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Signal to Noise
The aliens are coming, and they're ready to do business
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Signal to Noise
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By Eric S. Nylund
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Avon Eos
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$6.99/$8.99 Canada
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Paperback, June 1999
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ISBN 0-38-79292-3
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Review by Curt Wohleber
 omeone is out to get Jack Potter. Or maybe everyone is. When a
break-in at his office draws the attention of ruthless agents of the
National Security Organization, Jack loses his cushy academic job. Jack also has
to contend with his traitorous Uncle Reno and a beautiful but deadly woman
named Panda. Both claim to be working for the Chinese, but they seem to have
conflicting agendas.
And, in fact, just about everybody in Signal to Noise has a hidden agenda. Even
Jack isn't sure about his own goals and values, especially when his research
into computer cryptography yields unexpected benefits. From the seemingly
random background radiation of deep space, Jack has decoded an alien
transmission. The message includes design specifications for a device that
permits instantaneous communication between any two points in space. And so
Jack gains a dubious new ally called "Wheeler," a mysterious alien entity
who wants to trade information--cultural, scientific and technological--and
recruit Jack into his interstellar business operations.
Among the goodies Jack receives from Wheeler is the genetic code for an
enzyme that, when injected into people, edits their DNA, making them
smarter, healthier...and perhaps no longer quite human. Jack also obtains a
"gateway," a handheld device that enables him to teleport instantly to any
location on Earth. Curious computer hacker that he is, Jack tries to figure
out what makes the thing work, and where the gateway gets the enormous
amounts of energy that must be necessary to operate it. He eventually finds
out, but he doesn't like the answer at all.
The water was murky, encrypted...
Signal to Noise boots up at a fast pace, plunging headlong into a
weird, menacing future where life is a blend of ordinary reality and
machine-created illusion. Neural implants create spontaneous virtual
environments from a person's unconscious; this technology provides a uniquely
efficient and personal way to communicate ideas and emotions, but it also leaves the
unwary in danger of surrendering their deepest secrets.
The frenetic pace of the novel never really lets up. Even the more sedate passages
take place in distractingly exotic locales, real and virtual. The cavalcade
of daring escapes, double-crosses and revelations becomes exhausting after a
couple hundred pages. Readers might wish for more literal descriptions of
what's going on instead of imaginative but elusive passages such as, "The
water was murky, encrypted. Jack reached in, sifted through the silt and
scrambling algorithms, let the layers separate and clarify."
Author Eric S. Nylund knows a lot more about computer programming than William Gibson,
but as a writer he's not quite up to managing the complex, up-tempo
narrative with enough style to make it palatable. Jack Potter serves
admirably as an able yet flawed protagonist, but the supporting characters
are uniformly ambiguous, each one a potential ally-turned-foe or
foe-turned-ally. This gets annoying, though the boorish Uncle Reno and the
"gene witch" Zero are appealingly quirky.
Despite these problems, Nylund pulls off a gripping finale. Jack
confronts the devastating consequences of his actions and is forced to make
some agonizing decisions. It's an effective ending, though it would have been
better if the story line leading up to it had been less hectic.
I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, which is coming out this
fall.
-- Curt
Back to the top.
The SFWA Grand Masters: Vol. 1
An anthology that honors SF's greatest writers
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The SFWA Grand Masters: Vol. 1
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Edited by Frederik Pohl
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Tor Books
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$24.95/$35.95 Canada
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Hardcover, June 1999
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ISBN 0-312-86881-2
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Review by Clinton Lawrence
 n this new anthology, Frederik Pohl has collected stories and essays by the first five writers
who were granted the title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America.
In his introduction, Pohl writes that SFWA realized soon after it started giving out
the Nebula Awards that the Nebulas didn't properly honor the
lifetime contributions of the best writers in the field. At the urging of
Jerry Pournelle, then SFWA's president, the Grand Master Award was created.
According to the rules, only living authors are eligible (so they have the
opportunity to enjoy the award), and the award can be given no more than six
times in a 10-year period. In 1974, Robert A. Heinlein became the first
winner, and the award has been given 14 times since (most recently to Hal Clement).
The five writers honored in Volume 1 are Heinlein, Jack
Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fritz Leiber.
Heinlein gets the biggest share of the book, with five stories that take up
more than a third of the volume, including "The Roads Must Roll," "The Year of the Jackpot," "Jerry
Was a Man," "The Farthest Place," and "The Long Watch." Williamson's
contributions are "With Folded Hands," "Jamboree," "The Manana Literary
Society," and "The Firefly Tree."
Simak is represented by "Desertion," "Founding Father," and "Grotto of the
Dancing Deer." De Camp's stories include "A Gun for
Dinosaur," "Little Green Men from Afar," and "Living Fossil." And Leiber
has "Sanity," "The Mer She" (a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story),
and "A Bad Day for Sales." Williamson's "The Manana Literary Society" is a
non-fiction essay about his early contacts with other science fiction writers in
the Los Angeles area, while de Camp's "Little Green Men from Afar" is an
essay about pseudoscience.
Heavy on the Heinlein
Volume I is a promising start to a long-overdue anthology series honoring SFWA's Grand Masters. And, given the nature of the award, Pohl's approach
of including several stories by each author is the sensible way to to put this series together,
short of having a book dedicated to each writer. The format is effective at documenting how these writers evolved over
the years, from early stories that seem stylistically dated and a little
awkward by today's standards, to more polished and thematically important
stories written by the authors as they developed into science fiction legends.
A particularly nice touch is Pohl's inclusion of recommended reading lists
for each author, although the lists are short
and seem, by artificial limitation, to exclude some very fine works by each.
One minor, though still significant, weakness in the volume is the
dominance of Heinlein's section, which is twice as long as any of the
others. As the first Grand Master, and someone still considered by many
the best science fiction writer of all time, it's natural that Heinlein would
get the most space. Unfortunately, "The Road Must Roll" is a story that
seems dated thematically and stylistically, not just compared to
Heinlein's other stories, but also compared to the rest of the anthology.
It would have been a better book had Pohl chosen to allocate these 40 pages
to adding another short piece by each of the other four writers.
Nevertheless, Pohl has done fine work in assembling this anthology
(including a nice cover that looks like it's straight off a book from
the 1950s). It would be impossible to take on a task like this without
being criticized for some of the selections, and the important thing is that
almost all of the stories illustrate why
these five writers deserve the title Grand Master. This is a volume that belongs
in every fan's book case.
I might be forgetting someone, but I think most of the deserving Golden Age
writers who are eligible have received the Grand Master. Ursula K. Le Guin
and Samuel R. Delaney have been writing as long as Heinlein had when he
received the first award, and Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg have been
writing even longer. It seems to me that one of these four writers deserves
to be the next Grand Master.
-- Clint
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