f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] New Legends [Author] Greg Bear [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1996 [Read] 2013/12/04 [Review] 
New Legends is an anthology of SF stories picked by Bear with an eye toward the psychological & personal lives of scientists/researchers. I purchased a copy of it to look at the novella “Radiance” by Carter Scholz and compare it with the full novel Radiance for the annotated ebook of Radiance I have been working on for a while. That will be its own review, so I will pass over it for now. An unexpected bonus for me was Gregory Benford’s contribution: not a story, but an autobiographical essay “Old Legends” on the real-life background to “Radiance” that he lived through, discussing his physics career, time at LLNL (where “Radiance” is set), experiences with other SF authors in the Reagan-era lobbying for SDI/Star Wars, the Cartmill incident, his admiration of Edward Teller, etc. Scholz clearly drew on Benford for his novella, and so it was unusually interesting for me. The collection overall is good, but not great. A number of the stories are too clearly the product of early ‘90s anxious liberalism and have not aged well since they were written in 1993 or earlier (~20 years ago), some are half-baked, and some are just bad. A few are very good. They are grouped into thematic sections. To go through them in order (there are many spoilers below): “Elegy”, Mary Rosenblum. Good. A scientist working on controlled use of squid neurons to repair human brains and cure trauma like Alzheimer’s struggles with guilt about her demented mother, fear her research will fail, and worries that the squid she uses as raw materials may be part of something far greater. “A Desperate Calculus”, Sterling Blake. Bad. World-trotting scientists struggle to organize a response to a devastating pandemic. Twist ending: the pandemic was engineered to render women sterile, stopping the threat of overpopulation, forcing humanity to dieback and live in harmony with the environment, and the (immune) protagonists were spreading it through their jetsetting, overlaid on a geopolitical forecast of Northern hemisphere vs Southern hemisphere balkanization & resentment. The engineered pandemic conceit is nice but has been done many times before, and the politics are incredibly grating. Even in 1994 it should have been obvious that overpopulation was not going to be an existential threat and that the worst of the environmental problems are often solved by additional economic growth (the Kuznets curve). This story is particularly dated; contemporary writers thinking about using global warming as their threat should consider how much they care about dating themselves. “Scenes from a Future Marriage”, James Stevens-Arce. Mediocre. An unlucky couple who screw up all their life decisions fail again, and review their choices while contemplating suicide. Set against a vaguely dystopian background. This one did nothing for me as it was so over the top. “Coming of Age in Karhide”, Ursula K. Le Guin. Great. In an ageless city where every life follows ancient finely-honed patterns, a fearful child grows into its sexual maturity and becomes an adult. This is very much a Le Guin traditionalist story with her trademark gender twist, and it does what it does very well. “High Abyss”, Gregory Benford. Good. An alien religious war about the physics of the universe, in a universe which is not ours, culminates in victory for the renegade mathematician who led the revolt with his heretical theory that the world is not a line, but another topology. A treacherous counterattack sends the prophet aloft on a hot-air balloon and he realizes that his heresy did not go far enough - that the world was a string embedded in a far grander, far larger, more spherical universe (ours?). He is simultaneously exalted and debased by the epochal discovery of the truth of the Universe. Benford throws you in the hard SF deep-end to figure out the universe (I’m actually reminded a little of The Clockwork Rocket here as a recent example). Does it work? It’s hard to say because the story is so short. I’m not sure what the “string” is even supposed to be - a superstring? How does that work with the given system of the world with ’lava’ bubbling up in the center of the world? I thought initially the story was being set underseas on a crustal fault, and the lava was literal lava and the cold abyssal waters doomed the people if they tried to leave the long line/ridge, but then “stars” came up and I had to abandon that theory. I’m not entirely satisfied with my interpretation and wish the story had been longer and explained its world a little more. “Recording Angel”, Paul J. McAuley. Mediocre. In a vastly distant post-human future, a Indian-like city’s ancient rhythms are disturbed by a human returning from an eons-long space trip. She leads some sort of revolution. Did nothing for me, as nothing about it seemed important, the world-building failed to explain what was going on, etc. “When Strangers Meet”, Sonia Orin Lyris. Bad. A mind-controlling alien (the One) celebrates, with its many servants, the festival at the end of its year, culminating in a grand dance to the death (by exhaustion) of its vaguely human-like slaves. Interspersed are occasional comments about interstellar communication with aliens (humans?). This one frankly made little sense to me. There’s some repeated lines about the dangers of the servants becoming “too familiar” to the One, but also a line about “strangers bring benefits”. The story feels ominous but nothing gels before it abruptly ends with the dance performance and another use of the strangers line. What does it all mean? I have no idea. I can barely figure out what the alien social system is supposed to be (I think it’s modeled after eusocial insects), much less any theme or message. This might have worked if Lyris hadn’t badly overestimated my ability to understand what she wrote. “The Day the Aliens Came”, Robert Sheckley. Very bad. Supposedly humorous. A writer nonchalantly accepts employment with an alien tourist, but then suddenly he’s shacking up with another alien, and suddenly the couple is having kids and merging into a group organism with other couples and then the story just ends. WTF‽ This badly needed to be rejected or at least, Bear should have rejected it and sent it back to Sheckley with a note saying “where’s the second half of this story?” “Gnota”, Greg Abraham. Mediocre. A mid-future soldier gets hit by an IED due to sentimentality; his heart is to be replaced by a clone of his heart grown inside a genetically-engineered pig. He bonds with the pig. “Rorvik’s War”, Geoffrey A. Landis. Good. A citizen is conscripted into a war against the Russians. He dies in an attack - or maybe he dies another way, and then another. War is hell, and wasteful since the militaries’ computers can all simulate the outcome of the battles, except can they really take into account the human factor? Rorvik dies again and again, is taken POW and sent to a Communist re-education camp, until fuzzily he realizes: he’s in the computer simulations. He grapples back to reality, and his conscription is over. He returns home with all his limbs, having apparently served his country without any repercussions. But will he psychologically truly recover? I enjoyed this one in part because it undercut my expectations: I was mentally a little bored with yet another war against Russians and thinking it was a little stupid, but then the story justified its choices quite nicely. “Radiance”, Carter Scholz. Great. See Radiance. “Old Legends”, Gregory Benford. Great. See opening summary. “The Red Blaze Is the Morning”, Robert Silverberg. Great. Silverberg turns in one of the best stories in this volume: an old archaeologist, almost out to pasture, strives in his Turkish dig site to make one last extraordinary find justifying his heterodox theory of the origins of human civilization, following the clue of a few out of place artifacts. He is lonely, his body is failing, but his passion to understand the past drives him on in his fruitless digs. Haunted by his continuing failure to find anything at all, he begins hallucinating visions from the end of time, the dying Earth, the ruins of the mightiest civilizations that humanity will one eon give birth to. The visions are sent by his counterpart, one of the last sapient beings left in the ruins after the Gotterdammerung, who makes him an offer: to swap their minds (shades of Lovecraft’s scholars), so the being can study the impossibly remote origins of humanity and the protagonist study undreamt-of eras. He refuses of course, and the dig continues to go poorly, he drinks more and more, until finally in the climax, a Turkish official arrives with the shattering truth: the artifacts were planted by a corrupt Turkish official for the express purpose of egging him on and motivating more work at the site. His dig is futile, was always futile, and even the slender evidence he had was meaningless. His theory will not be vindicated. Utterly destroyed by the revelation, he accepts the Faustian bargain and flees into madness - or the future? And awakes at the end of time, with endless ruins to investigate and ponder. This story impressed me as close kin to “Radiance” and showing the dark side of a quest for truth. “One”, George Alec Effinger. Mediocre. A husband-wife team set out in a spaceship to search for life. As predicted by the Fermi paradox, they fail to find any on thousands of worlds. The wife dies, the protagonist slowly goes insane, and converts to religion as he continues to fail to find life on any planets he surveys. Wholly unconvincing, I thought. “Scarecrow”, Poul Anderson. Mediocre. An almost Asimovian pastiche, of another husband-wife team whose ship crashes on the chaotic moon Hyperion. They struggle to reach shelter in the installation on the moon, manned by robots, only to discover the robots have, yes, gone insane - or become religious, specifically, having developed a religion focusing on darkness/chaos/bad vs light/order/good. The pair need to prove they follow the light and are not sinister agents of chaos. Based on the wife’s brief religious dialogue with the robots, the husband receives inspiration: he proves that they come from the light by teaching the robots about fractals and chaotic equations which nevertheless have a simple beautiful mathematical core. Having proven his theodicy - how a good and orderly god could have created the chaotic Saturn environment - they are accepted by the robots as fellow worshippers and admitted into the base. While I really enjoyed the last page, I level the opposite accusation at this story that I did some of the others: it is far too long, almost all of it could be trimmed out, and some of the characterization is very poor (the wife is wholly unnecessary and IMO is constantly irritating). “Wang’s Carpets”, Greg Egan. Great. I would put this with “Radiance” and “The Red Blaze Is the Morning” as the 3 best stories in this volume. Upload civilization fires off a bunch of copies to remote systems to look for life, in part as a final attempt to find a justification for remaining involved in the real world and pursuing the great scientific project of understanding the universe, rather than enjoying ever more abstracted or refined simulations. They discover an apparently dull giant simple ocean life form based on self-replicating carbohydrate sheets. Egan offers a truly inspired bit of worldbuilding when he suggests the sheets then are Wang tiles - which are Turing-complete, surprisingly enough, and so host entire computational civilizations of their own! A wonderfully alien suggestion. This was apparently expanded in Diaspora, which if it’s as good as the short story, is well worth the reading. I’ll look for a copy.
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