Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (30 page)

***

Red Planet Blues

by
Robert J. Sawyer

Viking 2013

ISBN: 978-0670065776 (Hardcover)

Amazon Link Paper (may not work on all readers)

Amazon Link Kindle (may not work on all readers)

*

I don’t think I’ve read a Robert J. Sawyer book that wasn’t fun. Some of Sawyer’s novels have been entirely serious, but they’ve always been fun to read because at heart Sawyer is not only a fine writer, but he’s a fine entertainer.
Red Planet Blues
is no exception to Sawyer’s canon. It’s a novel that’s at once engaging and thoughtful—as all of Sawyer’s novels are. What’s more, you can tell that the author himself is having quite a lot of fun in telling this witty tale of a degenerate, corrupt Mars in the far future and he’s having a lot of fun coming up with new and original ideas, even if some of those ideas don’t get as fully developed as they should.

Sawyer plays with a number of familiar tropes in
Red Planet Blues.
First of all, it’s a hard-boiled d
e
tective tale told by your typical (or so it seems) world-weary (or Mars-weary) gumshoe whose new client is a knockout … but a knockout of a peculiar kind. She’s a “transfer,” something of an artificial human with a human being’s personality inside her. (The first part of this book is from Sawyer’s novella “Identity Theft.”) Alex Lomax gets sucked in immediately. Besides, he’s broke (as all good gumshoes are) and needs the work.

The plot, though, unfolds and becomes quite complex rather soon. The narration is swift (and typically hard-boiled), and the wonders of this unique Martian culture (and landscape) are many. If this novel has a problem, it’s that the latter two-thirds of the book
drifts
away from the original impetus inspired by the “transfer” humans. There is also something of the anachronism about the narrator. We’ve “heard” this voice before and it’s not all that clever or new, unless, of course, you’re quite young and
haven’t
read Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane or any number of other writers in the hard-boiled detective
noir
genre.
(Or if you’ve seen the
Naked Gun
movies, which, to me, absolutely destroyed the genre.)
Sawyer is clearly working within a tradition he knows his reader has experienced, and any pleasure one gets from this novel will depend on how much one likes that particularly story-telling voice and the occasional politically incorrect way (and that’s putting it nicely) in which Lomax describes women. It’s of a type, and that time might be long past us now.

Still,
Red Planet Blues
affords one a delightful reading experience and a vision of Mars that’s quite original. I can recommend it. (I can also see this as being a dandy movie … much better than either of the
Total Recall
duds.)

Copyright © 2014 by Paul Cook

*************************

Part 1

*

LEST DARKNESS FALL &
RELATED
STORIES
(only Lest Darkness Fall is being serialized)

Phoenix Pick, 2011

Trade Paperback: 290 pages.

ISBN: 
978-1-61242-015-8

Get the complete E-Book (including related stories) on Amazon.com (5/5 star customer rating)

Get the
complete Paperback
(including related stories) on Amazon.com (5/5 star customer rating)

.

Lest Darkness Fall (in a shorter version) appeared in the December 1939 issue of
Unknown
.
Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith Publications Inc. Lest Darkness Fall Copyright © 1941 by Henry Holt and Company.
Copyright © 1949, 1977, 1996 by L. Sprague de Camp
.

.
.

.
.

L. Sprague de Camp came pretty close to being the compleat science fiction writer. His work included novels, short stories, science fiction, fantasy, poetry, criticism, history, you name it. He won the Hugo and the International Fantasy Award, was the Guest of Honor at the 1966 Worldcon, won the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, became a Nebula Grand Master (the fourth ever) in 1979, and was given a Special Achievement Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 1996. He also edited and continued Robert E. Howard’s Conan saga.

De Camp’s career lasted for more than 60 years, and he authored more than 100 books, alone and in collaboration with his wife Catherine, and also with Fletcher Pratt (the I
n
complete Enchanter and Gavagan’s Bar series) and Lin Carter (the Conan series). His other series include the Viagens Interplanetarias, Reginald Rivers, Pusadian, Novaria, Marko Prokopiu, and The Incorporated Knight.

LEST DARKNESS FALL

L. Sprague de Camp

.

.

CHAPTER I

Tancredi took his hands off the wheel again and waved them. “—so I envy you, Dr. Padway. Here in Rome we have still some work to do. But
pah!
It is all filling in little gaps.
Nothing big, nothing new.
And re
s
toration work.
Building contractor’s work.
Again,
pah!
”

“Professor Tancredi,” said Martin Padway patiently, “as I said, I am not a doctor. I hope to be one soon, if I can get a thesis out of this Lebanon dig.” Being
himself
the most cautious of drivers, his knuckles were white from gripping the side of the little Fiat, and his right foot ached from trying to shove it through the floor boards.

Tancredi snatched the wheel in time to avoid a lordly Isotta by the thickness of a razor blade. The Isotta went its way thinking dark thoughts. “Oh, what is the difference? Here everybody is a doc-tor, whether he is or not, if you understand me. And such a smart young man as you—
What
was I talking about?”

“That depends.” Padway closed his eyes as a pedestrian just escaped destruction. “You were talking about Etruscan inscriptions, and then about the nature of time, and then about Roman archaeol—”

“Ah, yes, the nature of time.
This is just a silly idea of mine, you understand. I was saying all these people who just
disappear,
they have slipped back down the suitcase.”

“The what?”

“The trunk, I mean.
The trunk of the tree of time.
When they stop slipping, they are back in some former time. But as soon as they do anything, they change all subsequent history.”

“Sounds like a paradox,” said Padway.

“No-o.
The trunk continues to exist. But a new branch starts out where they come to rest. It has to, ot
h
erwise we would all disappear, because history would have changed and our parents might not have met.”

“That’s a thought,” said Padway. “It’s bad enough knowing the sun might become a nova, but if we’re also likely to vanish because somebody has gone back to the twelfth century and stirred things up—”

“No. That has never happened. We have never vanished, that is. You
see,
doc-tor? We continue to exist, but another history has been started. Perhaps there are many such, all existing somewhere. Maybe, they aren’t much different from ours. Maybe the man comes to rest in the middle of the ocean. So what? The fish eat him, and things go on as before. Or they think he is mad, and shut him up or kill him.
Again, not much difference.
But suppose he becomes a king or a
duce?
What then?

“
Presto
, we have a new history! History is a four-dimensional web. It is a tough web. But it has weak points. The junction places—the focal points, one might say—are weak. The backslipping, if it happens, would happen at these places.”

“What do you mean by focal points?” asked Padway. It sounded to him like polysyllabic nonsense.

“Oh, places like Rome, where the world-lines of many famous events intersect.
Or Istanbul.
Or Babylon.
You remember that archaeologist, Skrzetuski, who disappeared at Babylon in 1936?”

“I thought he was killed by some Arab holdup men.”

“Ah. They never found his body! Now, Rome may soon again be the intersection point of great events. That means the web is weakening again here.”

“I hope they don’t bomb the Forum,” said Padway.

“Oh, nothing
like
that. There will be no more great wars; everybody knows it is too dangerous. But let us not talk politics. The web, as I say, is tough. If a man did slip back, it would take a terrible lot of work to distort it. Like a fly in a spider web that fills a room.”

“Pleasant thought,” said Padway.

“Is it not, though?” Tancredi turned to grin at him,
then
trod frantically on the brake. The Italian leaned out and showered a pedestrian with curses.

He turned back to Padway. “Are you coming to my house for dinner tomorrow?”

“
Wh-
what? Why yes, I’ll be glad to. I’m sailing next—”

“
Si, si.
I will show you the equations I have worked out. Energy must be conserved, even in changing one’s time.
But nothing of this to my colleagues, please.
You understand.” The sallow little man took his hands off the wheel to wag both forefingers at Padway. “It is a harmless eccentricity. But one’s professional reputation must not suffer.”

“
Eek!
” said Padway.

Tancredi jammed on the brake and skidded to a stop behind a truck halted at the intersection of the Via del Mare and the Piazza Aracoeli. “What was I talking about?” he asked.

“Harmless eccentricities,” said Padway. He felt like adding that Professor Tancredi’s driving ranked among his less harmless ones. But the man had been very kind to him.

“Ah, yes. Things get out, and people talk. Archaeologists talk even worse than most people. Are you married?”

“What?” Padway felt he should have gotten used to this sort of thing by now. He hadn’t. “Why—yes.”

“Good. Bring your wife along. Then you see some real Italian cooking, not this spaghetti-and-meat-balls stuff.”

“She’s back in Chicago.” Padway didn’t feel like explaining that he and his wife had been separated for over a year.

He could see, now, that it hadn’t been entirely Betty’s fault. To a person of her background and tastes he must have seemed pretty impossible: a man who danced badly, refused to play bridge, and whose idea of fun was to get a few similar creatures in for an evening of heavy talk on the future of capitalism and the love life of the bullfrog. At first she had been thrilled by the idea of traveling in far places, but one taste of living in a tent and watching her husband mutter over the inscriptions on potsherds had cured that.