Sci-Fi Highs

By Peter Stoler

Five novels revive a genre

What ever happened to science fiction? In the 70s, readers were inundated with novels by giants of the genre: Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and scores of others. But bookstore shelves have grown barer and the names rarer. Even so, a handful of practitioners show that this may be merely a hiatus before the renaissance.

Arthur C. Clarke's sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two (Ballantine; $14.95), resumes the themes of his celebrated 2001, published 14 years ago. A joint Soviet-American expedition sets out to locate the spaceship Discovery and to examine the huge black monolith of 2001. The first part is easy; even Hal, the malevolent talking computer, which had to be electronically lobotomized in 2001, is reparable. But the crew can only watch as powers beyond its understanding transform Jupiter, which astronomers call "the star that failed," from an enormous sphere of gases into a small glowing sun capable of sustaining life on its satellites. As before, the monolith remains the piece that passeth all understanding. But no matter. Clarke deftly blends discovery, philosophy and a newly acquired sense of play that manifests itself in references to films like Alien and Star Wars, and snippets from recent headlines. If, by the end, he leaves readers as bewildered as his astronauts, they can at least claim to have been better entertained.

Thirty years ago, Isaac Asimov completed his Foundation trilogy, a Gibbon-esque look at the decline and fall of an intergalactic empire. Asimov, who abandoned fiction in favor of science, has now expanded his work to a tetralogy with foundation's Edge (Doubleday; $14.95). The last volume of the trilogy ended with a question: Does a mysterious organization, capable of controlling human history, really exist in some secret galactic refuge? Edge opens with an answer: Of course. It then proceeds to describe the rivalry between the altruistic Foundation and two less noble competitors for the heart and mind of the cosmos. As the breathless plot caroms on, Asimov winks at his audience. Interplanetary rocketeers not only take advantage of hyperspace (folds in the fabric of the universe) to bridge the light-years between one solar system and another; they also use English and credit cards. Rare is the author who can resume a story after a pause of three decades, but Asimov has never been predictable in anything but fecundity. This is his 260th book and one of his best. Given the master's past history, it may be a prelude to a pentalogy.

Frank Herbert's Dune books dealt with life, war and death on a desert planet. The White Plague (Putnam; $14.95) is set on earth in the grim present. Molecular Biologist John Roe O'Neill, an Irish American in Dublin, sees his wife and children annihilated by an I.R.A. bomb. Vengeance becomes his spur. In a home laboratory he invents a new disease and releases the plague in three nations: Ireland, because his family died there; England, because of British oppression; and Libya, because it operates training schools for terrorists. The disease spreads so quickly that life itself is threatened. These are the trappings of a Graham Greene moral thriller, but Herbert moves them into the arena of science fiction with some frightening speculations on medical warfare and some chilling ideas about the future imperfect, a hazardous place even without the threat of a nuclear holocaust.

Ursula K. Le Guin's novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Beginning Place, have made her the hottest name in contemporary scifi. The Compass Rose (Harper & Row; $14.95) shows her less a miler than a sprinter. The 20 stories reveal a versatile and far-ranging mind: one tale concerns two research scientists' attempt to decipher the writing of ants; another tells of an animal's efforts to understand the motives of a lab technician who puts it into a maze ("The alien's cruelty is refined, yet irrational," the animal observes. "If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold the food?"). The wittiest story examines the subject of time and deals with humanity's persistent demand: Why is there never enough? One answer has a logic that Pythagoras would have admired: like air from a tire, the stuff is actually escaping through a tiny hole in the universe.

Whimsy is currently in short supply, a deficiency that makes Douglas Adams' new book all the more welcome. Life, the Universe and Everything (Harmony; $9.95) is like nothing ever published before except, perhaps, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also written by Douglas Adams. Once again the protagonist is a reluctant wanderer named Arthur Dent; once again his intergalactic guide is an extraterrestrial named Ford Prefect. Vooming around the void accompanied by a two-headed, three-armed creature who once controlled the universe and a sexy space cadet, Dent manages to avert Armageddon and save the world for life as we never knew it. Adams delights in cosmic pratfalls, and if he sometimes loses track of his narrative, he more than makes up for it by confirming what many have suspected all along: "He learned to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries." Adams fails, however, to resolve the discrepancy between the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer. The answer, provided in Adams' first book, is 42. The question, postulated in his second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is: What is six times nine? The third book says that Q. and A. cancel each other out--and take the universe with them.

--By Peter Stoler

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