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his book follows Hidden Empire (2002), A Forest of Stars (2003) and Horizon Storms (2004) in charting a vast and complex future history. ("The Story So Far" is a six-page summary at the front of the new book that gets both old and new readers up to speed.) Book 5 in the series is due next year. Anderson's cast is huge, and he jumps among their various points of view during the course of 136 bite-sized chapters. The plot is distributed among their various actions, so perhaps it would be best to recount here some of what happens to the major characters.
On Earth, King Peter and Queen Estarra, the figurehead rulers of humanity's galactic holdings, are bucking for more power, especially to preserve the threatened life of their unborn child. Meanwhile, Basil Wenceslas, the real power behind the throne, is becoming more erratic in his behavior and judgment as the problems of the galaxy continue to settle on his shoulders.
The hydrogues, aliens who live inside gas-giant planets, pursue their attacks on human settlements. But now they must contend with sun-dwelling aliens, the faeroes, who have enlisted on humanity's side. Additionally, liquid-based aliens, the wentals, long assumed to be extinct, are engineering a comeback through human agents like Jess Tamblyn, now more than human, thanks to wental-infused powers. Last among the non-humanoid intelligences, the great green mind of the forest-planet Theroc is springing back in a surprising fashion after Theroc's near-total destruction by the hydrogues.
The Roamers, a branch of humanity distinct from the Earthers, continues to struggle against both hydrogue and human attackers. Their leader, Cesca Peroni, finds herself in danger from the Klickiss robots, those ancient traitorous machines who have undermined the loyalty of human-created robots and thus created a time bomb at the heart of the human empire.
Finally, the Ildirans, those immemorial humanoid aliens who remain mankind's tentative allies, have to deal with a rebellion among their people, the first of its kind. Thism, the mental network that unites all Ildirans peacefully, has been broken by a religious fanatic named Rusa'h, who threatens the lawful ruler, Jora'h. Jora'h must eventually take to the interstellar battlefields himself, while his young, half-breed, wild-talent daughter, Osira'h, mounts a diplomatic mission to the hydrogues.
Quintessential space opera
After nearly 2,000 pages of his epic, we can see clearly what Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns is intended to be. It is certainly not any kind of postmodern space opera, such as those purveyed by writers like Alastair Reynolds or M. John Harrison. Instead, it derives more from elder writers such as E.E. Smith and Jack Williamson, Gardner Fox and Edmond Hamilton. But a special debt is owed to Frank Herbert and his mythos that began with Dune (1965). As the official Dune prequelizer, Anderson has internalized the Herbert formula into his marrow, and he replicates it here with just enough mutations to refresh it and render the formula his own.
And as with his Herbert prequels, these books lumber on a little too slowly and stodgily. Consider that all the events in this massive novel take place over approximately only two weeks of narrative real time. Taking nearly 500 pages to tell the happenings of two weeks would have appalled Isaac Asimov, for instance, who dealt with millennia of the Foundation's business in that number of pages. Granted, Anderson is juggling a galaxy's worth of personages and action. But still, some compression would have helped. Each individual section is mostly taut, but somehow the contribution of each passage to forward movement of the plot is minimal. (And sometimes even an individual section is flabby. Please regard Chapter 49, wherein we learn three times in three pages that Tasia Tamblyn really wants to fight hydrogues.) Moreover, there is but a single uniform voice for every section. The switch from one point of view to another amounts to merely changing cameras in different locales. There is no distinction in the narrative tone from one section to another.
Still, in the end you have to concede Anderson's immense fecundity of incident, his ability to evoke some wonder-inducing moments and his sprawling vistas through time and space. Those qualities are what keep me reading. With things heating up on all fronts by the end of this book, we can hope that the next volume will deliver more bang per page.
If you rummage around in the recent back-issue bins at your local comics store, you should be able to find Anderson's very entertaining mini-series involving the Justice Society of America and a certain pulp writer named Jack Williamson. —Paul
Also in this issue: Remains, by Mark W. Tiedemann
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