"Nothing Personal" by Pat CadiganThe strongest moments are those of Ruby’s realizations about herself and the world while pursuing mysteries rather more abstract (and often larger) than the ones she encounters in her work as a homicide detective, and in the end, these are what carry the story. While by no means badly written, the answer (or non-answer) at the end of the hunt really is the point this time around, and the journey appropriately keeps the procedural mechanics to a minimum.
The reason for this is Masters’s hire by a "purple beachball with legs" named Mxwensll (Max for short) on behalf of his home system of Alpha Gillespie to look into a murder committed on Graydawn—a planet "locked" by its unbreathable chlorine atmosphere. Due to the consequent total absence of native life forms, and the planet’s general inhospitability, the only people on it are at the luxurious retreat of the chairman of an interstellar cartel (for whom the inaccessibility must have been the draw)—and the vice-presidents he brought in to notify of his plan to retire. When the chairman dies of asphyxiation in his space suit during an outing to see his favorite rock formation, it is immediately clear that one of the vice-presidents had tampered with it, and Masters’s job is to figure out which one.
The "locked planet" set-up conveniently eliminates a common weakness of this type of story—namely why the protagonist enjoys the latitude he does to pursue the investigation. This point apart, the setting just makes for a particularly extreme form of the locked room mystery, and while Max comes off as a likable enough character, the main purpose of using aliens instead of ordinary human beings seems to be to enliven an otherwise generic crime story.
Harry Turtledove‘s "Hoxbomb" is set on the planet of Lacanth C, a human-Snarre’t condominium (a political territory where two powers share sovereignty). The Snarre’t are a furry, nocturnal species, as scent-oriented as humans are visual and while they are comparatively backward in mechanical and electronic technology, they can do much of what the humans do by way of extremely advanced biotechnology.
Given the profound differences between them, relations between the two communities are uneasy. Naturally, when scooter dealer Jack Cravath’s wife, Beverly, gives birth to a baby who has been horribly deformed by a "hoxbomb," a uniquely Snarre’t biological weapon, the political stakes are very high indeed. (A "hoxbomb" is so named because it attacks hox genes, which create the body’s diversity along its anteroposterior axis, basically determining what goes where in the body. A hoxbomb "scramble[s] the sequence of [hox] genes and add[s] a couple in places where they [don’t] belong.")
Police sergeant John Paul Kling of the Exotic Crimes Unit goes on the case, and is forced to work together with a Snarre’t investigator that the narrator dubs "Miss Murple," her actual name being "a collection of screeches and smells that don’t translate well into human-style phenome." (All the Snarre’t, in fact, have such names for that reason.)
What follows is an obvious variant on the old "two totally dissimilar cops have to work together, then come to respect one another in the process." (Rowan Atkinson did a great riff on this one in his sitcom The Thin Blue Line, by the way.) Even by those standards, the investigation and conclusion are less than fully satisfying, but the execution helps; the novelty the aliens and their technology bring to the story more than makes up for the more generic elements. As he demonstrated in the Worldwar series and stories like "The Road Not Taken," Turtledove can write entertainingly pulpy aliens, and he does not disappoint this time. Additionally, while the ugliness of the crime is a poor fit with the story’s light tone, Turtledove pulls this combination off with about as much aplomb as can reasonably be hoped for, and as tends to be the case with his one-shot novels and short stories, Turtledove’s writing here is not totally bereft of its stylistic weaknesses, but sharper than in extended series’ like The Great War. (For a review of the latest volume in that cycle, see my February 6 piece at Strange Horizons.)
The story shifts back and forth from present-day Hope to an initially ambiguous "then." In part because of this technique, it becomes quite clear early on in the story just what had happened then (without the benefit of dust jacket spoilers in this case), and the story focuses instead on the drama of those events, and what they mean for the residents of Hope a century later.
Becca’s problematic relationship with Chase, which is a substantial part of the story, adds an element of nuance to both the story and her character. At times, however (especially when thinking again and again how much she would like to have her therapist on speed-dial), she may come across as a bit too neurotic for many readers’ tastes—and it would probably not strike readers unfamiliar with her previous work as much of a surprise that Rusch is also a writer of romance novels, so that how you feel about the trappings of that genre will likely affect your feeling about this story. Nonetheless, the intertwining of a murder mystery with the historical mystery Becca finds herself probing into for answers works quite well, not least of all because, despite its science-fiction touches, it relates to a chapter of the town’s past that was an all too real part of history.
Like Rusch’s piece, Gregory Benford‘s "Dark Heaven" is set in rural America, specifically a strip of coastline near Mobile, Alabama ravaged by the super-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, some of which, Benford informs us, "made Katrina and Rita look like mere overtures." The settlement of extraterrestrials from Alpha Centauri in the area (they are an amphibious species, attracted to the Gulf’s warm waters) is a mere detail amid the wreckage of these towns that always seem to be freshly battered, and which will never really rebuild. In this milieu, a body washes up on shore with puncture wounds in his arms, and Homicide Detective John McKenna is put on the case.
The story develops a very strong sense of setting, and McKenna is one of the anthology’s more developed protagonists. Solitary, callous, sometimes brutal, a creature of "the real world where primate signals held sway," John is not always likable, but is complex enough to keep from being just another "cop who’s seen too much" cliché. Benford also does the best job of integrating credible scientific extrapolation into a recognizable setting in the anthology, one result of which is the book’s most exotic extraterrestrials. Turtledove’s Snarre’t are basically amusingly tweaked humans, but the thought-world of the Centauri (what we can glimpse of it) is alien and nuanced, and McKenna’s involvement with them carries all the frustrations that a cross-species contact can entail, especially when they are compounded by political reality.
Concluding the anthology is Walter Jon Williams‘s "Womb of Every World." Despite the theme of the book, more than a hint of self-awareness (presented smoothly enough not to irritate) and the occasional reference to scientific concepts like "heat death," it is very easy to initially take it as standard sword and sorcery fantasy fare. While entertaining on that level, the story’s interest actually increases when his sword-swinging hero, Aristide, and his companion, Bitsy, step into a larger world.
The story’s construction is such that it is almost impossible to discuss it any further without bringing spoilers into the review. However, it should be said that Williams offers the anthology’s most exciting flow of invention and most thoroughly developed, lived-in universe, an attractive and fascinating setting for his characters to explore and interact with. Additionally, while the story–which is really a novel, not a novella in length–takes its time to develop, pacing is generally not a problem (though I did find it a bit sluggish for a brief patch in the last third), and Williams’ protagonist Aristide, a self-proclaimed "scholar of the implied spaces" and a swashbuckling fantasy figure with a boundless sense of play, fits into this world perfectly. On the whole, the combination works, though readers with less patience for world-building might not agree.
Publisher: Science Fiction Book Club (April 2007)
Price: $14.99
Hardcover: 496 pages
Item Number: 580927