action and adventure may occur, but they will always give way to futility. Fast-Friend, the weakest of the stories in the collection, involves a main character whose use of a genetically engineered miniature woman “angel” with the mind of a child for sex, places him in a borderline evil category, schemes to capture the woman he once loved before she became a Fast Friend, an interstellar being capable of traveling across star systems, with his ship, before deciding to let her go. And that too is another reminder that women rarely come off too well in these stories.

Story after story offers nothing but a grim look at humans and highlight the futility of human activity. From the start of the collection to the final end when Simon Kress is being dragged into the home of the orange Sandking maw by its spawn who wear his face and reflect his evil nature, the stories in Sandkings have nothing even faintly positive to offer, and their only peace is the peace of death.

Opening The Best of SF 13, the collection of what are supposed to be the year’s best SF stories, as collected by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer reminded me of opening up a New Dimensions collection from the 70’s and finding it full of the worst kind of experimental New Wave trash.

Am I being unfair? Not really. Five of the stories are satires, or that’s what they’re being called anyway. The worst of the bunch is John Kessel’s The Last American, which is a long, pointless and awkward narrative supposedly retold by a cybernetic intelligence (to make it more awkward) about the last human American President, as composed by a long session at an ANSWER rally. This kind of lame shopworn radicalism, that dates more to 2003 than 2008, fills the volume. Terry Bisson’s Pirates of the Somali Coast is labeled a satire, though it’s an ugly and pointless non-SF narrative told in letters so well researched that apparently Bisson is under the impression that the Somali pirates are arabs.

Then there are not one, but two, badly translated stories. First up is Baby Doll by Johanna Sinisalo , another non-SF satire, about the sexualization of young girls, that beats the point home by page 2, but drags on endlessly until you want to throw up. After finishing Baby Doll I assumed that I had survived the worst that Best of SF 13 had to offer. I was wrong. There was still John Kessel coming up.

Then there are the trunk stories. Marc Laidlaw’s An Evening of Honest Peril, a trunk story from six years back that features a “realistic” retelling of a World of Warcraft type MMORPG battle is a childish piece of fanfic that might have had some justification for existing in 2003, but has none in 2008. But in a bid for relevance Hartwell and Cramer seem to have gathered up gamer centered stories, including Kage Baker’s mediocre Plotters and Shooters.

Mediocre is the best that can be said of most of the stories in Best of SF 13. There’s Kage Baker and Joy Fowler, who along with Terry Bisson, have the ability to get their grocery lists printed in Best of SF collections. Nancy Kress shows up with Endgame, yet another story of a scientist discovering a substance that’s meant to improve humanity but destroys the world instead. Stephen Baxter shows up with a story that even the intro can’t help but connect to an Arthur C. Clarke original. Then there’s Gregory Benford’s Reasons Not to Publish, a two pager which revisits the astoundingly original idea that the whole world is a simulation. Tony Ballantyne’s Third Person hangs around the same neighborhood, and it’s a Solaris leftover, which tells you just what to expect. The Bridge by Kathleen Ann Goonan is yet another hardboiled PI in a cyberpunk future coping with wacky techno shenanigans involving human identity. Then there’s Ken MacLeod’s Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359, a story whose most interesting feature is its title. If you haven’t read any Science Fiction in the last 20 years, these might be new to you.

There are a handful of good stories in The Best of SF 13, if you look hard enough, mainly Wolfe’s Memorae, which makes an unusual amount of sense for Wolfe, How Music Begins by James Van Pelt is a nice surprise, Greg Egan’s Induction is passable and more notably Ian McDonald’s Sanjeev and Robotwallah is the one real winner here. John Henry’s As You Know Bob is amusing, mainly because it’s an unintentional parody of the rest of the collection. It also sums up why Science Fiction is in so much trouble.

That and the fact that David G. Hartwell, a Tor senior editor, and Kathryn Cramer, a reviewer at the New York Review of Science Fiction, think the mess that is The Best of SF 13 actually represents the best of Science Fiction. I can only hope that this collection was the product of the old boys\girls network in SF and that Hartwell and Cramer were just playing favorites with their friends. Because the only alternative is that they genuinely think that The Last American or Pirates of the Somali Coast or An Evening’s Honest Peril or End Game really are the best that Science Fiction has to offer. And from two people in a key position to shape what printed Science Fiction actually looks like, that is a very scary thought. Scarier than anything in this volume.

If you take Ringworld, twist it into a Helix and attempt turn it into a eco-moralistic tale, the result might well be something like Eric Brown’s Helix. Like Ringworld, Helix involves a large number of races settled in a strange and vast structure comprising different ecologies and landmasses, unlike Ringworld it’s shaped like a helix instead of a ring, resulting in the book’s title.

With its fairly generic book cover and blurbs, Eric Brown’s Helix is easily mistaken for another generic Science Fiction novel. Yet the wonderful first few chapters actually lead you to believe that the blurbs, mostly from fellow writers are correct, and Eric Brown has indeed produced a book worth reading. The first few chapters which take place on an earth which subject to aggressive global warming faces a complete global collapse focus on the perspective of Joe Hendry, a widower maintaining his lonely plot of land in an Australian starship graveyard. Unfortunately once Brown takes Hendry off the graveyard and to Helix, the novel implodes into a generic muddled narrative that is as tedious as it is predictable.

In one paragraph Brown destroys the Lovelock, the starship, which nevertheless manages to land on one of the Helix worlds. At this point the novel follows the misadventures of the cast of the Lovelock survivors, who include Hendry, his eskimo girlfriend, a medic with implants which implausibly allows her to speak any alien language within seconds of hearing it, the completely non-stereotypical macho angry African who may also be a warlord and a rapist and a number of aliens.

While Eric Brown did well enough in sketching Hendry and a decaying earth, he flounders when actually forced to create aliens and deal with the science of it. I’m no hard science purist but for a novel, one of whose subplots involves the triumph of science over superstition, Helix is all but empty of not only science but scientific plausibility. When Brown finds himself needing to create aliens, he simply has them think, talk and act like Renaissance Europeans in one case and Tibetan Buddhists in another. There’s even an alien Church complete with Bishops and crosses.

All this would be bad enough but Brown spools out a plot that requires most of the characters to behave like idiots. The Lovelock team wake none of the colonists and go fully leaving behind a ship of helpless frozen colonists behind. From there they do one foolish thing after another. The alien characters are little better, baiting the token religious fanatic figure even after being well aware that the Church can have them tortured and executed for heresy. The novel focuses on a quest for the Builders, who appear godlike and omnipotent and yet cannot even defend their own sanctuary without human help. Helix is filled with deus ex machinas that has lacks in logic and science and is choked with sentimentality and yet is meant to be some sort of paean to science and ecology.

With the death of Arthur C. Clarke, it’s hard not to notice that the Science Fiction of the present has lost much of what attracted so many to Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein in the first place. Squeezed on one side by market realities and merchandising novels and on the other by the erosion of quality and the loss of basic storytelling skills, Science Fiction today is a pale shadow of what it once was.

Science Fiction today is less concerned with the future than it is with the present. Faith in the future has given way to trends of technophobia and luddite sentiments not only in the usual haunts in Hollywood but in many books as well written by authors raised on Hollywood’s technophobic versions of Science Fiction’s vision.

The genre itself has grown convoluted, more concerned with itself than with serving as an open door to welcome in readers. Less concerned with telling a good story and more concerned with posing against the backdrop of some moral quandary and the latest scientific trend. It’s no wonder that anime is a lot more popular among the teenagers who should have been SF’s new readers and that the average age of the Science Fiction reader is continuing to trend upward and that the market accommodates it.

Science Fiction is killing itself off by turning inward, by catering to its core demographics’ preoccupations and failing to attract new readers in the process. What Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein brought first and foremost to their writing was a strong solid sense of rationalized order combined with an unfailing enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities and wonders of the universe. Both are qualities sadly lacking in Science Fiction today.

With the shrinkage of short story markets, once the major place for the development of new Science Fiction and Fantasy talent, you might suppose that Martin H. Greenberg’s endless themed short story collections are actually good. Except of course that Martin H. Greenberg mainly recycles commonly read stories by recognized authors, which lets them get paid for the reprint and creates an incentive for already well paid authors to keep writing short stories in a marketplace that rewards them better for simply sticking to writing novels.

It’s one justification for Martin H. Greenberg’s endless story collections that he edits the way compulsive gamblers play cards. Unfortunately it’s the only one. The con for the pro that Martin H. Greenberg lets professional authors get paid twice is that his short story collections are invariably terrible. Occasionally a good short story will somehow sneak in to a Martin H. Greenberg collection, probably because it was written 50 years ago by Isaac Asimov. But overall Martin H. Greenberg’s short story collections attract bad and outright overly reprinted stories the way lightbulbs attract moths, with the same destructive outcome.

Somehow it wasn’t this bad a decade or so ago when Martin H. Greenberg had a bunch of short story collections under his belt but they weren’t too frequent or too egregious. Lately though it seems as if Martin H. Greenberg turns out a dozen of them a year and that may be an exaggeration but not that much. Last time I stopped by, I saw at least four new ones and the covers alone made me slightly nauseous. The problem is that there are actually good short story collections out there, none of them however have the name Martin H. Greenberg on them. Martin H. Greenberg has become the Burger King of SF and F short story collections and the results are the same tasteless reprocessed junk.

That’s my main response to seeing a Hugo ballot with Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross and heaven help us, Cory Doctorow heading up the Novel category. Cory at all being up there with Little Brother, is pretty much up there with Marisa Tomei getting an Oscar. Or more accurately Stephen Colbert getting his fans to name a toilet after him. Only Stross and Scalzi even nail down the Science Fiction part of this and the bulk of the novels can be summed up as, well written self-indulgent crap. The rest of the categories are an Asimov’s fest as usual, Mike Resnick shows up twice, Ted Chiang once, Nancy Kress once, Swanwick once. If anyone needs a reminder of why written Science Fiction is dying out, the Hugos being reduced to the kind of literary circlejerk that the Nebulas used to be, says it all. We’re a world away from the era of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. The New Wave has had its final victory over Science Fiction and in the process killed its host. Science Fiction is now respectable. It however isn’t Science Fiction.

There’s a word to describe Warworld Blood Vengeance or two words, depending on how you punctuate. Half-assed. Where Warworld Blood Feuds worked as a neat fusion of the original War World stories with original material depicting the advance on the Citadel that brought together history, myth and war into a neat perfect synthesis, Warworld Blood Vengeance is for lack of a better word, a mess.

With all the authors on the letterhead it’s hard to peg exact blame for Warworld Blood Vengeance but since Warworld Blood Vengeance’s greatest sin is its worship of the Saurons, it’s not too farfetched to lay the blame at the doorstep of the creator of the Draka, who take on the same unbeatable and unstoppable qualities of the Saurons here, S.M. Stirling. It’s not however simply that the Saurons are unstoppable, their enemies, the Badari alliance have been reduced to complete idiots.

Warworld Blood Feuds spent a volume setting up compelling and determined characters. Warworld Blood Vengeance disposes of them as quickly and contemptuously as possible to focus on its hero worship of the Saurons. Aisha appears briefly in fully passive mode and dies in childbirth. Barak is barely visible and dies in a suicidal attack. General Hammer of God, probably the best character of the series, gets a little more page time, only to be reduced to a coward and a sniveling idiot halfway through. Chaya appears only as a madwoman and both she and Barak keep Sigrid around and finally release her and even ‘pay’ her to return home, for no apparent reason, where she promptly kills off the last of the Bandari saboteurs and orders a nuclear strike.

It’s senseless and it casually wrecks everything that had gone before it. The Saurons don’t so much win, as succeed by default. Where Warworld Blood Feuds was about a struggle for freedom, Warworld Blood Vengeance is about a gloating Sauron’s eye view of their return to power, as Sauron after Sauron admiringly speaks of Sharku and ends with the mass destruction of their enemies while the Saurons cheer. It’s every bit as nauseating as you would imagine but not altogether surprising from the author who had done the same for the Draka.

5. Bardon’s Revenge of Fury by David Drake and David Webber - First they blew up his planet, then they blew up his galaxy and then they blew up his starship. But that was their last mistake. Now Jon Bardon, mercenary with a grudge, and former Imperial Commando of the Secret Space Guards is after the Ap’Rij’hit Ra’none and nothing will stand in his way including an alien armada, bounty hunters, a seductive Imperial princess and his ex-wife who is now the Empress or something. Let the fury begin!

4. Applebee’s Elves by Jody Lynn Nye and Sarah A. Hoyt - When Emmie Winston who has believed all her life in elves discovers elves working at her local Applebee’s she is delighted and her 13 cats are even more delighted. But the presence of evil land developers who want to turn the Applebee’s into a nuclear power plant because they hate mother nature is a threat to the discovery of the secret of the elves. Also one of the elves might be a secret prince or something.

3. Russkies of the American Empire by S.M. Stirling - When Mike Barton, forest ranger formerly in the Gulf War, stumbles through an unexplained doorway into an alternate universe where the Russians colonized Russia and turned it into a vast Gulag full of Indians, there’s only one thing for him to do, lead the Indian tribes in a rebellion against their Russky overlords. Also for some reason in this universe fire and friction based weapons doesn’t work requiring Mike to invent an entire technology based on ice.

2. Smash the Space Bastards from Orion! by Eric Flint, John Ringo and Dave Freer - What if dinosaurs ruled the universe except on earth? Also what if they could use magic? Now imagine a dinosaur galactic empire based on magic battling humans in technological starships who are the only race in the galaxy on whom magic doesn’t work. Also imagine that in a last ditch effort to stop humanity the evil space dinosaurs go back in time to the age of the Vikings requiring Captain John Mistletoe USN to ally with the Vikings of the 4th century to destroy the dinosaur space menace once and for all. Also Captain John Mistletoe is blind but he has a really smart psychic seeing eye dog. Imagine that!

1. The Imaginary Brigade by Mercedes Lackey and Lois McMaster Bujold - When the International Space Station explodes sending researcher Diane Crawford back in time to the Age of Atlantis when wizards use magic, she discovers that the most powerful magic of all is love, and also crystals. But will it be enough to save Atlantis from the elves and their fearsome Imaginary Brigade that doesn’t exist? Can Diane go back to the present after discovering her magical abilities? Can you think of a reason for buying this novel? Yes, you’re still only thirteen.

Panic or not, a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel, obviously not penned by the deceased Douglas Adams is due to be released titled, And Another Thing, which is really just asking for it. It shouldn’t be all that shocking, after all how many Robot and Foundation, Blade Runner sequels and Dune novels have been released that were not written by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick or Frank Herbert. And how many of those should have been pulped from the start? The honest reality is despite some decent moments, most of them. A series that people genuinely enjoy is an author’s personal vision and not really everyone’s playground. And if that is true for series like The Foundation and Dune, which took place on an epic scale, it is all the more true for the Hitchhiker novels which were erratic, eccentric and personal. They can’t be duplicated except as a thin copy and there is no reason to try. And even Douglas Adams had run out of steam writing them, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish was a radical detour into a more personal intimate realm and Mostly Harmless was mostly empty. I don’t think anyone but die hard fans really took Salmon of Doubt as being all that promising. And that only makes this all the more senseless. If even Douglas Adams had lost the knack for writing Hitchhiker novels, having some third party do it will not fly, even with all the jumping off high places and not looking in the world.

Berserker’s Star reminds you of some of the old radio shows you can still catch sometimes where the characters follow the old pulp tradition, adventure isn’t hard to come by and the commercials are perfectly timed with the cliffhangers. That isn’t to say that any of that is a bad thing at all. Indeed in the mess of Brit inspired broody senseless SciFi we find ourselves stuck in now, Harry Silver and the Berserker’s are quite a relief. Written back in 2003 by an author born in 1930, Berserker’s Star is space as it was imagined in the golden age of Science Fiction, the technology may be a bit new but not painfully so, and the characters are perfectly at home in a chrome universe.

That isn’t to say that Berserker’s Star is a great novel. Saberhagen seems nearly as tired of the whole thing as his protagonist Harry Silver, scenes are written in a circuitous way and go on long after they have served as an information dump until they abruptly end, dialogue consists of the characters repeating the same things over and over again, most notably Lilly, but it’s a problem everyone in the novel suffers from. The Berserkers themselves are mostly absent from the novel except as a shadow and for a destructive climax that sees Harry Silver fighting to stop a Berserker plan to touch off a Hypernova that will wipe out thousands of solar systems.

But Berserker’s Star has plenty of charm, from the oddball planet that isn’t a planet with breakdown zones where technology doesn’t work and a planet that seems to be adapting to mankind, to its pulp age characters, sexist as the depiction of Lilly as the prototypical clingy shrill dame may be and to Harry Silver’s final suicidal showdown with the Berserker that takes him to within spitting range of a black hole and a pulsar through warped space. Even when he hardly seemed to be trying, Fred Saberhagen still delivered a much better novel than 90 percent of the writers who clutter today’s Science Fiction seem to be able to. Perhaps it was because he stuck to the basic rules of writing, know your characters, awe your readers, tell your story as free of clutter as possible and make sure you nail the ending. And Berserker’s Star does all of the above.

I’ve never been a fan of Ben Bova’s writing finding it to be a little clunky and too abrupt and oddly put together, often the sort of thing that comes from excessive overediting. Ben Bova’s The Aftermath suffers from the same problem on a larger scale as it tries to connect a number of intersecting storylines and characters over a period of years and does it with graceless abruptness.

But The Aftermath does have a good story at the center of it, that of Victor, his son Theo, wife Pauline and daughter Angie, living together on the bulky decaying ore carrier Syracuse, which is attacked when they witness the destruction of the Ceres miners colony, an attack that leaves Victor safe but penniless and alone and his family on a distant course away from Ceres and with a ship running low on fuel. It’s not original or epic, but it has a great deal of potential and is a throwback to the sort of Science Fiction novel that often used to be written. Unfortunately Ben Bova saddles the narrative with additional stories involving a mysterious alien artifact, Humphries Stellar Systems assassins, and one of the most annoying characters in any novel in some time, Dorik Harbin or Dom.

Dom sets in motion the events in the novel as Dorik Harbin, a drug crazed space mercenary who attacks the colony and the Syracuse. This is actually a high point for him in the novel as he spends the rest of it as a whiny cybernetic pacifist priest who has read Gandhi and is constantly trying to commit suicide and being captured, in between wandering uselessly through the narrative, complaining about how much pain he’s in, picking up dead bodies in space and annoying Victor and his family and everyone he encounters with warnings about the futility of violence, even as they’re trying to save themselves from being murdered. By the time Dom has finished rampaging through the novel, the story has been thoroughly ruined in the service of delivering yet another tired lecture about pacifism and non-violence. Another story thread involving the Captain chasing after Dom goes equally nowhere as Alex Humphries, the son or clone of Martin Humphries, decides along with the Captain to retire and devote himself to making the world a better place.

There is a good story lurking inside The Aftermath involving Theo guiding his parent’s ship back home as Victor does his best to get to them, unfortunately it’s joined at the hip with a terrible story involving Dom and the alien artifact and how we can all learn to be nicer people. If you can imagine a refreshing cup of Coke in which someone pours a whole beaker of sugar, you have a good idea of how Ben Bova ruined his own novel. The overly compressed and abrupt nature of The Aftermath along with the whole alien artifact story and Dom may be a carryover from the previous books of The Asteroid Wars, which i never read, but it’s little excuse for ruining a good story, with a lot of bad cliches.

Allen Steele has the dubious gift of writing novels that read like short stories or perhaps short stories that have been padded until they turn into novels. On close inspection Spindrift might pass for a novella rather than a novel, padded with minute details of the trip and the explorations of Commander Harker, pilot Emily Collins and traitor and prisoner and all around genius when it comes to aliens, Jared Ramirez.

From the start Spindrift whomps you with a whole lot of background, virtually none of which is elucidated as Allen Steels apparently is writing for people who have read his Coyote novels and expects you to know what’s been going on in the Coyote Universe. But stripped of background, Spindrift is the usual story about a first contact starship mission featuring a blowhard Captain, a savvy first officer, a fearful female pilot and a scientist who no one listens to but knows everything before it happens, who go off to make First Contact and encounter wise and peaceful aliens but nearly spoil it with their usual human warmongering ways.

Steele attempts to bring in some complexity with Jared Ramirez, who traded genocide for immortality in the name of ecology, but is unable to bring any kind of moral reckoning to bear on the whole thing and spends most of the novel using Ramirez as the prototypical genius that the brass won’t listen to but who turns out to be right about everything.

There’s nothing new in Spindrift, not that you should expect it from Allen Steele whose novels are basically simpler, up to date and real world repackagings of SF tropes. Spindrift is no different and like most of Steele’s novels offers no actual surprises, despite the attempt at generating mystery by setting the whole thing as a sort of flashback. If you’ve read Steele before then you know what to expect. If you haven’t, now you will.