Wildside | Legacy

Wildside

A secret tunnel leads to an alternate Earth where humans don't exist...yet

• Wildside
• By Steven Gould
• Tor Books
• $22.95/$33.95 Canada
• Hardcover, April 1996

harlie Newell and his friends are graduating from high school, but Charlie has plans much larger than the average summer job. Instead, he offers four of his friends -- Marie, Joey, Rick and Clara -- the opportunity to make a lot more money working for him. He assures them his idea is legal, but swears them to secrecy.

It seems Charlie inherited a ranch from his Uncle Max, who was recently declared dead after having gone missing for seven years. At the ranch, Charlie reveals his secret -- he has captive passenger pigeons, a species thought to be extinct. When his friends demand to know where he got them, Charlie shows them a tunnel to an alternate Earth where humans have never lived and where long-extinct animals roam freely.

Charlie plans to mine gold on this "wild side." He sells the pigeons to zoos and conservation organizations, using the money to buy equipment and to send his friends to flight school. Once the teenagers finish learning to fly, they transport the equipment they need to the wild side and set up their operations at Cripple Creek, Colorado. The mining is successful, but when they return to the tame side for the winter, the government has tracked them down. Armed federal agents have seized the ranch, and only the gate between the wild side and the tame side protects Charlie and his friends.

Steven Gould is meticulous with his details in Wildside, a technique which serves him well. The wilderness Gould describes, complete with saber-toothed tigers and mammoths, is a beautiful world firmly rooted in realism. His descriptions of flying are also strong, as well as crucial to the plot and characterizations (Charlie's father is an airline pilot, and Charlie is already an accomplished pilot himself). More impressively, Gould's characters make plausible mistakes, although sometimes Gould himself gets carried away. Fortunately, his clean writing style makes pleasant reading and keeps the novel moving, though large sections could probably be shortened.

Gould also spends time building a complex set of interesting relationships, both among the five main characters and between those characters and their parents. He uses the unrequited love of Charlie for Marie, who is in love with Joey, and Joey's problems with alcohol, to build some realistic tension between friends who genuinely like each other. Ultimately, though, it's Charlie's intelligence, resourcefulness and commitment to the project, and his friends' willingness to follow him, that drive the plot.

Though the ages of the main characters might indicate Wildside is intended for the young adult audience, it should hold interest for a much broader readership. It's not a great novel, but it is a quite enjoyable book.

I do think bringing passenger pigeons back from the wild side is a more interesting idea than mining gold there, and Charlie got a lot more money per ounce for them. -- Clint

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Legacy

Before Eon and Eternity there was...Legacy

• Legacy
• By Greg Bear
• Tor Books
• $6.99/$7.99 Canada
• Paperback, June 1996

reg Bear likes to think Big. Not content to fashion a single alien species -- task enough for many a science fiction writer -- Bear creates an entire alien ecology in Legacy, a prequel to his earlier novels Eon and Eternity.

In Legacy, Bear returns to Thistledown, an asteroid carrying millions of human passengers on a centuries-long journey between the stars. Within Thistledown, scientists have created The Way, an apparently infinite tunnel whose walls offer passage to other worlds, other times and perhaps other universes.

Several thousand rebellious Thistledowners have followed a charismatic leader down The Way to build a utopia on the planet Lamarckia. An ambitious young soldier named Olmy Ap Sennon is assigned to covertly visit Lamarckia and retrieve a powerful device stolen by the colonists' leader. Olmy sees his mission as a prime opportunity to advance his career. He knows the risks, but even his experience fighting the vicious, alien Jarts can't prepare him for the human tragedy unfolding on Lamarckia.

Olmy finds Lamarckia to be an odd world indeed: its plants and animals are but individual cells of vast, continent-spanning organisms called ecoi. Almost forty years after settlement, huge mysteries about the ecoi remain. What controls them? Are they intelligent? Is communication with the ecoi possible?

Against this strange backdrop, Olmy finds the would-be utopia wracked by violence. The colonists shun most advanced technology, blaming it for the war that devastated Earth and sent their ancestors fleeing into space. But this leaves them ill-equipped to survive on Lamarckia. The colonists endure starvation and crushing hardship, learning the all-too-painful lesson that the seeds of war lie not in technology but in their own hearts and minds.

While Legacy lacks the grand scope of its predecessors, Bear spins an involving yarn nevertheless, highlighted by a perilous voyage across Lamarckia's seas where the storms are alive and hungry. Unfortunately, Bear dilutes most of the suspense in Legacy by revealing too much of the outcome in advance, and the later chapters also tend to bog down. In particular, Olmy spends a lot of time running around fruitlessly in the middle of a drawn-out battle while the really interesting stuff happens offstage, deep in the heart of one of the ecoi.

Although this will go down as a minor work in the Greg Bear canon -- he also wrote Moving Mars, Blood Music and the audacious, genre-stretching Queen of Angels -- Legacy still offers a potent dose of fascinating ideas and strange thrills.

I continue to admire Greg Bear's masterful ability to incorporate far-out science fictional concepts yet still tell very human stories. -- Curt

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