Book Reviews: Earthgrip
by Harry Turtledove, 1994
Well, it was nothing if not a suprise to learn that Harry Turtledove, of all people--the Harry Turtledove of the long alternate-history sagas about Byzantium and the Civil War and WWII and about anything else about which you can propose a counterfactual--has also written something like this. The book is much, much better than the comically lurid cover illustration, and consists of three short stories, or more accurately two short stories and a novella. It seems as though Turtledove was in a mood for something light and fun--the pieces are about a crew of space merchants trying to make a living counducting trade with alien species, mostly primitive ones, and seem quite deliberate homages to the Polesotechnic League stories of Poul Anderson in particular, and a ton of other mid-century SF of which many including myself have fond memories.
All three segments have a serious problem, though--a little something called "plot." It feels forced and unspontanous in all three--one gets the impression that the author started with the endings and worked his way backward, and not with the greatest attention to the flow of plausibility either. His settings are, as always, superb, and the aliens are well realized and as genuinely alien as this sort of thing calls for, but one keeps returning to the plot, the book's Achilles' heel; Turtledove is no great prose stylist, nor an inexorable logician, but for someone as broadly learned as himself it is mildly dismaying to find colossal logical holes in all three stories. The G'bur story, for example: The humans have a spaceship. With a large cargo bay. And, in later stories, a laser suitable for intercepting missiles. And they have to resort to fighting an incoming army of barbarian land crabs on foot? With hand-stunners? Turtledove could easily have had the crew whip up some napalm and flambeé the M'sak. Or at the very least drop some rocks on them, for heaven's sake. Heck, why not just hurl a medium-sized boulder from orbit? To say nothing of the fact Turtledove's spacehip apparently comes equipped with a very large solar sail, easily applicable to braising the entire horde into a seafood platter in fifteen minutes or less. Sloppy.
The Atheter story is the shortest, and really just a postcard. It also makes no effort to explain why the Atheters could not have simply taken the seeds and planted the damn things in the right places themselves, manually, bypassing the whole noisy dung-producing animal-vector part--a plot hole that could have been easily disposed of by specifiying that the seeds could only germinate after being digested and expelled. Very sloppy.
The Foitani story is really the best of the lot--had it been written as straight adventure, it would have had definite potential. Unfortunately, this one doesn't even have a pat, forced ending; instead it has none at all, no resolution worth speaking of whatsoever. I mean, the last few pages are just about literally "Well, you three factions have been locked in a genocidal war for twenty-eight thousand years due to the fact that you are viscerally and categorically unable to tolerate each other's philosophical position and therefore existence. But why don't you just try to think about things a little differently?" Oy.
Well, I probably shouldn't sound this critical--truth be told, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Though the oddest thing about it is that Turtledove never actually explains what the heck "Earthgrip" is--the few times the word appears, in the Foitani story, in seems to mean, from context, "loss of high-technology civilization due to warfare," a definition that does not seem to follow from the word itself. Strange...
Well, it was nothing if not a suprise to learn that Harry Turtledove, of all people--the Harry Turtledove of the long alternate-history sagas about Byzantium and the Civil War and WWII and about anything else about which you can propose a counterfactual--has also written something like this. The book is much, much better than the comically lurid cover illustration, and consists of three short stories, or more accurately two short stories and a novella. It seems as though Turtledove was in a mood for something light and fun--the pieces are about a crew of space merchants trying to make a living counducting trade with alien species, mostly primitive ones, and seem quite deliberate homages to the Polesotechnic League stories of Poul Anderson in particular, and a ton of other mid-century SF of which many including myself have fond memories.
All three segments have a serious problem, though--a little something called "plot." It feels forced and unspontanous in all three--one gets the impression that the author started with the endings and worked his way backward, and not with the greatest attention to the flow of plausibility either. His settings are, as always, superb, and the aliens are well realized and as genuinely alien as this sort of thing calls for, but one keeps returning to the plot, the book's Achilles' heel; Turtledove is no great prose stylist, nor an inexorable logician, but for someone as broadly learned as himself it is mildly dismaying to find colossal logical holes in all three stories. The G'bur story, for example: The humans have a spaceship. With a large cargo bay. And, in later stories, a laser suitable for intercepting missiles. And they have to resort to fighting an incoming army of barbarian land crabs on foot? With hand-stunners? Turtledove could easily have had the crew whip up some napalm and flambeé the M'sak. Or at the very least drop some rocks on them, for heaven's sake. Heck, why not just hurl a medium-sized boulder from orbit? To say nothing of the fact Turtledove's spacehip apparently comes equipped with a very large solar sail, easily applicable to braising the entire horde into a seafood platter in fifteen minutes or less. Sloppy.
The Atheter story is the shortest, and really just a postcard. It also makes no effort to explain why the Atheters could not have simply taken the seeds and planted the damn things in the right places themselves, manually, bypassing the whole noisy dung-producing animal-vector part--a plot hole that could have been easily disposed of by specifiying that the seeds could only germinate after being digested and expelled. Very sloppy.
The Foitani story is really the best of the lot--had it been written as straight adventure, it would have had definite potential. Unfortunately, this one doesn't even have a pat, forced ending; instead it has none at all, no resolution worth speaking of whatsoever. I mean, the last few pages are just about literally "Well, you three factions have been locked in a genocidal war for twenty-eight thousand years due to the fact that you are viscerally and categorically unable to tolerate each other's philosophical position and therefore existence. But why don't you just try to think about things a little differently?" Oy.
Well, I probably shouldn't sound this critical--truth be told, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Though the oddest thing about it is that Turtledove never actually explains what the heck "Earthgrip" is--the few times the word appears, in the Foitani story, in seems to mean, from context, "loss of high-technology civilization due to warfare," a definition that does not seem to follow from the word itself. Strange...
posted by Senix at 11:22 AM
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