A Son of the Rock

Tor, 1995. 349p

The premise of this collection seems to be that Science Fiction can provide remedies for the ills of the world. I don’t believe it can. (SF can warn and inform while it entertains us but what we do with the information is up to everyone – and mostly to those who don’t read any SF.) My view is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that some of the prescriptions outlined in the book are mutually contradictory. For example one posits a Middle Eastern society where female children are selected against, another, a US where men are about to be eliminated. Others eradicate racism or religion, one suggests that clubbing together to have an annoying or threatening person killed might have benefits though there is a twist to the operation of the mechanism whereby that would happen. There is a logical flaw in the revelation of that twist, though.

Most of the stories are, not surprisingly, told from a USian perspective – which is an observation, not a criticism. My complaint is that the overwhelming majority of these stories are schematic and lacking in literary quality. Their styles are resolutely perfunctory, concerned with the idea rather than the illustration of that idea through the dilemmas of characters bound up in it. They read like the SF I remember from my youth when I devoured the early stuff from the 1950s and 1960s. It is almost as if characterisation is something to be afraid of. I’m prepared to exempt Lawrence Watt-Evans from this stricture, though, but in their joint effort Jerry Pournelle and Charles Sheffield in particular set up a straw man merely so that they can knock him down.

How To Save The World slips past easily enough but this is not one to be read if you like well-drawn characters in your fiction.