The Power | ||||||||
Frank M. Robinson | ||||||||
Tor Books, 222 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Victoria Strauss
Bill Tanner is a professor of anthropology at an unnamed university
in Chicago. He's part of a team working on Navy-financed studies
in human endurance, focused on answering the question of what
qualities make some people so much stronger, smarter, more
efficient, and more likely to survive than others. Colleague John
Olson, however, thinks the studies have a secret agenda, and at the
tense meeting that opens the book he blurts out a fantastic claim:
there's a superman among them, in hiding, just waiting for the
right opportunity to take over the world. The human race, he says,
is "all washed up."
Naturally this revelation is greeted with skepticism. Tanner, in
charge of the team, tries to soothe Olson with an impromptu
experiment designed to prove that no one in the room has
superpowers. But to everyone's shock, it proves just the opposite.
Olson, it seems, is right. But who is the superman? What does he
want? And is Olson correct about his nature -- is there a monster
loose within the world?
The rest of the book depicts Tanner's struggle to unravel the
mystery of the superman's identity -- and to survive, for the closer
he gets to the answer, the more relentlessly the superman pursues
him. It's non-stop action and suspense from the first line to the
last, a tale so thoroughly involving that it isn't until close to
the end that you begin to notice what seem to be huge plot holes --
such as why the superman, who can re-shape people's ideas and kill
with a thought, can't simply cause Tanner to lose his memory or
drop dead, instead of chasing him all over the Midwest. Not to
worry, though: the holes are filled with a doozy of a twist in the
final pages. There's something very pulpish about this trick
solution (which the astute reader may have seen coming, though s/he
probably won't figure out just how Robinson finally gets there);
nevertheless, it's reasonable enough within the context, and there
are enough hints scattered throughout the plot, to make it
acceptably plausible.
Robinson's speculations on the possible nature of a superman -- a
super-being endowed with intelligence and strength hugely beyond
that of ordinary humans, plus a range of mental powers humans don't
possess at all -- are very effective. Why, after all, should such a
being also be super-moral or super-ethical, when both morality and
ethics are largely social constructs, products of the very human
minds the super-being has outstripped? It makes perfect sense that
such a being should regard the human race as "animals," and use the
world and all in it for his playground -- as, in fact, humans
themselves have always done. Morality and ethics, after all, are
reserved for one's own kind.
It's interesting to compare The Power with Robinson's
recently-published Waiting, which takes up a similar theme
but executes it very differently. The trappings of the thriller
are retained (including the chases and the gory deaths), but the
writing is subtler and the characters more deeply delineated. The
science fictional ideas -- notably the origins of the super-intelligence and why it works differently from our own -- are more
fully fleshed out, and their implications more thoroughly explored.
The mystery, uncovered, is not a trick. And yet, though in many
ways it's the better book, Waiting doesn't have the raw
impact of The Power, or its compulsive readability.
One final observation: the revisions noted above seem mainly to be
aimed at updating the book -- such as pushing characters' birthdates
forward to make them seem contemporary, and altering references to
the Korean War. But The Power's ambience is firmly of the
past (characters take the train as a routine form of cross-country
transportation and eat lunch at the counter at Walgreen's; out-of-wedlock sexual relationships carry a sense of scandal and
professional women are referred to as "girls"); and anyway, what's
the point of inserting a mention of the Gulf War if you retain the
immediately following references to the WAVES? Far from
contemporizing the text, these alterations stand out glaringly from
it, and have the effect of making the narrative seem more, not
less, dated. The Power is a classic; I suggest it should
have been left as it was written, anachronisms and all.
Victoria Strauss is a novelist, and a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel The Garden of the Stone is currently available from HarperCollins EOS. For details, visit her website. |
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