From archive (archive) . From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Apr 6 17:43:38 1994 Path: lysator-ifm-isy.liu.se!lysator.liu.se!news.kth.se!sunic!pipex!bnr.co.uk!corpgate!news.utdallas.edu!rdxsunhost.aud.alcatel.com!aur.alcatel.com!news From: leeper@mtgzfs3.mt.att.com (m.r.leeper) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: Cassette of JEDI SEARCH Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: Wed, 30 Mar 1994 01:17:45 GMT Organization: not specified Lines: 72 Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <9403281323.ZM26969@mtgzfs3.mt.att.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: aursag.aur.alcatel.com JEDI SEARCH by Kevin J. Anderson Read by Anthony Heald Bantam, ISBN 0-553-47199-6, audio cassette, 180 min, 1994, US$16.99. An audiocassette review by Mark R. Leeper I don't often have much opportunity to review cassette readings of abridgements of novels, though I will frequently take the sting out of work around the house by listening to novels on cassette via Walkman. It certainly isn't my preferred way to read a novel, but it is the just about the most entertaining way I know of doing housework. I usually listen to novels like THE FIRM, but when a review copy of JEDI SEARCH showed up in the house, I figured, what the heck. JEDI SEARCH is the first novel of Kevin Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy. The series continues the adventures where the film series left off, with a story of Luke Skywalker trying to rekindle the order of Jedi Knights by finding and training new adepts in the Force. What can you say about the plot? It is just about what you would expect from a new "Star Wars" film. Anderson was clearly trying to translate the experience of seeing a new "Star Wars" installment into book--or in this case cassette-- form. We have new threats from the nasty Empire with bigger and more powerful weapons. We have the dubious joy of visiting the spice mines of Kessel, mentioned in the first film. Anderson has very consciously tried to tie the events, locations, and even objects of the series' films as if they were Anderson's series all along. This cassette production is read by Anthony Heald, who will be familiar to some as Hannibal Lecter's obnoxious psychiatrist and keeper from the film THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. There are a few artificial touches to make an attempt to use the medium to increase the cinematic feel. Chewbacca doesn't speak any language that sounds to us humans as articulate. He just sort of mornfully bellows. They have gotten the sound of one bellow off the soundtrack and they play it whenever Chewbacca is supposed to be speaking. I believe that is the only sound effect taken from the films, but it is used profusely. At times the production team over-use it and it becomes obvious that they have only one bellow which they use for all moods and messages. The cassette also uses the original John Williams score to add excitement to many of the scenes. Though they are, of course, limited to music that is already familiar--they hardly were going to hire Williams or anyone else to add to the original three scores. That is sort of the spirit of the whole production. It does as many simple and inexpensive touches it can to recreate the feel of what has gone before without adding too much that is original or new. This cassette was nothing earth-shaking, but it considerably improved the dreary task of shoveling my driveway. And I'll tell you I had one heck of a lot of empathy for Han Solo's back-breaking labors in the spice mines of Kessel. There is such a thing as going too far to make the listener think he is part of the story. %T Jedi Search %A Kevin J. Anderson %C New York %D 1994 %I Bantam Doubleday Dell %O audio cassette, read by Anthony Heald, US$16.99 %G ISBN 0-553-47199-6 %P 180 min %S Jedi Academy %V 3 Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzfs3!leeper leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper -- Mark R. Leeper , (908) 957-5619 Fax: (908) 957-5627 AT&T Bell Laboratories - MT 3D-441, 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!solace!paladin.american.edu!news.jhu.edu!aplcenmp!night.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.kei.com!uhog.mit.edu!news!news From: silverag@ix.netcom.com (Steven H Silver) Subject: Review of Kevin J. Anderson's War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches Message-ID: Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Keywords: author=Steven H Silver Lines: 116 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu (Graystreak) Organization: Netcom X-Newsreader: (ding) Gnus v0.94 Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 19:44:50 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Lines: 116 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.written:154027 rec.arts.sf.reviews:961 WAR OF THE WORLDS: GLOBAL DISPATCHES Edited by Kevin J. Anderson Review Copyright 1996 Steven H Silver Shared World Anthologies. At their best, they allow several authors, working in tandem to produce linked works which can either stand on their own or be read to form a larger whole. Robert Asprin's _Thieves' World_ series began on this high level. When carried too far, a shared world can degenerate into a game of one-uppance played by the authors; for instance, later entries in the _Thieves' World_ series. Sharecropped Worlds. They can often mean money to an author. A quick book or story in a universe created by someone else. Perhaps the most popular examples are the _Star Trek_ and _Star Wars_ books lining the shelves of all bookstores. In _War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches_, Kevin J. Anderson has assembled a book which is both Shared World and Sharecropped World. Although Anderson states in the acknowledgements that the idea came to him and he "stopped dead in [his] tracks on a hiking trail in the redwood forests of California with the sudden idea for this book," the idea actually predates Anderson's epiphany. The oldest story in the book, Howard Waldrop's "Night of the Cooters" first appeared in the April 1987 issue of _Omni_. Perhaps because Waldrop was not writing for a specific project, his story of Texan farmers dealing with H.G. Wells's Martian invasion rings the freshest in the collection. Nevertheless, other pieces are well worth reading. Anderson's assignment to his writers was simple: write a short story which deals with H.G. Wells's Martian invasion from a different location than London. In order to make the task more of a challenge, Anderson had each author write the story as if it were an eyewitness account by a noted author. Therefore, we find Barbara Hambly penning Rudyard Kipling's memories of the events and Daniel Keys Moran taking over Mark Twain's pen. The stories, therefore, must work on two levels. Are they good/enjoyable stories? Do they manage to capture the author's style without becoming parody? As might be imagined, some stories succeed on one level and fail the other, some succeed on both and some fail on both. The first piece in the collection is Mike Resnick's "The Roosevelt Dispatches". Not exactly a story, the piece is a collections of letters written by Roosevelt after killing a Martian in the woods of Cuba. In the letters, Roosevelt describes the physical characteristics of the Martians, thereby setting the stage for the following stories. The reader, even if they haven't read H.G. Wells -- and if they haven't, they should -- knows exactly what the oddities of the alien's bodies are. Anderson next takes over the narrative when Percival Lowell, the foremost Mars observer of his time, watches the launch of the Martian vessels from his newly completed observatory outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Realizing what the green flashes meant, Lowell embarks on a mission to signal the Martians and become the first human to shake hands with them. Anderson's piece, like Resnick's, serves a purpose in setting the stage -- even bringing in mention of a young journalist, H.G. Wells -- but doesn't really satisfy as a story. If left to stand without the rest of the book, Anderson's tale would be flimsy. In fact, the book's strongest stories, such as Walter Jon Williams's "Foreign Devils" and Howard Waldrop's "Night of the Cooters," ignore the framing concept of being written by contemporary authors. Instead, they relate events which happened to people as a straight story. Of those which do attempt to live within the framework laid down by Anderson, stories like Resnick's "The Roosevelt Dispatches" and Steele's "A Letter From the Home Front" work better than those which are straightforward story accounts as written by authors. Benford & Brin's "Paris Conquers All" seems to be a mixture of a Jules Verne novel and a story about Jules Verne, not really able to separate the author from his fictitious characters and writings. The book also suffers from the minor problem of continuity problems. The invasion of Paris seen by Pablo Picasso and the invasion of Paris described by Jules Verne can not be reconciled with each other. Anderson's way of dealing with this is to mention that these men haven't spoken to each other since their accounts were published. Silverberg's "The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James," places the invasion in 1900, three years after the Wells novel and other short stories are set. Silverberg's story, the most blatantly alternate historical work in the book, also has a footnote to the effect that James published his novel _The War of the Worlds_ in November 1900 and Wells never did write about the events. _War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches_ is light reading. If the reader is looking for a collection of short stories with meat to it, I would suggest looking elsewhere. However, if you are just looking for a few short stories to help escape from the world, you could do worse than this anthology. CONTENTS Mike Resnick: The Roosevelt Dispatches Kevin J. Anderson: Canals In the Sand Walter Jon Williams: Foreign Devils Dan Marcus: Blue Period Robert: The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James Janet Berliner: The True Tale of the Final Battle Umplopogaas the Zulu Howard Waldrop: Night of the Cooters Doug Beason: Determinism and the Martian War, With Relativistic Corrections Barbara Hambly: Soldier of the Queen George Alec Effinger: Mars: The Home Front Allen Steele: A Letter from St. Louis Mark W. Tiedemann: Resurrection Gregory Benford & David Brin: Paris Conquers All Don Webb: To Mars & Providence Daniel Keys Moran & Jodi Moran: Roughing It During the Martian Invasion M. Shayne Bell: To See the World End Dave Wolverton: After a Lean Winter Connie Willis: The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion & Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective %E Kevin J. Anderson %T War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches %I Bantam Spectra %C New York, NY %D June 1996 %G 0-553-10353-3 %O HC $22.95 %P 274 Steven H Silver Bibliographies on Jews in SF, Harry Turtledove, SF set in Chicago http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4208/sfbiblio.html HOMEPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4208/index.html Archived at: www.geocities.com/Athens/4208/review.html Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.books.reviews,alt.books.h-g-wells Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!newsfeed.sunet.se!news01.sunet.se!sunic!mn6.swip.net!plug.news.pipex.net!pipex!tube.news.pipex.net!pipex!hole.news.pipex.net!pipex!oleane!jussieu.fr!esiee.fr!sgigate.sgi.com!uhog.mit.edu!news!news From: leeper@mtgbcs.mt.att.com Subject: Review: War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches Message-ID: Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Keywords: author=Mark R. Leeper Lines: 229 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu (Graystreak) Organization: Intelligent Agents Group X-Newsreader: (ding) Gnus v0.94 Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 00:02:19 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Lines: 229 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:966 rec.arts.sf.written:155226 rec.arts.books.reviews:1693 alt.books.h-g-wells:33 WAR OF THE WORLDS: GLOBAL DISPATCHES edited by Kevin J. Anderson A book review by Mark R. Leeper Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper When I was growing up I very much used to enjoy certain themed anthologies, particularly those edited by Groff Conklin. Ones that come particularly to mind are his SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES IN DIMENSION and INVADERS OF EARTH, and Clifton Fadiman's FANTASIA MATHEMATICA and THE MATHEMATICAL MAGPIE. These days I don't care so much for theme anthologies. Occasionally when I used to read anthologies I would find one or two stories would be ones I had read before, but often they were worth rereading or could be skipped. Then I started finding anthologies in which all the stories were original and that allowed me to avoid the minor problem of repeating of familiar stories. These days, however, things have swept in the other direction and I will rarely spend time and money on a themed anthology of original stories. I want stories that are reprinted from elsewhere, and for very good reason. Theme anthologies aren't what they used to be. What I think is happening is that somebody gets an idea like that people would buy an anthology of alternate history Elvis Presley stories, goes out, and commissions a bunch of such stories. Once the editor has requested such a story he or she needs darn good cause to reject it. After all, if it does not make it to the anthology that author really cannot sell it any place else. First, there just was a whole anthology about alternate Presley stories so the public is probably oversaturated with them. Also, it is relatively obvious that this story was commissioned for the anthology and rejected or why else was the author writing on the subject. So it does not make sense for authors to write for theme anthologies unless they are pretty sure the stories will be accepted regardless of quality. In addition, it is a lot easier to write a story on an idea of your own choosing. An author have many interesting ideas but only the most mediocre and dull ideas on a concept like alternate histories of Elvis Presley. Nevertheless, that is where the money is and the story is unlikely to be rejected because it is just not very entertaining. So an Elvis Presley alternate history is what is written. The result is that we get a lot of what I find to be dull anthologies. I find when I read these anthologies, more often than not I have checked what is the final page number of the story and I am increasingly aware how many pages off that is. When I get there I feel more relief that I got there than excitement about the story. It is, in fact, very difficult for me to imagine what could be exciting about an Elvis Presley alternate history and reading such an anthology generally does not answer that question. My wife can read no end of stories on any of a set of topics she finds exciting, such as alternate history, Sherlock Holmes, etc. I probably have a list of topics like that, but I find I have a very narrow band of stories that I will unconditionally read based on subject matter. Certainly most of the theme anthologies coming out now are nowhere near my narrow band. If someone did an anthology of interesting mathematical ideas, maybe something like the old FANTASIA MATHEMATICA, that would interest me. But I can't see that happening. The field of mathematical stories has been left to Rudy Rucker and an increasingly limited set of authors. I really like WAR OF THE WORLDS, so when I got an advanced reading copy of a set of stories set during the invasion from WAR OF THE WORLDS, I decided to give that a try. In the original novel Wells himself only told about the invasion in England. There is no mention of whether the same events were happening in other countries or not. His original intent was to show Britons what it must be like when the British Navy pulls into some distant island and declares themselves its sovereign by virtue of British armaments. Wells wanted to explore how British society would react if the same thing happened to them. The story could not be told believably having the invader be any military power at the time, so Wells introduced Martian Imperialism. As a result he left open the possibility that it was only England that was attacked and that other nations did not come to England's aid. But certainly the easiest explanation is that the invasion was an international event and many countries were invaded. The stories themselves in this new anthology are largely writing exercises that borrow a lot from Wells. They try to throw in a little historical detail about chosen characters and what that character was doing at the time of the invasion. The descriptions of the battles usually vary little from those in Wells. It is an obvious formula to use but the stories that stand out are those that provide some variation. The other common approach is to do a pastiche, describing the invasion but in another author's style. Kevin Anderson begins the anthology with a preface claiming that this is certain famous people's versions of the invasion and if they contradict, well, different people see things differently. Apparently two of the stories contradicted so much that he has to give it special mention. In fact, there are more contradictions than that, but the claim does help to make the stories fit together better. The initial stories are minor, with Michael Resnick suggesting that Teddy Roosevelt would react to the Martian invasion much as he reacted to anything else he encountered. Anderson's own story is more a profile of Percival Lowell and his excitement at meeting Martians. Both of these are not so much stories as scenes from days of the invasion. Walter Jon Williams offers the first substantial story of the volume. His "Foreign Devils" is set in Imperial China and uses an alternate history approach. Having the story set in the Second Opium War allows there to be three warring parties, each fighting the other two. There are unexpected and ironic results of the Martian invasion. Daniel Marcus's "Blue Period" follows a much more conventional course of not really telling a story that stands on its own but instead just describing Pablo Picasso, describing scenes of the Martian attack on Paris, and describing the artist's reaction. There is description but not a lot of plot beyond "Picasso sees the Martian attack on Paris." Henry James' account is much more complete and perhaps should have been first since it is written by Robert Silverberg, perhaps the best writer in the book, and also because it gives a fairly complete retelling of the Wells plot in somewhat shorter form. Silverberg's "The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James" has not much new. It starts with James visiting Wells and expressing his admiration for Wells. What he says of Wells echoes the feelings that Silverberg has about Wells, as expressed on a panel at the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention. I am not sure that James had an admiration as strong as expressed here. The rest of the story chronicles the experiences of James and Wells during the invasion and is actually a shortened version of the events of the novel. Anyone who has not read the novel (shame on you) can learn the essentials by reading the Silverberg story. Just to keep in practice, Silverberg throws in an alternate history twist at the end. But it is only a half-hearted one, I am afraid. Janet Berliner ties Winston Churchill and H. Rider Haggard's fictional Umslopogaas into one of the more ambitious entries combining a bit of Boer War African adventure with the Martian Invasion. Curiously there is little connection drawn between Wells's metaphor of European Imperialism and actual European imperialism in Africa at the time. There is something of what amounts to a pun on what Haggard called an alien invader and the Martians. The premise starts to wear thin by the time we get to Howard Waldrop's "Night of the Cooters." That is ironic, because this may well be the story that inspired the volume and is the only reprint of a story written before the creation of this book. This story matches Texas Rangers against Martians. Waldrop's approach involves taking scenes right out of Wells, but translating them to another setting and perhaps modifying the style to the appropriate person. The story follows Texas Rangers going after some wayward schoolboys; when the Martians land the game becomes more describing scenes in the Wells, but with a Texas accent. His Rangers do fairly well fighting Martians and the Martians seem more vulnerable here than in other stories, but perhaps Waldrop has a certain pride in his state's heroes. Doug Beeson gives us an account of Albert Einstein during the invasion and it is one of the better stories. It gives us new incidents not in the Wells book, rather than just repeating scenes in other locations. The story also has the courage to try to invent a little about the Martian technology that Wells did not. Beeson's image of Einstein of constantly perceiving the world around him in terms of physics is not entirely convincing. We are not so successful in getting into Kipling's head. Barbara Shamble's story of Rudyard Kipling is well textured, but the plot is a bit of a disappointment. It has more dialect and less adventure than most stories in the volume, a bit of a disappointment considering that Kipling was the master of the adventure tale. George Alec Effinger offers a delightful pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs with a John Carter story that gives a broader context to the whole Martian invasions. The aliens that Wells let us assume were the only intelligent race on Mars are just one more strange species that fits nicely into the range of strange creatures Burroughs envisioned on Barsoom. This may well be the best story in the anthology, not for the writing style but because it tries to do something other than the obvious. More adhering to the formula, Allan Steele has a reporter seeing the devastation of the attack and recounting it to Joseph Pulitzer. Steele has some nice detail, but the story does little that others have not done. Much the same can be said of Mark W. Tiedemann's account of Tolstoy and its familiar device of the accompanying letter saying what a great find the account is. Tiedemann seems to be trying to work in geographic locations that have been in the news the last couple of years. Gregory Benford and David Brin tell us of the ever-optimistic Jules Verne who is certain that the Martians can be defeated. For background material they have a bit about Verne's disagreement with H. G. Wells that really comes down to disagreement between the approaches of hard science fiction and of lighter science fantasy. One thing that really is shocking from two major science fiction writers is that they believe that everything in the Martians comes in threes, three legs, three arms, three eyes. The hitch is that this three-ness was the invention of the 1953 movie, not the novel. The book had the war machines be striding tripods, but nothing else was in threes about the Martians. Don Webb's account of an eleven-year-old H. P. Lovecraft borrows some ideas from Nigel Kneale and the Quatermass stories. It does not have much of a plot but there definitely are intriguing ideas. Curiously it turns out to be a better story than Daniel Keys Moran and Jodi Moran's story of an adult Mark Twain. Missing from their story is most of the wit we expect from Twain. What could have been one of the better stories fails to capture the essence of Twain. M. Shayne Bell does one of the few really serious pieces in this non-serious anthology, an account of Joseph Conrad in Africa at the time of the Invasion. Again it compares the Martian invaders with European invaders in a troubled Africa. A more original and interesting approach is used by Dave Wolverton in his account of Jack London off in the frozen North meeting a French Canadian who uses a captured Martian is a most inhumane manner. This is one of the better adventure tales in the book. The final story is Connie Willis's piece about Emily Dickinson, a satire on college theses written in a form akin to literary slapstick. Some of the allusions are particularly clever though none struck me as actually being funny in the traditional sense of making me laugh, chuckle, or even smile. An afterword by Benford and Brin again in the voice of Verne tries to tie things up and suggest some differences in our world resulting from the Great Invasion. There is a plot that has become popular in the last ten or fifteen years of asking what would happen if two famous people in history and/or literature met. What if H. G. Wells had met Jack the Ripper, what if Sherlock Holmes had met Sigmund Freud, etc. This anthology fits neatly into that mold but for the fact that the one constant character is not a single person but the Martian Invasion. As such the book is of some interest value, though the sameness of the stories is a bit wearing. Perhaps the stories would be best read at a rate of one a week. Fans of the Wells novels may find this worth reading, but I am not sure that it was worth an entire anthology. But then a lot of anthologies are being published that do not seem to be very good subjects for whole anthologies and this is better than most. Waldrop's "The Night of the Cooters," which predated the anthology may have covered the idea as much as it needed to be covered. %B War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches %E Kevin J. Anderson %C New York %D May 1996 %I Bantam Spectra %O hardback, US$22.95 %G ISBN 0-553-10353-9 %P 228pp %S War of the Worlds %V 2 (in the sense of being dependent only on 1) Mark R. Leeper , (908) 957-5619 Fax: (908) 957-5627 Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs - MT3F-434, 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748 Homepage (inside AT&T firewall only): http://www-gbcs.mt.att.com/~leeper Outside AT&T firewall: for info try your WWW search engine on "Mark Leeper"