ancy Kress's latest novel is a sequel to last year's Probability Moon, and, judging by textual hints at the climax, also the second in a trilogy. In the first book, we were rapidly introduced to Kress' scenario for the 2160s. After the discovery of ready-made stargates, humanity used this borrowed network of FTL tunnels to expand into the universe, where we met several humanoid alien races, all of whom seemed to share a common ancestor with our species. Until the Fallers were encountered, that is. This enigmatic violent race, xenophobes who also had access to the stargates, were not part of our galactic family and immediately set out single-mindedly to exterminate mankind.
In the midst of this protracted war, an expedition to a planet called simply World is mounted, to examine an artificial moon that appears to be another relic of the vanished stargate-builders. But in mid-research, Fallers arrive, and the relic--a weapon of impossible strength that alters quantum fields of probability--is destroyed. But not before a matching one is detected buried on the surface of World.
The current book opens three years after the action of the first. A follow-up expedition back to World, under Maj. Lyle Kaufmann, is finally being assembled. Only two people from the original crew are onboard: Dieter Gruber and Ann Sikorsky. The rest of the team is newly recruited, and includes a genius physicist, Tom Capelo, and a woman with near-telepathic abilities, Marbet Grant, among others.
Tensions run high among the various factions of the crew: scientists pitted against the military, and those like Sikorsky, who would protect above all the natives of World, matched against those who value humanity's survival above all other considerations. To add an unpredictable component to the mix, the very first Faller ever to be captured is also on the ship, so that Grant can use her empathic powers to establish communication with the belligerent alien.
Out of the mouths of twerps
Award-winning author Nancy Kress, known more for her well-wrought humanist or bio-oriented tales, here bravely breaks new ground for herself, with a widescreen adventure. She does a credible job with the first two parts of her saga, with a couple of exceptions, to be noted below.
Kress mingles three tropes deftly in her book. The classic theme of "First Contact" is embodied in the thread involving Marbet Grant and the captured Faller, whose nonverbal communications are unriddled through human logic and intuition. "Conceptual Breakthrough" is provided by Tom Capelo's grappling with the deep physics of the artifact. And a kind of "Anthropological SF," akin to what Ursula K. Le Guin does so well, is found in the detailed limning of the Worlder culture, where "shared reality" promotes the ultimate in nonviolence. In all three areas, Kress exhibits intelligence and ingenuity, hewing to rigid speculative principles throughout.
But two things bother me about this novel. Kress's desire to nail down every loose corner of her magic carpet has the effect of draining the very magic from it. Events and facts are often presented twice, from different viewpoints, as if for clarification and reader-friendliness. But do today's sophisticated readers, used to being challenged by, say, Peter Hamilton and Greg Bear, need such hand-holding? It seems that this novel could have been reduced by a third and functioned just as well.
Second, the characters in both books are just plain unlikable. Amazingly, Kress' sure hand with sketching sympathetic personalities seems to have deserted her here, as if she felt that the kind of figures she used in humanist stories wouldn't fit the hard-SF universe. Tom Capelo must surely be the most abrasive of the lot, with two whiny daughters he insists on dragging along, but all the others are equally off-putting. Marbet Grant is a narcissistic manipulator. Lyle Kaufman is alternately a martinet and a baffled non-scientist. Dieter Gruber is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Enli the Worlder, much more vivid in the first book, is here rather cipherish and ineffectual. And so forth. I realize all these people are laboring under tense wartime conditions, but I've never seen such a dysfunctional, squalling cast before. Yet no one even rises to real heights of villainy either. Too bad. Kress has lots of intriguing things to say, but her words come out of the mouths of such twerps.
