clew's reviews: a book log

Radiant, James Alan Gardner

The Expendable universe is a great setup for medium-light fiction. Its advanced aliens are so advanced that they give both magic-show technology and deus ex machina moral strictures to the comically adolescent younger races, including humans. Between one and the other, each novel has a puzzle with an intellectual and a moral side, but the moral dilemmas don't play Top That! to the limit of belief; the aliens are supposed to leave an answer, not necessarily an easy one.

I liked this a lot. It seemed to prevent the superhero series problem of winning every fight, and collecting powers with each win, and accordingly facing progressively more dramatic and less plausible enemies. Remember the E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman books, which as I understood them followed the reasoning to an O altitudo! that left the universe in the loving hands of a psychically incestuous band of siblings; that's where the ideals of inherited aristocracy and sublimated life-force take you.

I don't need many stories along those lines, and it's far too common for the reasoning to lose altitude and decide that the grand plan will reward us for what we'd mostly do anyway. I was, therefore, alarmed when the standing heroine of the ostracized elite Explorer Corps, and a new heroine who makes a pretty bookmatched set with her, decide that they are the representatives of advanced races who need something from humanity that the advancement lost. Oh, sure, we're here to remind the gods of something; the meaning of 'hubris', I hope, but all too often in SF not. Humanity's puning self-esteem is braced from below when the other young races are like caricatures of stereotypes of aspects of our own; a bit too Here's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, if taken seriously. (Taken lightly, and with humans just as annoying, I enjoy the parodies as mockery gently directed at the author and readers.)

Maybe Gardner isn't going to write the triangles a three-sided god. The 'avatars for the gods' bit is a cautious guess on the parts of the characters. They've been wrong before. Me, I was thinking of dog-breeding and pigeon-fancying, which are known interactions between a powerful species and a weak one, and are even defended as polishing the best traits of the weak species.

ISBN: 0060595264