he starship Daedalus, traveling slower than light, has taken 20 years to reach the Alpha Centauri system from Earth. For 28-year-old Ryan Hughes, this moment marks the capstone of his life. Finally he and his 100 compatriots will fulfill their long mission: to colonize one or both of the two habitable planets that exist in this multistar system.
Not that Ryan has felt confined or maladjusted on the ship. Quite the contrary. He loves shipboard life and exists at the center of a rich network of friends and family. He's literally the most popular fellow onboard, a role that it's beginning to appear he was actually engineered for. True, he can't seem to convince Holly, the woman he's in love with, that she should love him back. And also his father, Ken, has sown a disruptive meme in the ship—that contagious idea being the notion of God and his divine plan, a tradition sternly excluded from the original specs of the mission. But all in all, Ryan foresees only good things to come from life in the Alpha Centauri system.
But what neither he nor any of the other colonists know yet is that one of their potential homes is an Eden, while the other one is hell. And that the moral choices they face might be most honorably resolved by residing in hell.
Ryan is a member of the two-man exploratory team sent down to the surface of the first world initially. He and his friend Sean discover a friendly, accommodating planet. The trickiest inhabitants are little land octopi, dubbed "customs agents," who exhibit an overwhelming curiosity about the humans, sifting through all their possessions in an amiable, monkey-like fashion. Soon this paradisiacal world is hosting a large crowd from the Daedalus who are reveling in the peace, security and ease of their new surroundings. Ryan's messianic dad has even named the place Eden.
But Eden has, if not a snake, then a wormy apple. The customs agents prove to possess the beginnings of sentience. They learn to make fire from the humans, and now already whatever culture they might have evolved on their own is bent in a different direction. Continued contact with the humans will warp them further. It's a moral responsibility and risk that should ideally be avoided. Ryan and some like-minded colonists immediately propose rocketing to the second world to see if it lacks intelligence and could hold their colony more ethically. After some dissent—including sabotage by Ken Hughes—the ship takes off.
The neighboring world, however, proves as challenging and physically dangerous as Eden was hospitable. Can Ryan convince his compatriots to abandon the easy life on Eden just to allow a few aliens to fulfill their potential? And will he even survive the rigors of the new world long enough to make his case?
Old-fashioned in a good way
Jerry Oltion's new book—hardly a "trunk novel," despite its long genesis, since, as he explains, he's updated it rigorously for this publication—exhibits a gentle, old-fashioned set of virtues, working out its classic themes in a solid, durable, craftsmanlike fashion that does not exclude certain frissons and thrilling moments. It reminds me of classic Andre Norton, or of some of the recent work from David Gerrold. "Hardcore" SF without any flash and glitter. (For a postmodern version of this story, see Salt (2000) by Adam Roberts, and you'll find out just how differently the same themes can be handled.)
Oltion's biggest pitfall in this tale of ethics in action, which he competently avoided, would've been to make Ryan an absolute secular saint, in opposition to his father's preacherly righteousness. But Ryan is an all-too-fallible human, who demonstrates uncertainty, jealousy, timidity and a few other endearing foibles, along with his more sterling qualities. This has the effect of keeping the reader both on Ryan's side and also in suspense as to whether Ryan can bring off what he's aiming for. And although Oltion's heart is plainly on the side of Ryan's position, he does not give all the good lines to him alone, but also fashions strong arguments for the God crowd. In fact, the ultimate rightness of Ryan's scheme is always in doubt, even till the climax and beyond. In this regard, Oltion has captured some of the moral ambiguity of James Blish's classic A Case of Conscience (1958). And at one point, Ryan is even subjected to a little bit of professional psychoanalysis, evoking Fred Pohl's conflicted hero Robin Broadbent, from the Heechee series.
Oltion fabricates interesting ecologies for both his worlds. The customs agents are a neat twist on a kind of proto-Hoka-like imitative race. And the nasty ecosystem of the hell planet is right up there with Harry Harrison's Deathworld (1960). Oltion accomplishes what he intended, though, by making the more savage world actually more appealing than the idyllic one.
I'd cite one small flaw in this low-key, pleasurable thought experiment, and that is the fact that we never get a sense of the 100 "redshirts" lurking outside Ryan's social circle. Even a few walk-on appearances or citations of names other than the supporting cast would have given us a sense of all the other lives in the balance of Ryan's campaign to convince his people to "do the right thing."
