The Sci Fi Guy

Empry is the third book in the Trigon Disunity triolgy, which features the continuation of a story that begins decades in the relative past of the storyline (in the first book Emprise). The second story, Enigma, changes direction and follows the main character, Merritt Thackery, as he discovers the secrets of the universe while working for the survey department. These stories come full circle in Empry, as Mcdowell pits mankind against an unknown and terrifying enemy – the Mizari. Thanks to Thackery’s travels through both space and time, mankind now understands that the Mizari are the most notable threat to the existance of the human race – and events unfold to destroy the Mizari where they exist.

Empry focuses mostly on two characters dealing with the threat of alien invasion and decimation, the chancellor Sujata and the director of the military forces, Harmack Wells. These two characters have spent their entire lives reaching to positions of power in an effort to protect humanity from invasion and keep the unified worlds together.

What follows is a chase unlike many others in literature – it happens over the course of some forty-odd years, as these two individuals chase each other across the voids of space traveling and superluminous speeds trying to reach the perimiter. Meanwhile, across the universe, Thackery conjurs a plan to intervene and attempt to discover a solution to the Mizari threat by uncovering the secret of their existance. What are the black “stars” that seem to be able to wipe out essentially anything and everything placed in their way?

Interestingly, I read the Trigon Disunity Trilogy almost in tandem to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Saga (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind), and there are some parallel concepts that each author deals with similarly. One of the interesting and recurring plot concepts for science fiction is what will humans do if and when we meet an alien culture? In the Star Trek sagas, it seemed like every time Kirk or Picard would bump in to an alien they’d already know how to speak with them, and they’d enjoy some Romulan ale and call it a friendship. Star Wars featured seemingly dozens of different species of alien, but again everyone got along. Yet Card and Kube-Mcdowell are faced with the challenge of crafting aliens that truly are alien. They don’t share human values – they don’t even necessarily think or communicate in simliar ways. I’ll actually discuss more of my thoughts of this alien encounter stuff in a later blog post.

Overall, the Trigon Disunity trilogy is a great thrill ride from one end of the universe to the other – spanning generations of time as well. The series flows well together, but I couldn’t imagine reading one of the later books while skipping over the previous ones. These stories don’t stand alone – it’s essentially one long story split in to three books. It’s a fun ride, and ends leaving the reader satisfied in the characters and the potential for mankind.

Whenever I travel, I try to take at least 1 or 2 good novels that I’ve been meaning to read or re-read, but I just took a trip where I wasn’t able to figure out what I wanted to take with me. I’ve cracked open an ancient Arthur C. Clarke book that’s sitting on my nightstand, but I just couldn’t figure out if I wanted to take it with me – so I wandered in to an airport bookstore and perused the shelves. While there, I faced the conundrum that’s faced millions of American travellers… Dean Koontz or Stephen King. Well, this time around, I opted for Stephen King, if only for the fact that the main book represented on the shelves was an anthology of short stories by him, titled Everything’s Eventual. Within this book are “14 Dark Tales”, including 1408, which is being made in to an upcoming movie starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. So, being the type of person that enjoys being able to say “oh… I read the book – and it’s better,” I decided to give it a shot.

The story itself is rather short spanning a mere 54 pages (and essentially 3 chapters), but as per King’s standard: it picks you up and doesn’t let go until you’re scared. The main character, Mike Enslin, is a man seeking supernatural events for his own success. Again, like many of King’s stories, the main character is a writer. I tend to believe that King truly enjoys fictionalizing himself and what he would do when presented with some of his own terrifying events. The character discovers the rumor of the Dolphin hotel in New York, that features a single room that has been home to numerous suicides and unexplainable phenomenon. The maids turn down the room once a month – and most that enter try not to be there for more than a fast turnaround.

When Enslin enters the room, at the sincere opposition of the hotel manager, he first chooses to believe that everything that is attached with the room is superstition. But within minutes he discovers that, while perhaps a ghost itself doesn’t reside in the place – the room itself doesn’t want him to live – to survive the night.

I don’t read much horror – I’m more of a space-travel scifi or post-apoc guy myself, but I will always commend King for his ability to give a reader goosebumps. The only other title of his that I’ve actually read from start-to-finish is Dreamcatcher, and even that I only saw after seeing the movie. Suffice it to say that the hollywood version of the story actually looks pretty good, and I’m also a fan of John Cusack – so that helps. If you’re looking for some great quick reads that can send some shivers down your spine, King’s Everything’s Eventual book of short stories might be worth your time.

Edit: Here’s the trailer for the upcoming movie… Releasing July 13th.

Truth be told, I’m a sucker for page-turning science fiction thrillers, and almost nobody does it better than Michael Crichton. Prey was written in 2004, and features a chilling tale of nanotechnology gone awry.

The story begins with Jack, a stay-at-home-dad not necessarily by choice, but by requirement. His wife, Julia, works for a startup company that’s working on cutting edge nano technology, and Jack recently suffered a significant setback in his career.

What follows in Prey leads Jack to question whether or not his loving wife of more than a decade is having an affair on him. She’s dressing more seductively, spending less and less time at home, and nearly ignoring her children. Beyond that, her demeanor is erratic: one minute she’s enraged by little family matters, and the next she’s trying to play the part of a nice home maker. But when Jack finally reaches the breaking point, everything changes within a few short hours. His former company calls him, requesting his urgent return to work as a contractor for Julia’s company – and his background of distributed computing and intelligent agents becomes the focal point of the next few harrowing hours.

Prey is, simply put, a novel about the potential future of nanotechnology. Out in the Nevada desert, the company that Julia works for has built a nano prodution facility that has gone wrong – what was supposed to be a secure manufacturing facility is now a breeding ground for a rapidly developing form of nearly intelligent life.

I’ve read several of Crichton’s books, including Jurrasic Park, Next, Sphere, and State of Fear, and each one of them has an amazing amount of depth, even as a page turning thrill ride. It’s almost impossible to put down Prey – each chapter cliffhangs on to the next. The story itself is told in less than a week of time, which really propels the drama forward. Flipping through the last 5 pages of the novel reveals dozens of sources that Crichton used to research the novel. In individual pieces the current nanotech research is fairly limited, but Crichton takes a leap forward and combines numerous facets of this new technology to create the nemesis we discover in Prey.

I’m not one to feel necessarily threatened by the future of nanotechnology. I’ll be the first to say that I think innovations like carbon nanotubes will truly put the world on a new pace of advanced construction – perhaps even my favorite – the development of a space elevator. A guy can dream, can’t he? But what Crichton points out deftly in this novel is that we must keep a close eye on those companies that are innovating nanotechnologies, because a misstep could result in dramatic and potentially devestating failure.

Ask anyone that knows my reading preferences, and one author will probably be at the top of the list: Orson Scott Card. The first Card book that I read, like most people, was the thrilling Ender’s Game. That novel places a young boy on a battle school in orbit, to train to fight the most terrifying opponent mankind has ever faced – the dreaded “Buggers”.

Speaker for the Dead is Card’s original sequel to Ender’s Game. I say “original”, because Card has incredibly crafted other tangential storylines to Ender’s Game, which include a companion novel, Ender’s Shadow, which features the story of Ender’s Game told from Bean’s perspective (Bean is one of Ender’s classmates at the Battle School). Well, anyways, getting back on track, I wanted to talk about Speaker, right?

Card does a great job of transforming the story of Ender from a boy in a battle school on not-too-far-in-the-future Earth, all the way to several thousand years in the future of humanity. Ender himself isn’t even specially featured in the first few chapters, as the story of Milagre is told. Milagre is a Portuguese (well, Brazilian) colony world that features a living, sentient species known as the “Piggies”. This homeworld, however, also features a terrible plague and a terrible secret that haunts another of our main characters, the young xenobiologist, Novinha.

Ender is called to Milagre to speak a death, and in doing so unravels the truth about so many things on this small world. The act of speaking a death itself is most of what I want to talk about. In Card’s future universe, Ender has righted many of his past doings by writing the story of the true nature of the ominous “Buggers”, which is titled The Hive Queen. However, over the course of several thousand years, the fact that Ender is The Speaker and The Speaker is Ender has been separated. The Speaker is good – Ender himself is seen (even within his own writing) as the Xenocide – the devestation of the Buggers and the worst of mankind.

The concept of speaking, however, is a great idea for someone like myself. The idea is that the speaker reveals as much as he or she can to the audience – to the world. This truth is revealed from a 3rd persons’ perspective, in this case a Speaker – who can unravel a person’s life and identify more than what they did, but why they did it. I was unfortunately recently at a memorial service for a loved one that passed, and I found traces of a speaking in the memorial given. There were events, there was life, there were actions. There was simple truth about what motivated the life of the deceased, and an order for how each previous action propelled the next one.

I know, at this stage in my life, were I to pass I would eagerly welcome a speaker. For the time being – I’ll be content to read about them.

One of the authors that lies somewhere between horror / thriller and science fiction that I enjoy is Dean Koontz. I have no idea how he manages to churn out so many stories year after year, but his tales are uniformly well written, if possibly formulaic. There’s usually a hero with extraordinary powers, and almost all of his stories feature dogs, too.

The Taking was published in 2004, but like much of what you read here on SciFi-Guy.com, I like to keep myself surrounded by great fiction no matter when the novel was published or the movie was created.

To begin The Taking, we’re greeted with a loving couple of mis-matched likeness in a quiet lake town in Southern California. What follows is a tale that Koontz cues up with vivid imagery – of a dark and terrifiying night where nothing makes sense and few have a chance for survival. This is a grizly story, and definitely in the realm of horrific science fiction, but Koontz meanwhile creates characters that we the reader imminently want to succeed and make it.

The strength of Koontz’s The Taking is on the question of what would happen if suddenly humanity was faced with the deepest, darkest horrors of our minds – and whether or not an alien invasion could take the form of a psychological mind game. The main character, Molly, is forced to constantly evaluate who is trustworthy and who should be feared, as her and her husband try to rescue those that seem immune from the terrors that are bestowed upon this dark night. Not only that, but she’s forced to face her darkest pains from her past, including a psychopathic father that shouldn’t be there. The town itself is drawn vividly, so that the reader is immersed in a “purple fog” in what’s obviously a small town.

Truth be told, this is a page turner, plain and simple. It’s hard to find a place to leave off because each harrowing moment of Molly’s adventure leads to another question. The most pressing question Koontz’s asks was actually written by another science fiction writer years ago – what would an alien invasion of a species thousands of years more advanced than us look like? What would they do to colonize this world, and would we know the difference between madness and chaos versus the planned extermination of humankind.

The second book of Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell’s Trigon Disunity trilogy is titled Enigma, which is a fitting title for this novel. Essentially, it begins where Emprise left off, however detached from that story by about 150 years of advancements. Where Emprise is a story about the descent into and out of a devestated mankind, Enigma shows a future where mankind has finally figured out what it wants to do – discover the stars, and search for our other colonies from millenium past.

Enigma, is unlike Emprise in it’s narration as well. Where Emprise shifted the focal character of the story as the situation developed, we begin Emprise with an unlikely character to follow – Merrit Thackery. Thackery is, by all accounts, a beauracrat in the making – he attends Georgetown to become a government worker, and hopefully become a secretary to one of the leaders of the world-unifying Council. Most of these ambitions are his own devices, though we soon discover that it’s in fact more an appeal of his mother, Andra.

However, for Merrit, everything changes as he takes a lottery-won journey to Jupiter. From there, he stands in an observation bubble and becomes enthralled by the majesty of the world below him. For him, experiencing Jupiter is akin to a drug that he yearns to become addicted to. And from that moment on, he pushes himself to leave the world of government service, and applies to join the space-going USS (Unified Space Service). He leaves Georgetown to further his space-exploration career, and is driven by a madness to be included on one of the Survey ships that are seeking out new colonies. Along the way, Thackery discovers that he must create alliances with the right people in power, and he must work himself harder than anyone else to reach the level he wants to be at – a colony lander. He parallels his experience over Jupiter to the experience of landing on an alien planet and discovering the true nature of that place.

Enigma is aptly-titled because the overriding question posed in this novel is simple: Where did the first colony come from; and what happened to it? There are obviously more colonies than just the Journians (which conclude the first book), but what happened to the First Colonists (FC)? And why have they discovered some colonies in ruins and others doing perfectly fine (albeit technologically inferior)? The enigmas posed by Kube-Mcdowell prompt the reader the push forward to each chapter to uncover answers.

Where Emprise took earth from a devestated world to a unified planet, Enigma takes mankind from a dim light on some edge of the galaxy to a powerful force sweeping across star systems. Aided by technological advancements that essentially shouldn’t exist (according to the physicists of the stories), man is now able to sweep across vast distances faster than light.

The story itself really does flow at a fast pace. There are numerous characters to follow, but again, Kube-Mcdowell made a great choice to fixate the story on a single main character, which means everyone of relevance flows to and from Thackery’s world. As with most 2nd books of a 3-part series, this novel ends with essentially a cliffhanger. Dozens of questions of answered, but just like with many great Science Fiction storylines, the answered questions only lead to bigger unanswered ones. If you enjoyed Emprise, you owe it to yourself to complete the trilogy. I’m not sure if the book would make sense or stand alone if you haven’t read the first, however.

Well, summer is right around the corner, and with it comes the opportunity for parents to help their children explore more things outside of the classroom. Obviously, a great summer should be filled with campfire stories, roadtrips, and outdoor adventures, but there is also the room to help expand your kid’s mind. For the record, I’m not a dad, but there are a few science fiction titles that I’d really recommend to anyone with kids in the 10-15 year old age.

• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

I may not be able to say it enough – this is a great work of fiction. Orson Scott Card creates a story so enthralling that most people I’ve known that have picked up Ender’s Game haven’t been able to put it down until it’s concluded. The language is complex but not so obscure that a young adult can’t determine the context from the story itself. Not only that, but the story is about a child, which makes Ender a remarkably familiar character. The story, while including a fair amount of violence, is also passionate about brotherhood, thinking outside-the-box, and overcoming challenges.

• Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

This may or may not be a book actually included in a high school English cirricullum. If it isn’t, it should be. Farenheit 451 is the story about the destruction of knowledge and the control that the lowest denominator can empart on society. The title itself is derived from the temperature that books burn, and in Bradbury’s world – firefighters don’t stop fires, they create them. It’s a chilling tale, but may encourage your son or daughter to be more inquisitive and less likely to simply accept the world at face value.

• 1984 by George Orwell

Orwell’s 1984 features a chilling story of a future (or, more specifically, an alternate past) where Big Brother is in control of essentially all information, and the minds of the people are as malleable as clay. The story follows one particular resident who questions the authority, who desires to break out from the mundane existance that he’s been forced to endure and experience the freedom he can only barely remember of his youth. This is probably a title best left for slightly older young adults, because it does deal with some touchy subjects, including sexual desires and physical torture (er… not at the same time).

• Foundation by Isaac Asimov

When I was in junior high and high school, nobody had introduced me to Asimov, but Foundation (as a stand-alone book or as part of the entire Foundation Saga) is a great story, and should definitely be read by a young science fiction enthusiast. Like most of Asimov’s stories, the tale is simple yet poetic, and challenges the readers to consider everything. Foundation is essentially the story about how human kind fights wholeheartedly against entropy, even when it’s inevitable. The entire saga might be a worthwhile way to spend the summer – in a hammock with a glass of lemonade, and with the mind wandering among the stars in the far distant future.

Why I think Science Fiction is an important part of a young adult’s reading.

My recollections of junior high and high school are becoming dimmer every day, but I can recall a specific emotion when I graduated: relief. There are lots of pressures on young adults to make a wide variety of decisions, and unfortunately the school system isn’t great at teaching how to make imaginative choices. Imagination, for all the art and learning opportunities that exist for young adults, is unfortunately lacking in our current society.

I’m not trying to point fingers at school systems or administrators. I know they try very hard to provide the best with what resources they have at their disposal. But imagination and free thought is inhibited. It’s not even the school’s fault. It’s the fault of our hectic media culture, which tends to encourage confirmity. Furthermore it’s a young adults peers – they each establish a set of pressures amongst one another, which oftentimes leads to those that think outside the “peer collective” to be percieved as outsiders.

Those that read Science Fiction understand that imagination and creativity are ways of life. A Science Fiction fan loves the unknown because discovery is in our nature. That’s what helps us turn the page – the thrill of discovering what our favorite characters are, and what the world or the universe may potentially hold in store for us all. Great Science Fiction is often uplifting and empowering, and on top of everything else, can spark an imagination. Well, even if your teenager isn’t reading science fiction, encourage them to spend less time near the television, computer, or movie theater, and more time reading a great book. Enjoy the summer, and take advantage!

As you might have noticed (and hopefully will notice more as you keep returning to the SciFi-Guy.com!), I’m a huge fan of post apocalypse. It’s a difficult genre though, because as popular as Kevin Costner’s movies have been, there just doesn’t seem to be much appeal for the subcategory of science fiction. The demise of Jericho is another in a long string of under-performing and critically panned post-apoc science fiction stories.

Jack McDevitt is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and he produced an absolutely awesome post apoc novel titled Eternity Road. Eternity Road is the tale of a group of travellers that embark on a journey to uncover the past – the past to them is our fairly near future. And the trick to McDevitt’s storytelling is that he creates a universe where we managed to annihilate ourselves nearly completely. Remnants of our civilization are now ghost stories and mythology, and McDevitt masterfully paints the story of our far away ancestors to be.

On the whole, EternityRoad isn’t a perfect story. The devestated civilization of the future seems unfortunately predictable, and there’s little description of how we managed to essentially re-emerge in to a pre-renaissance society. In fact, I think that’s one of the biggest challenge of many post apoc stories – its not the story itself that occurs, but how the author sculpts the formation of the future as a result of the apocalypse to come. However, whatever Eternity Road may lack in “present day” development, it makes up for in creating a journey across a vast landscape.

Most of the time, the characters are secondary to the action they’re faced with. This includes all manner of threats to their trek, including a fair mix of natural and man made. The story begins in the Mississippi delta area, and ends. . . Well, I won’t tell you where it ends, but I assure you it’s pretty far from where our main characters begin.

If you’re in the mood for one of the better examples of post apoc science fiction, I really encourage you to give Eternity Road a chance. Perhaps you’ll become a McDevitt fan like the SciFi-Guy!

There are several Science Fiction authors that I’ve tried to follow regularly because for one reason or another, their stories appeal to my reading style. One of those authors is Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell, who has written several great novels, including an intriguing series of books called the Trigon Disunity. The books in the series include Emprise, Enigma, and Empery.

The first book in the series, Emprise, sets up a future world that, when written, actually takes place in our world today. The story begins with an innovative calamity for human-kind; the nullification of atomic weaponry by making the worlds’ atomic energies stable. This means no cold war, no nuclear power, and no nuclear weaponry to grip mankind against each other. In doing so, inadvertently the scientists who created these permanent nuclear “shields” are now villified and accused of being the cause of the world’s problems. Within 20 years, the world goes through numerous world wars for energy, and the nations themselves become devestated by their attempts to acquire energy and resources for themselves and their people.

Scientists and scientific thought are considered the plauge of mankind, and as such the new leadership focuses on how little they actually know about science. This is akin to a self-inflicted social post-apocalypse culture – scientists are hunted and committed of crimes much like witches of the 18th century.

Alone in a remote corner of the United States is a radio astronomer, operating his radio telescope as a hobby and as an obscure passion to suffice his solitude. He must keep his interests a secret, or else his use of solar panels and metal for his hobby will soon make him an enemy of the people. And of course, like radio astronomers do; he discovers a signal that can only mean one thing: we are not alone in this universe.

Emprise, for having been written over 20 years ago, is still an outstanding science fiction novel. The main characters include Rashuri, the leader of the new consortium designed to control the next phase of human kind. Among the other characters worth noting are Tai Chen, the leader of China who positions the Chinese as the dominant force in the new future Kube-Mcdowell explores. Scientists are again able to establish their work, and everything is designed to advance the field of space exploration, for the core desire becomes greeting this alien ship while it’s en route to Earth, rather than allowing it to arrive and suprise mankind with any array of potential outcomes.

Emprise has one notion that I have to believe was slightly ahead of its time for 1985, which was the introduction of a unified global network (read: Internet, anyone?). It’s amazing to consider that he explains the Internet years before it truly reaches the state it actually is today, yet the similarities are stunning. That factor, in my opinion, makes Kube-Mcdowell a powerful science fiction storyteller. To be able to envision a world by extrapolating the state of computing and communication in 1985 is profound.

The characters within Emprise are interesting, but perhaps overly archetyped. For instance, within the Chinese contingent, it seems as though the author considers all Chinese leaders to be empirical and combative. Similarly, the Indians within the story seem to be extremely passive and productive. Perhaps these archetypes were coincidental, but I think moreover they were the result of the state of global affairs of the early 1980′s.

I’ve already read these books before, but I’m looking forward to pouring back through them again, and sharing my thoughts with you here on SciFi-Guy.com. If you have the chance, I recommend picking up a copy of Emprise and seeing if it appeals. Its a worthwhile science fiction tale and for most readers, I think the ending will hook you in to the next two parts of the story.

Update: There is now a summary and review of Enigma, the second book in the series by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell.