Subject: Review: "Legacy" by Greg Bear

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 24 Sep 1996 11:39:00 -0400

"Legacy" by Greg Bear
		A Postview, copyright 1996 p-m agapow

A prequel to "Eon" and Eternity": The Way is an endless tunnel, a flaw in
spacetime with hidden openings that are paths to other worlds.  One of these
other worlds is the interdicted Lamarckia, a lush planet with a strange
biology of ever-warring meta-organisms.  The luddite Lenk has spirited a
group of followers away and colonised Lamarckia.  The melancholic agent Olmy
is sent on a one way mission to investigate and finds the planet in upheaval
- in more ways than one.

Great unsolved mysteries in pop culture, Take 1 :

* When Jim Jarmusch, Win Wenders and Hal Hartley get together,
  do they make fun of other people's names?
* Raymond Chandler once said that if he got stumped when
  writing a story, his solution was to write in a man coming
  through the door with a gun.  Is is correct to assume therefore
  that Chandler got writer's block, on average, twice a page?
* When a new series is breathlessly announced as being "in the
  tradition of the `Foundation' trilogy", what actually does that
  mean?  It's about a group of scientists controlling history?  Or
  that there are three parts?
  
Add to this "Exactly what happened to Greg Bear between 'Forge of God' and
'Queen of Angels'?" because it sure doesn't look like the same writer
sometimes.  Even contrasting a book and its sequel - e.g.  "Forge of God"
and the excellent "Anvil of Stars" - there's been an incredible
transformation.  The latest example is "Legacy."

"Eon" was not a favourite of mine, being a book where the flashy science was
the protagonist and the characters just flimsy background that shook every
time someone slammed a door too hard.  An interesting and fertile setting
was wiped of any interest in the carwreck of a beginning chapter.  Needless
to say, I didn't read the sequel "Eternity".  (A less fortunate colleague
quipped "If it took you an eon to read 'Eon' ...")

"Legacy" is a prequel to "Eon," set as the asteroid Thistledown journeys out
of the solar system.  The asteroid side of affairs barely features in the
novel, just one of the many ways in which "Legacy" is tenuously connected to
its siblings.  Indeed the entire mission aspect is basically an excuse to
get Olmy to Lamarckia, a very thin excuse.  There's something very Dilbert-
esque about it: imagine the chief of Way Defence with two curly tufts of
hair saying "We don't know what's happening there or what you can do or how
you can get back but go and get me a report, would you?" and Olmy,
spherical, myopic and in lycra, thinking "I'm doomed".  In style too,
"Legacy" is different.  This is a personal story of Olmy's alienation,
failure and awakening against the panorama of a larger struggle.

Bear provides a fascinating backdrop with the ecology of Lamarckia.
Biologists will find some aspects dubious, but Lamarckia is so interesting
and such a departure from Earth biology that any mistakes are probably
excusable.  But the book avoids the obvious trap of becoming a travelogue
story, instead giving us a moderately complicated political and personal
plot with Olmy struggling to keep his cover and investigate the brewing
civil war on Lamarckia.  The characterisation is perhaps not as good as that
in (say) "Anvil of Stars" and there is a rough point or two here as well,
but again these are forgivable.  The book is also a little long, but not
annoyingly so and there is enough story to fill it.

So in summary, "Legacy" makes a few mistakes but does so much right that
these are easily forgivable.  Greg Bear is still on track and this novel
comes recommended.  [***/interesting] and BBC period dramas on the Sid and
Nancy scale.

%A Greg Bear
%B Legacy
%I Tor
%C New York
%D 1995
%G ISBN 0-812-52481-0
%P 471pp
%O Aus$14.95

paul-michael agapow ([email-masked]), La Trobe Uni, Infocalypse
[archived at http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~agapow/Postviews/]