The Dragons of Springplace | ||||||||
Robert Reed | ||||||||
Golden Gryphon, 312 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
While
Robert Reed has obvious escaped the terminal fate of his heroine, and
claims LeGuin, Tiptree, Wolfe and Silverberg as influences, he appears to be
an amalgam of several writers. The sense of nostalgia and wonder of
Ray Bradbury, the fantastic weirdness of A. Merritt, the settings and
characters reminiscent of Cordwainer Smith, and the alien ecologies and
humour of Stanley Weinbaum, have been fused and remolded and modernized into
Robert Reed. Many current science-fiction writers could do well to implant
a bit of Mr Reed's brain into their own.
What first strikes one with these stories is that they thrive on atmosphere
and character development and are not incident-driven pulp literature --
short term excitement quickly forgotten. Throughout the
stories, characters evolve (some not so figuratively, e.g. "The Remoras")
and overcome their moral and physical limitations, achieve insights into
what it means to be human or alien and what these states of being have in
common, and they come to understand the genius loci of their
environments.
For example, the title story follows the evolution of a
sociopathic young man who has escaped the strict genetic programming of his
contemporaries and who, through a love for a younger woman which he won't
allow himself to voice, even to himself, redeems himself by altruistically
giving up his life to save her (and the world).
Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention he has this thing about killing huge
dragon-like mutant lizards that live in a nuclear waste dump, with only
a Bowie knife.
In "Waging Good" a young woman from a filthy rich moon
colony takes the fall for a capital crime while her equally guilty friends
get off scot-free. Her sentence is commuted to joining the Peace Corps on
a now devastated Earth. She comes to empathize with the miserable survivors
of germ and nuclear warfare and when her term is up and she returns home
to seek revenge, she realizes that her now penniless friends are more worthy
of pity then they are of revenge.
It is these sorts of stories that make
Reed's characters more than just pieces of driftwood carried along by the
current of events, but rather shapers of events themselves.
From a young boy's alien encounter in a Nebraska cornfield (in "To Church
with Mr Multhiford"), an annoying know-it-all who hasn't got a life, and whom
even an alien from Tau Ceti knows to avoid ("The Utility Man"), an alternate
world where a long distance runner (something Mr Reed practices in real life)
must escape from an alien bent on a duel steeped in millennia-old traditions
("Stride"), to a planet-sized Gormenghast-like space-arc serving as
interstellar cruise ship for bored immortals in "The Remoras" and
"Aeon's Child," Reed's images are rich in atmosphere. In the latter story,
the war between rival Gaean lifeforms somewhere in the lost passages of the
giant arc are reminiscent of the weird landscapes and combatants in A. Merritt's The Face in the Abyss. The common setting of these and
other stories on this vast arc is somewhat reminiscent in tone if not in
milieu to Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories.
Reed is fascinated with the thought of what human beings with virtually
endless lifespans are going to do with themselves. While John Wyndham
showed us all the sociological implications of a human lifespan expanded
to about 200 years in his "The Trouble with Lichen," Reed takes this one
step further, creating quasi-immortals. Some he has living vicariously
off the experiences of prefabricated humans which only serve as a data
acquisition system for them ("Guest of Honour"), some outsiders, the Remoras,
endlessly recreate their mutation ravaged organs to adapt to new conditions,
while others wile away the millennia on extended cruises.
Reed's sense of nostalgia is most apparent in the last story in the book,
"The Shape of Everything," where an aging astronomer looks back on his youth
and how it all ties into the grand scheme of things. But the same
Bradburyesque mood pervades not only "To Church with Mr Multhiford" and
"Decency" set in the American Midwest, and "Stride" set in small town America,
but also his pieces set it the far future. In "Waging Good" the character,
though living far, far in the future, looks back on the friends and pranks
of her youth in much the same manner.
If you are looking for something along the lines of an acute dose of
easy-reading science fiction action in the E.E. "Doc" Smith or Edgar Rice
Burroughs mode, Robert Reed is definitely not for you. However, if you are
looking for rich and varied scenarios with interesting and well developed
characters which require some investment on your part, this is the place to go.
Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. |
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