A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove

I like hominids.  When I was in college, I took a physical anthropology course to fulfill some of my natural science credit, and really enjoyed it.  I even remember most of what I learned, which is a feat in and of itself.  So I looked forward to reading A Different Flesh, which puts forth the question — what if American Indians never settled the Americas, and instead Homo erectus (here called sims) was present when Columbus sailed?

To tell the truth, I had no idea where Turtledove was going to go with this.  Having only read his Worldwar series, I was guessing that there would be a lot of warfare.  I was fairly wrong.  Turtledove, rather than following one particular person, spends each chapter in a section of time and explores human-sim interactions.  This felt to me to be a fantastic way of exploring the idea, and one that most authors don’t employ; movement along time to uncover the differences and similarities between his imaginary world and ours helps expose the gulf between the two.

In the beginning, there is violence, and the sims give as good as they get.  Soon, however, it’s clear that the sims are not capable of adaptation, and thus start losing ground — quite literally.  Their land is slowly taken from them, and they become more marginalized.  They are also “domesticated” and used for menial labor.  Sims’ existence also provides a backdrop for the earlier formation of the theory of evolution, which sparks earlier scientific achievements of other types.

Against this backdrop, Turtledove shows us a world in which the Americas outlaw slavery for humans at a far earlier date than our own country decided to — against creatures such as the sims, humans of any type are obviously much the same and are worthy of the full rights deemed appropriate for one’s fellow man.

While declaring all people of equal worth, there is also the prominent struggle of putting sims in the proper context.  Are they human, or merely animals?  What rights do they have?  Turtledove brings this topic up again and again, sometimes in disturbing ways.  Sims are used for medical experiments, much as animals are.  The arguments about using them in such a way are similar to those used to justify the use of other animals for medical research.  How strange it feels to use creatures who have the ability to understand language (plus create spontaneous sentences of their own), create tools, live in camps, cook their food, and plan ahead for our own benefit and not necessarily theirs.

I enjoyed this book greatly.  I have often wondered about what life would be like with another hominid still alive and kicking on Earth.  Turtledove did a remarkable job of providing a possible answer.  His prose is clear, and his conclusions follow in logical fashion.  It is a thought-provoking book, raising questions about how we treat one another and our fellow species on this planet.

Rating: 5/5

Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson

Three Hears and Three Lions surprised me when it came in to my local library through MeLCat.  Huh, I thought.  This is short. Despite being under two hundred pages, however, Poul Anderson’s first book about Holger Carlsen packs in a good story about both universe travel and traditional medieval European lore.

Our hero, Holger Carlsen, an engineer in World War II-era America and, later, Europe, finds himself back in his homeland of Denmark, assisting the resistance force there.  While trying to get an important scientist to Sweden, Holger finds himself in a shootout with Nazis and passes out.  He awakes to find he’s naked in a forest.  Nearby is a horse, clothing, and gear that suits him perfectly.  How he got there, he has no idea, but it soon is obvious that he’s not in Denmark anymore.

In trying to find out where and when he is, Holger gathers to him a dwarf, a woman who can transform herself into a swan, and a mysterious Saracen who has been seeking him out.  Together, they venture to fight the forces of Chaos and further the goals of Law.

I found this book fairly entertaining.  First of all, Holger’s body knows his life and his training; it’s his mind that gets in the way of him doing things with graceful skill.  The message that you can think yourself out of the knowledge you already possess is a good one, and I think it’s pretty true.  A lot of times, when I’m answering questions at work, it’s not until after the exchange has ended that the best answer comes to me — and then I have to chase the other person down and give them that information.  Learning to trust oneself to do the right thing, if you know you have a firm grip on reality and usually do the right thing, is a great lesson.

Secondly, there were a couple of subplots and small events that were also entertaining.  At one point, one town was suffering from a werewolf attack, which our heroes helped out with.  Not only did it add a little action, but it also filled in some knowledge about magic in this new world that would have otherwise gone unknown.  It helped explain some future events, and why they happened the way they did.

The third thing I thought was nice about this book was how it was solely from Holger’s point of view.  There are several reasons why this is great.  The first is that, sometimes, jumping between characters is annoying.  The second is that it allows us to only see what Holger sees.  While one can sometimes see the action he should take, there are some situations where what he should do — or even what is going on — is obscured.  For example, his swan-maiden friend, Alianora, who is also his love interest, shows some response when Carahue, the Saracen, flirts with her.  Holger, seeing only that a woman he loves might be falling for another man, is distraught.  Only in the end is he clued in to why Alianora acted the way she did.

Also awesome was the flip from a world where science is dominant to one where magic is dominant.  Holger’s knowledge of basic scientific principles save the adventurers several times.  Moreover, the actions he takes that have a scientific basis are seen as miraculous by the people of this other world.  I thought it was a tastefully-done exploration on how two cultures can see both see one another as wondrous.

The only thing that I have a quarrel with is the speech of Hugi, the dwarf, and Alianora, as well as some supporting characters.  It is colloquial.  While I understood most of it, I wasn’t quite sure what type of accent they were meant to have, and so some word spellings were lost on me, and I couldn’t figure them out.  I might spend a bit of time on piecing together something if I have a linguistic interest in it, I don’t want to have to do it in a piece of fiction I read for enjoyment.  I want the characters to be understandable.

Despite the occasional linguistic confusion, I enjoyed Three Hearts and Three Lions.  It’s cute, it’s action-packed, and it’d be a good read for anyone who likes The Chronicles of Prydain.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 4.5/5

Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling

Island in the Sea of Time sounded good to me.  I love alternate history and speculative fiction.  What could be better than a book that blended both in an innovative way, incorporating some science fiction into the mix?  Unfortunately, despite some good aspects, Island in the Sea of Time fell flat for me.

Let’s start off with the good.  I liked the idea of an entire island of people from our own time being suddenly tossed into the far past.  What challenges they would face?  How would they meet the obstacles facing them?  A fantastic plot, in my opinion.

I also delighted in the anthropological aspects Stirling put in.  Linguistics is an interest of mine, so I found some of the exposition language structure and evolution absolutely fascinating.  His conjectures on how various cultures functioned and how they would react to visitors from today’s world were obviously well-researched, at least on the European side.

The cultural part that I disliked, however, was the heavy focus on building or maintaining technological conveniences, creating weapons, military training, and warfare.  I just wanted to skip over the pages that dealt with this stuff, and that’s bad, since it makes up about half the book.  Many (and I mean many) of the characters have military training, which I found too convenient to be believable.  This leads me to my next issue with the book.

The residents of Nantucket are far too accepting of their situation.  There are a couple of freak-outs in the book, as well as allusions to points of crises within individuals.  I, however, find it difficult to believe that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the time shift.  There are off-hand comments about suicide, but they felt like they were obligatory mentions so that Stirling could get on with the story.  We follow no character who has such inclinations; this probably would have made Island in the Sea of Time more compelling, more human on an emotional level.

Character abilities and skills also felt too well-distributed to reflect reality.  A Coast Guard ship just happens to get trapped in the time shift, so we have a military force with at least one fighting ship, plenty of trained soldiers, and modern weapons.  There’s the woman who runs the greenhouse, so we have someone who knows how to grow crops and can teach others how to do so.  We have a librarian who is apparently so freaking talented that she can keep everyone apprised of the information they need to perform their jobs.  We have a historian with interests in the time period the island has been thrust into, as well as a working knowledge of linguistics.  We have an astronomer, who has the ability to communicate with the English tribes because she also can speak a Baltic language that is similar to proto-Indo-European. We have a captain who is, apparently, God’s gift to both military strategy and tactics.  And we have a native woman who is gifted in so many ways that it makes suspension of disbelief very difficult.  On top of that, we lose exactly one of the main cast of characters.  He doesn’t happen to be a central character, either; we probably follow him about a half-dozen times, whereas most of the other characters get approximately thirty to forty sections scattered throughout the book.  That smacks of the unreal to me.

Also unfortunate, in my opinion, Stirling focused on the prehistoric British inhabitants, which was baffling to me, seeing as the island tossed back in time was Nantucket.  We are given very little information about the Native Americans of the area; he allows us to read about their first encounter, and then leaves them almost completely.  This struck me as strange; why toss away a fascinating people who could help the Nantucketers with farming, gathering and the like — as well as trading — in favor of the long sea voyage and constant skirmishes in England?

The other aspect of this is, when we are allowed to view one extended encounter with Central American natives, they are portrayed in a horribly brutal light.  While this might be accurate, some of the actions taken by the Olmecs were horribly graphic — graphic enough to cause me to have a nightmare about one particular scene.  It freaked me out to no end, and also felt unfair to the indigenous Americans.  Why do they get to experience such a characterization, while the European peoples encountered are as nuanced as the Nantucket residents?

Based on the comments by Harry Turtledove and Robert J. Sawyer, I thought I was in for a spectacular read.  I’m saddened to find that wasn’t so.  A more Nantucket-based, psychologically sensitive book would have been fascinating.  Since this is one in a series of books, many of the battles could have waited.  As it is, Island in the Sea of Time leaves the reader with a dry book about martial history, martial tactics, and flat characters.

Rating: 1.5/5