From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri Jul 24 15:42:14 1992 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!ig!dont-reply-to-paths From: ecl@mtgzy.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: THE MODULAR MAN by Roger MacBride Allen Message-ID: <9207211305.AA21133@presto.ig.com> Date: 22 Jul 92 06:28:48 GMT Sender: mcb@presto.ig.com Lines: 55 Approved: mcb@presto.ig.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) THE MODULAR MAN by Roger MacBride Allen A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper David Bailey has downloaded himself into his home maintenance unit (a.k.a., vacuum cleaner, a.k.a., "Herbert"--it's a pun, get it?) and now Herbert is being charged with first-degree murder, because the complete download of a personality destroys the original. The district attorney hopes Herbert's owner (Suzanne Jantille, who is also David's widow and a lawyer) will take the obvious path and ask for dismissal on the grounds that Herbert can't be charged because he isn't human. This would set a precedent for preventing the rich from achieving immortality by replacing all the parts that wear out--in effect, turning themselves into cyborgs. But Suzanne takes another tack. Allen raises a lot of interesting issues here, but eventually short- circuits them (you'll pardon the pun) by providing an ending that does not follow at all from what comes before, but from the whim of one character (which means, basically, the whim of the author). And the supposedly innovative solution to resolve the problem of the "immortal rich" is one that has appeared before, and in a very well-known work. (I'm desperately trying to avoid spoilers here.) In addition, I'm no lawyer, but it seems obvious to me that if Herbert can stand trial as David Bailey, then David Bailey isn't dead, and so no one can be tried for his murder. If the prosecution is claimed Herbert is David Bailey, but a *different* David Bailey, then it's clear that the original David Bailey did all the set-up for the transfer ("murder") and so the new one is not responsible. (If I rig up a suicide device so that I'm killed when someone rings my doorbell, is the unsuspecting mailman guilty of murder?) Allen tries a bit of hand-waving to get around this, with some obscure point of law not introduced until near the end of the story (future law, not any law we have), but it's not very convincing. This is probably the last of the "Next Wave" series, and even this is an abbreviated entry: instead of an introduction by Isaac Asimov and an essay by a "working scientist," it has three short articles by Asimov strung together in place of the essay and no introduction. THE MODULAR MAN started out with some great ideas, but didn't carry them through. I wish I could recommend this book, but ultimately I found it disappointing and annoying. %A Allen, Roger MacBride %T The Modular Man %I Bantam Spectra %C New York %D June 1992 %O paperback, US$4.99 %G ISBN 0-553-29559-4 %P 306pp Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | att!mtgzy!ecl or ecl@mtgzy.att.com From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri Nov 11 12:51:51 1994 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.written Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.kth.se!sunic!lunic.luth.se!eru.mt.luth.se!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: dani@telerama.lm.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Allen: The Shattered Sphere Message-ID: <39m3l8$4ie@asia.lm.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@netcom.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: Telerama Public Access Internet, Pittsburgh, PA USA Date: Thu, 10 Nov 1994 05:22:58 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 70 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:667 rec.arts.sf.written:80753 "The Shattered Sphere" is the second book in Roger MacBride Allen's "The Hunted Earth" series -- a somewhat lackluster sequel to his excellent "The Ring of Charon". In "The Ring of Charon", the Earth is...abducted. By mistake. There is a life form that farms solar systems, and one of its...constructs...mistakenly takes a human gravity-wave experiment as a signal to harvest our solar system. (This life form is one of the ideas central to the book, and doesn't lend itself to capsule description. It has aspects of a Von Neumann machine, a berserker, a cyborg, a Dyson sphere, a hive, and a pack, if that helps.) That book ends with Earth in a very strange stellar system centered on a Dyson sphere, the humans who were off Earth at the time trying to pick up the remaining pieces in a badly damaged solar system, and the wormhole connecting the two closed. Oh, it also ends with indications that there's something out there that eats Dyson spheres for lunch. In "The Shattered Sphere", that something comes a-snacking. This book consists mostly of the humans on both sides of the wormhole learning about the kidnappers, which makes for a great deal of exposition, however disguised. That's not automatically a bad thing: "The Ring of Charon" was just as exposition-heavy, and the most interesting part of the second book is the exposition (disguised as a process of discovery and intuition) on the development of the Dyson system. It works if there are enough interesting concepts upon which to expound, and if it is tied in to an interesting enough human story. Most of the concepts we encounter in "The Shattered Sphere", however, are elaborations of those introduced in the first book. There just isn't enough new meat to hang on the thin plot skeleton. (It would have been interesting to see more done with the sphere-eater. Allen uses "strange matter" here the way some books used "radium" earlier in the century -- as one part explanation and nine parts incantation.) The book ends with the immediate dangers being warded off by virtue of the humans having thought of ways to use their kidnappers' technology that didn't occur to their kidnappers -- a somewhat wooden plot device in itself -- and by virtue of just the right tools not only being at hand, but also being incredibly easy for outsiders to use. "The Hunted Earth" may be best classified as a disaster story: Something big happens (hurricane, earthquake, plague, nova, whatever) and we spend several hundred pages getting lectured to about that disaster and watching a cast of characters cope with it. Since it's also "idea sf" -- science fiction whose most interesting aspect is the clever concept rather than the plot or the character -- the coping mostly takes the form of solving the problem, rather than of rioting or plotting or dying horribly. It's a familiar formula because it works. In "The Ring of Charon" it worked very well. If "The Shattered Sphere" is any indication, however, its not a a formula that can support too long a series. At least, not unless the sequels introduce enough new and interesting material, rather than expanding and expounding upon earlier material. %A Allen, Roger MacBride %T The Shattered Sphere %I Tor %C New York %D July 1994 %G ISBN 0-312-85734-9 %P 412pp %O $22.95 %S The Hunted Earth ----- Dani Zweig dani@telerama.lm.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope